Our First Podcast

The Next Generation continues to expand our horizons, so to speak: Code Redd Net finally has a podcast, available through Podbean at http://crnpodcast.podbean.com. Embedded below is our first episode, subtitled Rise and Fall of the AI Bot. Fans of multiplayer shooters should be especially interested. We would love to hear your feedback on this first attempt, as well as suggested topics for future episodes. Soon the CRN Podcast should be available through the iTunes store. Until then, you can subscribe to automatically receive the latest episodes, or you can listen through the dedicated Podbean player at the bottom of this page.

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Movie Review: Men in Black III (2012)

Men in Black III is a forgettable summer fling, one that seems unnecessary and specious at worse, but still, it's never flagrantly awful, and that's good news. It's just another blockbuster to keep your eyeballs occupied for an hour and a half, and that's a noble enough reason to exist, I suppose. All you can realistically expect from this kind of movie is some neat special effects, and, if you're lucky, every action it presents will be clean and every loose end will be tied up before the credits roll, and perhaps you'll be sent home with a charming one-liner or a bit of dialogue to repeat to your friends and coworkers for the next week. MIB III meets these expectations, and never goes beyond them, just like a good C+ student. Basically, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith are back as agents charged with policing the extra-terrestrial visitors/permanent residents of Earth. When Jones mysteriously disappears, Smith travels back to July 1969 in order to prevent his partner's assassination by an oddly-coiffed creature, freshly sprung from a lunar prison. It works as a plot, but the first 20 minutes or so are fairly painful to watch. Smith struggles, and fails, to make his dialogue anything but insipid, while Jones has to hold back his genuine pathos so they don't outshine such juvenile material. But once the action begins, things explode and colors splash on the screen and everything's fine and predictable. Josh Brolin steps in to play the younger version of Jones, and he does an admirable imitation of the more youthful, less haggard Jones. Things build to a climax, as they always do, and it's all paid off in the end, as it always is. MIB III is nothing to recommend, surely, but it's certainly nothing to reprimand, either. It'll be there if you need something to do for a little while.

Daniel Craig in... Moonraker?

This may be a week old, but timeliness has never been our main concern. Nevertheless, IGN has the first 007 Legends trailer up, this one showcasing an updated version of the absurd Roger Moore epic, Moonraker. We've kindly embedded the trailer below:

Moonraker is a decent enough choice (one of five classic films to be featured in the upcoming game), but I'm not sold yet on the do-over philosophy of these new Bond games, perhaps because I was not overly fond of the GoldenEye 007 remake. Seems like this one will have levels culled from Bond lore, but inhabited this time by Daniel Craig and his newfangled smart phone gadgets instead of the original actors. This may be unfortunate considering how much fun I had playing the retro-stylings of Sean Connery in the From Russia With Love remake for PS2, which kept all of the atmosphere of the original film but expanded it for a new medium and a new audience.

Luckily, with E3 looming, we're likely to learn more soon.

Movie Review: In Time (2011)

Having a personal interest in the study of economics, I was fascinated by the premise of a world in which time has one left in his/her life could be exchanged. There are so many implications that this would have. In the Austrian school of economics, there is a large emphasis on time, and so I think its methodology would be well suited for analyzing this movie. First, let me list the premises of Timberlake's world: people are biologically engineered to live until their 25th birthday (from which they no longer age physically) and then have a year left (which is displayed on their arms), time can be traded among people through touching (or with a scanner, somewhat like one used for barcodes), time is the primary form of currency, and people are divided into different "time zones" which seemed to be based on their socioeconomic status. The movie begins with Timberlake waking up and not having much more than a day left. He goes about a normal day: goes to work to earn some time and spends his night at the bar. However, there is a man at the bar with more than a century left and is flashing his wealth. A gang comes to steal from him but Timberlake helps him escape. The man reveals to Timberlake that there is actually enough time for everyone but the rich keep it for themselves, gives him most of his time, and then leaves. And so Timberlake begins his quest to break the system that keeps the poor as wage slaves by robbing time banks and running from the time cops.

I was pretty disappointed with what was done with the story when they had such an interesting concept. It ended up just being a simple class-warfare, exploitation movie when it could have been a deep thought experiment in how much different the world would be if people could trade time. And they failed to think it all the way through. For example, if the human race were to survive under these conditions at all, I would expect there to be a majority of the population to be quite young, yet there were very few kids in the movie. Also, I would expect an armed revolution to be more prone to happening since people have very little to lose if they only have a few hours left to live. Austrian economics would lead us to the conclusion that people would have very high time preference (meaning that they are more concerned with present consumption than that of years later), which means that their saving would be lower (but there is a further complication in that their savings would be in years, but we'll disregard that). Without getting too technical, a higher savings rate means that there is more investment, and therefore more economic growth. But since people would have higher time preference, combined with the fact that most people would have less human capital than our world because the average age would be much younger, living standards should be much lower than displayed in the film.

