ScribbleKing

Some catching up to do...

Lets try to pick up where we left off... Some time ago I told you I would try to post at least three times a week, and well, I haven't really been able to do it lately. But I've seen quite a few movies in the past weeks, so reviewing those seems like a perfect way for me to do some catching up, so here we go!

Yeah, I'm a bit late...

But best wishes for 2008! I had also wanted to wish you a merry christmas, a few weeks ago, but more woes befell the site, and I haven't been able to update for a few weeks. So in case you were wondering what happened to my top 50, it will be updated this week and next. Of course, over the weeks that I wasn't able to update, I have already started doubting the 50 movies I have put in there, and I was almost done on a completely new top 50, but then I looked back and realised that the old top 50 was pretty much on point after all. So no changes, and more updates later this week!

It is time

When I announced to you yesterday that I was going to make a whole bunch of favorites lists, so as to better inform you what my favorites are, one of the things that sprang to mind was to make a list of my favorite movies. I have always held off on this, as I think there are so many movies I still have to see, that I cannot really give a list that does credit to every movie out there. I have tried making a list for a long time, put a lot of work into it, and then discarded the result before the list was even done. For some reason, I see it as a sort of important piece of information that cannot be let out of the bag too soon, or bad things might happen.

Of course, this is all stupid. Sure, I haven't seen many of the movies from the IMDB top 250, but is this really a bad thing? Why not just make a list, and then update it every year so it can reflect the new (and old) movies I have seen? I love making lists, yet I have never made the most important list there is to me as a movie lover. I guess part of me is worried that my reputation as a serious movie critic (cough) will be ruined when my readers see that The Replacements is in my list of favorite movies. Or that my friends will snub their noses at me when they see that movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Godfather and Star Wars aren't in it.

Well, I think you will agree that it is time for me to leave such concerns behind, and just get cracking. Next week, I present to you my top 50 favorite movies of all time, divided into 5 daily parts of ten movies.

It is time.

Who will come out on top?

As you probably know, I love making top tens. I'm one of those people who keeps making lists all the time, of sometimes the most useless facts, and sometimes of the same thing weeks in a row. I can't help it, and if you surf the web you can see easily that I am not the only one. And when I look at my stats, it's very clear that the top tens are amongst the most popular items on this site, some lists having been viewed over 10.000 times, which is pretty big when you consider how small this site really is.
Well, in the coming weeks, this site will be flooded with top tens, since I've gotten the idea to add these top tens to the sidebar of the different sections of this site. This way, people surfing here can see my preferences, and then they will know if they should pay attention to what I'm writing or not (I'm inclined to say yes, but hey, that's just me). Three good things come out of this: this way the lists give you a good idea of what I'm about, I can make lists to my hearts content, and I'll grab a few extra visitors here and there. And that can't be a bad thing, I'd say.

Download Busta Rhymes and J Dilla's free Dillagence mixtape

For many years, I have been a big fan of hiphop producer J Dilla. While many other hiphop producers just followed the popular trends and kept churning out the same old same old, Dilla kept redefining himself, making some of the best rap songs in hiphop history. So when he passed away in 2006, I was in shock. There aren't many people who have had such a big impact on my music listening as he has, and I was afraid of a future without new Dilla music. Of course I needn't have been too afraid. The man has made so much music in his life that we will be hearing unknown stuff from him for years to come. Besides which, there are always rappers out there who take some Dilla instrumentals and turn them into a new mixtape. Plenty of times, the results of this aren't very impressive, but here we have a new mixtape that is very much worth your listening time.

Mick Boogie of the League Crew hooked up with long time Dilla-cohort Busta Rhymes and made a mixtape with him, using plenty of Dilla music the fans will have heard before, but also plenty of stuff they don't know yet. When mixed together as well as here, it's a pleasure to listen to, especially since you can hear Busta Rhymes' passion for his old friend's music. I'll say it: save for his period with The Leaders of the New School, Busta has never sounded better than he did over Dilla's beats. And the best thing about this new mixtape is that its free, though the people behind it appreciate it if you donate some money to the Dilla foundation if you enjoy this mixtape as much as I think you will.

Download it here

Aaah, comics...

There was a time when I went to my regular comics shop in Amsterdam almost every Saturday. When there, a whole pile of books would be waiting for me, most of the times hidden behind a big weed scented cloud. My comics dealer was a man (well, he still is, he just isn't my dealer anymore) who answered to most of the cliches that you associate with Amsterdam. Enter the shop, and he would be sitting there, puffing on a joint and sipping a beer, looking at me happily. Whether this was because he was happy to see me (and my money), or because he was already somewhere on a planet of his own, I'm not sure, but the mood in the shop was always relaxed, with the highlight of most weekends being the bus trip back, where I would browse through the pile, picking out my most eagerly anticipated books and flicking through them.

