Yes, I Saw The Chris Roberts Video

Oh hey, look! Chris Roberts - onetime famous PC game designer turned moderately-successful movie producer turned space sim kickstarter-helmer - used a bit of THIS infamous Big Picture episode as part of a SXSW panel about the non-death of PC gaming (which feels a lot more like a very lengthy live-performance advertisement for his kickstarted space sim "Star Citizen," but whatever; business is business)! Nifty!

I mean, yeah, it's totally out of context and kinda makes it seem like I'm saying something completely opposite what I ultimately was in that episode, and it would've been nice to see some attribution since, y'know, I'm also in business here... BUT! exposure is exposure, and fun to see all the same even though - yes - I understand that he likely intends it's presence to be representative of all the ::ironic quotes:: "EXPERTS!!!" he intends to show who's the boss. Them's the breaks.



And now, for context, the original episode in-full:

The Escapist : The Big Picture : PC Gaming Is Dead - Long Live PC Gaming!

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Blomkamp's "Elysium" Is Class-Warfare... With Mecha-Suits

Hooooooly shit.

First trailer for Neil "I Almost Wasted All This Talent On The 'Halo' Movie" Blomkamp's follow-up to the magnificient "District 9" has hit, and it kicks ass. It's another socially-conscious scifi actioner, this time casting Matt Damon as the point-man (leader?) of a team from poverty-ravaged 2159 Earth who use strength-augmenting mechanical exo-skeletons to launch an incursion against the titular Elysium, an orbiting space-station where humanity's wealthy elite have walled themselves off from the rest of us (and, from the look of things, have no shortage of robot soldiers working to keep said rest of us out.)

Yeah, this looks good...

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Big Picture: "Miracle, Man"

Aaaaand this would be why this needed to be in two parts.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Miracle, Man.

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Margaret Thatcher is Dead

Headline sort of sums it up: Former British PM Margaret Thatcher, ill for some time now, died today of an apparent stroke. She was most-recently the subject of the Meryl Streep Oscar-Aquisition Device "The Iron Lady," my review of which appeared here and I'll repost below the jump to mark the occasion.

As a student of history, I have my own general outlook on Thatcher's legacy... but frankly the opinions that count for much more at the moment are those of the folks in the UK who lived either during her tenure or lived through the after-effects thereof. The moment belongs to them, and UK folks among my readership (or, y'know, anyone else really) are invited to weigh in in the comments - given the way most of my British/UK aquaintances tended to speak of her for the most part, I imagine the discussion will be spirited to say the least:

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Iron Lady

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Escape to The Movies: "Evil Dead"

Relax, it's good.

Intermission begins the first of a two-part Sam Raimi retrospective.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Evil Dead

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"Carrie" Re-Make Full Trailer

The buzz on the "Carrie" remake was that it's not very good, which may or may not be responsible for it getting bounced to mid-Fall; but you can't always trust those sorts of things. Anyway, now it's got a full trailer which aims to help get everybody who never saw the original classic get on the same page with those who did by giving away the entire story in two minutes...




Well... it's "Carrie" alright. Obviously can't hope to touch the original DePalma film, one of the all-time great horror flicks, but it'll be interesting to see the story (summary: abused/bullied teen has telekinesis, everybody pays) played out with characters who look more convincingly like high-schoolers.

Re-staging the car-flip as a slo-mo/bullet-time CGI gag is depressingly innevitable, though it should be fun to see whether they go even further on Carrie's mother's Christian zealotry (an edgy move for the late-70s) or dial it back for fear of pissing off Flyover audiences; and I wonder if there'll be pressure to tone down the ambiguity of the original finale (yeah, it's supposed to ALSO be Carrie flipping to the Dark Side... but most of her class more-or-less had it coming by that point) now that "misunderstood kid on a rampage" is more of a 'thing' in the popular-consciousness...

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Bad Guys On A Timer

It probably says something about my own wasted youth that I can be watching a trailer in 2013 and my first thought is: "Wait, wasn't this part of the premise for the shitty 'Double Dragon' movie?" (I checked, it was.)

Anyway, the premise behind "The Purge" is that at some point in the near future the United States has turned itself into a well-behaved utopia by instituting an annual one night "get out of jail free" event wherein all police and/or emergency services are suspended and everyone so-inclined gets a free pass to rob, murder, rape, destroy or whatever anyone and anything they want without fear of legal reprisal. In the film, a suburban family takes pity on a guy stuck outside during this year's Purge, inviting the wrath of the Purge-participants who were hunting him.


Great pitch, to be certain - but to be honest I lost a lot of interest once the Slasher Movie crew turned up. The real horror (and real promise) of the setup should be the revelation of what absolute bastards the "nice normal people" of the world turn into when you take away the chance they'll get punished; so having the heavies for this turn out to be a pack of Arkham Asylum goons who'd likely be out pulling versions of this shit in a world without a Purge feels a lot like chickening-out of something more subversive... though to be fair it's extremely likely that the point of the "Strangers"-knockoff masks is so the film can pull "shocking" reveals ("OMG! It's the mailman/grocery-clerk/barber!") later.

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