Terminator 2

Yes, another movie review from Jimbo himself. I might start a series, I'm not sure. Anyways, Terminator 2. Overall, a good movie. Yes, Arnold is a terrible actor, but as a robot, he doesn't need to show emotion to be an enjoyable actor. He only needs to whip on glasses, flash a serious look, and stride calmly toward you with a huge gun in his hand and half his face ripped off to be about as badass as you could possibly be.

Terminator 2 included enough explosions, car crashes and massive guns to satisfy the hordes of drooling movie-goers, and enough plot depth and acting talent(minus Arnold)to keep me entertained. Not that the previously mentioned action-y stuff wasn't interesting, it's just that for me, most of that sort of thing doesn't make a movie. There was, however, a very cool chase scene in the movie that was possibly the best chase scene I have seen in a film before. It involved a helicopter, an ammunitions truck, a massive tanker filled with liquid Nitrogen, and of course, huge guns. The budget of this movie was obviously very big. Probably a bit bigger than that of Evil Dead 2.

Most people know the plot of the Terminator movies, but I'll run over it for those freakishly deprived people who don't know it. Basically, things went haywire when the USA turned over its military defenses to a supercomputer named Skynet. Skynet proceeded to fire nuclear missiles all over the world, I think because of the whole "humans can't control themselves so we must control them" theme that's common in a lot of robot movies. Anyways, after the nuclear explosions wipe out half of human existence, the Terminator robots under Skynet's control proceed to wipe out the rest of humanity. Although the robots kick serious human resistance ass, John Connor, the leader of the human resistance, starts kickin' ass back. Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill John Connor as a child, and in response, John sends back a friendly Terminator of his own to protect himself as a child. And this is the point at which the plot becomes confusing. Why not send five Terminators back to kill John? Why not send 100 Terminators back to protect him? Whatever. Anyways, that's the movie's plot in a nutshell. One of the very cool things about the movie, I thought, was the T-1000 sent back to kill John. It was made of some titanium-alloy something that was, in essence, liquid metal. This guy could turn his arms into spikes, melt into the floor, and take the form of anyone he had contact with. In the end, I give this movie four out of five Jimbos for cool action scenes, a compelling plot and, of course, Arnold.

Evil Dead 2!

Recently, my family has been going through a bad action/horror movie phase. Our recent views have been the Robocop series, Terminator 3, Escape from New York, Army of Darkness, and just now, Evil Dead 2. Bruce Campbell is... well, you need to see him to understand his incredible acting presence. Here's a good look at the man:
Truly an amazing character. Here's a more flattering view of the chintacular wonder:

He's one of those people whose acting is so over-the-top terrible that it's actually extremely enjoyable. He has some of the best one-liners ever concieved, such as "All you got left now is jack and shit, and jack just left town!" and "Let's make like Zeus and bolt."
Evil Dead 2 isn't really the sequel to Evil Dead 1. Apparently, Evil Dead 1 was so bad, people couldn't get through the whole thing. However, someone thought the movie had potential, so they gave Bruce & friends some actual money to do a remake of Evil Dead 1, and Evil Dead 2 was born. Bruce doesn't have as many snazzy one-liners in Evil Dead 2 as in Army of Darkness or Alien Apocalypse, but his terribly incredible acting makes up for it. The plot goes like this: Dashingly handsome Ash Williams (played by Bruce Campbell himself) goes to an abandoned log cabin to make sweet, sweet love with his stunningly beautiful girlfriend, Annie Knowby (played by Sarah Berry). He discovers a tape recorder, and on it a recording of an archaeologist's exciting new find: The Book of the Dead. As the recording begins to read the book's text aloud, a dark and evil presence is awakened. And with it comes one of the many ingenious cheapass effects pioneered by directer Sam Raimi: a camera flying through the woods towards the location of our stalwart hero, accompanied by strangled screaming. We never really see what is in such a hurry to reach Ash, but we can use our imaginations. The unknown presence steals Ash's girlfriend, whose reanimated corpse does a little jig for her boyfriend before leaping off into the woods. This dramatic scene sets off the horrible series of events Raimi has in store for Mr. Williams, among which is this tasteful scene where his hand becomes possessed (please forgive the blood; it's just one of the many overdone things that make this movie charmingly bad):
Other classic scenes include one where Bruce slams down a trap door on a zombie's head, shooting an eyeball out of its head and into one of Bruce's accomplices; one where Ash shoots his disembodied hand crawling around in the wall, whereupon he is drenched in a torrent of blood flowing from the wall; and one where the zombified grandmother of Bruce's aforementioned accomplice grows a huge neck and gets in a boxing match with the chinmeister. Overall impression: A cheez-tastic horror movie, the bad acting and cheap special effects make it awesomely funny. A must-see for Bruce Campbell fans.
This is Jimbo, signing out.

Wow. Just wow.

If I had to sum up a Buckethead concert in one word it would be this: overwhelming. Last night's concert in San Francisco was my first concert, so I can't base my opinion of concerts on a first impression. I do, however, think that, in general, I am not going to really be a concert person. Oh, sure, the music was "SHREDTASTICALLY AWESOMERIFFIC," but I didn't find the marijuana fumes, ear-bleeding music, and need to stand for four hours quite as awesome.
The first act was Kid Beyond, beat-boxer extraordinaire. He could make some noises with his mouth I had no idea even existed. One of the cool things he would do was make one noise, press a button to somehow record that noise and play it over and over again, then add on a different noise that fit in with the beat. He kept laying on new and interesting sounds, and it actually sounded pretty cool. It was great for an opening act, but after about ten minutes, I stopped being amazed. One can only take so much beat-boxing in one night. He amused the audience later on by having them invent some sort of viking-pirate cry of "fnyaarg," then later a more emphatic version of "hoom'fnyaarg," but when he left the stage, I was thoroughly ready for Buckethead.
Which brings me, of course, to the man himself. He wears red bowling shoes, a black trench coat, pants several sizes too small, fake dreads(I think), a white mannequin mask, and a KFC bucket on his head. Oh yeah, and whenever he talks, he uses a severed head. It was bizarre to see first-hand. Unfortunately, never in the performance did he whip out his nun-chucks and do some killer moves. He did, however, shred like the history of shreddage has never seen shredded before. He played on into the night, until, at 1:00, he hung up his guitar and walked offstage, leaving a thoroughly satisfied audience. It was really a sight to see.

Meh

Hmm... The new computer is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it can play Steam games on high graphics with a very high fps. The downside: it's very unstable. When I first took possession of this computer, it ran Steam games beautifully, but crashed after several hours of gameplay. No problem, I thought, I'll just restart it and launch the game again. But alas, it was not to be so. After about half an hour, it crashed again. I decided to let it sit for a while. The next day, I got about an hour of gameplay before it crashed again. After a while, the crashes turned into BSODs, and appeared about five minutes into a game. I sought the help of some friends, and decided to restore settings to about a week before the BSODs started happening. After that, the games ran beautifully, without crashing. After that, however, there was a SNAFU that involved an error screen whenever I started up the computer. The noob who sold me the computer gave me a Windows XP Professional disk, and I started from scratch. And then, inevitably, the games have started crashing again. Can anyone help this poor noob?