Pretty Sure I'm Right

Deadeye Dick

2012-01-31T18:19:00.000-05:00

At this point, the formula for a Kurt Vonnegut novel is so clear and familiar that it's almost completely transparent, but they're still so enjoyable to read that it's hardly worth caring. Like a lot of his work, Deadeye Dick is less a novel with a plain, straightforward narrative and more of a jumbled memoir of a character who seems like some possible version or aspect of Vonnegut himself, examining the absurdities of life and America and society through events that range almost everywhere on the scale between hilarious and depressing. He had his method down to a science by the 80s, and the result is yet another easy to read book that I liked a lot and wouldn't mind going through again.

This particular book is about Rudolph Waltz, a man born in the 1930s to very silly parents and whose entire future is affected when he accidentally does something horrible when he's twelve years old. We learn a lot about his life and the lives of his close family members, and also little snippets about the various other residents and famous events in Midland City. As far as recurring Vonnegut elements go, the novel returns to science fiction with the concept of a neutron bomb that can wipe out the residents of a town without actually affecting the non-living landscape, and it shares a location and some characters with Breakfast of Champions. I'm not sure that the two stories can actually be reconciled into a single continuity, but that was never the point of Vonnegut's writing anyway. Deadeye Dick isn't his most innovative or surprising work, but it's still a very entertaining and occasionally poignant novel, which is pretty much the writer's real trademark.

Fawlty Towers

2012-01-30T18:26:00.000-05:00

Fawlty Towers is a sitcom co-written by and starring John Cleese as Basil Fawlty, the eccentric and put-upon owner of a small hotel in England. Coming not long after Monty Python's Flying Circus wrapped up, it's kind of surprising how standard a show it is, but it manages to be very funny regardless, and with him playing so many small parts while working as a member of Monty Python, it's hard not to say Fawlty is the best character Cleese ever played. The show takes place almost entirely inside the hotel, and the plots revolve around the mishaps and misunderstandings that seem to occur on a daily basis, as Fawlty butts heads with his wife, his dimwitted Spanish waiter, and the various guests who rent rooms. Other recurring characters include a couple older longterm renters with a few running jokes and Polly, a part-time assissant played by Cleese's writing partner and then-wife Connie Booth, but who doesn't do much besides occasionally help Fawlty with his elaborate attempts to conceal problems from his guests and his wife.

The show is a little hit and miss, because while it's almost always funny, some of the episodes revolved around plot ideas that are fundamentally frustrating for a viewer. I realize that it's sitcom convention for small lies to balloon into big ones very quickly, but when the small lie that starts things off seems unnecessary in the first place, it can lead to a whole storyline being irritating to watch even while the individual gags can still be quite funny. The best parts of the show are when Fawlty is matched up against a guest who happens to be a huge pain in the ass to begin with, and the comedy comes from both his befuddlement and abrasive rudeness in response. Things usually escalate in a remarkably madcap fashion, often ending in complete chaos at the end of the episode. The best one was probably the finale of the first season, which begins with Basil running the place by himself while his wife is in the hospital and ends with him trying to do the same while heavily concussed and failing to avoid upsetting a group of German guests. I don't think anyone will ever call Fawlty Towers much of an innovative show, but that doesn't prevent it from still being wonderfully entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny over 30 years later.

Movie Update 37

2012-01-29T09:35:00.000-05:00

Crimewave

This is the only produced Coen brothers script that the brothers didn't direct themselves, though the duties were taken by their friend Sam Raimi. It combines elements of both of their careers in film, and combines them to create what might be best described as a live action Looney Tunes movie. The subject matter is darker, but the actual content of the film really isn't. When a man hires a couple of goons with silly voices to kill his business partner after finding out about his betrayal, they end up going on a rampage through the city, with one of the man's employees and a girl he meets getting caught up in it. It's a very strange and silly movie, with some very elaborate comedic setups, surprisingly exciting moments of action, and an entertaining appearance by Bruce Campbell. A bizarre film that you'll probably like if you're a fan of the filmmakers involved.

Dracula

It's always interesting to me how sterile and stately the horror films of the 20s and 30s are. Genre icon Bela Lugosi stars in his signature role, instilling Dracula with charm and menace as he moves from Transylvania to London in order suck a lot of blood. It's of course pretty toothless in comparison to modern vampire stories, but I mostly enjoyed the slow discovery by the other characters of what Dracula really is and their calm attempts to prevent him from killing or enslaving any more women. Heh, toothless.

