Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Someone is (thankfully) missing here, and his name rhymes with "hot-mud-sand." (credit: Warner Bros.)

This week's feature-length Justice League film benefits as much as it suffers from a "can't get any worse" reputation. Between the diminishing returns of Zack Snyder as a filmmaker, a crowded cast of new-to-film DC characters, and the incredibly stinky shadow of Batman V Superman, you'd be foolish to go into the latest (and likely final) Snyder DC film with high hopes. Like, even if it's adequate, that might seem monumental.

With that in mind, Justice League lands almost exactly where I predicted: as a mostly tolerable, occasionally fun, often ponderous, rarely logical attempt to unify the DC Comics film universe. It doesn't unseat Wonder Woman as the best DC Comics film in recent memory. It's certainly no Avengers, and, gosh, it isn't even Avengers: Age of Ultron. But it also won't live in infamy as another one of DC's midnight-movie laugh-a-ramas. It's just acceptably subpar.

Two outta three origins ain’t bad

If you're desperate to have your pro-DC bias acknowledged, Justice League does kick butt at a couple of things. The film has to juggle a whopping three film-universe origin stories, and it surprisingly succeeds at two of those.

Enlarge / The pull of the Force is strong with things like an impeccably rendered Millennium Falcon. (I mean, gosh, that's purty.) But Star Wars: Battlefront II can't paint over most of its failings. (credit: EA / DICE)

I've tried to give the new video game Star Wars: Battlefront II a fair shake, and I tried to do so through three types of fandom, at that. I really dig Star Wars—and I've generally appreciated when the series has expanded its universe in video game form. I'm a big fan of DICE as a creator of high-polish, massively multiplayer online shooters. And I thought 2015's reboot of the Star Wars Battlefront game series was perfectly satisfactory as an accessible online action game.

I kept all of these optimistic angles in mind as I booted the new game—and as I used my lightsaber of fandom to try to carve through its confusing economies. But that's been Scarif-massacre levels of difficult. Battlefront II ultimately lands as an adequate-but-forgettable combination of polish, bombast, and been-there-done-that shooter tropes. Even after EA's last-minute about-face, little about the total package makes me eager to recommend it to anybody looking for a family-friendly blaster, a Star Wars-worthy story, or a month-after-month dive into online team combat.

One step forward, how many steps back?

Enlarge (credit: Sergi Reboredo/VW PICS/UIG via Getty Images)

A New York state judge has concluded that a powerful police surveillance tool known as a cell-site simulator, a device that spoofs legitimate mobile phone towers, is a "search" and therefore requires a warrant under most circumstances.

As a New York State Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn ruled earlier this month in an attempted murder case, New York Police Department officers should have sought a standard probable cause-driven warrant before using the invasive device.

The Empire State court joins others nationwide to reach this same conclusion. In September, the  District of Columbia Court of Appeals also found that stingrays normally require a warrant, as did a federal judge in Oakland, California back in August.