I’ve always loved martial arts flicks. The problem is, these days they tend to use CGI and/or wire-work to enhance the wild and crazy stunts they portray. While I can enjoy a CGI or wire-work movie if that’s what I’m in the mood for, when I want to watch a martial arts flick it’s generally because I want to see just what the human body can do when it’s properly trained and pushed to its limits. CGI could turn anyone into a martial arts madman on screen—I want to be amazed by what someone can REALLY do.

Recently my husband and I started visiting some friends in Virginia for occasional movie nights, and it turns out that they’re huge martial arts fiends. They introduced us to some Thai movies, and we’re completely and utterly hooked. Our two favorites so far are Ong-Bak and Born to Fight. As expected the plot is flimsy and largely there to provide an excuse for the fight scenes, but that’s to be expected. Thai martial arts are amazing to watch, and the man who produced both of these films apparently feels that the way in which Thai films can distinguish themselves, since they don’t have the resources of Hollywood or Hong Kong, is through their death-defying stunts and unique forms of martial arts. Boy howdy is he right. These are incredibly visceral movies, and if you watch the ‘making of’ specials on the Born to Fight DVD you’ll see at least one stunt that came entirely too close to killing a stunt man.

Ong-Bak is particularly amazing for its chase scenes and its long fights involving Thai martial arts. Born to Fight takes a bunch of professional athletes (seriously: they used real professional athletes instead of actors) so that they could do jaw-dropping stunts and fight scenes that mixed athletics and martial arts. It’s every bit as good as watching an old-style Jackie Chan-style scene using props to their fullest. I can’t wait to see The Protector next.

Apropos of nothing, the latest reviews are of two J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts books: Strangers in Death (her latest), and Naked in Death (the first in the series).

I’m finally getting around to reading & reviewing some more fiction. Wheee! Today’s review is of P.D. Gilson’s Gaea: Beyond the Son, and I have two more novels that I read over the weekend and at the end of last week that I need to review. I finally read a Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb mystery out of curiosity, and I read Craig Smith’s The Painted Messiah.

I wanted to link to Murder By the Book today after reading this post by Sam Houston. Not only does it sound like a fantastic bookstore, but apparently one of the folks there got the bright idea to start up a publishing company aimed at reprinting now-out-of-print mysteries. You know the ones—where you go to buy book ten in a series by an author you just heard of, and you think you should start at the beginning of the series, only it turns out that books one through seven are out of print now? That always drives me insane! Anyway, these folks got the wonderful idea to try to fix that. Go visit Busted Flush Press!

Then, take a moment to watch this fontariffic video:

(Found via book/daddy.)

I don’t watch most game-related videos. To be honest, I find most of them supremely boring. The majority of them are exactly what you’d expect to get from a video-maker whose true interest is gaming, not the making of videos. I.e., the focus is on nigh-meaningless (or at least fairly uninteresting) numbers flying across the screen, or showing off some supposedly ‘uber’ character, rather than on making a good video. However, there are three very notable exceptions to this that I can easily think of.

I don’t even play Guild Wars. But dang, Zack’s videos are good enough that I love them anyway! I’ve never pretended to have any skill whatsoever at reviewing anything related to movies or music; I tried it once or twice and quickly realized I should never do that again. But since this isn’t the reviews blog anyway, here’s my attempt at explaining what makes Zack’s videos so different from most of the ones out there.

For one, he has a perfect sense of editing. The movements utterly match the music. This is far and away one of the top reasons I love his videos.

One of the reasons I think his GW videos work particularly well is that the GW emotes are entertainingly spastic, particularly in contrast to the fancy outfits the characters wear, which inherently makes the videos funny to watch.

Zack also picks catchy songs that work well with video game emotes, and then he’s smart enough to stick with those emotes. So many fan-made videos end up as a bunch of ‘talking heads,’ where they somehow try to make it look like the characters present in the videos are speaking things from the songs for five minutes, and frankly that’s boring and dull.

Not that Zack is the only good game-based video maker out there, of course; of particular note is spiffworld, who makes fantastic Warcraft videos based on Jonathan Coulton’s music. If you prefer spastic and hilarious Zack is the better choice; if you like entertaining stories set to original music, spiffworld/Coulton is great:

And finally, no such list would be complete without Cranius’ inimitable “Big Blue Dress”. While it does have a bit of the “heavy on the numbers” problem, that takes a back seat to the more fun stuff. Keep an eye out for the gnome backup singers, and remember: a man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in Twill!