One from the Heart

Post-70s Francis Ford Coppola continues to make absolutely no sense to me. One from the Heart tells the story of a couple in Las Vegas that finds their relationship falling apart, and their struggles to either resolve their differences and move on with their lives. What makes the movie different is its musical quality - the characters don't really sing, but the original music by Tom Waits pervades the whole thing, it frequently dabbles in an unreal sense of space, and the film is entirely and totally obviously filmed on elaborate sets at a soundstage. The movie's budget problems and failure at the box office cost Coppola a ton of money, and a lot of his career from then on can be attributed to continued financial problems. Was it worth it? Uh, not really. The movie is okay.

Witness for the Prosecution

A courtroom drama directed by Billy Wilder, based on a play, based on a story by Agatha Christie. Other actors get higher billing, but the star of the show is definitely Charles Laughton, an aging English lawyer who was recently released from the hospital and decides to take on the defense of a man accused of murder, against his doctors' wishes. The trial itself is pretty straightforward, until the characters start making unexpected choices and Laughton has to stay on his feet to deal with the changes and continue the defense to his best ability. The ending is so twisty that a voice actually advises the audience to avoid spoiling it to their friends so they can enjoy it too. It's a well-made and wonderfully acted legal drama that wraps up satisfyingly without letting anything come too easily.

Chuck - Season 5

2012-01-28T11:48:00.000-05:00

For its entire existence, Chuck has been an uneven show. There are some things it has always done well, mostly involving making its central characters sympathetic and likable, though they've been known to make annoying decisions at various points. There are some things it has had trouble doing consistently, but can often manage. It is occasionally very funny, though it also often isn't, especially when they return to the Buy More for yet another boring B story. And there are some things it has never quite gotten right, mostly involving the spy stuff. It will have moments of inspiration or clever homage, but it's often buried in too many references or plotting that is just poorly thought out and irritating. None of these aspects of the show really changed in the show's brief fifth and final season, but I would say it's probably the show's best since the second, because the action/drama side was at least occasionally competent, and the focus was on giving those likable characters fitting conclusions, and they all got fitting and occasionally touching send-offs, even Jeff and Lester, the bozos who are usually tolerable at best.

The silly idea of the Intersect has always been central to the spy aspect of the series, and that's once again the case this time, though they thankfully managed to put a twist on it by no longer having it stuck in Chuck's head the whole time. It's still the center of the plot though, as a bunch of guest actors and returning villains are brought on and dealt with in rapid fashion as the show teases some possible story arcs but doesn't really stick with any of them for a long time. The last handful of episodes do finally build a sense of momentum with a bad guy who lasts more than an hour, and a gut punch of a plot twist that is surprisingly effective considering how terrible the scene in which it occurs is. It leads to an ending that is not quite the comfortable fairytale finale I was honestly expecting, but is still a touching and hopeful one that does justice to characters who have maintained my affection despite the show's many ups and downs over the years. Chuck was never as good as I wanted it to be, never managing a way to mix espionage and humor in a way that does justice to both, and never quite doing enough with a protagonist that manages to be relatable to nerds rather than an irritating stereotype of one. But while it had flaws, it never stopped being easy to root for, and I'm glad the creators got the opportunity to end the story in an acceptable way despite the series never really growing beyond its small but dedicated audience.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

2012-01-23T18:22:00.000-05:00

The first regular Zelda game on a console in five years came out as the Wii's life cycle began to wind down to a close, perhaps too late for it to have a major impact on the gaming landscape. I think Skyward Sword is a really good game, and I certainly had more fun with it than I did with Twilight Princess. But Twilight Princess came out in 2006, and Skyward Sword doesn't do enough differently to be as notable as that game was at the time. People were hoping for Nintendo to really do something different with the series, and while they made a polished and enjoyable adventure, it's not much different from what we're used to.

I do generally like the setting and general story of Skyward Sword - it goes back to the beginning of the series, and shows the origin of a number of elements that have recurred often throughout the twenty five years that they've been making these games. The game's a bit slow to get going, features repetitive dialogue, and has some interludes that don't really lead anywhere, but the game was designed well enough that it didn't really feel like a slog before it got going. There's a bit more to the characterization than there was in the past, too. It's hard to really develop the cast too much when they don't really speak and almost all of their dialogue is exposition, but the main players felt more like people than they usually do. And while I'm tired of gorons at this point, they did make a point to introduce several new types of creatures.

