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Damn fine product. (A one-month review of the ASUS X551-MAV-HCL 1201E laptop)

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I can’t possibly pass for a computer expert, but I can tell you what’s worked for me and what hasn’t.  After a month, I can cheerfully report that I am quite happy with the ASUS X551-MAV-HCL 1201E laptop.

I read a bunch of product reviews before I purchased it; with one poorly spelled exception, customers reported that it was “good for the price.”

I agree.  As someone who really only uses Microsoft Word and the Internet, it’s been perfect.  It is actually faster than my last computer, even when that was new — it boots up quickly and connects to the Internet in a snap (even with the inferior Internet Explorer that comes standard).  It seems to handle Word and the net together just fine, and doesn’t slow down, even if multiple windows are open in my web browser.  (I didn’t even notice a significant difference when I downloaded and used the speedier Google Chrome.)  Other customers were concerned before purchase that it has a weak processor — the Intel Celeron N2830.  But I only use word processing, the web, and simple multimedia like Youtube and Netflix — not the photo editing and video creation.

It comes loaded with Windows 8.1 — but will upgrade automatically, if you sign up, for Windows 10 when that becomes available.

A few more quick notes:

1)  This laptop comes with no manual whatsoever.  You’ve got to be able to connect with your WiFi, then research the (quite lengthy) make and model to reach the manufacturer’s website for specs and information.

2)  It doesn’t come loaded with Word.  You need to download that and pay for it independently.  If you don’t want to spring for the entire Microsoft Office suite, you can get a monthly subscription to word for about $8.

3) The desktop layout is kind of useless.  There’s a matrix of square icons for programs and websites that you will probably never use. Or, if you do, you’ll habitually select them from your bookmarks.  “Trip Planner?”  “Reading List?”  “Baked Eggs and Ham?!”  We are approaching the singularity if my computer can provide me with baked eggs and ham.

4)  The laptop’s camera is pretty poor. It takes grainy images.

5)  It comes loaded with the cumbersome McAfee antivirus program.  I downloaded AVG, which I prefer.  (Most of my friends use something called “Avast” these days, but I refuse to use any antivirus program that sounds as though it were named by a pirate.)  It is always proper to have only one antivirus program operating at one time.  So I not only disabled, but dutifully tried to remove the McAfee program from my hard drive.  For some reason, I could get rid of the main program, but the “Uninstall” function will not work for its apparent companion program, “McAfee LiveSafe.”

6)  I was surprised at how easily I got customer service.  Might’ve been on the third ring, and I wasn’t placed on hold.  The representative was quite helpful.

7)  There is a one-year warranty, you’ve got to keep the document handy and ALSO register the product online with ASUS.  Beyond the one-year period, you can still call customer support for advice over the phone, which I thought was pretty nice.

8)  As for the “Incredible Beauty” and its “Classic, Timeless Design” that ASUS advertises on its website?  Well … I can’t really vouch for that.  It’s a shiny black laptop, not the goddam Mona Lisa, ASUS.

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“Four Devils, One Hell”

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I recently passed this along to a friend — “Grendel Tales: Four Devils, One Hell” is easily one of the best comic stories I’ve ever read.  I want to call it a limited series, but “Grendel Tales” was an ongoing 1990’s anthology series with individual stories that took place in the expansive “Grendel” universe established by the genius Matt Wagner.

The story is by James Robinson, the art is by Teddy Kristiansen.  [Edit: the covers below actually were painted by Wagner himself.]

It’s a mixture of crime noir, drug-addled fantasy, apocalyptic fiction, a conspiracy mystery, good old vampire horror and a kick-ass New Orleans party story.  It deserves a 10 out of 10.

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A tiny review of “The Strain” Season 2 Premiere.

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“The Strain” hissed and clawed its way back into our hearts and veins on Sunday; the season 2 premiere of FX’s vampire series deserves an 8 out of 10.

