Poker Night At The Inventory/Poker Night 2

I never really got into the whole "Texas hold-em" craze that swept the nation some years ago.  I watched Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo a couple of times just to see things like the cast of The West Wing duke it out for charity, and I played in one match with a friend of mine and people he knew (which gave me a new rule, never play cards when three of the players are in the same family).

But I haven't really watched any tournaments online, and I don't have any poker-style electronic games, outside of the occasional hand during some down time in Red Dead Redemption.

But then Telltale Games had to go and ruin the whole thing with their Poker Night At The Inventory games, a pair of games I regularly pop open and play when I just want to pit my minds against some notable characters from games, movies, comics, web series, and cartoons.

Giant Robots vs. Giant Monsters!

So, the movie Pacific Rim is coming out soon, and I'm hesitant to see this movie.

The thing is, I don't know why.

It seems like the perfect list of ingredients for someone like me.  Let's break it down:

1)  Guillermo Del Toro.  I love so many things he does and I think he's one of the most inventive directors and producers that Hollywood has access to.  I loved Pan's Labyrinth, I loved Hellboy, I loved Megamind and all he did on that was act as a consultant.

I'm excited for his upcoming Incredible Hulk TV series.  I even found myself enjoying Blade 2, and it is not, by any means, a good movie.  I mean, sure, it has Wesley Snipes suplex a man through a floor, it has Ron Perlman in tight leather (which I guess is somebody's fetish, God help them), it has the world's most illogically performing weapon ever created in the "light bomb," and it has the most awesomely obscene line I've ever heard uttered in a film (Google "hillbilly heaven," folks)... but, I mean, it's not really good.

But we'll get to that movie later.

2)  Giant robots.  I love me some giant robots...though I tend to prefer a non-heavy military focus.  I think it's why I prefer Full Metal Panic! and Big O and The Iron Giant over, say, Mechwarrior or Gundam.

Though, The Iron Giant is probably just one of the best animated films ever made.  And that's the gospel truth.

3) Giant monsters.  I love, love, love silly giant monsters and rubber suit monsters.  I watch classic Godzilla movies when I find them and enjoy them in a purely non-ironic way because I think they're brilliant.  I watch the MST3K Gamera films and love each one of them.  I even love the terrible Godzilla films, such as the one where he does a flying slide kick balanced on his tail to another monster.

However, I think that some of my hesitation might come from the fact that there's one series with giant robots  and giant monsters that I absolutely hated, despite it being one of the "greatest animes ever made."

That's right, I'm talking about Neon Genesis Evangeleon.  This series was so bad, that halfway through it I was rooting for the monsters to kill everybody except for the really hot drunk woman and the drunk penguin.  The characters were unlikable, the story line became a giant soapbox for the writer to stand on and stopped making sense a few episodes in, and it played off so many things about Japanese animation that I've found seriously annoy the hell out of me that I only completed it out of a sense of obligation to be able to call myself an "anime fan."

Plus, I'll admit it, I knew some people who were die-hard fans of the series, and these people creeped the living hell out of me.  I knew one person who was such a die hard fan that he was willing to announce to me in a public place how badly he wanted one of these things:

That is a pillow case that fits a five foot tall pillo so the owner can hug an animated teenage girl who's barely dressed decently enough for this blog.  There are pillows of these same characters with no clothes on or actively engaged in sexual activities with each other.

Pillows.  For people to hold against them.

Thanks for keeping it classy, Japan.

Oh, and they come in different fabrics like "peach skin" (which is supposedly soft and feels like the skin of a peach, naturally), velvet, and something called "2 way tricot" which I don't want to know about because the fact I even know this much about these things is probably making it that I'm really close to having to alert neighborhoods to my moving in to the area.

Great, now I just feel really unclean.

What was I talking about?  Oh, right, Neon Genesis Evangeleon.  Man, I really hate that series.  I hate it more than I do anything ever created by Uwe Boll.

So perhaps it's my opinion of that series causing me to be hesitant, since when I look at Pacific Rim, Neon Genesis is the only context I can think of when it comes to robots at that scale, unless I'm just completely remembering how big a Gundam gets incorrectly.

4)  GLaDOS

The fact that the woman who voices GLaDOS is the voice of a computer system in Pacific Rim should be enough for me to see the movie on its OWN merit, if just to wait and see if she seizes control of the robots and destroys humanity once all the monsters are killed off.

So there's enough there that I should be really excited for this film, and I probably will see it, but I just can't get as excited as I want to be.  I think I'm also afraid that I'm going to have the same problems I had the last time I watched movies with giant fighting robots (see: the Transformers films) because I also really hated those, partly because half the time the action had me trying to figure out who or what I was looking at.

Well, as long as it doesn't make anywhere near the same number of mistakes that the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie made.

How many did that one make?  I'm going to leave you with this:

I'll remind people that Siskel and Ebert pointed out one other mistake the movie made...if you're going to put in unlikable characters based on two critics who hate your films, why wouldn't you kill them off?  What a wasted opportunity!

Ask Erik: Episode Twenty-Four

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries. Do the classic "rules" of naming planetary bodies still apply when so many are found so quickly these days?  Is there a mathematical formula for creating great music?  Why, Seattle?  Why must your baseball team hurt me so?

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.