The onslaught of video games this past fall caused me to put my recently acquired PS3 on the shelf for a stretch that has only ended recently. Though titles like Battlefield, Modern Warfare and Skyrim were available on both systems, years of loyalty and comfort with my Xbox 360 caused me to buy all cross-platform games for it rather than Playstation.

Now, I’ve finished with most of them (I’ll get around to you eventually I suppose, Assassin’s Creed Revelations), and I’m able to catch up with the one PS-exclusive title out this fall that I cared about missing, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.

If you’ve missed my thoughts on the previous two Uncharted games, you can find them here and here. It’s a series I hadn’t been able to play for years, but I’m happy I finally managed to catch up with it at last. And now with Naughty Dog’s next project being the mysterious apocalypse thriller “The Last of Us” rather than another Drake adventure, I think we might have seen the last of him for quite some time.

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In a world where Bourne, Bond and Ethan Hunt  would have us believe that spy games and espionage all involve shaky cam martial arts fights, hundred mile an hour car chases and a constant cacophony of explosions, TinkerTailor Soldier Spy would disagree.

It’s a thinking man’s spy thriller, adapted from the famed John le Carre novel that spawned decades of imitators. A few shots are fired yes, but there’s nary an action sequence to be found, but with the power of the story and how brilliantly it’s executed by the cast, your heart might be beating just as fast as it would in an action film as the mystery unfolds.

It’s mostly research and mind games, but Tinker, Tailor takes what could have been a dry concept and makes it quite exciting. It’s reminiscent of the similarly excellent subtle American spy catcher film, Breach, though there’s no true story here being used as a basis.

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Even though I watch and review 1-2 movies a week, every week, there are some that slip through the catch that I don’t manage to see in theaters. One of those was Warrior, the MMA film with Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy that I skipped because I thought it looked a bit cheesy, but I heard many, many good things about it since, so I decided to watch it yesterday.

It’s an emotionally powerful film, but almost manipulatively so. I had thought going in that it was based on a true story, but as I watched the plot progress, I realized that there was no way this was possible. (Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t seen it). Two plotlines run parallel to each other, one follows Edgerton, playing a physics teacher and former average UFC fight who goes back into the ring when he’s about to lose his house. The other has Hardy as an Iraq war hero and former high school wrestling champion who reunites with his once-alcoholic father to train in MMA once more. The two both enter Sparta, a tournament of the best 16 MMA fighters in the world with a 5M grand prize. Oh, and did I mention they’re brothers?

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Really, Dexter? You made me sit through unequivocally the worst season in your history so you could give me exactly ONE minute of relevance at the very end?

Needless to say, something very, very significant happened in the closing moments of the Dexter season finale last night, and join me after the break so we can discuss it away from the ears of those who don’t wish to know yet.

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Who says Americans can’t have their own James Bond?

What once seemed like an eye-rolling bit of news, that there was going to be a FOURTH Mission Impossible film, has actually been an eye opening experience that perhaps there’s room for another indefinitely long running action film series in our pop culture lexicon.

Bourne is attempting to do the same thing with a fourth installment himself, but Ethan Hunt and Mission Impossible are far closer to the Bond formula, with less overarching plots and focus on realism, and more unreal action sequences and maniacal villains bent on world destruction.

And while Bond has taken a more subdued path as of late, almost looking more like Bourne himself, it appears that Hunt might be ready to take his place as our go-to action hero.

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New Year’s Eve is less of a movie and more of pure “celebrity soup,” and I don’t mean the funny, Joel McHale hosted way.

It’s a sequel of sorts to Valentine’s Day, also helmed by Gary Marshall, but despite a few overlapping cast members, has nothing to do with the last film other than its core concept of “get a metric ton of celebrities to agree to act for twelve minutes each in this film based around a somewhat enjoyable national holiday.”

This concept has worked exactly once, in the form of the fabulous British Christmas flick, Love Actually, but that film succeed because of a brilliant script which interwove a dozen odd plotlines into one coherent story, with each character’s story being compelling and well-acted enough where it could have been its own film.

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As we head into the final stretch of this season of Dexter, the show finally gets to pick up the pace, and as such, there are a whole host of events to discuss from this week’s episode.

I may not like this season overall, but it seems at least that at last events are moving forward with significant relevance to the larger plot of the show, not just this DDK bullshit that at this point, needs to end.

Dexter went all Jack Bauer this week by stopping the poison gas attack by shoving the recent Travis conscript into an interrogation room and locking the door. Are interrogation rooms hermetically sealed or something? Do they have not haven ventilation ducts? I suppose it’s a little better than setting it off in the main open area, but still, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t come back to work three hours later after that.

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Oh Saints Row, how I love you…

The Saints Row series is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated gems of the current console generation. It’s easy to dismiss it at first glance as a wannabe GTA clone with a goofy name and worse graphics, but if you sit down and actually play one of the games? You’ll be having a blast within minutes.

I missed the first game entirely and went straight to Saints Row 2, and upon completion, promptly declared it my game of the year. The reason why was that in terms of pure enjoyment, there was nothing else that touched it, and after desperately wanting Grand Theft Auto to stop taking itself so seriously following the dark and gloomy IV, I got my wish in the form of Saints Row.

Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to Saints Row: The Third ever since, despite it’s Shrek-like title. What I’ve found over the past twenty hours or so might not have blown my socks off the way the first game did, but it’s a marked improvement over its predecessor in a lot of technical ways, even if the initial “wow” factor is gone.

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As you may have noticed, I don’t review Sons of Anarchy on a weekly basis as I usually only do that with one show at a time. But with the way this season of Dexter has gone, I almost wish I had made a different decision, as at almost all times during this fall, Sons of Anarchy has been the best show on TV.

This isn’t a new phenomenon,since the show was superb in seasons two and three, with the finale of the latter being one of the most jaw dropping hours of televisions I’ve EVER witnessed. I wanted to at least touch on this fourth season’s final episode, even if I’ve missed discussing all those that came before it.

What I have written about SOA recently is that I discovered that the show is a loose interpretation of Hamlet, with biker gangs subbing in for nobles. But the real meat of that is that there’s a son (Jax) haunted by the ghost of his father (John) and he must rise up and kill the king (Clay). With Jax discovering ALL Clay’s misdeeds last episode, including killing his father, his best friend’s father and trying to kill his wife, it seemed clear what had to be done.

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Hooray, finally the first episode of Dexter practically all year where I don’t have to spend most of it lamenting the stupid, impeding plot twist of Gellar and Travis being one and the same.

That speculation was finally put to rest last week when it was revealed that yes, Travis had killed Gellar over three years ago, and had been hallucinating seeing and taking orders from him ever since.

But now the question is what has happened to Travis? The escape victim said she heard and old man and a young man’s voice, and so when Dexter witnessed Travis talking to himself outside the church, shouldn’t he have been voicing both halves of the conversation?

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