It was great.  It had everything that made the show unique and fun in Season 1.  We’ve got frightening, truly disgusting vampires that don’t disappoint us by being “sexy” or “charming,” and we’ve got an ambitious script that takes a stab at depicting an expansive story, complete with a historical context and a decent modern apocalyptic conspiracy.  We’ve got fantastic bad guys that chew the scenery, portrayed by top-shelf actors.  And the scares are there!  I actually jumped during one attack, and there’s a new subplot toward the end that might’ve been dreamed up by Satan himself.  (Yeesh.)

Unfortunately, we do also appear to have the same irritating one-note stock characters as good guys.  Their thin dialogue includes little indication that they’re affected by the horrific events around them.  And the acting among our heroes is not great across the board.  These guys might’ve been cooked up by a high school creative writing class.

Also … there’s an occasional plot contrivance here and there, but we’ll forgive those.

Still, fans will not be disappointed!

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A short review of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012).

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I actually really liked “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012).  I’d give it an 8 out of 10.  And that’s even with my own admitted possible bias, as I am not a huge fan of traditional fantasy.  I certainly can’t claim to be a fan of the original books, because [downcast eyes], I’ve never read them. I tried “The Silmarillion” once, because I thought that was supposed to come first in J.R.R. Tolkien’s chronology … and I just couldn’t stay with it.  So I guess my take on this movie is that of an outsider, as it was with Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

But this was enjoyable movie for anyone, I thought.  It’s a total immersion into an incredibly beautifully rendered fantasy world.  I thought the sets and backgrounds were more detailed than the first films, for example.  It’s a gorgeous movie to look at.  The acting is uniformly excellent throughout.  And the continuity is just great; there are well crafted segues into subplots that will eventually lead to the original trilogy.

I think the only thing that hampered my enjoyment was that it felt so much like a children’s story.  (I believe I read once that Tolkien actually began his novel as a bedtime story for his children, while his subsequent “Rings” epic was intended for adult, mainstream readers.)

Peter Jackson had his creative sensibilities planted firmly in childhood fairy tale when constructing this movie.  For an outsider, this seems like a standard (and sometimes predictable) quest movie.  We have a tremendous deus ex machina at the end that a child might not recognize, but this adult did.

The dialogue, monsters and action were often too cartoonish for me.  As a fan of creature features, I found the monsters were often too silly to be credible.  (I had this small quibble, as well, with the original film trilogy.)  With the outstanding exceptions of the Warg and the White Orc, they often seemed like CGI-rendered cartoons.  The three trolls who want to cook the dwarves, for example, were like something out of a silly Hanna-Barbera cartoon.  If this film was supposed to engage adult viewers, this creative approach was a pretty big misfire.

But I recommend this, even to people who don’t typically enjoy sword-and-sorcery fantasies.

Seriously, though … that deus ex machina at the end … if such an option is available to our heroes, why not employ it from the start of the movie?  Hell, why not employ it throughout the entire “Rings” trilogy?

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“Fright Night 2” was an average night.

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I submit that the direct-to-video “Fright Night 2” (2013) is the paragon of average horror movies.  It is neither great nor terrible.  You don’t immediately call your friends to recommend it, but you don’t bemoan its $1 rental price at Redbox either.  I’d give it a 6 out of 10.

The movie suffers greatly from an insufferably irritating iteration of protagonist Charlie Brewster.  He’s uncharismatic in every scene, including those showing his weaselly entreaties to the girlfriend who left him after he cheated on her.  (He is played blandly by Will Payne; she is played rather well by Sacha Parkinson.)  Entirely absent is the charm and likable innocence that Anton Yelchin brought to the role in 2011’s “Fright Night.”  (Kyle Reese fought vampires in 2011, then aided John Connor in the future to fight terminators, evidently.)

The lackluster Charlie here is compensated for by a terrific villain.  Jaime Murray is a fantastic female equivalent of Dracula.  She’s a strong actress, she’s a quite tall brunette who looks the part, and she knows how to both sex it up and scare us.  I love her as a bad guy (gal).  I’d love to see her play a conspirator on one of the nerd community’s most anticipated upcoming revivals: “24” or “The X Files.”  I’m told she has a role on that … medieval show that people watch.  “Shame of Thrones?”  “Dame of Thrones?”  I’ve never seen an episode.

