Pop goes the weekend
I’m sitting here with that weird spaced out First Person Shooter feeling. I planned to be in bed early last night but then I decided to update my iPod, and selecting 4GB of music from a folder that’s 20GB+ in size, is real Sophie’s Choice stuff.
Anyway as for this weekend’s pop culture activities, I finally got around to watching Martin Scorsese’s The Departed on Friday evening. It’s a very good film if a tad long – the film particularly loses energy once Jack Nicholson’s enigmatic gangster ‘departs’.
Anyway, in terms of The Departed’s superb cast, it’s refreshing to see former heartthrobs Leo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and even Mark Wahlberg, showing some serious dramatic acting chops. The audience especially feels for DiCaprio, who seems of all the characters to get a bum deal – discredited, suffering from severe anxiety, and under mounting pressure from both the police and the brutal gangsters to carry on an identity charade. Matt Damon’s character, by comparison, comes across as a smooth-talking sleaze, who manages, undeservingly, to garner all the glory and promote quickly through police ranks.
I also wasn’t too overwhelmed by the film’s ending. After a scene that rivals the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, Scorsese allows his last shot of the movie to be cheesily obvious.
Still, The Departed is a gritty gangster drama worth seeing.
On Saturday and Sunday we LANed for the first time in ages. Mostly we played FEAR Combat (braving friendly fire a lot of the time), some Dawn of War (I quit early on, after losing my army of Space Marines to simultaneous combat on both fronts), and Titan Quest. With 3 players, chests in Titan Quest started pumping out rare green and blue items. At one point, every second sarcophagus was producing a blue item. My battle mage reached Level 40 (max is Level 65), and achieved another item for his Ramses set – just 2 more to go!
Oh, and I got half way through the first collected volume of The Sandman (Issues 1-8). Wow, the series really is something else. My favourite so far has been the Sandman /Constantine crossover in which the King of Dreams must team up with the chain-smoking detective to retrieve his pouch of sand from a drug addict using the grains for a near permanent ‘dream fix’.
I’m gaining more and more respect for DC Comics, with the knowledge that they were behind the release of seminal The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Kingdom Come and the mature-readers only Vertigo imprint (of which Sandman is a part). Can Marvel even compete in the realm of comics as Art?
Anyway as for this weekend’s pop culture activities, I finally got around to watching Martin Scorsese’s The Departed on Friday evening. It’s a very good film if a tad long – the film particularly loses energy once Jack Nicholson’s enigmatic gangster ‘departs’.
Anyway, in terms of The Departed’s superb cast, it’s refreshing to see former heartthrobs Leo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and even Mark Wahlberg, showing some serious dramatic acting chops. The audience especially feels for DiCaprio, who seems of all the characters to get a bum deal – discredited, suffering from severe anxiety, and under mounting pressure from both the police and the brutal gangsters to carry on an identity charade. Matt Damon’s character, by comparison, comes across as a smooth-talking sleaze, who manages, undeservingly, to garner all the glory and promote quickly through police ranks.
I also wasn’t too overwhelmed by the film’s ending. After a scene that rivals the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, Scorsese allows his last shot of the movie to be cheesily obvious.
Still, The Departed is a gritty gangster drama worth seeing.
On Saturday and Sunday we LANed for the first time in ages. Mostly we played FEAR Combat (braving friendly fire a lot of the time), some Dawn of War (I quit early on, after losing my army of Space Marines to simultaneous combat on both fronts), and Titan Quest. With 3 players, chests in Titan Quest started pumping out rare green and blue items. At one point, every second sarcophagus was producing a blue item. My battle mage reached Level 40 (max is Level 65), and achieved another item for his Ramses set – just 2 more to go!
Oh, and I got half way through the first collected volume of The Sandman (Issues 1-8). Wow, the series really is something else. My favourite so far has been the Sandman /Constantine crossover in which the King of Dreams must team up with the chain-smoking detective to retrieve his pouch of sand from a drug addict using the grains for a near permanent ‘dream fix’.
I’m gaining more and more respect for DC Comics, with the knowledge that they were behind the release of seminal The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Kingdom Come and the mature-readers only Vertigo imprint (of which Sandman is a part). Can Marvel even compete in the realm of comics as Art?
Comments
DC has definitely had the best superhero stuff though. Grant Morrison's 26 issues of Animal Man was also brilliant. And Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. Marvel has had some good stuff though. Frank Miller's work on Daredevil was excellent. Kurt Busiek's Marvels as well. And J.M. DeMatteis' work on Spider-Man was pretty heavy.