Diary 2018-12-31
I'm almost done with the code for tic-tac-toe. Here's what's left:
- Code the ability to draw winlines
- Add sound effects and music, because I want to learn how to do those.
We also watched the third Maniac Cop movie today, and, whew. I preferred the first to the second, but the second is way better than the third. Issues include:
- Front-loaded exposition so a character can die quickly.
- Cordell doesn't kill much (in what we assumed would be a slasher movie), and it's not clear what his motivations are throughout the movie.
- Out of the four kills (just barely more than the movie's hero) Cordell did that I can remember, one of them has no effect on anything at all.
- It's a Maniac Cop movie with a message of "boo-hoo, poor cops".
- Nothing that gets revealed to the characters changes the basis of Jessup's lawsuit, but then he goes on a shooting rampage and gets killed in self-defense. Makes it easy!
- Like a lot of these goofy movies we've seen, there's an obligatory-feeling romance-like plot-like occurrence that displays the approximate emotional depth of the first few lines of Sk8er Boi. (Looking over the lyrics, since I didn't remember them clearly, I'm pretty sure most b-movie creators, if they listened to Sk8er Boi, it would blow their minds.)
- It feels like the movie is there in service of a bunch of cool (or "kewl") scenes, which do nothing to impart any sort of weight.
- Ultimately, the closest we got to feeling suspense was wondering when exactly the dumbass house of cards we'd seen constructed would come tumbling down. (On reflection, the movie might have worked slightly better if we hadn't seen Kate's final moments in the convenience store except through the news footage. That way it would only be obvious in retrospect that Kate is partially being framed.)
- The timeline is a little confusing, meh, I dunno.
Ultimately, compared to the first movie, I feel like the sequels don't really have anything worthwhile to say.
Anyway, post is running late, better turn in and try to get back in the swing of things later.