Benedict Cumberbatch Might Be the Best Actor Ever

I'm sitting on my couch, watching the last hour or so of Desolation of Smaug.  I love this silly movie; I probably rent it from the library or borrow it off friends once every two months or so.  In particular, I love the conversation between Bilbo and Smaug, deep under the Lonely Mountain just before Smaug breaks free and heads for Lake Town.  Even when the rest of the movie(s) didn't live up to my expectations, this conversation is eerie and dark and spine-tingling every time -- exactly as I pictured it years before when I first read The Hobbit.

It is surprisingly hard to find a good picture of this conversation online -- lots of fan art and old animation

Their conversation is just starting to heat up -- Smaug has started his "My claws are daggers" speech, that deep rumbling bass voice stirring into anger -- when Bishop's friend joins me.

"Did you know," he says, "that Benedict Cumberbatch did motion capture stuff for Smaug?"
I'm a little surprised at this. "Like Gollum?"
"Yeah! But... he's a dragon. So why did they need the motion capture?"  We debate this for a while, finally settling on the fact that a) Benedict Cumberbatch tends to move his face a lot, and b) so does Smaug. Particularly his dragon-eyebrows.  That's got to be the reason for it.

Of course, my next stop is the Internet, where I quickly discover that not only did Cumberbatch do this, he apparently spent roughly 3 or 4 days doing the motion capture, complete with dialogue and rolling around on the floor.  Observe:

There are websites out there devoted to all the gifs from this event!

This is seriously the best thing I've discovered on the Internet in a long time. 

 The interviews I read and watched all convey the same idea: Cumberbatch really wanted to get into character, and the CGI masters who created Smaug wanted some rough ideas for realistic movement.  Put them together and you get not only Smaug, but also the most amazing and hilarious images of a man truly devoted to his craft.

Some of the pictures, like this one, are decidedly psychotic -- and that, to me, gives Smaug's variation in emotions so much depth.  He's already a well-written character, thanks to Peter Jackson staying fairly close to Tolkien's original creation, and being voiced by someone as talented and involved and really okay with putting himself out there as Cumberbatch truly brings the character to life.  I mean, I'm a little scared of him as I watch some of those scenes, and I think that's exactly what Tolkien was going for.

It's obviously not a perfect match -- one of the CGI guys talks about how the differences in physiology between dragons and humans make using motion capture a little irrelevant. But it doesn't change just how cool this is -- and how much more real it makes Smaug feel.

As always, I am looking forward to whatever Benedict Cumberbatch does next. And to The Battle of Five Armies (trailer here), of course.

As if I really needed another reason to love him...

Edward Elric: A Fangirl's Dilemma

I first developed a crush on Edward Elric when I was about 16.

Back then, when Ed and I were approximately the same age, his being animated was no boundary to our love.  I read the manga religiously, watched the anime on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim as often as I could, and kept my Fullmetal Alchemist calendar hung up long after the year changed over.  The series contained so many interesting, well-developed characters that I pretty much developed a new crush every time I opened the manga up -- for a long time, far longer than I want to admit, I even slept on a Roy Mustang pillowcase.

sleeping with Roy all night long... ;)

As I started college, FMA gradually slipped out of my life.  One week I was reading the manga, the next I couldn't locate the latest issue in my tiny college town, and soon I'd forgotten all about it.

Until a month ago, when I picked up Attack on Titan.  Instantly, with the addition of anime to my 'recently watched' list, Netflix flooded me with options, and Fullmetal Alchemist caught my eye -- this time though, it was FMA: Brotherhood, a re-make of the original anime that followed the manga exactly.  It sure didn't take long for me to get hooked again.

You'll have to look up the plot basics if you aren't familiar with it.  It's too complicated to explain quickly.  

What I quickly realized is that now that I'm an adult -- complete with job, mortgage, and husband -- having a serious fan-girl crush on Edward Elric is .... almost gross.  I mean, he's 15, maybe 17 by the end of the show! I'm almost 26! Ed might still be drawn as damn sexy, with his chiseled physique and earnest smile, but now he's a child compared to my adult.  I am so not cool with this; if I was Winry, as I remember picturing myself back during Round 1 of this obsession, I'd be in some serious trouble.

