#Goodtimes

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It’s time for another instalment of Mixed Reviews, this week I’ll be covering the series premiere of ABC’s new show V, the somewhat newish movie Away We Go and the recently released Borderlands. A little something for everybody, so away we go to the reviews!

V (Series Premiere, Aired November 3 2009 / ABC) – Torrent

I’m a little conflicted with this show after just watching it, although I did enjoy it for the most part and I plan on sticking with it to see where it goes. I’d like to point out that I’ve never seen any episodes of the original V series that aired in the 80’s, so I was going into this without knowing much more than it being a show about an alien invasion of some sort.

From the first few minutes of this show I was completely impressed by the special effects and production qualities, this is a great looking show. The cast is also top notch, with a lot of familiar faces such as Alan Tudyk & Morena Baccarin (Wash & Inara from Firelay), as well as Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliette from LOST) and good old Scott Wolf from Party of Five. Everybody on the cast does a great job and it’s just generally well done.

Loved the initial appearance of the Visitors, the mixed reactions from the public and how the story moved on smoothly to get things going. What really started to bother me was the obvious comparison of the alien visitors to the general American view of evil communist invaders. As the episode moved into the final scenes, I was having a lot of trouble enjoying the visitors, instead of seeing them as aliens all I could think of was cold-war era American propaganda about communism. There’s one point where the “friendly” alien visitors announce that they will be offering universal health care, which is met by a hilarious look of fearful surprise on a reporters face and the music takes an eerie tone, as if it was an incredibly evil communist move. And then of course, bad things start to happen and the friendly aliens really turn out to be evil invaders, which is the premise of the series.

I realize I might be looking into this symbolism too deeply, or seeing it the wrong way, but it just feels like a very strange time for an American series to be airing which equates universal health care with evil reptilian aliens who want to conquer the earth. Instead of enjoying a good old fashioned alien fashion, it just ended up removing me from the show and putting me back into the sad reality of current affairs.

But, with all that said, I did actually enjoy some of the show while putting that stuff behind me. I’m hopeful the series could get better, I’ll be watching the next few episode to see how it goes. Another concern is the schedule for this show, only four episodes will actually be airing initially and the rest of the show will be return March 2010, if these four episodes generate enough interest that is. So, I recommend checking out the show to see what you think, but don’t get too invested in it yet as it could disappear into the abyss even quicker than the great Firefly.

Away We Go (Released on DVD September 29 2009) – Torrent

Have you ever been craving fresh coconut and then ended up in a frustrating battle that just results in a horribly messy pile of coconut shell that’s covering your kitchen floor, now filled with anger and despair, you leave the broken coconut to go find pizza and RC Cola? That’s how I felt after attempting to watch this movie. Honestly, I had to just turn it off after the first hour because I couldn’t handle anymore.

I’m not quite sure why I had such a bad reaction to this one, since I’ve been excited to see it for ages and I’m fans of John Krasinski and Mya Rudolph. It looks like the movie’s got plenty of great reviews across the board, so I guess it’s another Earthbound situation that I’m in. Maybe I’m just really losing patience with movies who focus on long-winded shots of the characters staring off into the distance as they contemplate their pointless existence. I do enough of that on my own, I don’t want to watch other people doing it.

The only thing about this movie that I did enjoy a little bit was the appearance of Jim Gaffigan, because it’s Jim Gaffigan…he’s hilarious no matter where he shows up, even his recent appearance on Law & Order (bonus torrent for reading this far).

Borderlands (Released October 21 2009 / PS3, 360, PC)

My first impressions about this game was that it would be a cheap Fallout 3 knockoff, but ended up feeling more like Diablo with the tiniest mix of Fallout in a great combination of obsessively fun gaming. It’s a first person shooter with a great role playing system wrapped set in a desolate wasteland that initially seems like Fallout, but quickly sets itself apart from that world since it’s not a post-apocalyptic setting…just an unfortunate place to live, filled with freaky monsters and psychotic people who want to kill you.

The main draw from this game comes from the insane amount of weapons and items to collect, which are generated on the fly similar to Diablo’s dungeon generation, so you’re constantly finding new pieces of equipment that you can either use, sell or trade with friends. The best thing about the weapons in this game are the elemental effects which can add fire, acid, shock and explosive elements to your bullets to cause massively entertaining carnage.

The single player game is great, but what really shines is the co-op play. This game easily could have been an MMO, but instead they went in the direction of strictly co-op play with up to 4 people. The game does an excellent job with this co-op play, you get the feel of playing an MMO without some of the more annoying things like random people griefing you or having to wait for enemies or quest-givers to respawn…it’s just you and your friends questing and collecting for hours on end having a whole lot of fun with classes that complement each other really well.

Of course the game isn’t perfect, it has some minor issues. The most annoying issue from this game has to be the lengthy load times between game areas, especially after playing through all of Uncharted 2 without a single loading screen it can get a little annoying waiting around when you’re traveling between areas quite a bit. And then there’s the storyline from the game, which didn’t interest me at all and I’ve been ignoring it completely, but this hasn’t stopped me from enjoying hours of obsessive leveling and item collecting. I’ve hit level 27 today and I can’t wait to get back at it to keep on moving up the ranks.