But regardless of all these quibbles, let us just take the movie at face value and overlook the more subtle economic implications. Even then, they leave so many gaping holes in the story that its hard to make sense of it. The biggest one is that they never explain how "time" is created (as there is a vault in the movie containing a device which stores a million years, as well as banks with containers storing all kinds of time). Secondly, they never explain how the rich are able to steal time from the poor (it is just assumed that they do since they have so much more time). It's as if someone tried to write a Marxist allegory that has just as little understanding of economics in its story as in the real world. In our world, wealth has to be produced; it is not as if it all just existed and somehow the elite got more of it while the masses got little. In the movie, wealth just seems to exist. The film also doesn't seem to demonstrate any understanding of the structure of production: the rich just live somewhere else, seemingly not even participating in commerce with the underlings, but the rich exploit them somehow. Whatever it is, it cannot be a criticism of our world since it is too far removed from it.

Perhaps I over-analyzed In Time and this left me unsatisfied. It actually is somewhat entertaining, if only for the thought experiment, and it is useful, if only for exposing economic fallacies. Beyond its concept, don't expect anything groundbreaking. Perhaps if you lower your expectations enough, you won't end up as disappointed as I was.

Skyfall Trailer

It's here. More of a teaser, really, so it's hard to gather any impressions beyond the visceral, but it works well enough to get us excited for the film.

Our Next Generation

Ricky Tan would approve.

As you can see, Code Redd Net has had a bit of a facelift. However, our more eye-sensitive color scheme is not merely cosmetic; we believe this change signals our rededication to providing more extensive coverage of contemporary media, still tempered, of course, by the occasional, and unabashedly nostalgic, look back at the classics. We're also planning to launch a podcast in the very near future. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts about this redesign, in addition to anything else you would like to see from your pals at CRN.

N64 Review: Sarge's Heroes 2

Offering the electronic equivalent of playing in the sandbox with small plastic men, Sarge's Heroes 2 is an entertaining, albeit short, diversion. I think that perhaps the one thing, if I had to pick just one, that makes the gameplay sub-optimal is the limitations of the N64 controller itself. Though we may not even think of it now, but may have noticed when we made the transition, it surely is a treat (some might say a necessity) to have two sticks at your disposal when playing a shooter. in this case, one has to depend on auto-aim in combat as the manual aim requires a stationary position and lack of cover (in most cases) since it can only be viewed in first-person. In the harder levels or on the higher difficulty options is when this becomes the most irritating. To avoid taking damage, one must strafe back and forth like an idiot and wait for the auto-aim to get on target. Other than this problem and the brevity of the story, Sarge's Heroes 2 is "good to go." However, one thing that may be worth considering is the PS2 version, as it may deal with this particular control bug (though I am not certain since I haven't played that version). If you can help the CRN community by providing this information in the comments, it would be highly appreciated.

Agent Under Fire Multiplayer, or: Why AI Bots Matter

Agent Under Fire is a pretty good PS2 game, all things considered, but it's a bit on the short side. Multiplayer is absurdly enjoyable, what with all the jetpacks, Q-claws, and low-gravity settings, but without buddies nearby, you miss out on the fun. For whatever reason, only the PS2 version lacks AI bots to properly flesh out your deathmatches; both Gamecube and Xbox versions support them. Doesn't sound like much, but little things like that give a game value, replayability. Take a look at this video (ignore the overbearing intro if you can) to get an idea what PS2 owners like myself missed out on:

More thoughts on AI bots to come. Stay tuned.

Wednesday Double Feature: The Avengers (2012) and Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I went to these movies on consecutive nights (midnight release for Avengers, Friday night for Cabin in the Woods) so I'm grouping them together for a few quick reviews:

The Avengers (2012)

I talk a whole lot about spatial clarity on this blog, especially in regards to modern action movies. Continuity editing, that most common style of editing in narrative filmmaking, which seeks to make the surroundings and full movements of the characters legible (and, hopefully, enjoyable) to audiences, has been lost to a new style where fast, discontinuous, and ultimately confusing cuts signify the action alone, not the actual, physical goings-on. Thankfully, Avengers is  a straight-forward, clean action movie, one that's exciting without inducing headaches. Sure, the plot is the usual Marvel nonsense, but the special effects sequences are fantastic and logically organized. This is the kind of blockbuster I can always get behind.

Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Now this was something of a surprise. Indeed, I had heard absolutely nothing about this one going in to the theater. Matter of fact, just going by the title, I fully anticipated a wholly conventional horror flick. Not that I would've minded, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I got to see instead. Cabin is the epitome of the post-modern, hyper-reflexive genre film. What starts out in the most typical fashion (five dumb kids take a trip out to the mountains to get friendly with each other) becomes more Charlie Kaufman than Friday the 13th. What you get is one of the most original, surprisingly brainy movies so far this year.

Updates on Skyfall, TimeSplitters 4

Here's some news items regarding two of our favorite franchises, courtesy of Chicken Man:

Love that bulldog.

Maybe this isn't exactly new, but The Hub Now has some interesting photos of the upcoming Skyfall. The word for the day is "gritty," I suppose, what with all the sour faces, chiaroscuro lighting, and guns. Really, though, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. Daniel Craig has always brought a more brutal bent to the series than anyone else.

GameSpot has a mini-interview with one of the creators of the TimeSplitters series. Pedestrian stuff for the most part, but it did lead us to another story from late last month: TimeSplitters 4 is not currently in development. Though this is not surprising by any means, it's sad to hear nonetheless. Will we ever see another TimeSplitters game? My guess is no, but I would love to be wrong.