It doesn't help that he still has the "hair boner," that little piece of bang that just won't fall down with the rest of his hair.  That little blonde spike was totally adorable when I was 16, back when boners were still a hilarious and un-encountered concept.  Now that I've grown up and learned how adult and fun boners can be, I still find the hair cute, but now it had a side of "inappropriate shudder" accompanying it.

Nor does it help that my students are actually OLDER than Edward.  I teach seniors in high school -- they're usually about 17 or 18 years old -- and let me tell you, there is nothing attractive about any of them.  They're teenagers for god's sake -- they're smelly and immature and generally out of control (the girls too!).  This is not a winning age group.  But Ed, in his animated and dear-god-you're-young youth, is totally enticing.

I get it: he's animated.  They can draw him to be whatever they want -- most of the time he looks and acts like he's in his early 20s, anyway, with his ripped up arms and agile combat abilities.   Frankly, I wish they'd written him in his 20s because then I wouldn't feel so dirty for having a crush on him.

I can try to transfer my love to Roy, a more age-appropriate choice even if he's a little too intense for me.  With his being a much more subtly motivated character, he's hard to piece together and truly appreciate, so it's hard to feel connected to him.  Ed might be young and angry, but his motives are pure and his actions always geared toward good -- and deep down, I don't want to give him up.  He is an easy character to love, age difference or not, and I'll stand by him to the end.

The REAL Movie Event of the Summer

The smell punched me as soon as I walked into the theatre.  I had already been hesitant about this experience, and now I was grossed out too. Perfect.

I loved Dragon Ball Z as a kid, but the movie sounded less than compelling, especially as an adult.  I gave in when Bishop's friends begged us, more out of nostalgia than anything else.

Tickets sold out several hours in advance; luckily we'd purchased ours that afternoon, or we really would have been screwed.  Eau du Basement Dweller washed over me as we tried to find our seats in a surprisingly crowded theatre, our friends waving frantically for us.  They -- and all the other guys around us -- radiated excitement, like this was the best movie to hit theatres since Desolation of Smaug last Christmas.

Still skeptical, I sat and began people watching.  The first thing I noticed? This theatre contained, no joke, 98% men.  I think I saw maybe 5-7 girls in the whole place, including me.  The second thing was that we were surrounded by some truly out-of-date people: the group sitting behind me was having a Trigun argument (the anime was released in 1998) and when one of those Snickers commercials aired, I heard several "I am Jack's aggressive appetite" jokes, a 1999 Fight Club vintage I was surprised to find still irritating.  The third thing I noticed, before the lights dimmed, was the stranger sitting next to me; he was waiting for the movie to start by playing on his phone, complete with Goku (the DBZ main character) background.  We are talking high-level Nerd Achievements here.

Here's the poster. You now know more about this movie than I did when I agreed to see it. 

When the lights dimmed, everyone instantly hushed.  There were no trailers -- maybe when a theatre is showing a relic from the 90s, they can't use their standard previews? I'm not sure.  It got as far as that 'digital picture brought to you by whoever' ad (that one that always looks way prettier than the actual movie) before even the projector couldn't handle it and revolted; the movie stopped, the sound died, the lights came up, and the theatre went nuts.

About 3 minutes later, a blue PlayStation3-esque loading screen appeared, to shouts of "They're using the torrent file!" and plenty of laughter.  We were back on track.

The opening few minutes of any truly nerdy movie are filled with inside jokes that only those who faithfully followed the origin material gets; this remained true of the Dragon Ball Z movie. As soon as Goku and King Kai show up in the opening scene, complete with video game-style sound effects, the theatre went nuts.  Again. Since it'd been an appropriate number of years since I'd seen this show, I had no idea what was going on.  As the dialogue went on, it became clear that there some things I just wasn't going to get; Goku would say something and everyone would laugh, including Bishop, and I just had no idea what was going on.  That's actually unusual for me -- I have a great memory for quoting movies and TV shows, and I really did love this show.  Apparently too much has happened since my last viewing and I'd lost all the really important information.

