Stubs - Blast of Silence

Blast of Silence (1961) Starring Allen Baron, Molly McCarthy, Larry Tucker, Peter Clume. Directed by Allen Baron. Screenplay by Allen Baron. Produced by Merrill Brody. Run time: 77 minutes. USA. Black and White. Film Noir, Christmas

If there was a holiday you wouldn’t associate with film noir, I would think it would be Christmas. However, there are several including Christmas Holiday (1944), Cover Up (1949), Roadblock (1951), I, the Jury (1953), and Blast of Silence (1961). One of the bleakest, is the last one on the list, Blast of Silence.

Shot without permits and made on a shoestring budget of $28,000, filmmakers used borrowed equipment and shot the film in twenty-two days spread over a four-month period, including during Hurricane Donna (September 10–12, 1960), the only hurricane of the 20th century to blanket the entire East Coast from south Florida to Maine. The film was written and directed by the lead actor, Allen Baron, who really had no film experience prior to this.

Baron hadn’t intended to be the lead either, having written the part for his friend Peter Falk, but a paid gig made him unavailable. In typical film noir style, the film is narrated. The difference is that it is not the voice of the main character, but rather an observer-type read by blacklisted actor Lionel Stander for a fee of $500. The narration, written after the film was completed, was the work of blacklisted writer Waldo Salt, using the name Mel Davenport.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) (PS3)

Note: This review contains spoilers for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009).

With a game as successful as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) (CoD:MW2), making over $1 billion within three months, the future of the Call of Duty franchise would be surely be guaranteed. However, that future would not include series creators Jason West and Vince Zampella. It’s a very infamous and well-documented story, but the short version is that West and Zampella wanted more creative control over Call of Duty (CoD) following Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s (CoD4) success, though Activision CEO Bobby Kotick included a loophole in the agreement that control would revert back to Activision if the duo were ever fired. Soon after, Activision did everything in their power through an internal campaign dubbed “Project Icebreaker” to find a reason to replace the duo during development of CoD:MW2, which included plans to stage a fake fire drill to copy Infinity Ward employee emails. After CoD:MW2 came out and proved a massive success, West and Zampella were fired after renegotiations fell through, with Activision accusing them of “insubordination”. About 40 of Infinity Ward’s employees, numbering around 100 at the time, would quit and leave with West and Zampella to form Respawn Entertainment, who would develop the Titanfall series in partnership with Electronic Arts before later being acquired wholly by EA and making both Apex Legends and the Star War Jedi series. In the meantime, however, Infinity Ward was in the midst of developing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (CoD:MW3), now put in jeopardy without the studio’s founders, and the publisher was in a legal battle over unpaid CoD:MW2 royalties. As such, Activision would seek assistance from Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software to help with development on CoD:MW3, which would see the light of day in late 2011.

That brings us to now, as I now finish my journey through the original Modern Warfare trilogy. I didn’t remember hearing too much from other people around the release of CoD:MW3, but I did remember hearing about the drama around West and Zampella (especially the fire drill story). I was already planning on playing CoD:MW3 to round out the trilogy, but after enjoying Infinity Ward’s work on CoD4 and CoD:MW2, even with whatever criticisms I may have expressed, my curiosity grew about how the studio would handle CoD without any involvement from its creators. Although Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward did their best given the situation, it’s impossible to ignore the effect of West and Zampella’s absence in the final product.

Stubs - O. Henry’s Full House

O. Henry’s Full House (1952)  Starring (in alphabetical order): Fred Allen, Anne Baxter, Jeanne Crain, Farley Granger, Charles Laughton, Oscar Levant, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Peters, Gregory Ratoff, Dale Robertson, David Wayne, Richard Widmark. Directed by Henry Koster, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Howard Hawks, Henry King. Screenplay by Richard L. Breen, Walter Bullock, Ivan Goff, Ben Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Charles Lederer, Ben Roberts, Lamar Trotti. Based on the short stories "The Cop and the Anthem" in New York World (Dec 4, 1904); "The Clarion Call" in New York World (Oct 29, 1905); "The Last Leaf" in New York World (Oct 15, 1905); "The Ransom of Red Chief" in The Saturday Evening Post (Jul 6, 1906); and "The Gift of the Magi" in New York World (Dec 10, 1905) by O. Henry. Produced by André Hakim. Run time: 117 minutes. Black and White. USA Comedy, Drama, Anthology, Christmas.

