onday, and I'm running late, so right to it. Random news and photos and such up here, with a review of Unleashed down below.

Last time I posted about my troubles thinking up enough acceptable names for the characters and locations in the fantasy world of my novel. To the rescue rode Caaroid, with a link to this name generator site.  It's one of many sites that have similar bots, and basically they input a few hundred names from one region or culture, and then the bot randomizes them and invents hundreds of new ones from the root letter arrangements.

I haven't found any names that I could just lift directly from any of the languages into my story, but I have found plenty of inspiration for word forms, ones that I could take and change a letter or two and make them acceptable. With the help of that site I filled out a large section of the map with several rivers, a bay, a mountain range, a desert, and half a dozen town/city names in short order yesterday. The real question is why I didn't look up this sort of thing several months ago, when I first started inventing dozens of names of rivers and towns and cemeteries and other things for my story.

Good question. Um... I distrust technology?

This is an entirely random observation, but a few days ago I forwarded a link to a site with some martial arts videos to three people who love watching that sort of thing. I'll talk more about why in a couple of weeks, but for now just consider that all three people enjoy Kali and enjoy watching other forms of martial arts. Additionally, realize that all three are Mac users, and by that I mean Mac fanatics.

How fanatical are they (Mac users in general, as well as the three individuals I'm speaking of in this instance)?  So fanatical that none of the three watched the movies, simply because they were encoded in the Internet-standard WMP format. You know, Windows Media Player, the format for like 75% of the movies you see on every site that has to worry about bandwidth expenses and file size? True, you can get by with just Quicktime if all you ever watch are movie trailers, since the studios have the budgets to pipe those out at higher quality, but there's so much other funny stuff to watch online I can't imagine limiting myself to one media player.

Imagine how Mac fans would laugh and ridicule PC users if we refused to get Quicktime, since it was a Mac application? After all, QT is the best movie format, with the highest quality images. Of course it's about 10x the size of WMP, which probably explains 99% of the improved file quality, but that's not the point. I was just amazed that they would deny themselves videos simply because they'd have needed to use a piece of MS software to view them.

And yes, of course Microsoft offers a version of WMV for Macs. It's nice of them really; they've got no reason to waste programmer time to create and support a version of their player for the 6% or so of Internet users who are still on Macs, but they do, either out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of a desire to get their tentacles into every machine on earth. I'm better on option #2, personally.

I've had a new cellphone for a month or two, with a camera on it, but I've not taken many photos with it, and haven't bothered to post any of the ones I have taken. The image quality of the camera isn't bad, but my phone is a cheap model, with a display that's pretty crappy. So, oddly enough, the photos are much better than they look on the phone, and I can't really tell if a shot is any good unless I mail it to myself and view the 640x480 image on my computer monitor.  Malaya's camera phone wasn't much better than mine, but it's got a far better LCD and she can see her pictures. Perhaps not coincidentally, she takes a lot more and a lot better photos. 

To the scores.

Unleashed, 2005
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Humor: 6
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6.5

The plot, in a nutshell, is that Jet Li's character Danny has been raised/trained from childhood by Bob Hoskins' low-class gangster, and has been turned into an attack machine. "Danny the Dog" is the film's title outside of the US, and that pretty well sums it up. Danny is barely human, in a very innocent yet vicious way. He's sweet and tender and childlike, until Hoskins takes off his collar and tells him to kill. So long as the collar is on, he might as well be a slightly-retarded child; once it's off he'll murder anyone with his bare fists.

The movie sets this up with a couple of wild fight scenes, and establishes Hoskins' sleazy character as he takes Danny along as the muscle on some shake down operations. During their rounds, Danny gets left alone in a warehouse for some time, and has a chance encounter with a blind piano-tuner played by Morgan Freeman. During their time together Danny is treated like a human being, and responds to Morgan and the piano music he gets to experience, and when Danny later ends up on his own, he seeks out the man who was kind to him. Morgan takes him in, and Danny lives with him and his young stepdaughter for a time, becoming more human and realizing that his former life was a horrible thing.

Inevitably, as the film's plot requires, Uncle Hoskins turns up again and Danny is pulled back into his life as a dog. Does he revert to his savage pet nature? Does he seek freedom? Does he live happily-ever-after or not? The last third of the film is interesting as the plot gets resolved, and I'm not going to give it away since the trailers don't either, but honestly, can't you guess? It's a mainstream film, so where do you suppose it comes down on the horribly-tragic vs. sweetly-uplifting scale? The movie is done well enough that you don't know exactly what's going to happen, and it's dark and realistic enough that you have some doubt as to whether everything will turn out okay in the end, and while it's not exactly a suspense masterpiece, it's not bad.

Here are some more specific comments about the scoring categories:

Script/Story: 7
This score is basically for the concept and ideas of the film, which were quite interesting. Could you really raise a boy to become a dog, triggered to kill by the removal of his collar? I don't know and this isn't really examined in the film, since it's already been done when the movie opens. More examination and analysis of this would have been interesting, but I think it was beyond the scope of the production. I also thought Danny became normal and kind far too easily, given the life he's endured, but that's also required by the scope and time flow of the film. If they'd set the story over ten years they could have examined every detail, but with just a month or two of time passing they had to compress everything, with the risk of parts becoming psychologically unbelievable.