There is an actual plot to this movie.  Lord Beerus, a god who looks strikingly like a large, angry, purple cat, has heard of something called a Super Saiyan God, and he's seeking out the remaining Saiyans in order to meet one.  In doing so, he crashes Vegeta's wife Bulma's birthday party, where he ends up enjoying time with his minion/trainer, Whis, Vegeta and family, Gohan, and the rest of the Dragon Ball Z gang.  Goku crashes later, having had a disagreement with Beerus before.  Eventually, Beerus gets pissed and demands a fight with the Super Saiyan God, so they have to figure out a way to find one so he can meet him and thus leave the party/Earth alone.

This can be summed up more accurately here:

At the party, Beerus wants to try pudding but Buu won't share. 

His totally sane reaction to Buu's selfishness. 

With some help, Goku goes from this 

to *fabulous* (check out that pink hair and those delts)

 so he can stop Beerus from destroying the Earth. Over a pudding cup. 

I swear that's the plot.  A few minutes of obligatory bad Japanese pop music during the fight scene, and the movie is over.  Bulma even invites Beerus back to her birthday part next year and Whis gets a sushi to-go box to take back to his and Beerus's training planet/tree thing.  (Spoiler Alert: Beerus is ultimately defeated by wasabi -- he eats a whole chunk of it in one bite and his head just explodes.)

It surprised me, but I actually had a lot of fun. The movie was really funny -- Trunks finds Mai, who now looks like a little kid (a throwback to the show? not sure) and wants her to be his girlfriend, and Emperor Pilaf keeps trying to steal things and getting caught, but no one's concerned because he also looks like a little kid.  Goten and Trunks run around together, and Piccolo looks on with his usual cool detachment while Vegeta gets super pissed at nothing and keeps blowing up at Beerus or Bulma.

The dialogue and animation are pretty much still kid-level, just like the anime, so going in with no expectations helps :) And anytime anything even remotely subtle happens, everyone immediately shouts about it for the next five minutes -- an old anime tradition.  Watching with someone you can make fun of it with helps too.

Somehow, I doubt I'll be purchasing this gem, but for a night, it was fun to re-live being a kid with Dragon Ball Z.

More Like "Attack on My Free Time"

I start back to school next week, so naturally I decided to start a time-consuming TV show in the meantime.
Everyone from friends to students to random strangers at cons has been telling me I needed to see Attack on Titan for months now.  I was hesitant: skinless giants? semi-medieval human society? subtitles??

But now that I've finally started watching it, I can already tell it earned all those recommendations.

That skinless giant I mentioned.  I was under the impression that all the Titans were as big as this one and just as skinless, but it turns out that isn't quite the case! 

The basics are these: in an alternate human history, giant humanoid monsters called Titans have essentially destroyed/eaten most of humanity.  They range in size from 60+ meters tall to a mere 3-4 meters tall, and very little is known about their origins or physiology other than that they are extremely hard to kill.  They don't seem to need to eat, judging from their lack of interest in eating wildlife, and the reason behind their eating humans is described as "pure bloodlust" at one point.  Most of them are male, and they lack any semblance of junk (think a giant, hungry Ken doll).

At the start of the show, humanity has been clustered behind a series of 50 meter high walls for 100 years, and where, exactly, those 100 years are in human history isn't quite clear. They have guns and cannons, but only primitive ones.  They travel via horse and carriage, but have 3D Maneuvering Devices (how the military moves to fight and kill Titans) that are gas-powered.  No one seems to have any idea what's outside those walls either, other than Titans.

During those 100 years, the Titans don't seem to have eaten anyone (or anything, as far as humans can tell). Many humans have never even seen a Titan and thus question the heavy military presence in the cities.  But of course, that military is immediately necessary in the first episode, as the Colossal Titan appears over the walls of the city and the attack begins.  Other than the Colossal, most of the Titans seem to have skin but are just as largely invulnerable, hungry, and terrifying to humans.

