Anything and Everything Reviewed

Point 1: Characters

House and his team are all equally skilled at what they do and, while frequently paired together, we often see each character do their own thing with what skills they use. From the very first few episodes, House makes fun of itself by acknowledging its tropes and, at the same time, breaking them. It sets up the typical “diverse” cast of one female, one black guy, the white main protagonist, and his “student”, so to speak. However, instead of it being a tired concept, the show proceeds to mock itself and shows like it by revealing that House only hired Foreman (black man) because of his criminal record and Cameron (female) because she was pretty. It does not sugarcoat the fact that these characters are here for reasons that are not morally good and I find that a great jab at these tropes. 

I also love that the characters proceed to break the tropes themselves. Foreman is a doctor just as capable as House and often butts heads with him, pointing out the racial inequality that House puts him through by making him the sidekick and making him break into places or do things against his ethics code. 

What I don’t fully like is that Cameron’s character is trapped as House’s potential love interest. There’s several allusions in the series to her being like an angel, with a very giving personality and a complementary outlook to House’s. It’s obvious that she is supposed to end up with him, especially with how often it is brought up that she likes him and knows he likes her. I feel like that is wasted potential for a character that was portrayed in the first episode as a girl who will break the mold of “you only get what you want because you are pretty” and as the “token female”. Still, she has her moments and her overall character as the heart of the show allows emotion into House’s moments of off-handedness.

Chase isn’t a character type I am very fond of. To put it bluntly, he is like a bootleg version of House himself. If you had taken House’s traits and put them into the wrong type of person, that would be Chase. If I had to pick a more coherent trope, he’s the pretty boy of the group. Unfortunately, looks don’t get him as far as Cameron’s do.

For that, characterization will get 2 points.

Point 2: Continuity

I don’t think the continuity in the story is established well. There are certainly references every few episodes to events preceding, but not so much that you need to have seen that episode to fully grasp the message. Episodes seem to be weeks apart in terms of timelines and medical cases don’t connect aside from special cases (like House’s ex-wife). Side stories like Cameron and House’s relationship, as mentioned earlier, are consistently mentioned every other episode, but that is pretty much all.

For the sparse continuity between episode, I’ll have to not give points.

Point 3: Conflict

The conflict within the series mostly surrounds House’s attitude toward the hospital and its patrons. Cuddy, the chief of medicine, is always at odds with House about how he breaks rules and pisses people off. At one point, there is new management that tries to force House out. It is a constant battle in every episode and it entirely relies on House’s character as an asshole who breaks all the rules to get the proper care for patients. 

I believe shows that rely entirely on the characters to bring conflict are weak because you can easily explain away the conflict by taking the character away or changing them. If a conflict is dependent on more than one factor, it is a strong conflict for a tv show. House is the one show that does rely on one character for conflict but still makes it a strong conflict. It can be explained away by taking House away, but then it wouldn’t be the same show. It’s not like when a show gets rid of one villain only to bring in another. The show itself is about House and the conflict is also tied to House, making the conflict a central part of how the show works. Sure, if House wore a lab coat and was nicer to people, the conflict wouldn’t work, but then the character and the show itself wouldn’t work either.

For the strong yet dependent conflict that works, I award 1 points.

Point 4: Message/Lessons

House’s episodes either offer information about House or what House learns about people, whether in general or specific ones or even himself. His team will learn about trusting House’s judgement, his friends learn about his morality, or everyone learns more about his past. If the medical information in the show is valid or not, I do not know. The medical cases seem real enough, such as misdiagnoses causing further problems or withheld information escalating the problems, even if the information was minuscule. From the medical cases, people can take certain lessons from other peoples’ mistakes, but the series doesn’t present any huge underlying messages. In short, the lessons of the show are more pertaining to the characters and I don’t think they have any semblance in real life.

For having lessons in the series but not outwardly in life, I’ll give it 1 point.

Point 5: Misc.

Even though the lessons of the show don’t apply to life, it does have a lot of references to real life blunders of society that House makes fun of (thus why I mention that the medical cases could offer a lesson or two). The most well-known that I have seen of House is the autistic person and the mother that didn’t want to vaccinate. In both cases, House told off a nurse and a mother, respectfully, in his own smart-ass way. The nurse commented that the child would never be ‘normal’ and House went on a rant. A mother brought her child in with a cold and lets slip that she doesn’t vaccinate, so House makes smart remarks about how baby coffins were all the rage. Other references include people self-diagnosing, vegan parents with their first child, racially-specific medication, different sexualities, etc.

