Blinking Lights

     Okay, so this post is going to be a load of reviews. First off, hooray! I got a new laptop, and it is brilliant. I'll talk about that in a bit. Second, I got Red Lights on Blu-ray, and I feel morally obliged to review it because I watched it in the cinema and didn't then. But before I get onto either of those things, I want to talk about Wreck-it Ralph.



     I went to see that in the cinema a couple of weeks ago. I know that kinda makes this a late review, but I needed some time to think about it. Because it was a good movie, but I've not really had anything else to say about it. It wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty spectacular as far as video game movies go. If you do go see it, though, go see it in 2-D. Wreck-it Ralph is, in my opinion, the final nail in the coffin for 3-D movies right now: as an animated, CGI, video game movie, it could've used it in real burst-out, cheesy ways, and I would've loved that. But it was the same old same old. It didn't add anything to the film, and I don't want to see a technology like 3-D used just because it's there. I want it to make the movie better.

     Apart from the 3-D, Wreck-it Ralph was loads of fun. I'm not gonna go through the whole story here; suffice to say Ralph is a video game villain who wants to win for once. When he does, he learns a valuable lesson, because it's a Disney movie. They wouldn't just say "Kids, winning is everything", would they? I'd say it's pretty standard fare, akin to Shrek in story - the typical bad guy wants to do good instead, gets ridiculed for it but comes through in the end - but the literally sugar-coated landscapes of Sugar Rush and the duelling storylines make it more challenging and compelling, with a clever diabolus ex machina and a crazy plot twist thrown in here or there.

     Now that that's out of the way, Red Lights. It tells the story of physicist and sceptic Tom Buckley as he works with Sigourney Weaver's no-nonsense fraud-finder Margaret Matheson, uncovering fake psychics and rooting out the true causes of their so-called "powers". When Simon Silver, a professional stage psychic and one of the best in the world, returns to performing after a mysterious 30-year absence, Margaret tries to dissuade Tom from investigating him. Of course Tom doesn't listen, and when he does investigate that's when things begin to get really strange.

     Robert De Niro's Silver is brilliantly enigmatic and entertaining, and his conflict throughout with Cillian Murphy, playing Buckley, is menacing and unnerving to watch at times. The mysterious happenings, the appearance of apparent psychic powers under rigorous scientific tests, all signs point to Silver being a true psychic, but Tom won't give in. It leaps at times from comedy to fear, trying to make you laugh and scare you silly at the same time. The tension leaps around like a seismograph needle during an earthquake, always leaving you wondering if perhaps you missed something. And at times, this isn't a good thing. There are points in the movie (one fight scene near the end springs to mind) when it passes through dramatic and into more than a little ridiculous. I feel like there were important scenes which had to be left on the cutting room floor; some things just don't seem to add up at times. The birds, for example, and the line of salt in Silver's apartment. Does the salt hint at something I missed? Is it more of Silver's theatrics? And why are sparrows so insistent on trying to kill Tom Buckley? Red Lights is a good movie, chuckle-worthy in places and incredibly dark and dramatic, but there always feels like something is missing with it.

     I watched it on my laptop, an Acer Aspire V3-571G. With its i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce graphics card it's a powerful machine and it hasn't struggled with anything I've used it for so far. I've not installed my highest powered games yet, but it hasn't struggled with Worms 4: Mayhem or Neverwinter Nights, and the Blu-ray disk drive has easily and capably run anything I've played with it. Red Lights, Rango, Firefly and Serenity, they've all played brilliantly, and at improved quality, on here. The hardware is absolutely brilliant.

     It's the software which falls down flat. Windows 8 has been designed for both tablet and computer use, so going back onto a laptop and seeing the user interface setup, with an apps store and news and social networking feeds already in place, feels odd immediately. What's worse is, everything about it feels counterintuitive. When I hit the start button on the start menu (the aforementioned user interface) there are times when it doesn't collapse. Maybe it's because I'm used to an uncluttered desktop, but it feels too big and unruly - there's even a scroll bar along the bottom so you can see everything you apparently need. I've never used half the apps it already has on here! It gives me news, sport, travel suggestions, the weather in Paris... my head's spinning already! What the Hell is a SkyDrive, and why do I need one?

      It feels like they've sat down and decided they need a system which works on tablets and laptops, so they've made a list of what people using tablets need. And then they've started making it and thought "oops, we forgot about the laptop part. We'll give them a desktop; that'll do!" So now I have no Windows Media Player, which is what my tablet uses to sync songs and videos, and instead I have Clear.fi Media. Everything on here uses the cloud, because apparently no one wants to store things on their hard drives anymore. The only things on here which don't use the internet, by the looks of things, are the desktop and the games I've installed myself. What's more, this whole new operating system disagrees with half my games - I can't install them because they use large fonts, or small fonts, or some other equally ridiculous thing the new Windows doesn't support. It feels like they left the laptop behind for this one - none of the apps even have close buttons in the corner now, you have to drag them to the bottom of the screen. That said, in desktop mode everything is still pretty much the same, and Internet Explorer actually runs faster than Chrome on this thing. But I still can't get over the fact that it just feels so not like a computer, even though it is.

EDIT: It does have Windows Media Player. But like everything else on here, the process to actually getting it is ridiculously convoluted. It didn't turn up in the store; I had to plug in my Nexus 7 before I could find and install it. And even that took three tries, because it couldn't recognise that it was a tablet the first two times. Windows 8 you are not smart. -.-