Star Trek - Season 2

New features for Star Trek's second season:

- The first use of the classic arena music is here I believe, when Spock and Kirk are forced to fight to the death. It then pops up again every couple episodes.
- Kirk has a new green v-neck command shirt with a sideways Starfleet emblem at his hip instead of on his chest. I don't really like it, but he only wears it half the time.
- Kirk gets busy with alien ladies a lot more often. Most of them just look like humans, but it happens all the time.
- McCoy gets his name in the main credits. He deserves it, he might actually be my favorite character.
- Chekov shows up. He's a really lame character. In a show where the Enterprise can travel back in time by going really fast, the episode where a gorgeous female member of the landing party is totally into him was the hardest to believe.
- It might just be me, but I feel like the idiosyncrasies of Kirk's speech patterns are much stronger now. This is where people got the justification to mock him until the end of time.
- They've done it before, but this was the season where they really went wild with extremely powerful computers and robots that are always defeated by using logic against them to either fry their circuits or cause them to shut themselves down. It's clever the first time guys, but it becomes a cliché when it happens every time.
- I'm pretty sure the return of Mudd is the first instance of a recurring character who's not an Enterprise crewman, and still the only one so far.
- Another new plot nugget they decided to use repeatedly is that of a planet that has molded its entire culture after a specific period and place in Earth history. You want Kirk and Spock to fight Nazis? You got it!
- Glowing, multi-colored brains in a glass dome.
- It took a while, but we finally have a scene with a bunch of exotic-looking aliens all meeting in a room on the Enterprise. This should have happened in the pilot.
- And lest I forget, we have the first recorded instance of a parallel universe in which the evil version of a character has a goatee. Good stuff.

The thing about Star Trek is I can't decide if I like it more when it's good or bad.

MC Chris - Part Six Part Three

I pretty much knew what to expect at this point from Chris' third release this year. Funny skits that wrap up the story started four releases ago, a few catchy songs with clever, nerd-related lyrics, a more sentimental song for the ladies I guess, and a brief running time. I'd put it closer to Part Six Part Two in terms of quality, but the entire suite is pretty entertaining overall. The skits this time show an increase in the trend of allowing less than perfect takes to make it onto the final recording. When Chris and his friends start breaking out in laughter at the absurdity of what they're saying it can be as funny as if they played it straight, and they're giggling pretty often this time. Actual song-wise, "Hipster Hunter" and "Emo Party" go after a couple different groups in pop culture, and I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek they really are. "Dengar's Dumptruck" might be my favorite of the new bounty hunter songs, and it might just be nostalgia that keeps "Fett's Vette" on top. "Distant Lands" has a chiptuned beat and is a cute little track to wrap up the new music here. I'm interested to see how MC Chris Goes to Hell shapes up, but until then this drip-feed of new music has been pretty enjoyable.

A Storm of Swords

Man, I love this series. Swords is even longer than the first two volumes and continues to escalate the drama of the story. I'd need more than two hand to count the number of times the plot took a turn that completely blindsided me. Even in the last fifty pages, when the pace is supposed to be winding down, I was taken by surprise repeatedly. But it's not just crazy happenings that make these books awesome, as I've said before. Martin's prose is still excellent, completely readable while still being intelligent, and occasionally artistic when called for. His capacity for building an enormous cast filled with characters that are three dimensional and almost universally generate a strong emotional reaction, whether good or bad, is astounding. Even ones who only occasionally show up in the background are generally memorable, only a few of the various knights and lords in the capital city tend to blur together in my mind.

The thing you have to understand before starting the series is that reading it is not always the most joyful experience. When the author admits to having trouble bringing himself to write an important chapter, you know that your heart's probably going to be broken a few times. It's not exactly constantly depressing, and there are plenty of moments as triumphant as any others are bleak. Still, the world these characters live in is a brutal and unforgiving one, and readers are constantly being reminded that no one is untouchable. Well, maybe a couple people are, but they're few and far between. I forgot to mention this back when I was saying that the good in the series wasn't all spectacle, but the subtle backstabbing and political maneuvering, involving lots of forced marriages, is just as engrossing as anything else in the story. It's a constant mystery who's really the cause of anything, and it's safe to say that you can't really be sure about anything at this point. The next book, A Feast for Crows, is limited to the largest of the multiple regions the story covers, due to the stuff happening in the other places giving Martin so much trouble writing that he decided to split them apart, and release Feast earlier. I've heard that it is less eventful than the first three books, which I think I'll be fine with, because I could use a breather, and it might be a chance to really enjoy the quieter aspects of the story.