Every episode does a good job of keeping suspense up while also throwing in humor and various sad bits. It’s not like the over-exaggerated medical dramas where every intense sentence is punctuated by a burst of music. It has its comedy, its serious moments, and moments that makes you cry like a baby. The actors do a great job of playing off each other to create this tone and I appreciate how each personality within the show goes about a situation in ways that allow all types of viewers to relate.

For these reasons, I award an additional 2 points.

House MD is a great show overall. The characters are strong and truly diverse. The structure of the series makes it gripping and entertaining without using those tired tropes we always see. I wouldn’t say it’s a satire of medical drama (like Scrubs) but it does make fun of the genre and itself in a non-forced way. Each episode offers something new and something relevant for each viewer. It could’ve done better with a few small things, but it is an overall good series.

Rating: 6/10

Point 1: the plot

So the center plot is these three brothers called the Bone brothers are run out of their town and traveling the desert. They get separated and find their way to another town that has never even heard of their kind. At the same time, a girl named Thorn and her grandmother Rose meet the Bones at different points and uncover secrets about their family as they try to figure out how to get the brothers home and why all these dark creatures are showing up.

Pretty basic plot of finding home and all these secrets. It’s not all that special of a plot, either. How often have we heard about lost main characters, family secrets, or dark forces rising up out of nowhere and gunning straight for the central characters? Pretty often, I bet, but not in quite the way Bone does it.

What sets familiar tropes and stories apart is how they are structured. If a story has all the same elements in the same order with just a few things changed, it gets pretty old. Eragon got away with it by including a unique world with dragons and magic (especially the sequels, when Christopher Paolini wasn’t fifteen years old), but the structure is basically a dressed-up Star Wars plot. 50 Shades of Grey is the most embarrassing example of this, being exactly like Twilight but with actual sex and a few minor changes to get past the masses that don’t know better. You can look at Bone’s story and think it sounds like a lot of fantasy stories that you have read, but at the same time, it is unique. Sure, all the tropes are there, but in their own unique order and spin of them. 

All in all, I award the plot with 1 point out of 2.

Point 2: the characters

This is where the story shines the most. Again, many character tropes are included, but with a good spin of things. Let’s start with the Bones. Fone Bone, Smiley Bone, and Phoney Bone are just as you expect them to be. Phoney is fake, Smiley is always smiling, and Fone is... a good listener? (because phone). However, as the story progresses, you see character progression and several parts to the characters that you would not expect from just meeting them. Fone is a nerd that loves to read, simply enough. He gets all lovey with the main girl, Thorn, and doesn’t tell her how he feels ever. Typical nerd behavior. When Fone gets thrust into this world of adventure, he takes up arms and becomes a hero like in the books he reads. However, even if he is shown as a sweet nerd, there are times when he acts really entitled because of how much better he is than his brothers and how he believes he cares for Thorn more than anyone else. So, basically, like real life nerd boys.

Thorn is my favorite female protagonist of any media. She is a very strong feminist character and she doesn’t show it by being radical or going into “women can do anything men can do” rants that some writers feel the need to put in at some point to make female characters important. Thorn reacts like any girl would in her situation, but makes it 10x better. Meets a weird creature (Fone Bone) in the forest that claimed to know her? Is suspicious but also sasses him. Fone tells her that he’ll handle the chores because he’s a man? Proceeds to do all the chores when he couldn’t even lift an ax to cut wood with. Dark rat creatures break into her house and run her into the woods? Picks up a stick and tries to fight them off. Finds out she’s actually a princess? Gets mad and becomes a badass with a sword.

I can go on and on about the characters. There’s a dragon that makes Fone Bone look like he’s crazy on purpose, there’s Fone Bone’s brothers who are a good duo and have the most character development, there’s Grandma Rose who’s literally a cow racer that kicks ass and is actually a queen, etc. Thus, I think the characters deserve 2 full points.

Point 3: Setting

The world established within the world of Bone is a little all over the place. You cannot tell where anything really is. Bones lived in Boneville and no one seems to know what that is except for the Bone brothers and the so-called “villagers”. It’s apparently a mountain and a desert away from the village Thorn lives in. It is a medieval setting... somewhat. Currency works on a barter system, there is/was a royal family, and there are no technological advancements that I can make out. Magic is a thing, but it’s not prominent; it only works with the bad guy and the royal family. Dragons exist but are semi-extinct. No one actually knows they exist except the Bones and Grandma Rose. There is a lot of traveling in the stories, but you’d need a good map to be able to tell.