The game follows a familiar structure, starting you in an introductory area to learn the ropes, slowing allowing you to enter new areas, and accomplishing various tasks in between trips into dangerous, puzzle-filled dungeons that are the meat of the gameplay, before eventually pushing you toward an endgame that leads to the final boss fight. The sections between dungeons were more involved with usual, and while they aren't quite as tricky, they do feel like real, focused challenges rather than filler you have to do before you're allowed to advance. You will acquire items you need to get past certain obstacles, learn to fight new enemies, and encounter interesting things in the world before you can advance. I also thought they did a good job with side quests this time, or at least it seems that way since I did more of it than I have since Majora's Mask came out. A lot of it revolves around Skyloft, the town in the clouds you start the game in, which isn't particularly big but is filled with people who have a problem they need help with or some useful equipment to sell you.

It's interesting to look at how the dungeon design has changed over time with these games. The older 3D games had lots of simple, repeatable challenges like having to light torches or push blocks, and tons of locked doors with tons of keys to unlock them. Over time the design has gotten more focused, with fewer keys and more specific, location based puzzles as the technology and sophistication of the design has improved. I wouldn't say they're necessarily more fun, but they're thought through a little better. The boss fights are about what they always are - some are tougher than others, none are truly frustrating, and they all test what you've learned and the items you've found in unexpected and satisfying ways. The biggest problem I had with most of them though tended to revolve around the controls - the Wii version of Twilight Princess had you swing the remote to make Link swing his sword, but Skyward Sword is much more specific about it, with every item depending on your ability to aim or swing precisely with the remote. It's a function system, and the way it influences the combat is interesting, but there were often still issues getting it to work precisely and it led to a few frustrating moments.

One problem the series has always had that Skyward Sword fixes is that there's actually a use for all the money you find. You don't have to worry so much about the size of your wallet, and you can buy things like potions (which are actually useful since fairies don't fill your health bar up any more), larger pouches for your ammo, and special gear with various uses, and you can also collect bugs or rare treasures to pay for upgrades to your gear. I still say Zelda is an action adventure, but these changes make the game feel a bit more substantial and closer to an RPG. Something they haven't fixed is the feeling of the game being padded out a bit, which is especially noticable towards the end. Yes, there's another lengthy segment that feels suspiciously like a fetch quest, and while there's enough unique stuff to do that it isn't entirely lazy, it does feel unnecessary since the game is plenty long without it - I left a fair amount of optional content on the table, and the game still took me 40 hours to beat.

Skyward Sword definitely has a few warts, and it's hard to shake the feeling that the Zelda series is behind the times, even ignoring the fact that the Wii can only display it at 480p in the year 2012. But it's still a Zelda game, and that means it's a charming adventure with some enjoyable dungeon and combat design, and an experience that's entirely comfortable to sit through. Perhaps that slight lack of ambition keeps it from being an absolutely classic game, but it's still one I'm totally glad I took the time and effort to play.

Movie Update 36

2012-01-16T18:27:00.000-05:00

These were expiring, so I watched them. Yep.

Ball of Fire

A screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks, featuring Gary Cooper playing off type as an awkward, stuffy intellectual and Barbara Stanwyck playing very much on type as a club singer and mob boss' girlfriend who helps him and his fellow encyclopedia writers come out of their shells. Ball of Fire is mostly an enjoyable movie, though there's definitely something very weird about it. The professors are all pretty likable guys, but it's just a little uncomfortable seeing them all fawn over a young and attractive woman, even if it's innocent. The shift from her using them to avoid the police to actually getting romantically interested in Cooper is pretty abrupt as well. As I said though, it's mostly a fun movie.

Deathtrap

Sidney Lumet movies are often based on plays or feel like they could be, taking place in a small number of locations and not being particularly visually flashy. That's definitely the case with Deathtrap, though I think the entire thing being limited mostly to a single house works in its favor. Deathtrap was a play about writing a play based on a murder, and the fact that the movie version isn't a play itself does do a little to remove some of the inherent cleverness of the structure. But the story still works, and the performances by Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve are really good. I can't say as much about the other characters, but it's both an amusing and incredibly tense movie at times, with some great twists and surprises.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

It was a big surprise for this movie to be in color, though apparently that was a thing for its makers Powell and Pressburger while most directors from the 40s were still working in black and white. The movie is based on British cartoons about a blowhard English military man, though it tells an original story about how such a man might come to be like that over a lifetime of fighting in wars. Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook give a pair of great performances, first as young soldiers, then as middle aged veterans of the first World War, then as old relics at the beginning of the second. There's also an amusing bit with Deborah Kerr playing three different women who all look the same at various points in his life. The movie is concerned with many things, but the main one I thook away from it is how a lifetime of experiences can affect a person and make them who they are. A great and refreshingly civil war movie.