Winning the World Series

It might not seem like a long time to fans of other teams, but the nine year wait between championships for the New York Yankees sure seemed like forever. And since I was barely a teenager the last time they pulled it off, this is the first time I was actually old enough to stay up past midnight and see my favorite team win at all. It's extremely gratifying, and I feel lucky to be born into a family that loves a team that other fans hate for their payroll, but always does their best to give the faithful what they want - a shot at the best players and a constant hope for victory.

I've always liked Alex Rodriguez when almost nobody did, and this was the year he finally got rid of his demons. Spring training was a disaster, but he homered in his first and last at bats of the season, and became a hero in the playoffs, hitting three game tying home runs in the first five games and powering his team to the final round. He wasn't quite the same force in the World Series, but he did manage a couple more big hits including the go-ahead double off Brad Lidge in game 4. When he slowed down, Hideki Matsui picked up the slack and earned himself the MVP award for the series despite not starting a game in Philadelphia. He hit the game winning home run off old Yankee nemesis Pedro Martinez in game 2, and punctuated that last night with six RBI in his first three at bats. Matsui is a consummate professional who might have just played his last game as a Yankee, and if so it was nice to see him go out like that.

I don't have much else to say, other than I still feel good, and I hope this feeling carries through the off-season as the Yankees make their moves to prepare for a run at number 28. I feel like this was the best team they've had since that amazing one in 1998, and it was a pleasure to watch them play for the last seven months.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Uncharted 2 is the kind of sequel that all game sequels should hope to be - it makes you never want to go back and play the previous one again. Which is a bit unfortunate in this case, because I still intend to replay the first game for the trophies they later patched in, but just looking at footage of it makes it clear how far Naughty Dog has come in two years. Uncharted 2 is stunning, and easily the best game they have ever made. It's possibly the prettiest game ever, both in terms of technical detail and enchanting art direction. Few games have ever impressed my programmer side (how did they do that?) and my gamer side (woah, that's awesome) at the same time, but Uncharted 2 does it constantly. This is a case where technology is used not just to make the game look nice, which most serious gamers will appreciate, but actually improve the depth and variety of interactions Nathan can perform, making it more fun, which most serious gamers will tell you is more important. There's just things it does that no other game has done, and it could end up being a real watershed moment to transform the action genre into something more dynamic and interesting than just a series of encounters with a bunch of dudes with guns.

The core of the game is still the cover-based shooting, and that's improved over the original. Most people seem to be comparing the aiming and shooting itself very favorably to the first game, saying how much better is. I'm not so sure it's the shooting itself, just that the design and pacing of the encounters is much more thought out and interesting that it often was before. I mean, there are definite improvements, especially where things like controlling the hand-to-hand and grenades are concerned, but what makes the game better is a better understanding of how to make a game like this that comes from doing it repeatedly. Still, if the game was all hiding behind walls and firing guns at people's heads, I'm not sure how much I would like it. The elements of traversing difficult terrain and solving some environmental puzzles are still there, and improved just as much if not more than the shooting.

Drake's notebook returns, but instead of just handing you the answer to a puzzle it often gives you clues to help you figure it out, and you can also flip through it to find some amusing notes Nathan made. Nate has more ways to get around at his disposal, and the climbing is integrated into real world situations more often, when he has to find his way through a war-torn city and fend off enemies at the same time. By the end of the game, I was kind of tired of the escalating difficulty of the shooting segments and their frequency, but for the most part it's an excellently paced, exciting game. The boss fight is better, and the option to improve your odds in some situations by sneaking up on the enemy is nice, although I question the decision to put a mandatory stealth section right up front before the action gets going.