The show starts focused on three friends: Eren, his adopted sister Mikasa, and their wimpy buddy Armin. Eren seems to be the leader; he's loud and angst-y but very, very motivated to kill the Titans, thus driving a lot of the show.  Mikasa, who was adopted by Eren's family after hers was murdered, is an understated badass; she works to protect Eren at all costs and doesn't tout her own abilities, but as soon as they start military training, it's obvious that she's the most deadly of anyone on the show.  Armin started as a common bullying victim, but his character evolves a lot as time passes and training takes over; he ends up basically a tactical genius, which is pretty cool.

After they escape the Titan attack, they join the military and the pace of the show really picks up.  More characters get added, more complications arise, and the abilities of the writer really show as each character has depth and emotion to him or her.

There is a brief period of peace wherein everyone relaxes a bit and Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and the others can focus on their training.  Then the Titans appear again, and all hell breaks loose.

Mikasa, being a badass as only she can

I admit, it's a weird concept for a show, but hey, that's anime.  There are some obvious anime-only issues that go along with it -- the wiggly eyes that anime characters get to indicate strong emotion stand out a lot, especially if you're like me and haven't watched anime in a few years.  And the dialogue, which is all in Japanese and apparently 100% shouted, has a sometimes wacky, stilted English translation that makes it clear the show was translated in a hurry, as opposed to written to convey the same ideas/emotions but in a more natural way.  In one early episode, Eren kicks a guard and Armin jumps in to defend him, saying literally, "I am sorry he kicked you, one of the adults. He is hungry and thus irritable."  Obviously a translation and not real writing --which is okay! It's not an English show in writing or origin, so whatever.  Actually, as it goes on, the translation tries to make the English more fluid and natural by throwing in a bunch of "ain't"s and "gonna"s, thus adding a humorous redneck element.

Those are about the only details I can pick on though; it's a really good show, with really (thus far) consistent characters and creative conflicts. It's also absolutely beautiful, and the music rocks, if that helps.

I've heard that the show evolves to include political subterfuge and more mysterious elements as it goes on, which I'm really looking forward to.  It's clear even now, only about 6-7 episodes in, that there is more to the Titan story than what Eren, Mikasa, and the rest of the squad know.  Little hints -- like how surprising the appearances by the Colossal Titan are (considering he's 60m tall, you'd think he'd be easy to spot) -- abound that something dangerous and secret is going on.

I'm not yet far enough in to know what that something secret is, and I don't want to spoil anything if my speculations are correct, so I'm going to leave it at that.

Let the binge-watching commence!

It's on Netflix. Go watch it. Now.

The End of Mass Effect (*Spoilers!*)

I'm about to finish my second play-through of Mass Effect 3, and I really, really don't want to do it.

I've done it before.  Most likely, I'll do it again eventually.  But the ending crushes me every time -- last time, the first time, I ended up sitting in bed, unable to sleep and occasionally crying, over the gut-wrenching agony of the end.  That probably won't happen this time; I'm better prepared, having done it before. Last time I knew what was going to happen though and I still lost it.

The ending is always catastrophic, no matter which end I choose or how my actions play out.
I know, I know, there was a big dispute between fans and Bioware over how the game ended vs. how Bioware said it might end with regards to personal input and all that. Some friends of mine won't even touch ME3, even if they loved ME2, because of that mess. I don't care -- I thought the ending as perfect.  The series has never pretended to be anything other than a tragedy: characters can and sometimes do die in every game. So the end was no surprise, even if that doesn't make it less painful.

The end never gets tough until I reach the Forward Operating Base, after Shepard has taken out the Hades cannon and they're getting ready for the final run to the Beam/Citadel.  All those goodbyes...

Shepard can call each of her (I play as a paragon FemShep, for the record) old squadmates from Mass Effect 2, like Samara and Jack, people she's encountered throughout ME3 but never joined her.  All those calls are short and to the point: no elaboration on events or stories, they're mostly just quick "good luck"s and then it's over.  But seeing some of my favorites -- Samara, for example -- again just for a quick moment brings home that this game is over, the trilogy is over, and who knows what's coming next.

Some of the longer conversations are even worse.  Some, like Tali's or Kaiden's, aren't that bad, even as much as I love Tali, and Liara's offer to blend minds one last time can be rough to watch: I teared up a little at that this time through.  Others, though, brought so much more up to the surface.