“Fright Night 2” benefits from Romania as a wonderful shooting location, and it’s captured nicely by the talented eye of director Eduardo Rodriguez.  What is the deal with average or mediocre horror films being filmed on location in Romania?  Is it just really cheap to shoot there, like Prague?

Anyway, this movie’s title is a misnomer.  This movie isn’t a sequel to the terrific 2011 film.  It is actually a remake — we again meet Charlie Brewster and Peter Vincent (the very cool Sean Power) for the first time.  It’s confusing.  I’m guessing that this was a rejected script for the 2011 film that they decided to shoot anyway?

And here is my requisite exposition to silence the pedants in advance — of course we are all aware that this is a “remake of a remake.”  The 2011 film is a nice update of the 80’s classic.  (And wasn’t that fun flick the talk of the neighborhood back in the day?)

Sooooo, seeing how average this film was, I really can’t recommend that you ether watch it or skip it.  I guess I can just offer a neutral “hmm.”  I’d suggest that it is acceptable fare if you’re an especially ardent vampire movie fan who has already viewed the classics that are easily available.

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“Terminator Genisys” Terminated My Boredom!

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There.  You see that truly sucky play on words that I employed in the headline for this blog post?  That should give you a sense of the quality of this film’s script.  I’m serious.  When one character expresses their desire to rule the world, another character shouts “Rule THIS!” before blasting the former with a laser.  Because the future is a long, looooong way from Tennessee Williams, Baby.

But hold up.  Believe it or not, this will actually be a positive review of “Terminator Genisys” (2015).  I’d reluctantly give it an 8 out of 10, because it was a fun summer popcorn movie, despite its flaws.

And there are flaws.  It isn’t high art, and it can’t even approach the pathos, drama, characters, rich themes and great old fashioned movie thrills of the true terminator classics: the 1984 original and James Cameron’s astonishingly superior sequel in 1991.

The dialogue for “Terminator Genisys” is terrible in many places.  The story’s most important character, Sarah Connor, falls flat.  She’s scripted as a chipper, upbeat, 20’ish “It Girl” who utterly fails to win viewer loyalty, as Linda Hamilton’s traumatized crusader did so beautifully in 1991.  I also humbly opine that Emilia Clarke did poorly with the role.  This is the first time I’ve ever seen her perform — I’ve heard that she’s actually considered a very good actress playing a queen on … that TV show.  “Game of Bones?”  “Crones?”  Or something?  People like that show, right?

A lackluster Sarah Connor might be a serious transgression in the fan community.  For a kid who learned to love science fiction movies in the 80’s and 90’s, Ellen Ripley will always be the paradigmatic heroine, but Sarah Connor was second.  No, no one can equal Hamilton’s performance, but others can still perform the role quite well when it is competently scripted.  Just see Lena Heady’s inspired turn in television’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (2008).

The “timey-wimey” stuff lost me early on.  Seriously — the time travel story elements confused and annoyed me as soon as Kyle Reese (Jesus, I almost wrote Corporal Hicks) entered the time machine and began having inexplicable memories of another timestream.

Who is sending multiple terminators on multiple missions?  Are they from various timelines and various iterations of Skynet, or are they from a single future?  Our heroes have an unknown benefactor with access to time machines?  A T-1000 attacks people on a rowboat?  Does it … float, then?  Walk on water?  It seems to me that hopping on a boat would be a rather ingenius way of escaping an unstoppable robot, unless he commandeers his own vehicle …  Hell, it’s something I’d never thought of, and I am precisely the sort of weirdo who thinks about things like that.  (Is it any worse than when other people have zombie contingency plans?)

I’m not even sure I understand the motives of the story’s antagonist who we see the most.  Is this character on nobody’s side, exactly?  If this character is a superior model composed of nanobots, shouldn’t Skynet be manufacturing and deploying dozens, instead of just one?  For that matter … why do individual terminators each have an individual consciousness and point of view?  Can Skynet simply download its own single collective consciousness to every unit?

I felt a little embarrassed at first, but the Internet reassures me that most, if not all viewers, are puzzled about these things.  The wonderful io9.com, for example, has an excellent tongue-in-cheek “FAQ” pointing out this movie’s surprising multitude of unanswered questions.  Warning: SPOILERS.

http://io9.com/terminator-genisys-the-spoilyr-faq-1716548070

Also … I really disliked this movie’s central plot twist.