While I did complain about the constant fighting by the end, one of the things that drove me to keep playing was the story. It's no match for great literature by and means, but as far as an adventure tale in the style of Indiana Jones or something, it's one of the better examples I've seen in any medium. Like the first game, the plot is based on a real-world historical mystery, and ties in likable characters and a touch of campy supernatural elements to keep you interested in the treasure they're seeking. The main cast from the first game all returns with the addition of a few new interesting characters, and the cut scenes feel like exchanges good enough for a real movie. The banter is often funny and witty, and Nate remains one of the more likable protagonists in games right now, even if his easy going personality doesn't quite mesh with him having to kill hundreds of dudes fairly often. I'd be interested to see this team do something a little less violent with the same setting, but in the meantime Uncharted 2 is possibly the best game I've played from this console generation.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

I don't remember a lot about the first movie, other than it being mostly crap, managing to screw with the established continuity for both franchises it involves, and ending with an alien fetus inside a predator. Oh my! That's pretty much where the sequel picks up - a hybrid between the two emerges, messes up the ship kills the other predators, and lands (in a very crashing sort of way) on Earth, where it and some face huggers (Which I guess were on the ship because the predators were studying them? I don't care enough to remember or look it up) proceed to wreak havoc on a small town in the United States. I won't say AVPR is anything close to a good movie, but I did enjoy it more than the first, which seems to be an uncommon sentiment. It's sort of the typical slasher set-up, unlike what we've really seen in either series previously, as it establishes a handful of interconnected and not terribly interesting characters, and then picks them off gradually in increasingly gruesome ways. Not usually my cup of tea, but it's a formula that I guess works and doesn't seem that out of place with the idea of putting either of these sci-fi killers in that setting.

Of course... those killers shouldn't be in that setting in the first place. The predator in the movie is a badass cleaner who comes in to cover up the chaos caused by the incident in the beginning. He doesn't do a very good job of it, as before long the entire town is overrun with aliens and the government has to call in the big guns. But why do they care about the cover up in the first place? They're hunters, not galactic police men. It just leads to another annoying predator who kills everyone he comes across, which is less compelling than the original characterization. Sorry to spoil this crappy movie that you don't care about the plot of, but there's a tie-in at the end to the Weyland-Yutani corporation of the Alien movies, supposing that predator technology helped humans eventually get out into space in a serious way in the first place. Um, okay... so why do they still use flamethrowers and bullets in the future if they have a predator's energy-whatever gun, and how come the company claims to have no recorded cases of the aliens previously in the future? The entire point of the Nostromo's diversion was to get a living sample of one of the creatures, but we're supposed to think it took them that long to get one when there was an outbreak of them ON EARTH during our time? They should have just made their movie with adequately gory deaths and fan-pleasing homages instead of trying to get cute and tying it all together. Also, the Predalien looks too much like the predator. Aliens from humans don't look nearly that human. Oh well.

Predator 2

I think the original film is one of the best action movies of the 80s, but I wasn't a big fan of the series' step into the 90s. It takes place in Los Angeles in the then-future of 1997, and replaces the terminator and the jungle environment with city streets and a guy who is perpetually too old for this shit. It's from that dated style of film where gratuitous blood and violence is obviously better than the alternative and a swear word that we haven't heard in four minutes is as clever as it needs to be. The first movie had some corny bits - "stick around!" comes to mind - but it somehow felt different. The predator itself was a deadly enemy to be feared, and the guys it was hunting down were serious, dedicated men. In Predator 2, Danny Glover sneaks up behind gang members in a shootout with the cops in the middle of the street during the day and shouts "Hey, assholes" anyway so he can see the looks on their faces when he mows them down. He's surrounded by as cliched a group of cops as you can find, and this is in the middle of the period where Bill Paxton had the market on over-loud obnoxious douches absolutely cornered. The police angle did absolutely nothing for me, and unfortunately a lot of the movie hinges on it.

The predator in the first film had a goal - he was on a hunt, collecting the trophies of one of the best fighting forces on Earth. In this movie any actual goal either doesn't exist or is so unapparent as to be trivial. It just goes around killing anyone it wants to - mostly those at least brandishing weapons, yes, but there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just pointless, going around killing while the police futilely try to track it down. Later a special team investigating the creature and trying to acquire its technology - a team surprisingly willing to divulge its secrets to any cop tenacious enough to confront them say two or three times - tries to take it down in a warehouse, and from there is a prolonged, poorly paced sequence of events where Glover follows it around as the two play cat and also-cat. The film lurches to a conclusion promising a sequel that never really came, and ties up a truly disappointing successor to a pretty darn good movie. Just like with Alien, the first half of the series is all you need to see.

