The James Logan Courier

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Nintendo was perhaps more lucky than good with "Wii Sports," a terrifically fun compilation of games that made the Wii remote look considerably more versatile than it actually was.
With "Wii Sports Resort" — and particularly, thanks to the Wii MotionPlus attachment that's bundled inside — that illusion is now for real. The MotionPlus attachment allows the Wii remote to mimic real-time motion in ways the remote cannot do on its own, and "Resort" takes full advantage en route to establishing itself as a superior sequel.

Structurally, "Resort" feels a lot like the original "Sports." Each of the 12 available sports (up from five) features a handful of modes built around the sport, and each mode offers a single-player mode with scalable difficulty, two- or four-player local multiplayer or (in most cases) both. Online play, once again, is a no-show.

By Jamie Maxfield, Courier Correspondent

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Review

Anybody driving past Century 25 in Union Landing last Tuesday, they would have seen the mass of people waiting in excitement to see the newest movie in the Harry Potter series.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was long awaited, seeing as the original release date was supposed to be in November of 2008, but it was worth the wait. There were seven showings of the film that night, from midnight to 12:30, all of which were sold out long before the premier.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)


As licensed tie-in products do, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" scores an unintentional direct hit as a game that, for seemingly avoidable reasons, feels every bit as disposable as the movie on which it is based.

It didn't have to be this way, because "Fallen" does an awful lot right on the mechanical side.

The various Transformers — and you can embody quite a few of them by playing out the story from both the Autobots' and Decepticons' sides _ control as they should in robot form. Outside of some temporarily clumsy helicopter controls, they also move fantastically well in their vehicular incarnations.

By Roger Moore
The Orlando Sentinel (MCT)

Every food recall pushes "Food, Inc.," Robert Kenner's documentary about the state of our food supply, into the news.

"There's a tremendous interest in this subject," Kenner says. "Every time something we eat is recalled, interest goes up."

Rave reviews aren't the only reason a movie that isn't playing in many theaters is creating a stir.

By Walter Tunis
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

LEXINGTON, Ky. — The trouble started right about sundown, just as the Felice Brothers took the stage. That's when the power went out.

Thus, the coarse, celebratory music of the ensemble — a family band from upstate New York that blends modern and Appalachian folk, zydeco, blues, primitive country and more into a Band-like roots-music quilt with sometimes-punkish leanings — was left without any power.

By Mike O'Sullivan
Los Angeles

A book by first-time novelist William Pack, called The Bottom of the Sky, takes readers from rural Montana to the financial center of Wall Street and high-tech hub of Silicon Valley. The writer's own journey had been just as interesting.

The Bottom of the Sky follows the different paths of a brother and sister. Author William Pack says the book is fiction, inspired by elements from his own life.

"Certainly the venues are autobiographical," said William Pack. "The primary protagonists are born and raised in rural Montana, particular outside of Roundup, Montana, in abject poverty. So from that standpoint, that is where my life started as well."

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)


Volition's past work on the "Saints Row" and "Red Faction" have joined forces for one extraordinary lovechild in "Red Faction: Guerrilla," which ditches the franchise's claustrophobic first-person shooter roots in favor of a full-scale, third-person liberation of open-world Mars.

"Faction" originally established itself by allowing players to destroy environments before destructible environments became remotely commonplace, and "Guerrilla" makes its name not only by applying that principle to a persistent, open-ended landscape, but by once again doing it better than anyone ever has. Advancement through the game opens the door to all manner of explosive technology (rockets, atomic rifles, armored vehicles and mechs), but it's just as fun to leisurely decimate a fortress with nothing more than your absurdly powerful sledgehammer. The ensuing mayhem feels astonishingly authentic: Buildings come apart and topple realistically rather than in a manner that feels anywhere near scripted.

By Carrie Rickey
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)

PHILADELPHIA — Slim as lightning, Kathryn Bigelow makes movies charged with adrenaline and electricity, action thrillers like "Blue Steel" and "Point Break." The 6-footer with the radiant presence of a Redgrave and the steel nerves of a high-wire artist is drawn to stories about daredevils addicted to the rush.

