Netflix Minute: The Negotiator

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.

F. Gary Gray is a director who originally came from the world of music videos, much like several other of his contemporaries like Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, and David Fincher. This enclave of camera talent has its ups and downs, both of which can often be attributed to the style that uniquely springs from telling a story in less than five minutes. Gray, in particular, suffered a decisive failure recently with his 2009 film Law Abiding Citizen, pummeled due to overwhelming violence and more importantly, an unbelievable plot that would require divine intervention to take place in the real world.

I can hardly blame him for being attracted to the script, however, as there's something inherently attractive about a well-planned scheme played out on screen by the genius who created it. That concept builds the perfect foundation for quite a few heist movies, which show the thieves barely managing to steal something under the most tricky lock and key. While Law Abiding Citizen failed to impress, F. Gary Gray did manage to hit this concept just right on his first attempt in 1998's The Negotiator.

Shuffled: Side Project Trumping Edition

Every other Wednesday I hit the shuffle button on my 90 gigabytes of music and post the results. I might have to justify some of the stuff in my library, but hopefully it will help inform you of new music -- Or at least be entertaining.

For all of the times that I write descriptions like, "I've barely listened to this at all. I really should listen to it more." -- this is actually a randomly-created playlist I can really sink my teeth into. There's some old theatrical rock from the 80s, some punk that I listen to in a completely different context than I'm sure it was written for, and two side project bands that I probably like more than the original bands they spawned from. If you only listen to one song on this edition of Shuffled, at least make it the fourth. Now, HAVE AT IT!

Found: CAPTCHArt

Found: Ridiculous and/or funny and/or awesome website/picture on the Internet. Please comment on post to verify ownership/hilarity/awesomeness.

We've all experienced the anti-robot security questions, asking us to type in two ridiculous words that usually have nothing to do with each other. Well, CAPTCHArt.com takes these security questions and turns them into hilarious pictures or comic strips. It is updated daily and anyone can submit their own using a random generator for their inspiration. Some are pure genius and I have found myself laughing out loud on plenty of occasions -- which is rare for something so simple. I posted some of my favorites after the jump.

Video Round-Up: Goodbye to Politics Edition

Video Round-Up is a weekly post collecting an assortment of videos from around the web. Whether they be music videos, creative viral marketing, just plain cool, or just plain ridiculous, they will all be found on Video Round-Up.

Aaaah, the political season is over. Finally we can watch TV without suffering through a commercial break full of campaign ads. To help bid adieu to those suffocating ads, I've decided to start things off with a video that showcases just how badly all of that pep and drive can turn out when you get a little over-zealous in that campaign. It should help us segue nicely out of politics and into ridiculousness -- albeit in a slightly scary way.

Game Review: Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is difficult—punishing, in fact. The gameplay in this sequel to the flash smash success offers a simple mechanic: try, die, and repeat. However, this brutal celebration of trial and astronomical errors has recreated classic 2D platforming fun, and rises to the top of downloadable titles this season.

Dr. Fetus is still capturing, releasing, losing, and recapturing Bandage Girl in this sequel, and with that skeleton of a story, you dive into instant high-speed platforming. In the beginning, the scope may seem small: you start out with five visible worlds with twenty levels each. But you quickly learn the ways to access more than twice as many levels—each original level (in the light world) has a much more difficult counterpart in the dark world.

Insufficient Funds: Give Up, Robot 1 and 2

Insufficient Funds is a weekly post in which we feature a free, or very close to it, piece of media that you can enjoy without overdrafting your bank account. So if you're low on funds, stay tuned to Cerebral Pop every Friday morning.

I don't play many Internet games. I usually get bored or frustrated and all too easily navigate away from the page. But after the first few stages of Give Up, Robot from Adult Swim games, I was hooked.

You play as a charming little robot with a grappling hook, being watched over by a God-like computer -- much in the vein of Portal. This head computer wants nothing more than your death. He actually tells you that he loves you when you indeed die -- and believe me, you will die... many times. The game is just hard, and you may want to quit, but provides enough fun that you'll want to see it to the end. The encouragement of the head computer telling you to give up after you complete a stage is another reason to push on through.

Game Review: Costume Quest

Double Fine is widely heralded as delivering some of the most charming and witty games ever released, and is generally regarded amongst many game enthusiasts as one of the best publishers around. Still, after some mixed reviews of Brutal Legend -- their last game -- some may have been wary of Costume Quest. I'll just start off by saying, while I do have some gripes of the game, it easily charms it's way out of them.

The downloadable sector really helps the game conquer annoyances that might have made it a chore to finish if it was a much longer, disc-based game. A sort of RPG-light would best describe the structure surrounding the game, but they've made attempts at tweaking the old-school, RPG formula to better suit their needs.

Netflix Minute: The Crazies

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.

I should admit something right away... I'm not a big fan of horror movies. It's not as though I don't respect them for a lack of cinematic value or anything pretentious like that; I simply don't really like to feel scared. There are exceptions to this rule as there are with any broad matter of opinion, in this case the offenders are zombie films. There's a fundamental dynamic of humanity that's questioned in such films, asking the viewer how they might react in such a hopeless situation when it's difficult to know who to trust. In recent years, the archetypal zombie flick has been gently altered in key ways, often adding some complexity to the barebones "reanimation + flesh eating" formula by means of viral outbreaks and such. One such attempt at altering the classic formula was made in Breck Eisner's latest, The Crazies.

Unoriginal Soundtracks Podcast: Red Dead Redemption Edition

Every other Wednesday I share a playlist of songs tangentially related to a single game or series. Songs about alien sex for Mass Effect, songs about world leaders for Civilization, and so on. Searching for random terms on Spotify is a great way to discover new music and rediscover old classics.

Things are a little different this week as I'm piloting a podcast version of this playlist. The same mix of obscure and classic music is present, along with my carefully-researched anecdotes. The same painstaking attention to track order is there. The difference? You now have less text to read, and the playlist isn't influenced by the dictates record labels give YouTube.

Tell me what you think of the new format in the comments below. If you've got room for a bi-weekly, half-hour music/games podcast in your life then perhaps you'll see Unoriginal Soundtracks in iTunes soon.

Video Round-Up: Halloween, Oh Wait Edition

Video Round-Up is a weekly post collecting an assortment of videos from around the web. Whether they be music videos, creative viral marketing, just plain cool, or just plain ridiculous, they will all be found on Video Round-Up.

 

Yes, it seems we are just in time to celebrate Halloween--nope, nix that. At any rate, I hope you enjoyed your Halloween celebrations; that is, I hope you weren't stuck answering the door every time you sat down and read two sentences of that classic scary story you've been meaning to read so that you couldn't finish it until the bell rang signaling the new month, and you missed Ray Barnholt's live stream of a playthrough of Ghouls & Ghosts, and you couldn't find time to watch a scary movie because while you didn't like handing out candy to trick-or-treaters you didn't want to be a Scruge and turn off your porch light, nor could you find a spooky game to play through to try and get into the spirit of the holiday and no one called you because they had responsibilities on Monday morning and--

Sorry.