Still, I have to give this movie a free pass.  I simply can’t give a negative review to a film during which I laughed and smiled throughout.  This is a fun summer event-movie.  It’s a fast-paced, sci-fi actioner with fantastic special effects, the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and tons of fan service and Easter eggs.  (Recreating the 1984 film’s sequences shot-for-shot?  C’mon!  That was just cool and fun.)

We’ve got nanobaddies, liquid metal terminators (made of mimetic polyalloy, to those of us in the know), aging T-800’s with stiff joints, time machines, terminators arriving in multiple decades, Bot-on-Bot violence, a schoolbus flipping over on the Golden Gate Bridge and … somebody does something totally sweet with an oxygen tank.  They really threw in everything but the kitchen sink for this movie.  The result is only kid stuff, but it’s still a good time.  If you see this movie, and you don’t smile when a T-1000 emerges from a police car windshield, then you have never been a 10-year-old boy.

This year’s “Jurassic World” had none of the earmarks of a great film, but it still entertained.  I gave that a positive review, so I’m going to go head and recommend this as well.

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A mixed review of “The X Files,” Season 9.

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[THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.]  Well … it pains me to admit it, but even a diehard fan of “The X Files” has got to admit that its quality waned in the last season of its regular run — 2001’s Season 9 was pretty uneven, with great “monster-of-the-week” episodes and surprisingly disappointing final entries into the show’s over-arching “mythology” episodes.  I’d give this season a 7 out of 10, and that’s from a biased fanboy who loves this show in much the same way that others love Star Wars and Star Trek.  Frankly, I’d recommend that you peruse Wikipedia’s episode list to select the standalone eps so that you can watch only those.  Skip the conspiracy eps entirely — even if you’re a lover of the long running mythology, as I am.  (You’ll only be disappointed.)

Again, a few of the single stories really shined, and weren’t symptomatic of the creative problems that visibly plagued the show near the end of its 90’s era run.  At the top of the list is the outstanding “Release,” in which the murder of John Doggett’s son is resolved.  This episode had everything that made “The X Files” great — good guys, bad guys, and ambiguous guys all working at cross purposes; a tragic mystery; a haunted past; pathos; twists and red herrings; and great emotional interactions among key characters.  Plus … wrath and gunshots. Damn cool.

“Release” also highlighted Cary Elwes’ wonderful talent.  What a great, darkly ambiguous character he made Brad Follmer.  I liked him far better in this role than his comic caricature in “The Princess Bride” (1987) or his traumatized victim in the “Saw” movies.  This show could have taken on great new directions if it had emphasized the triangle among Doggett, Monica Reyes and Follmer, instead of belaboring past stories so much to retain fans of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

Other episodes shined as well.  “4D” and “Audrey Pauley” were like great episodes of the classic “The Outer Limits” (1963).  “Audrey Pauley” benefited from a fantastic actress (Tracey Ellis) in the title role.  “Hellbound” frighteningly pushed the limits of gore and shock-horror.  And “John Doe” was a pretty decent old-fashioned Hitchcock-type crime tale.

Let’s … just not dwell on “Improbable,” the utterly stupid … “numerology episode.”  They bagged an amazing guest actor like the iconic Burt Reynolds and subjected him to this?!  If anyone can tell me the significance of those two unidentified Italian men crooning in the episode’s coda, I’d be eternally grateful.

The mythology episodes … sigh.  They failed to please.  I know that many fans point to David Duchovny’s absence as the reason, but I disagree.  This is the story of a decades-old, global, inter-planetary conspiracy.  It isn’t just one man’s story, and we’d followed Fox Mulder’s quest for the prior eight years.  We can have a coherent and logical continuation of the story without him.  And the writers and actors of “The X Files” did just fine in introducing more crusaders that we care about — two great characters in the form of Doggett and Reyes.  Robert Patrick was terrific; Annabeth Gish wasn’t perfect, but had room to grow, as Gillian Anderson did in the early years.  And of course Anderson’s immense talents still made Scully a perfect heroine.  You know what would have been a daring creative decision?  Martyring Mulder to motivate the survivors.  (Duchovny wanted to leave anyway, didn’t he?)