Then there came a time when the pile of new comics in my house kept growing and growing, and I kept spending less and less time on actually reading the books. This, coupled to the fact that my life was getting more and more expensive, this prompted me to at one time decide to quit buying new comics for a little while. That little while turned out to be three years, a time in which I got rid of maybe half of my comics, and hardly spent time reading the other half.

More on that Simpsons Game

I already told you earlier that I'm growing quite fond of that new Simpsons game by EA. It's bloody derivative and frustrating, but also so well written and funny that I've started to overlook the obvious faults and to just enjoy it. It's a really easy game, which I actually don't mind as much as I used to. As a matter of fact, I read something a few weeks ago, I think it was on Penny Arcade, where one of the guys wrote a piece about him not being into difficult games that much anymore. To him (I think it was Gabe), games have become more of a form of entertainment where you want to walk through a story, and have some easy fun with it, and where you don't want to be interrupted too much by levels that you have to play again and again.

That's a very good point, and I find myself in that same situation. I've done my time in the trenches of videogaming. I've played games like Kingdom Hearts, where I was playing until late at night, cursing loudly at those insanely difficult end bosses and where I became so wired up that I had to stop playing at times and take a walk to relax. I'm not sure if I would still be up to that sort of fanatical gaming anymore. Well, I still have Kingdom Hearts 2 waiting for me somewhere, but when I finally start playing it, it will probably be a case of one hour at a time, which is mostly the amount of time I have for games nowadays anyway.

Did you see that Speed Racer trailer? If not, then keep it that way

Even though I'm getting a bit bored with movies based on well known properties, the Speed Racer movie had a lot going for it. Speed Racer is a cool character, with some cool stories attached to it. The movie is directed by the Wachowski's. It's got people like Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci. But then the first trailer hit and my expectations for this movie sank to the bottom of the Expectations Ocean (if there would ever be such a place). I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to release this trailer, but it looks absolutely horrible. I had no idea what tone they would be going for with this movie, but I had no idea they were planning on making a cheap Spy Kids knock-off with fast cars. This trailer looks like a cutscene from a bad videogame. I still have a small bit of hope left in me that they are going to turn this movie around in the right direction, but a bigger part of me is worried that it's not going to happen... Or maybe I just have to re-adjust my expectations and look forward to a "zany action adventure that will make your senses pop". Click on to see the trailer.

Hey, what happened?

As you may remember, I made it one of my ten challenges to update this weblog at least three times a week. After a few weeks in which I succeeded in reaching this goal, for the past two weeks there haven't been any updates at all. No, for a change, it wasn't me coming up with new plans to revamp the site, and I wasn't even too lazy to update the site. The simple fact is that it was time for me to pay my monthly subscription to Typepad, and right at the moment when this was supposed to happen, my credit card ran out, and it took me a bit longer than I had hoped to get it up and running again. Luckily, Typepad is cool enough to not immediately delete everything when you haven't been able to pay, and they even kept the site online for all of you to view.

But anyway, things have been settled, and the site is back up, hopefully to not be discontinued in this way again. Starting monday I hope to be back to the 'at least three times a week' schedule, so let me wish you a good weekend, and see you on Monday!

Move aside, PGR 4!

Over the weekend, I was finally able to wrestle Project Gotham Racing 4 out of my Xbox 360, and replace it with another game that will probably keep my attention for some time to come. I am talking of course about Call of Duty 4, the latest in a line of shooters that has won great critical acclaim, and judging from this new installment, rightfully so! Normally, I look shooters every now and then but I'm never as excited about them as I am about good racing games. I have for instance been dipping into Bioshock for some weeks now, and even though I can see that it's a great game with a very intriguing story, I still don't have that drive to really get stuck into it like I have with games like PGR and Forza Motorsport. There have been some shooters that grabbed me, like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, but it's still a genre I most like playing multiplayer with friends at gameparties. I think however, that I won't let Call of Duty out of my grasp until I complete it.

This is the perfect example of a game that grabs you. It's not just the brilliant graphics, but also the fact that this game is exciting, full on action, almost like really playing a movie. You get dropped into intense situations that keep you alert for the full playing time, since you know that even only looking away for a split second can mean the end of your character. And even though in person I am not violent at all (some would even go so far to call me an old hippie), there is an undeniable thrill in blowing up shit all over the world. To put it bluntly. Besides which, the game gave me flashbacks to Operation Wolf, which of course can never be a bad thing. And just for the fact that the game features an Arcade Mode, available only when you finish the story mode, I want to complete this game as soon as possible.