While it wasn’t common practice for studios to make a series of short stories into movies, 20^th Century-Fox thought that the writings of William Sydney Porter, also known as O. Henry, were worthy of such a treatment. That is not to say anthology films were not made; they have been made frequently in India, Italy, and Great Britain, to name a few. Anthology films had been made prior to this one in Hollywood, most notably If I Had a Million (1932), produced by Paramount and including a segment directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

That said, it is thought that three films produced in the UK were the inspiration for O. Henry’s Full House: Quartet (1948) was based on stories by Somerset Maugham, who also personally introduced each one. Quartet was such a success, two sequels were made Trio (1950) and Encore (1951), also based on Maugham short stories. Paramount picked up the sequels for distribution in the U.S and the films were both critical and commercial successes.

Seeing as each segment was written, directed and starred different people, we’ll take each segment of the film one at a time.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) (PS3)

Note: This review contains spoilers for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The explosive success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) would naturally justify production of a sequel, eventually confirmed and revealed as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (CoD:MW2). While I was in high school back in 2009, this was actually the first Call of Duty (CoD) game where I couldn’t escape discussion about it thanks to the massive hype surrounding it (even a teacher would mention playing it one time during a class discussion). Apart from hearing endless discussion about the multiplayer, however, I was mostly aware of one Mission, “No Russian”, due to its controversial content, which for years was the only thing I knew about CoD’s storytelling and knowingly out of context. Now, with much more knowledge about CoD than I had before, my approach is more informed by not only playing CoD4, which has an incredible campaign on its own, but also the knowledge that this was the last time that Infinity Ward would develop a CoD game with original creators Jason West and Vince Zampella still involved, a story that I’ll save for another time. For now, however, we celebrate this blog’s fifteenth anniversary with CoD:MW2, which holds up surprisingly well in spite of some issues with the campaign.

Tron RUN/r (PC)

During a drought of Tron media following Tron: Legacy, Sanzaru Games developed Tron RUN/r, which introduced the franchise to the endless runner genre. When I first heard about the game, without looking into it further, I will admit that I didn’t bother with it because the title made it sound like a mobile game, only for me to learn during the leadup to Tron: Ares that it was, in fact, a PC/console game. On seeing you could still buy it on Steam, I waited for a sale to purchase the Deluxe Edition bundle that includes all DLC and starts you with 11,000 Bits, the in-game currency. While my personal dexterity and endurance was only able to carry me so far, I’m still glad to have finally played this game.

Stubs - Miracle on Main St.

Miracle on Main St. (1939) Starring Margo, Walter Abel, William Collier Sr., Lyle Talbot. Directed by Steve Sekely. Screenplay by Frederick Jackson. Produced by Jack H. Skirball. Run time: 78 minutes. Black and White. USA Christmas, Melodrama

Before there was Cher or Madonna, there was Margo. Born María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell, in Mexico City, Margo began her career as a dancer, at age 9, working for her uncle Xavier Cugat and his band in performances at nightclubs in Mexico. While accompanying Cugat and his orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, Margo was discovered by producer and director Ben Hecht and screenwriter Charles MacArthur, who cast the 17-year-old performer as the lead in their film Crime Without Passion. She would also have a memorable part in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937).

