PAD #5: Cowboys to Canines

Got into a pre-screening of "A Millions Ways to Die in the West".  Over-all, I'd say it was pretty good.  It has a bit of that vulgar kind of humor that wouldn't have been out of place in a South Park episode (or movie), so it certainly won't appeal to everyone, but I liked it over-all.  It was perhaps a bit on the long side, but I do wonder if it only felt dragged-out because a number of scenes shown in trailers are from such late parts of the movie that I kept thinking "So when's it get to such-and-such scene?"  It never necessarily felt like the movie was dragging along, so I'm thinking that maybe wondering about those scenes is what dragged it out in my head.  Still, it was funny, and at the end of the day that was its goal, so I'd say it's over-all pretty decent.  It was also the kind of movie that Charlize Theron needed after the bombs that were Prometheus and that terrible Snow White movie.

On the matter of previous movies for the actors, I looked through Amanda Seyfried's page to see what else she's been up to, and I completely didn't notice that she was the main character in Epic when I went to see it.  Man, that's a movie that came and went with little fanfare.  Honestly not sure if I liked it or not, but I suppose the fact that I spaced on it so completely that I had to visit the page because just the title wasn't doing anything for me tells me that it didn't have a lasting impression.  I'd say it's a case of a good idea that could have been implemented better.  It had its moments, but they were bogged-down by the rest of the movie being mediocre at best.  I would say its redeeming feature is that it didn't contrive a reason for the main character to stay small (or one of the small characters to grow normal sized) just for the sake of the romance subplot that was going on.  Instead it closed with a much more real feeling of "She went back to her world, and he went back to his".

So I guess Watch Dogs is out.  It looks interesting, but I've never been into that GTA brand of games.  I'm sure they're great for most people, but having played around with GTA3 way back in the day, it just never hit me as something that I had to own.  Still, Watch Dogs does bring-up a good question:  Is it really "one of the first true next gen titles" that Ubisoft promised it would be?  First was that bit of controversy when the graphics were toned-down compared to the original videos that they showed-off at a previous E3, and now that the game is out, does it really feel "next gen"?  If not, should we be mad at Ubisoft for hyping it as being such?  Of course, it's a slippery slope anyway.  If even one person asserts that he feels like it is, but everyone says it isn't, how can we definitively say whether it is or isn't "next gen"?