Monthly Archives: August 2008

Dropped in to see how my laptop is doing

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Today I dropped by Best Buy in Pentagon City to see if they could at least tell me what’s going on. But the Geek Squad is using the “layered incompetence” defense. The laptop is locked in a cage, along with descriptive paperwork. They cannot find the keys. Seriously. This is really happening!

Add another $54 to money I spent somewhere other than Best Buy because of this: A copy of Unreal Tournament III, and a WoW playing guide.

I would also list people who I’ve discouraged from using Best Buy with my story, except that everyone I talk to says they have already learned not to trust the Geek Squad.

Today they called.

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Best Buy, in Pentagon City, Virginia, suddenly thinks my laptop is fixed.  So I get a call from the Geek Squad number, which invites me to call back.  I do so, but the “dispatcher” says I have to talk to the store.

“I can give you their number,” she says.  I wait.  Then she asks which store.  I tell her: Pentagon City.  “Is that spelled Penti?”  No, I spell it out.  She can’t find it.  I go online, look up the store locator, find the store, and give her the zip so she can find it herself.  She thanks me for the info and hangs up.  Anything I can do help the Geek Squad educate employees.

I call the store.  “Sure, it’s ready.”

I ask what’s been done to it.  They have to call me back.

A few minutes later, I get a call.  Turns out nothing has been done.  Well, they tried to find an operating system, but failed.  So they hoped I would just come pick it up and be happy?

Geek Squad stole my hard drive

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I would be updating this more often, with especially insightful entries on the classic “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and the new Starship Troopers III, except that I stupidly took my laptop to The Geek Squad for repair.  It was working pretty well when I took it in, except for the wireless card.  They handed back to me broken.  And didn’t even say “oh, by the way, this doesn’t work anymore.”  I had to take it home to find that out.  Now, I’m stuck between the manager of the Pentagon City Best Buy’s Geek Squad, and a service center in Knoxville Tennessee, and am unable to even find someone who will take responsibility enough to talk to me about.  Like kids in a schoolyard, everyone is pointing the finger at someone else.  More to follow.

A Defense of Uwe Boll

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Uwe Boll is, possibly, the worst director, ever. Worse, he has attacked one of my other loves, video-games in his ridiculous attempts to adapt a number of classic videogame franchises for the big screen. The primary crimes against video games, against movies, and against humanity itself include:

  • Alone in the Dark (ridiculous)
  • House of the Dead (OMG Stupid!)
  • Bloodrayne (Wow, not even Ben Kingsley can act in this POS)
  • Bloodrayne II: Deliverance (Wait, it’s bad, makes no sense, and this one has NO NUDITY!)

Unlike Ed Wood, who is often given that title, Uwe Boll isn’t trying to express some strange, complex vision, yet failing. Ed Wood had odd plots, mixing aliens and transvestites in some kind of pattern that you think secretly must make sense in his head. But Boll’s pattern is just derivative crap. You know pretty much what he’s trying to say, because other people have already said it better.  His best shots are clearly copied, his worst show that he didn’t understand what he was stealing.

All this I knew, but when I discovered my PS3 could actually sell me movies, the only thing worth downloading and watching was In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  I’ve only played a few minutes of that particular game, so I have no particular fondness that could be violated, but I was definitely up for an evening of Uwe bashing.  Many parts are bad, and everything good is not original.  But, still, Jason Statham is putting it all out there, doing his athletic action coupled with sullen intensity.  Ray Liotta is at about half creepy, but that’s still pretty creepy.  And Matthew Lilard is nasty enough that you find yourself really rooting against him.  By the predictable ending, I was engaged.  Not impressed, or blown away, but I wanted bad things to happen to the bad guys and good things to happen to the good guys.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Uwe boll movie without some inexplicable old, but still respected actor phoning it in.  Bloodrayne had Ben Kingsley, this one has Burt Reynolds!  As the King!

But I’m not changing my mind about Uwe just because he directed one mediocrity amidst all his crap.  I loveUwe Boll because the world would be less mysterious without him.  How does he get money?  How does he get medium-large names to appear in his obviously bad movies?  Why does he insist that he’s a mis-understood artist?  Also, he’s the only director I know of who challenged his critics to a boxing match.  Two took him up, and were defeated.  How about having Spielberg fight anyone who didn’t like the last re-hash of Indiana Jones?  I’d be up for that.

The other thing about Uwe Boll is that he’s trying the best he can.  He doesn’t have much talent, and he doesn’t make up for it with technique.  He sucks, but he’s trying to make the best movie he can.  Not so much Spielberg and Lucas.  They have talent coming out the wazoo, but contine to foist crap like the latest Indiana Jones movie on us.  That smacks of contempt.