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3)

Back in high school, in the far-off era of the mid-2000s, I couldn’t escape discussion about Call of Duty (CoD) from fellow students, particularly the Modern Warfare trilogy (even one of my teachers played Modern Warfare 2 at the time). Despite this, however, I never really touched the games for one reason or another due to my differing tastes in games at the time. I have since played more FPS games, as you can see on this blog, but even then, I still never touched CoD and hadn’t intended to thanks to the series’ increasingly mixed reception. That would change, however, as I learned that the series had more than just the name going for it and actually left a major impact on FPS games and gaming as a whole. As such, I decided that for the fifteenth anniversary of this blog, I would finally do my due diligence and play the Modern Warfare trilogy, beginning with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) from 2007, developed by Infinity Ward. I didn’t know exactly what to expect going in, but I walked away finally understanding the game’s appeal and lasting influence.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (Film)

When the first Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) film finally came out in 2023 and proved itself a runaway success, making back over ten times its $20 million budget, a sequel, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (FNAF2), based on the game of the same name, was inevitable. As a fan, I was hyped enough for the film that I attended the Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con, where the cast and crew discussed the experience working on the film and they had announced a Scream reunion with Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich appearing in the same film once again (they also gave away pizza boxes lifted straight out of FNAF). As a reviewer, I recognized the flaws in FNAF, even more so on repeated viewings, though there were assurances that the production crew had listened to feedback and incorporated the criticisms into the sequel, which had a much smoother production. While FNAF2 did leave me curious about the future of the series, I can’t deny that it was overall a step down from the original.

Zootopia 2

Ever since seeing the original Zootopia in 2016, I’ve always felt that there was a lot of untapped storytelling potential for its setting. While this has come in the form of comics and children’s books, as well as the short-form Disney+ series Zootopia+, I’ve felt a lot more could be done with a longer story, as the premise seems to lend itself perfectly to an episodic TV series. While this does not appear to be happening, the next best thing came nearly 10 years later with the announcement of the sequel film Zootopia 2, though my expectations were tempered a bit by Disney’s recent sequel track record. It is then fortunate that the film not only surpassed these expectations, but actually managed to improve on the first in some ways.

Stubs - Larceny, Inc.

Larceny, Inc. (1942) starring Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, Broderick Crawford, Jack Carson, Anthony Quinn, Edward Brophy. Directed by Lloyd Bacon. Screenplay by Everett Freeman, Edwin Gilbert. Based on the play The Night Before Christmas by Laura and S. J. Perelman (New York, 10 Apr 1941). Executive Producer: Hal B. Wallis. Run time: 95 minutes. Black and White. USA. Comedy, Drama, Christmas

Towards the end of his career at Warner Bros., Edward G. Robinson made movies that spoofed the hard-nosed gangster roles that had made him a star; comedies, like A Slight Case of Murder (1938) and Brother Orchid (1940). Both of these films were directed by Lloyd Bacon, so it is no surprise that Bacon would be chosen to direct Robinson’s final film at the studio, the comedy Larceny, Inc.

Sonic Heroes (Xbox)

Note: This review contains spoilers for Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes.

Following the release of Sonic Adventure 2 (SA2), the previously unthinkable happened when Sega went third-party and started developing titles for non-Sega consoles and handhelds, including Sonic Advance, which officially ended the long-standing rivalry with Nintendo. When Sega showed interest in developing a multi-platform Sonic game, Sonic Team USA landed on a team-based concept to take advantage of the capabilities of newer hardware. Since the new title, Sonic Heroes (Heroes), would celebrate the series’ twelfth anniversary, they also decided that they would create a standalone experience closer to the Genesis games instead of a third Adventure entry, both due to the number of numbered sequels hitting the market and out of a desire for accessibility. The final game would launch in 2003 to mixed reception, but still sold very well and led to the development of 2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog.

Unlike some of the other Sonic games I’ve reviewed recently, I actually have more of a personal history with this one. When it first came out, it was one of the first Sonic console games I owned, so I played it obsessively, yet I couldn’t ever finish the game. At some point, I didn’t have my PS2 copy anymore, though an original Xbox that I bought still had a copy in the disc drive, so I ended up playing that copy for the purpose of this review (the disc had seen better days, but the data layer still looked fine). Fortunately, the disc held up well as I finally completed Heroes over twenty years later and concluded that it’s built around a neat idea with a tedious and frustrating execution.