There's a subplot in the late film as Danny begins to remember something of his childhood, and begins to wonder why he has such affinity for the piano, and I suppose that adds to the emotional heft of things, but it just confirms our initial suspicions about various characters. I also didn't buy the grand finale of the film; I thought it was ridiculous and overwrought, but I think it's pretty much supposed to be that over the top. The logic holes were harder to overlook, in a "But what happened to the ten other gangsters? And aren't there any police in this city?" sort of way, but just concentrate on the drama of the main characters and ignore the other details and you'll be happier.

Acting/Casting: 6
No one does an amazing job, but everything is pretty okay. Morgan Freeman plays the same elderly, dignified, compassionate character he's played in every movie over the past fifteen years.  This time he's blind, and while he didn't do a very good job of it (he's constantly turning his head to look at the person talking, and not really feeling with his hands the way blind people do) he wasn't awful or anything. Bob Hoskins does the feral, low-class gangster very well, until the plot made him go totally crazy at the end. Jet Li is the most important character though, and he did an acceptable job playing the simple and childlike Danny. Danny's nothing like Arnie's cyborg in The Terminator, but at the same time they are similar in being written for actors who can't really act.  Danny is robotic in his stillness, with very little emotion shown, and in that way any emotion he cracks is a revelation to the audience. Jet's convincing in his few moments of reaction and happiness since he's totally overselling them all, like a child, and since the role allows and even requires that of him. There's no nuance, and that works fine.

Strangely, the only character we left wondering about was the stepdaughter. She wasn't exactly a love interest, but she's very bouncy and friendly and really bonds with Danny's wounded man-child. The problem was that she looked about 30, and since her stepfather Morgan Freeman was 65 or so in the film, we assumed the daughter was at least in her late 20s, if not older. The fact that she's got big metal braces on early on is strange, since you don't often see those on adults (though Morgan could use some for his yellowing grill), but we went with that since they were clearly trying to make the actress look younger.

The odd and unbelievable part came in mid-way through the film, when she gets home late and Morgan's character is overly worried about her. She's an adult, just living at home to help her blind father out, or so we thought until they remarked that she had just turned 18.  We were like, "Eighteen in what, dog years?"

When we got home, the first thing I looked up on IMDB was the actress. Her name is Kerry Condon, and while she's not well-known enough to warrant a photo or biography with a DOB on the IMDB page, Malaya did some more digging and found that she was 16 when she appeared in Angela's Ashes, in 1999. That means that she's now 23 or so, and playing an 18 y/o wouldn't be that big of a stretch, if she didn't look 30. Seriously, there's no way I'd card her if she came into my 7/11 to buy some wine coolers. The age thing isn't helped by her stepfather being 70, either. He's black and she's white, so I dunno how else they could have done it, and I'm sure they were overjoyed to get a real actor like Morgan Freeman for the role, but maybe he could have been her step-grandfather or something, just to make the ages even remotely-believable. Aside from just hiring an actual teenager for the role, I mean.

She reminded me of every TV show about high school, where they've got Jason Priestly or Ian Ziering sporting a bald spot and wrinkles as they play a 17 y/o. Or hell, Spider Man, with the 27 y/o Tobey Maguire playing the oldest high school student in the history of cinema.

Action: 7
The fight scenes are damn good, but there aren't that many of them, and between them there's a lot of character-based stuff that wouldn't be out of place in a Hallmark Special. It's that syrupy. I didn't think it was horrible though, and honestly, I much preferred quality sappy stuff than the awful comedy or action acting efforts in most martial arts movies.

The style of action was interesting too, since Jet Li was not the usual technical and precise and controlled martial arts master in this film. He was savage, like an attack dog, and while he kicked and leaped a few times, he mostly just beat the shit out of people. Savagely, hit after hit after hit, slamming their faces into the floor, stomping them on the ground, and so on. He'd usually face three or four guys and knock them all down before zeroing in on one, and just destroying him. Five, ten, fifteen hits in rapid succession; only stopping when one of the other people got up and kicked/hit him, at which time he'd turn and savage that person.  Danny was not flawless; he got hit a lot, he bled, and he should have suffered about fifty broken ribs and concussions.

There's some pretty good technical fighting as well, but the movie suffered from a lack of the big fight scene. It had a good action climax, but it sort of came out of nowhere, and there wasn't a head bad guy who we were waiting for Danny to finally have a showdown against. Instead this bald white guy shows up with little preparation, and turns out to be a martial arts master. He has a great fight with Danny, much of it in a bathroom that was about as wide as a phone booth (they filmed it from above, and the speed and blocking and dodging done in that tiny space was amazing) but if we'd been waiting an hour for them to fight it would have been more satisfying when it finally took place.

Humor: 6
It's not a comedy, but there are some cute scenes with Danny becoming a person with emotions.  Prepare to be manipulated.

Eye Candy: 3
The lowest score since it's an intentionally-ugly movie. It's set in Ireland and if there was a single scene with the sun shining, I don't remember it. There weren't any night scenes either, oddly enough, just lots of ugly warehouses and wet back streets and ugly people dressed in drab colors.

Fun Factor: 5
Not a fun movie. Lots of weighty emotional issues, with even the combat scenes full of regret and doubt and pain at the poor murderous idiot savant. I could see watching the fights over again for the choreography and speed and excitement, but they're not martial arts showcases; you couldn't learn from watching the technique or anything, and they make more use of creative editing and music to make the moves look fast than most Jet Li movies do. 

Replayability: 6
Much like the fun factor, the fight scenes aren't good enough to watch over and over again, and the plot elements aren't bad the first time, but I can't really see anyone savoring this one time and again.