First, yesterday’s book review was of Sebastian Beaumont’s unique and captivating Thirteen. Up next should be the Pastry Queen Christmas and Red Lion Inn cookbooks! Somehow my Amazon reviewer rank is in danger of cracking the top 1,000 (I’m at 1,007 this morning exactly 1,000 this evening), which is a little surreal since I’ve never made it a focus of my reviewing; I just cross-post brief versions of many of my reviews there so the books get a little more exposure. I can tell our Google pagerank must be recovering from the switch to the new domain name, since suddenly we’re getting lots of requests for reciprocal links from random unrelated websites.

I found the following hilarious video at Books and Other Thoughts. The costuming and detail are incredible, and the spoof is spot-on:

While that video is for the tech support weenies, computer geeks, and book nerds among you, the following is a World of Warcraft video: IRL. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to group with a jackass, and the sheer proliferation of wacky props alone makes this a hysterical view (found at Massively):

It’s been a while since I last posted a video of any kind. I don’t even play Guild Wars, but there are some great videos for it. I once posted a link to a GW/WoW dance-off video set to MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” which was just awesome; my other favorite is the GW video set to “Beverly Hills,” put together by the same guy. He has true editing talent. I have to say that one thing I love about GW is the… enthusiasm… in the character emotes.

Anyway, I was bad this weekend and signed up for the PotBS stress test. I’m waaaay impatient about it coming out, and got my husband to pre-order me a copy for my Christmas present!

I was going to watch the Bourne Ultimatum this weekend; really I was. But when we got to the mall it turned out the stores were still closed (we like morning showings—fewer people) and the first showing of Stardust was earlier than Bourne, so we watched that instead.

I haven’t yet read Stardust, but I like to take movies separately from any book or story they might be based on anyway. You can’t duplicate a book with a movie; you really need to make some significant changes to make it work and I think of the result as a separate entity. So I like to see separately whether the movie works as a movie. Stardust, to me, was a wonderful movie. It was fun and funny, heart-warming, beautiful, and just plain fun. The actors were great, particularly Claire Danes and Robert DeNiro.

But back to the Bourne Ultimatum. I’m hoping I’ll get around to seeing it this weekend, but in the meantime, here’s a hysterical video parody of the movie. Ya gotta love actors who don’t mind making fun of themselves:

In other news, today’s review is of Douglas Clegg’s The Abandoned. I know people have said lots of good things about Clegg, but honestly, I didn’t really like the book that much. Hopefully I’ll find some better books when I take this and Second Genesis back to the library this afternoon. The Second Genesis review will be up later this week.

I didn’t really start watching Dr. Who in earnest until I was in my teens, and then I was totally addicted to its campy sci-fi wonderfulness. The funny thing is, I later saw an episode that I recognized as one I’d briefly caught part of when I was rather younger, and hurriedly switched away from because it scared the hell out of me—at the time I had no idea what the show was or what it was about. I just knew there were giant spiders biting a girl, and something about a humanoid alien about to get his brain vivisected, and when you’re young those are scary things! It left enough of an impression that I still found the same episode a bit creepy the second time around, even though by then I was quite familiar with the show.

Today, though, I have to share a great little video called “The Complete Dr. Who in Five Minutes:”

Found on the eminently handy SF Signal blog.

In an unrelated note, my review of James Rollins’s Sandstorm is up at the reviews blog. I have two cookbook and three novel reviews coming up soon!

Time to pass on a fun link: Wil Wheaton’s Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s. I love Wil’s writing, and since I grew up in the 80s I remember each and every one of these movies with, yes, that sense of guilty pleasure. Scanners is my favorite on that list, and of course I can’t help being disappointed that The Last Starfighter only got an honorable mention. However, Wil says if there’s a good response he’ll do more of these, so read & respond! I want more.

Edit: Apologies to folks waiting for return emails from me. I think the Medrol did the steroid thing of supressing my immune system enough that I developed an infection, so I feel pretty cruddy and have a doctors’ appt. tomorrow, and really am not accomplishing much. Hopefully they can make it all better, with as few antibiotic side effects as possible. Yes, this is an appt. with a new doctor, not that crappy old one.

Wow. What else can I add? Too funny and fun. I absolutely loved “The 300″ and saw it in the theater twice, which I haven’t done with a movie in years; I’m getting a kick out of the few take-off videos that are actually really good. This one, IMO, is perfect!

Technorati Tags: movies, videos

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Yes, it’s really that time: time for another issue of the Twilight Time. The subject is: To crit or not to crit?

Technorati Tags: game master, gameplay, gamers, games, gaming, GM, Jonathan Coulton, roleplaying, rpgs, World of Warcraft

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