As the setting isn’t a good selling point for this story, it gets no points.

Point 4: Misc.

The author said, in his forward, that the comics were released by chapters at first and then were compiled into volumes. Most readers did not know they were a full story with plot and reoccurring characters until the volumes came out. This is a good thing because it means that the story can stand on its own in separate chunks without confusing the reader. I myself picked up the second volume of the series, which starts with Fone Bone already with Thorn away from his brothers, at a school library and I had no problem understanding what was going on aside from knowing characters from the moment they are mentioned. 

The art style is very simple but quite beautiful. The Bones just look like little deformed skeleton people (side note: when Undertale came out, I didn’t know where Sans and Papyrus came from, so I thought they were OCs from the Bones or something). Thorn and the other humans were incredibly drawn. The main villain, who works with bugs, was masterfully drawn with all the tiny bugs surrounding them. The scenery was also crafted nicely, despite the setting not being set correctly.

I would give it 2 full points for the above things.

It has its moments of dark tones, with death and necromancy at work, but it also has a nice balance of humor and adventure. It does not need to kill off characters, include rape or violence, and introduce great tragedy to be a great and realistic fantasy story. There is love and drama; there is death and sadness; there are dragons and rat creatures that love quiche. It still manages to be a very good fantasy story.

Overall: 5/8

But I digress. No one really plays a human when they have the option to play a cool-looking monster unless there’s benefits to being human that the player wants or the human just looks better. Humans are always the superior race and, in a fantasy setting, it gets dull. Gotta get that sweet systemic oppression in there. At least, that is my experience with MMOs I’ve played or my friends have played.

I should mention right now that I have never played World of Warcraft. I’m too poor to shell out any money for a game. I already am 100s in the hole for several other MMOs (not all at once though). This review, therefore, is from the point of view of a moviegoer that expects to not get half the references in the movie since it is a video game movie.

On that note, the one thing the Warcraft movie did right by what I know of online games was how dull the humans actually were in comparison to the orcs. The acting by most of them held little emotion-- or at least a LOT of whispering. Those who DID show any emotion were clearly the actors who were paid more (aka the main/MVP characters).

Here’s a little example (WARNING: spoiler paragraph, don’t read unless you saw the film). The captain of the human army has a son. He reveals later that he blames his son for the fact that his mother died in childbirth (which is a shitty reason to hate your son like he can’t control that shit), but for the moment, you just get the slightest hint of his son being a thing. It’s a ‘zone out and you’ll miss it’ sort of thing. Someone mentions his son and he’s like “oh yeah whatever”. All other interactions with the son, he just acts sort of flippant. I get that the explanation this movie gives is that he’s avoiding his son, but he doesn’t portray that very well. It’s like he’s talking to the most animated wall ever created. Then the son dies and he’s so very broken up over it... but he mostly just acts like he hasn’t slept or showered in a week and may have gotten drunk/hung over during the war meeting with the king. Everyone grieves differently, but this guy grieved like a college student about to take a final exam.

Speaking of the human captain (no spoilers really to this point), the show the actor puts on makes it feel like he is supposed to be the WOW player. He’s the snarky one, the badass that never dies. In the battle scenes, he cuts through orc like butter while everyone else gets their heads smashed and crumble cheddar biscuit-style. He also has a cool griffon and if that’s not a popular mount, I’ll eat my computer.

On the opposing side, there are the orcs and those parts of the story are the most engaging in the whole movie. The chieftain of the clan is the main focus there and he is probably the least chaotic of all of them. He also has a wife and kid, which tugs on the heartstrings a little. He’s also the only one of his people willing to really oppose their lich leader, Goldhand or something like that.

I won’t go into too much summary, but I felt more for the orcs than I ever did for the humans basically. The actors did not make me feel like I was immersed into the world of Warcraft. It was more like I was at a hyper realistic DnD session. The orcs made it more real; they felt a lot more real. They made me not want to question how much longer to the end of the movie (which is over two hours long, I might add).

