Media roundup

It's been a busy and exciting time. Loads of new things to take in! I reckoned I'd let you know what I thought about them in descending order of relevance to the common man.

Music!
It's been really ages since I listened to any new music. No, yet another Halo soundtrack and ripping the game music out of World of Warcraft don't count. I had a crack at a method that's worked in the past: keep the Recommended Listening page on Questionable Content open in one tab, the City Library online catalogue open in the other. What I ended up with was this:

Royksopp - Junior
Who would have thought pop music could be so enjoyable? Lots of bright cheery sounds and lady vocals. Great stuff.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Complex vocal layerings sung from the back of the room create a sound that is as compelling as it is unfamiliar. Held together by delicately sequenced electronic noodlings. This one's been on repeat pretty much since the day I got it.

If anyone's got any further recommendations, I'm all ears.

Film!
House-sitting lets me take advantage of Dad's monster TV and his region-free DVD player. International delights for all!

Mongol
Chronicles the rise of Genghis Khan. Makes him out to be a pretty stand-up guy. There's not much in the way of actual battles, but that's OK: all your attention will be on the mind-blowingly gorgeous Mongolian scenery.

Rec
You might also be familiar with its American version, Quarantine. For the uninitiated, Rec is a Spanish horror flick about people trapped in a building with some kind of nasty infection. We watch through the lens of a news crew following the firefighter who get called out to the scene. It's sort of The Blair Witch Project meets 28 Days Later.
The makers knew what they were doing. If there was a book called "How do to horror movies right," they learned it by heart. Rec hits all the bases, combining "BOO!" frights with the gnawing sort of fear that's much harder to pull off.
Muggins here decided to watch this while alone in a big dark house in the middle of nowhere. Not the brightest move, especially with the last 10-15 minutes being everything the box claims them to be. It isn't as utterly petrifying as the first half of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, but it gets pretty damn close.
As much as I want to, I can't really talk about why it's so scary without spoiling the scares, so just go rent it, would you?

I've Loved You So Long
It's really hard watching the lovely Kristin Scott Thomas, made up like she just emerged from a concentration camp, spending almost the entire film in a blank-eyed fug of emotional self-mortification. The film is right there with you, willing her to believe that she deserves better.
This is another tricky one to talk about, given that the question lending the film its central moral and ethical thrust isn't even asked until the final scene. My review for the paper was singularly hard to write because of this.
My one hint: this is a film probably best appreciated by parents.

Lots of goodies coming to the cinema soon. Coraline, Public Enemies, Drag Me To Hell, District 9, Up.

Games!
Ah, finally we get to it. These are the things that have been provoking all the emotional responses lately.
Statute of Limitations Fair Warning: I'm probably going to talk about the ending of games that are two to three years old. If you're late to the party like me, and don't want to know the ins and outs of these things, now's a good time to stop reading.

Halo 3
There was no way this game would have been able to live up to the years of people telling me how good it was, so I'm not going to mark it down for not blowing me away as much as it should have. Certainly there were a goodly number of "holy shit!" moments, mostly involving colossal vistas a million kilometres across, but the story was only OK and the play ranged from "quite intensely pleasing" to "this is penance for something, I'm sure."
I'm going to skip my more detailed thoughts on the game itself and get right to the good bits: the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana, because secondary to being a "save the world" story, Halo is also a love story.
(There's another thing, but I'll get to it afterward)
Master Chief is a specially enhanced super-soldier (called a Spartan), bred since childhood for war. He can never have true friends, such is the pedestal upon which he has been placed. His few Spartan peers - the only friends he might actually have had - are all (presumed) dead. He's thrown into a terrible war, the fate of not only humanity but the entire galaxy resting firmly on his shoulders.
His only companion in this is Cortana, an AI construct bearing the imprint of the now-dead Dr Catherine Halsey, the overseer of the Spartan programme. She spends most of her time in his neural net, guiding him, warning him and implicitly encouraging and reassuring him. She herself is peerless, having no friends or associates other than Master Chief.
For the first two games the relationship is pretty understated. It's not until the third one that it becomes clear just how much the two need each other (for the super-oblivious, the final video really spells it out). It's there in Cortana's words and Master Chief's actions and body language. It mitigates the punch-in-the-gut ending somewhat, but that in itself is a way of farewelling the two for the time being.

The "other thing" I mentioned above is the participation of the Firefly guys. Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk all voice random marines, and it's a pleasure to listen to them bringing their Firefly characters to the game.
Something outrageous happens, and there's Fillion yelling self-aggrandisingly, "That's right! That just happened!" Conclude a firefight and you hear Tudyk, in a very Wash-like fashion, ask for a check-up, or comment about how awesome he is - or about how awesome Master Chief is. Baldwin just channels Jayne the entire time, talking about wanting steak, or, you know, quoting Firefly directly. There are Firefly references ("shiny," "Gorram," etc) scattered throughout the dialogue.
The three of them have big parts in the upcoming Halo: ODST game too, which looks like crazy amounts of fun. Of course it helps that Fillion is a Halo 3 nut.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat
Brilliant, beautiful and yet awful at the same time. The full power of modern weapons directed against human beings is on display here, whether it be snuffing out men with a sniper rifle or annihilating their little glowing heat signatures during the utterly chilling Spectre gunship sequence (actual Spectre footage is...Christ, it's just ghastly). The Middle East street battles evoke the terror such fights must inspire; if it was anything like that over in Iraq, it's easy to see why kids with rifles went sailing right off the edge and shot anything they saw.
Visceral personal reactions aside, the game is made by the high-velocity, no-punches-pulled story and matching gameplay, as well as the gorgeous scenery. There's a flashback level set in Pripyat, Ukraine - the city right next to Chernobyl - which is all long grass, abandoned buildings and shadows. Can I have an entire game like that, please? Oh wait...

Gear of War 2
Blerg, I'm running out of steam here. Mallen and I have been playing through this co-op, and it's top stuff. I thought it would lack the punch of the first game, but Epic upped the ante with loads of challenging new monsters and some great level design: the Riftworm was a good idea executed dully, but the level following was the creepiest a game has been since System Shock 2 - and given that SS2 set the bar for creepiness and horror in sci-fi shooters, that's high praise.

OK, I've written myself into a stupor. Time to go pass out.