I didn't have the From Ashes DLC the first time I played, so I didn't have Javik and didn't know what to expect.  Javik made an interesting contribution to the crew in ME3; as the last Prothean, he can be kind of a douchebag with his focus on victory at any cost, but there's compassion mixed in there for him as well.  They're both warriors, but with a weird dynamic: Javik approaches everything ruthlessly whereas my Shepard has more of a heart. My Shepard and he are always getting into fights over the morality of her choices, and I had to break up more than few fights between him and others. By the end though, they respect each other. When he tells Shepard that she's standing for all people who have faced the Reapers, that all souls are watching her... I was destroyed.  The whole conversation was heartbreaking in its sincerity.  (Those writers/voice actors deserves some serious awards).

And EDI.  oh EDI... I know I'm going to kill her, I do every time because that's my final choice for the Reapers, the choice I think Shepard would really make, given the circumstances and the motives of the game: destruction.  And that kills EDI too, since she's an AI (artificial intelligence). When she talks Shepard for helping her feel alive... my heart breaks.  I miss her, every time, and the prospect of having to explain it all to Joker (assuming I live...)...

In a weird way, I am glad that so many of my favorite characters were already dead.  Mass Effect 3 is a tragedy, an intense, talented one that invests you deeply into the characters even when you know they are doomed, and I got sucked in completely.

Thane's death is expected, though the short prayer he gives for Shepard made me weep.  And Mordin... I don't think I would have been so upset to see Mordin go if he hadn't started singing on the way up to the top of the Shroud.  Legion's death for his people provides an honorable way for Tali to come to terms with the geth, and I appreciated that element of her story.

I hate that I can't save during this whole process -- it means I can't go back and re-live Shepard and Garrus's goodbye without playing through the first part of Priority: Earth again (which takes a while).  Their goodbye is one of my favorite moments in the game; I cry every single time. The Shepard-Garrus romance feels so real, so tension-filled and desperate as they fight the end of their worlds.  Garrus is written as a deep, complex character throughout the whole series: Shepard is constantly helping him through moral crises, romanced or not, and each one adds layers to his complicated character.  In that way, he feels real to me.  I've always been drawn to people who have a past, who don't just coast through life without getting deeply, intimately involved in something along the way.  Garrus is like that: he's invested in his life, in his world, and I love that about his character.  Throughout their romance, he and Shepard are trying to find a lighter side, trying to enjoy each other in the face of death and destruction.  Their Citadel date about halfway through ME3 highlights that, especially their shooting contest on the top of the Presidium.
So when they have to say goodbye... I love it, even as I'm crying over how desperate those last few exchanges are, how much they are still trying to stay positive and together.

The last moments of the game.  Shepard looks so pissed, so ready to be over and done with the Reapers, so determined to take them down.  I love it.  

The end of Mass Effect 3 depresses me, and not just because the game's over and I have to say goodbye.  It's just that nothing I do will be ever be on that scale -- no matter what I do with my life, I will never save the galaxy.  I will never be the one to make those kinds of sacrifices.  I can choose to make small ones, if I want to, but the world isn't tailored for me to be Shepard.

I knew this before Mass Effect.  I read a lot, and I play enough games, and so many stories hinge on heroes.  Stories with this kind of scope happen a lot in fiction, and let-downs when they're over happen a lot too.
But something about Mass Effect feels different to me.  Maybe I just love Shepard and her world so much -- maybe I see how my life could be, given that several fundamental things about the world/universe were a little different... I believe I could have her kind of courage and determination, if faced with that situation. If saving the world really did come down to me, I think I could do it.

I love this game.  I don't care what other people think about the ending(s), nor do I waste time analyzing all the tiny flaws that no doubt exist.  That doesn't matter to me.

I will always do all the extra work so Shepard can breathe one last time, in the last moment before the credits role.  I don't want her story to end, in the game or otherwise.

Obviously, no one is forcing me to make that final run.  Only the fate of the galaxy is at stake, after all.  And it's time to take back Earth.