Odd Man Out

Carol Reed's The Third Man is a classic of the noir genre, though I can't say I enjoyed Odd Man Out nearly as much. It has an interesting subject, with James Mason playing an IRA leader who gets wounded and stranded in the middle of Belfast (though the film is not actually explicit about either of those references). There are some interesting moments sprinkled throughout, though I was mostly kind of bored while I was watching it, which shouldn't happen with a movie about hiding from the police and troublesome politics. I didn't think it was bad, I was just rarely actively intrigued by what was happening, and with a genre that thrives on intrigue, it was disappointing.

The American President

2012-01-15T15:30:00.000-05:00

It was pretty amazing how much this felt like an alternate universe's version of The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin wrote it, in much the same style as the show, with lots of intelligent back-and-forth dialogue and well-timed dramatic speeches. It has a movie budget with a movie cast and a movie director in Rob Reiner, but it's filmed pretty plainly and on the same sets as the show. Most of the characters have pretty clear equivalents from the show. Michael Douglas' President Andrew Shepherd is not that different from Josiah Bartlet, and Martin Sheen even plays a chief of staff similar Leo from the show. It shares a couple other cast members like Joshua Malina, and the rest of the actors are a mostly recognizable bunch, playing roles they might have played on television had they not been more successful. Michael J. Fox is another member of the staff, and Richard Dreyfuss plays a Republican senator with designs on the presidency.

The focus is a bit different than The West Wing though - while it does get into some of the nuts and bolts of politics, particularly the wrangling it takes for controversial bills to get through, it's mostly in the service of a romantic plot that's the real core of the story. The President is a widower due to his wife's death before his election, and he hasn't been really looking to date while in office. Annette Bening plays a lobbyist who gets a job in Washington, but things quickly get weird when she and the President hit it off and they start seeing each other regularly. There's a lot about whether a President, even a very popular one, could ever have a non-marital relationship in office in this day and age.

Dreyfuss' character is cartoonishly evil and slimy, and uses the situation to smear the President, who doesn't stoop to defending his personal life despite falling approval ratings. His personal and professional lives though finally collide near the end, once the health of his political goals come into conflict. It's a bit more silly and outlandish than anything you'd normally see in a regular story of politics, but it's not a politics movie - it's a romantic comedy with a political setting. It does the job well enough, but I'm glad Sorkin didn't get it out of his system and went on to use a lot of his ideas to create one of the best TV dramas of the last decade.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2012-01-14T11:59:00.000-05:00

The only movies in this series that I've seen previously are the original and Tim Burton's terrible remake. I like the first movie, but I didn't have much hope for another attempt to revive the concept, even if a story about how apes taking over the planet might actually happen is more interesting than just doing the first movie again. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, though. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is certainly flawed - the science is mostly pretty silly, and a lot of the human characters are generic summer movie tropes with nothing to them. But the movie does a few key things right, and the result is a perfectly solid popcorn movie, and the rare kind of one that actually has a soul.

The key to the whole movie is the realization of the character of Caesar, as performed by motion capture veteran Andy Serkis and animated by Weta. If they didn't have him as a central figure around which to base the story, they wouldn't have that much. But by establishing the character and using him so well, they turned what could have been a simple monster movie into something more complex and interesting. What's so different about the movie is that it's not clear what exactly we're rooting for. Normally that would be a problem, but here that conflict is an essential part of what makes the whole idea interesting. In the end, it's clear that the apes are not the bad guys - man's own hubris is. And while that's not exactly a new idea in the realm of science fiction, for once I didn't feel like an anti-science message was being rammed down my throat. It wasn't that we are wrong to try to advance medicine by playing god, it's that sometimes there are unforeseen consequences in the relentless pursuit of power and profit. And I was fine with that.