For me, two other problems were responsible for the show’s decline.  The first was structure, and the second was the redundancies with past seasons.  Season 9 was all over the place — at this point, I’d bet the viewers had largely lost hope that the show’s long-running mysteries would be resolved.  Subplots were raised and dropped with little impact; the episodes concerning baby “William” were maudlin and tiresome.  The season moved forward with minimal clues and exposition.  Its penultimate episode, “Sunshine Days,” was … a mythology episode?  Or not?  I’m not sure — we have a new superpowered character whose unique gifts might be “the answer to everything.”  Well … that’s pretty much the same plot point with which we left off with Gibson Praise in a prior season.  It was a nebulous plot point that wasn’t well supported in the script then, and it’s even less believable now.  And the final episode was a cobbled together rush job, in which past guest stars cameoed in a literal trial for Mulder.  (Admittedly, I, for one, thought Chris Carter did a decent job of wrapping up pre-existing story arcs.)  The we leave off with a kind of … distant-future cliffhanger … which was subsequently unaddressed by the second feature film in 2008.

But the recycled story arcs were worse.  Instead of a conspiracy, we have “a new conspiracy.” Instead of superpowered Alien Bounty Hunters with a little known Achilles’ heel, we have … “super-soldiers” with a little known Achilles’ heel. (And this silly story device seems like something out of the old “Roadrunner” cartoons.)  Instead of a credulous guy and a skeptical lady, we have a credulous lady and a skeptical guy.  I’m not sure what Carter was thinking, except that he must have been consciously paralleling past seasons that had proven so popular.

Oh, well.  It’s still “The X Files.”  And it wasn’t all bad.  Check it out on Netflix and decide what you think.

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A short review of “Hellraiser: Deader” (2005)

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Believe it or not, “Hellraiser: Deader” (2005) surprised me at first for being unexpectedly good for the seventh film in a franchise.  We’ve got a detailed, original, creative horror story setup, we’ve got some quite good makeup effects, and we’ve got Romania as a great atmospheric location.  I was having a good time.

Just past the halfway mark, however, this movie descended into confused plotting and incomprehensibility, half-heartedly depicted by bland directing and bad acting.  (The lead actress here illustrates for us that not every pretty girl can be an Oscar contender.)

Fans of the franchise, take note — this is only a putative “Hellraiser” movie.  The iconic “Pinhead” makes a couple of perfunctory appearances; the other “Cenobites” appear once, I think, in background.  A quick check of Wikipedia confirmed my suspicion — this was originally a standalone horror movie script, into which these characters were inserted (and pretty tenuously in terms of plot).  Clive Barker had no creative involvement whatsoever.

I’d give this movie a 3 out of 10 for an interesting first half, and I’d recommend you skip it.

You know what?  Go watch “From Within” (2008).  That’s a good horror yarn that gets too little press.

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A tiny review of Season 6 of “The X Files.”

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Season 6 of “The X Files” is probably the best season of the series, in my honest opinion. It deserves a perfect 10.

The mythology episodes (and their conclusion in the “Two Fathers/One Son” story arc) are the best ever – a perfect blend of science fiction, horror, mystery, suspense and spy thrillers. It’s fantastic the way Chris Carter gave us convincing special effects for a 1990’s tv show.

Standalone episodes were also at their best, with gems like “Drive,” “Milagro,” Arcadia” and “Monday.”

The only failure was the truly horrible episode, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.” It was truly as stupid as it sounds. It just can’t drag down the otherwise amazing season, though.

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A tiny review of “The X Files,” Season 5.

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“The X Files” was in its heyday during Season 5 – this deserves a perfect 10. There were a slew of fantastic mythology episodes, and the standalones included all-time classics such as “The Pine Bluff Variant,” “Folie a Deux” and “Bad Blood.”

There was only one misfire – the draggy and unsatisfying “Chinga.” And even that was at least watchable, thanks to onscreen chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

Great stuff.

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