Other things I want to make note of: the graphics were stunning and I wonder if the game is that beautiful. The battle scenes were exciting and one of them did a wide shot that looked like the hub area of WoW (which is one of the only things I know of WoW). The lore isn’t explained too well. There’s the base lore of “orcs and humans have been duking it out for a reeeeaaalllly long time” and you can guess that there is a sort of royal family, good/evil magicians, and other races aside from orcs + humans. That is pretty much all. Everything else would require some knowledge from the game to understand.

My final result is that this movie is very good for people who have an interest in or is an avid player of WoW. I’m sure most of the movie doesn’t go over fans’ heads. For everyone else, you’ll be confused most definitely but it is still an enjoyable experience in the theaters. The story itself is pretty basic yet original. The wooden actors on the human side may bore you, but the orcs will keep you entertained. Such is the nature of online gaming, after all.

Rating: 7.5/10

There’s the obvious reason of “it’s a fitness game- it has no end”. True, but there’s a lot of games like that. The end of Wii Fit is when you put your controller down and don’t touch the console ever again. However, I want to talk about the technical parts of the game that make it virtually impossible to ever truly be good at it.

First of all, the scale and science behind the Wii Fit are unbalanced and one-sided. It takes your weight at face-value. It doesn’t matter if you have a small body but big breasts, lots of muscle tissue, are short for your age, or what. It will weigh you and judge you harshly if you are not up to statistical standards. Not that the scale is ever accurate-- if you have it placed on anything that isn’t solid concrete floor, it will be a few pounds off. Up or down? Depends on the position of the moon and sun, apparently.

In addition, the tests it throws at you are weirdly critical of you. It starts off asking you to work on your center of balance. I, after a few years of playing this game, figured out how to stand in a way that gets me close to the center. Even then, it judges you harshly, saying you’re still slightly off even if your right side is 50.5% and your left is 50.45% or something. You would have to be superhuman or astronomically lucky to get the exact middle down to the tens of the whole numbers. Several other tests work the same sort of way. Stand on one foot, stand perfectly still, etc. No normal human being can resist shifting weight from one foot to another or breathing in a way that doesn’t make you move an inch or two.

Not only that, but the results are extremely unforgiving. If you get a single test worst than your last result, it will raise your age and you are deemed “very weak”. Even if it is your first time playing and you don’t understand the test, it will not be nice. There’s no levels to the tests so they’re all the same level of difficulty. It takes practice to learn how these things work, so the name of the game is “git good or your self esteem takes a plunge”. This sort of thing is what makes first time gamers not even bother to keep playing long enough to get the hang of it. Once the game raises your base age 10 years, it goes in the garbage.

The exercises themselves are pretty accurate in terms of form and how they work, but the methods of making them register into the system are flawed. When I am breathing deeply, it shouldn’t be calling me a trainee for moving. Newsflash: the belly moves a little when you expand it. Thus, your weight may shift as you stand in place. It can clearly detect when the person falls off the board, but it punishes them for it rather than offering alternatives. Sure, you can grab something when you are on one leg, but there is no room to make that change once you start and realize your mistake. It is also a slightly exploitable system. What is to stop me from just pressing as hard as I can with each foot and standing there during some of these exercises, aside from my own pride?

Now this doesn’t pertain to the game’s difficulty, but it is still important to point out: the multiplayer sucks. There’s no good way for two Nintendo accounts to get scores while in the same room. Half the fun of exercise is doing it with someone and Nintendo is supposed to promote family fun, but where is the fun in doing exercises twice or separately for two or more people to get the credit?

Bottom line, this game is hard in the sense that it is so precise and unforgiving, there is almost no way to win. There’s no accomplishment in getting a move right because it will still tell you that your leg shook that one time, so you are a piece of shit and will never amount to anything in life. Not that it matters, since you’re fat no matter what your body type is.

I have to question the demographic this game was marketed to. People who like exercise wouldn’t buy this game. They already have gym memberships that pay off more than the $50 used for the game + however much they need for remotes and Wii Boards. They have scales that are much more accurate. Is this targeted for kids? What kids want to exercise MORE than what they get in gym class? Moms, maybe. I’m sure there are moms of people who own Wiis that like having personalized gyms in their homes without shelling out hundreds for treadmills that turn into coat hangers.

Honestly? I’d go for the over-glorified coat hangers. Hell, I’d settle for a scale and a cheap pedometer. It would help lose weight much more efficiently than the Wii Fit. Instead, I have a game taking up space on my shelf and a little pedometer. Thanks, Nintendo.

Rating: 6/10