Cleared: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

You know, I kind of enjoyed the first one, and I was having fun with the joint Army/Autobot military ops at the beginning, but the Sam Witwicky story is SO painful that I actually stopped watching straight through and just hunted for action scenes. Then even THAT didn't work, because it made no sense, but the exposition is all tied up in the painful Sam Witwicky story. I wound up just skipping to the end and watching the rather unexciting final battle. Blah.

Cleared: Hinterland

I bought Hinterland a while back during the flood of deep discounts Steam had running for the holidays. It's an interesting mix of Diablo and Sim City. You start out the game with a character that can be one of roughly a gazillion different types and have the mission of taming, well, a Hinterland. The game revolves around recruiting people to your town and fighting monsters, and it blends these two elements in fun and interesting ways. It's also not very expensive, even at full price, which is definitely a plus. I would recommend this game. It's not going to keep you busy for years, but it has a nice, casual pick-up-and-play element to it that makes it great for a few hours of time killing. As a further added bonus, the system requirements aren't particularly high and it can be run in a window, and a fairly small one at that.

A little fudging

Since I've been clearing movies like nobody's business, I'm going to swap movie credit for TV show credit 2-for-1 and add Seasons 3 and 4 of Chuck.

Cleared: Chuck, Season 2

Unsurprisingly, I liked Chuck Season 2 as much as I liked season 1. In fact, I probably liked parts of it more, as Chuck started coming into his own in this season. One of the things that really sticks out to me about this show is that while the situations in the show are often absurd, the emotional lives of the characters feel very authentic. Characters deal with some very hard emotional stuff in this season, and the writers do an excellent job of making the audience, feel it. Characters grown and change, as do relationship dynamics. It's very good. Can't wait to watch Season 3.

Cleared: High Noon

A good friend and former coworker recommended High Noon to me a while back, and I finally got around to watching it today. It's amazing how much this movie manages to say in how little time. I really enjoyed it. Marshall Will Kane is a quintessential stubborn Old West lawman, good and decent, and responsible for his town being safe, but when a group of four outlaws comes to town, nobody will stand with him. It's heartbreaking to see him try and try and try to get someone to stand with him, and nobody is brave enough to do it. The only ones who offer to help him up to the end are unable to. Gary Cooper plays the role brilliantly, and you can see the turmoil and anguish on his face as the clock ticks down in real time to the arrival of the outlaws. Brilliant. Definitely a classic for a reason!

Cleared: 9

The tagline for 9 is "When our world ended, their mission began," but it wasn't really our world that this post-apocalyptic tale is set in a wrecked version of. The setting is somewhat reminiscent of Fallout in its retro sci-fi feel, only the world seems to be derived from an endless 30s or 40s (or maybe even earlier) than 50s. And then there's a splash of the supernatural, or at least super-weird. The movie was quite well-executed and very atmospheric. The animation was of excellent quality, and there were a lot of cool little touches with various salvaged objects and so forth. I enjoyed it a lot, and also think it, or something heavily inspired by it, would make for an excellent tabletop RPG setting. I'd recommend this one, and I may be purchasing a copy at some point. I'd like to watch it again. (In other news, it's good to get some colors other than red, white, and black in the image of the cleared item...)