Two Quick Reviews or Why I’m Still Pale After the 4th

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The Video Game
As I’ve written before, I’ve never been much for quest/adventure games like Zelda. However since I’ve bought my Wii that has started to change. My first game was The Godfather, which became entirely too engrossing a game for someone like myself who’s a huge film buff and enjoys waving the Wii’s motion capture controllers in the air. Now comes Harry and his friends and the results are even better. The game follows the 5th book/movie to a tee and opens with Harry ending yet another horrible summer with his “family” in rather terrifying fashion. Soon you’re off to meet up with The Order and Sirius Black walks you through how to use the Wii controller as a wand. After that it’s on to Hogwarts which is where the game takes off. I bought and played the game pretty much all day yesterday with a good friend of mine who like me isn’t much of a gamer but we picked up the basic controls in a hurry. The school and its ground are huge and expansive but at the same time there are not a lot of empty rooms or fake doors (something The Godfather has way too many of). Graphically it’s a great looking game and all the characters except for poor Ron Weasley look just like the actors who play them on the big screen. My friend and I played on the easy level so there were never any time tables or limits which really allowed us to ease into the game although we still found many challenges. The spells are fairly easy to use except for the targeting feature which seemed rather difficult especially when in a duel. The other shortcoming would have to be that it’s a one person game. Now again I’m not a video game geek so maybe that’s not possible but since you walk around the whole game with Hermione and Ron why not have an option for one or both of them to be playable. I understand logistically it might be a nightmare but it would be better then the two of them getting in your way and repeating themselves over and over again. Still it’s a top notch game that makes good use of the Wii and just makes me want to consume the new movie and the final book even more.

The Good German
Let’s get two things out of the way; one, this is not the movie with Matt Damon, that’s The Good Shepherd, and 2 there are many words to describe this movie but good is not one of them. George Clooney and Cate Blanchett are two of the few actors who I’ll pretty much see anything of. Usually I’m more faithful to directors especially say one Steven Soderbergh. So it is with great great disappointment to report to you what a dreadful mess of a movie The Good German is. I know you’ve probably already been scared away by the low box office and lack of critical success but I seriously thought this was one of those films that would shine on DVD. The only thing that shines on this DVD is the underside of the disc when you eject it. Clooney and Soderbergh made one other troubled film a few years back called Solera but even that still had redeeming qualities. Designed as an ode to old films like The Third Man, German comes off more like a parody where no one is laughing. Tobey McGuire gives a performance that should have told us he couldn’t pull of the evil Spiderman parts of Spidey 3. Blanchett and Clooney truly seem to be going in circles and neither is doing it well. The mix of news footage and the old film stock Soderbergh shot on, sounds like a great idea on paper but comes off looking cheap. I love black and white for its black blacks and its white whites but here so much is overexposed it detracts from any enjoyment of the black and white experience. If you like Clooney, Blanchett and Soderbergh, stay away from this movie at all costs, you’ll be sorely disappointed.