The reason the apes aren't outright good guys, besides the fact that their victory means the eventual extinction of humanity (as humans we are naturally inclined to be against the death of all humans), is James Franco's character, a scientist who's pushing hard on a drug that allows brain cells to repair themselves and could potentially cure victims of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, which his father has. I don't understand why John Lithgow was cast as the father when it's not a significantly meaty role and his mere appearance makes most people get ready to start laughing, but he helps humanize Franco, along with his girlfriend played by Freida Pinto, who pretty much only exists in the movie because they wanted a female character.

When one of the apes the drug is being tested on gives birth and Franco is forced to care for the baby, he both realizes that the drug has intelligence-improving as well as restorative potential and develops a strong bond with the ape. Their connection is what drives most of the drama and more heart-wrenching moments in the story, and Franco and Serkis make a good pair, even if only one of them is ever actually on screen. As Franco's reluctance to continue pursuing the drug grows in the face of the dollar signs growing in his boss' eyes, a more outright conflict develops as more apes get their cognitive abilities boosted and Caesar becomes a Spartacus-esque figure (sort of ironic given his name, I guess). It builds to a climax that is more complex than summer movies usually go for, and the ending does plenty to seed a sequel that could take place either soon after or much later, closer to the time of the "beginning" of the story. I'm not sure which I'd rather watch, but I will say I enjoyed this movie the most of three that I've actually seen. As dopey as some of the characters in Rise are, and as much as I didn't like it going back to the well on some of the original's famous lines, it's still overall a less silly and more competent film.

Best Shows of 2011

2012-01-12T18:42:00.000-05:00

Once more, with feeling: this list was chosen from seasons of shows that had their season finale air in 2011. So for the network shows, material that occurred way back in the fall of 2010 is relevant, and the brand new seasons aren't. It's just the only way to make it work, okay? I don't see the value in looking at it otherwise. Stop looking at me like that.

Best of 2011

10. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX)

It's Always Sunny doesn't have the human core that it would take to be my favorite comedy on television right now, but that's by design. It's about a bunch of loudmouth jerks who do terrible things to each other, and that's been the launching point for a lot of great comedy in the last seven years. Just going by the strength of the laughs, this was one of the better seasons in the show's run, which is quite a feat considering how generally consistent it is with its cast and its writing. It's not that new anymore, but what they're doing is still so good that I don't really care.

Favorite Episode: "Frank's Pretty Woman"

9. Sons of Anarchy (FX)

This could have possibly ended up higher on the list if the finale turned out differently, but it was still an exciting, tension-filled season of a show that does a great job of balancing baser thrillers like gun fights and car chases with some really strong human drama that drives everything. It turned out to be sort of a table setting season in the end, but the journey to reach its lukewarm conclusion was at times as brilliant as anything else I saw on TV last year.

Favorite Episode: "Hands"

8. Parks and Recreation (NBC)

The third season of Parks and Rec built wonderfully on the second, continuing to develop its ensemble cast into one of the most lovable bunches on television while adding two more talented people to its cast in Adam Scott and Rob Lowe. They also did a lot to gradually turn Pawnee, Indiana into one of the most fully developed and enjoyable fictional towns in TV history. It's just a show that's always growing, and never feels like it has to stop. It doesn't blow my mind as much as shows higher on this list, but it's wonderful all the same.

Favorite Episode: "Media Blitz"

7. Louie (FX)

I don't know if I'd like Louie more if the show made more of a concerted effort to be funny. Because as much as I love the fact that Louis C.K. can do pretty much anything he wants with the show, and am frequently moved or affected by some of his wilder experiments, I still often find myself thinking that the inserted moments of his regular stand-up comedy are the most enjoyable bits of the show. Still, it's hard to fault the show for what it is; an incredibly honest and inventive series that's more concerned with doing something different and interesting than making you laugh a few times. That's admirable, and the show is good enough to pull it off.

Favorite Episode: "Oh Louie/Tickets"

6. Game of Thrones (HBO)

You know I think was a strong year for drama on cable when a nearly perfect adaptation of one of my favorite books is my fifth favorite. George R. R. Martin's fantasy series is the definition of meaty, and television would be the only reasonable way to adapt it without totally gutting the story. That some things are simplified or lost in translation is besides the point - Game of Thrones is highly successful at bringing the series to a larger audience, and is a lot of fun to watch whether you're familiar with the books or not. The production values and quality of the cast are outstanding for television, and the dark, unforgiving world the story takes place in fits right in with the gritty cable feel. Again, not perfect, but plenty good enough.