Her latest, "The Hurt Locker," about a U.S. bomb-disposal technician in Baghdad in 2004, plugs viewers directly into the central nervous system of such a risk junkie, and it's earning Bigelow the best reviews of her career. "An instant classic that demonstrates ... how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can't kick the habit," the Wall Street Journal salutes.
"The Hurt Locker" is a topical exploration into mindful violence and one warrior's mindset: The acute focus that makes Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) such a cunning creature of war is the very quality that makes him unsuited to just about everything else.

By Glenn Gamboa
Newsday (MCT)

You don't need to be bonked in the head by a massive piece of Broadway scenery to figure out that something is going on.

As AC/DC's surprise double-platinum No. 1 "Black Ice" album and the success of the Broadway musical (and future motion picture) "Rock of Ages" would suggest, '80s hard rockers of all sorts are once again at the peak of pop culture.

And Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott says he knows why.

By Leah Koenig
Mother Nature Network (mnn.com) (MCT)
What does your typical morning routine look like – a blurry-eyed stop at Starbucks for a banana and takeout latte before hopping on the freeway? You are not alone. What if, instead of the stressful gridlock and disposable cup, you tried biking to your office and treating yourself to a freshly-brewed mug of coffee once you arrived? For Vanessa Farquharson, it is all in a day's greening.

As a 20-something Canadian journalist and self-proclaimed sustainability-novice, Farquharson challenged herself to make one green change to her life every day for an entire year and blog about it along the way. Over the year, she tackled the radical (e.g. unplugging her refrigerator and foregoing toilet paper) and the small (e.g. streamlining her beauty care products and attempting to date green), while trying not to alienate her friends or family by turning into a "smug hippie."

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Before the Wii was marketed as a system for everyone, it was pegged as a beacon for unprecedented immersion. Now that Nintendo's $20 Wii MotionPlus peripheral is finally here — and, more importantly, games like "Grand Slam Tennis" are on board to support it — that original claim finally holds true.

It demands mentioning that "Tennis" plays fine without the peripheral. The same control scheme from "Wii Sports" is included, and "Tennis" betters it by mapping lob and drop shots to the A and B buttons and allowing players to use the D-pad to shift their character between quadrants on the court. A more advanced scheme, incorporating the nunchuck attachment, affords players full character movement along with the same shot controls. "Tennis" allows you to swap schemes and difficulty levels on the fly, which makes establishing your ideal setup reasonably painless.

By Colin Covert
Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (MCT)

The outer-space indie "Moon" puts the alien in alienation.

Ever-interesting Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, a contractor running a one-man mining operation. His employer is LUNAR Corp., a benign enterprise that supplies Earth's energy needs with Helium-3, a precious gas extracted from the moon's surface. Nearing the end of his three-year term, he's eager to be reunited with his wife and young daughter. He talks to the moon base's resident computer, GERTY, as if it was human, but otherwise he seems unaffected by his long solitude.

Alert viewers will suspect that something more worrisome is afoot. The video communications from Sam's Earthbound bosses are condescending and unconvincingly supportive. The seemingly friendly computer is voiced by Kevin Spacey, an actor who couldn't tell you the time of day without seeing duplicitous. Sam's quarters are unkempt, and Rockwell is renowned for playing wackjobs. He gives hints of psychological wear and tear. When he takes a rare drive in a lunar rover, he crashes and loses consciousness. Waking up in the base's medical facility, he's confused, and comes to believe he's not alone up there.

By Cary Darling
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Every decade or so it happens.

African music, often exiled by the pop mainstream into the land of world-music exotica, threatens to make a broader incursion into American consciousness.

The '60s: South Africans Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba scored breakthroughs while the New York group the Tokens went to No. 1 with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," their take on a Zulu song written in 1939.

The '70s: Cameroon's Manu Dibango comes up with a global hit in 1972, the sweaty, sax-drenched instrumental Soul Makossa, considered by some to be the first disco track.

By Kim Janssen
Chicago Tribune (MCT)

Did you struggle to make it past page 20 of "Moby Dick"?

Do you live in fear of people discovering you've never read "Hamlet"?

Too busy for CliffsNotes?

Two University of Chicago freshmen believe they've found a solution. The pair recently signed a book deal with Penguin Books to rewrite 75 classic novels and plays as "Twitterature."

In a move likely to be greeted by book-lovers with a mixture of horror and why-didn't-I-think-of-that jealousy, college roommates Alex Aciman and Emmett Rensin, both 19, are rewriting classics by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dante and other greats in 20 or fewer 140-character tweets.