Alien Resurrection

Joss Whedon is one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction. I haven't seen much of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's work, but he did direct Amélie, one of my favorite films of the decade. So what went wrong here? I'm not quite sure. I feel like there's the core of a solid Alien movie in here - not as good as the first two, but still passable. Cloning Ripley, while resulting in a plot development that doesn't actually make sense to me, is a fine way to bring back the character back in a new way and actually advance the time period again, unlike Alien 3 which didn't feel new. The ship of smugglers were a nifty notion, and are pretty much a prototype version of the crew in Firefly. And there are some interesting situations and disturbing scenes that work better than anything in the last movie did. It just doesn't come together into something I'd want to watch again. It might just have been that it was before Whedon really discovered his chops as a screenwriter and Jeunet figured out what kind of movies he really wanted to make. Resurrection ends up being an interesting failure.

Man, I had some momentum until that paragraph break. It was getting kind of long though, it had to be done. Um... Whedon has talked about how it wasn't necessarily changes to the script that he thinks hurt the movie, just that the overall execution of what was written on the page was totally off. And I can sort of see that. There are a lot of lines or exchanges that could have been better with a different actor or just a different way of saying them, and the movie just feels clunky, like the people in charge of different areas just were never in sync. I'm not saying the story they had would have been a good film if these problems were corrected, it's just that it compounds the problem. An awkward and unwieldy film. Some moments totally work, but most of it just doesn't, and I'm confident that the latter half of the Alien quadrilogy can be, and probably should be safely ignored in the future.

Alien³

Unlike Aliens, Alien 3 doesn't do much of anything that the first movie didn't. It answers the question of how to make a single one of the creatures scary again after Ripley fought off hordes the last time: replace the marines with bald, British criminals and take away their weapons. This time, the alien bursts out of an animal instead of a person, resulting in slightly different physiology. In some ways, it's the best looking of the first three films, with superior gore effects and a good looking alien. But whenever the shot is wide enough to see the entire thing visible, it ends up being horribly composited with the rest of the picture and actually looking worse than if they just cheated more with the camera work.

This was actually David Fincher's first feature film, though unfortunately not a very good one, and thanks to disputes with the studio he's basically disowned it. It's hard to say how much of the movie's badness is the result of outside tampering and how much is it just being a bad movie. It seems more hateful than the first two. The series is known for the vast majority of its characters dying, but this one kills off three survivors from the last movie in the beginning for no real reason. The setting is weird, and the surrounding cast this time is kind of dull, with every person sort of being the same dude. Aliens expanded on the series' scope, and Alien 3 draws it back, just trying to make some money without doing much that'll make it seem worth the time. Honestly, I can't think of many reasons I shouldn't just call it awful. The ending is unexpected and pointed, thought it didn't stop them from making yet another sequel five years later. I'm gonna go think about something else now.

Aliens

It's a damn shame it took James Cameron fifteen years to finally get back to directing action films. In just a decade spanning the 80s and 90s, he made four of the best and most original such movies in that period, plus The Abyss which was okay I guess. Alien still holds up and is worth watching, but this is the movie I regret not seeing until now. I've heard of its influence on the aesthetic of many modern video games over and over, and that rang pretty true while I was watching. Aliens takes the setting and style of the first movie, and amps up the intensity and excitement tenfold. It begins with Ripley finally being discovered and awoken from her frozen state fifty seven years after the first movie, not long after her previously unmentioned daughter, that she remembers as being ten, dying an old woman. It's kind of a convenient way to add emotion to the revelation, but Cameron does a good job of carrying the motherhood thread through the rest of the story. A colony has been established on the planet where the first alien was discovered, and she goes on a mission with a unit of soldiers to try to prevent things from going to hell. You can guess whether they succeed.

The movie maintains some of the horror elements of the first film, but mostly establishes its own personality with the various wisecracking marines and the added danger of a species that is now mostly fighting on its own turf. They expand on the question of the creatures' biology, and where they all come from. The action doesn't have the specific complexity of more modern movies, but there's a real sense of chaos and danger as they basically wage war on each other. A few of the characters are somewhat annoying, but you come to regret each of their deaths and root for their triumphs. The aliens are generally pulled off better than in the first movie, with some clever filming to hide the fact that they're, you know, not real, and the final obstacle is a particularly impressive bit of practical effects work. The climactic moments are as strong as in any movie, and in the end Aliens is a great, satisfying action movie, dark but not as depressingly bleak as the rest of the series. Just watching it made me more optimistic for Avatar.