Favorite Episode: "The Pointy End"

5. Boardwalk Empire (HBO)

For a lot of these dramas, the favorite episode is somewhat randomly chosen. Pretty much episode has something good to it, and what it comes to is which one had that one killer moment that jumps out more than the rest. Boardwalk had a very successful debut last year, and it was improved this time around, expanding on the scope of its examination of the way crime and politics intertwine in early 20th century America, and giving more time for all of its characters to grow into believable people that you care about. It's a bit too stately and concerned with symbolism to match the gripping personal intensity of HBO's very best crime dramas, but it's still damn good and always fun to watch.

Favorite Episode: "Ourselves Alone"

4. Homeland (Showtime)

Looking back, this might be the only brand new show that I watched in 2011. And if that's the case, it was a darn good pick. What starts out as a nice paranoid spy thriller quickly grows into something more, as the characters doing the watching start interacting with the watched, and it turns into a messy smashing together of personal and political turmoil. The show doesn't quite have the breadth of other dramas on this list, being so focused on a single story and a small group of characters. But what they do with that limited scope is very impressive, and worth celebrating.

Favorite Episode: "Marine One"

3. Justified (FX)

For some reason, the first season of Justified was more concerned with telling a bunch of cool little modern cowboy stories than creating a real story for its great main character, and that seemed to be the case for a little while in season two as well. But it wasn't long before it became clear what the greater plan was, as smaller squabbles gave way to an incredibly compelling story of deep rooted family rivalries in a dangerous community that never forgets past slights. Margo Martindale gave a supporting performance for the ages, and just like that, the show morphed from a solid, stylish police drama into something much greater that everyone should watch.

Favorite Episode: "Brother's Keeper"

2. Community (NBC)

Community doesn't have the consistency of tone and content that other shows might have, that probably help them establish larger and more casual audiences who know what to expect when they turn the TV on. Community's eccentricity might have contributed to its low ratings, and its removal from the spring schedule and possible eventual cancellation before it was even nearly done telling stories. But if removing the less safe elements of the show so it could stay on the air a few years longer meant that it wouldn't be as potentially exciting, unique, and simply hysterical as it routinely is, I wouldn't make that trade. The second season of the show took a lot of risks, but they almost all paid off and helped create one of the best single seasons of a sitcom I have ever seen.

Favorite Episode: "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas"

1. Breaking Bad (AMC)

Another year, another first place finish for Breaking Bad. I can't help it. There's just no show that combines a unique visual flair, stupendous acting, dark humor, and a shocking and unpredictable plot like Breaking Bad. I don't quite think it was better this year than it was last time, but I was impressed with how they managed to shift the focus away from Walt without compromising the show's unerring watchability or the long term goals that they're striving toward. And with the way the spotlight returned to him as the season ended, it reinforced my belief that he is the most interesting, and doomed, protagonist on TV today.

Favorite Episode: "Crawl Space"

Best Albums of 2011

2012-01-11T18:32:00.001-05:00

I still find myself to be more concerned with trying to appreciate the whole history of modern music than making sure I stay up to date, but I did a decent job of buying new albums. Most of it is from the year's first half, though.

Best of 2011

8. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

Fleet Foxes' second album isn't as original as their first, and for good reason - it's pretty much the same thing again. Still, that same thing is very enjoyable, and it's hard to fault the band for sticking with what they know and can do well. A folksy but still distinctly rock-influenced sound, and nice vocal harmonies playing off the singer's strong voice. I find it hard not to like it a lot.

Favorite Song: "Helplessness Blues"

7. James Blake

Most people probably think they have a pretty good idea of what dubstep is, but I doubt many of them think of something like this. James Blake likes to use the bass, but he does so sparingly, just like all of the other elements at his disposal. It's very sparse music, perhaps too sparse in some places, but the results are often worth it, slowly building up to and then releasing tension in profoundly effective ways. Plus the guy has a great voice, something you don't usually hear about electronic musicians.

Favorite Song: "I Never Learnt to Share"

6. Radiohead - The King of Limbs

It's unusual for there to be a new Radiohead album that isn't a huge game changer, but that doesn't mean a perfectly normal album by them won't still be really good. And The King of Limbs, despite being a bit lean on running length, is definitely good. Its eight tracks experiment with sounds and styles the band has played with before, but does enough with them to make it definitely worth plenty of listens on its own. They're a band that's expected to reinvent music every time out, but as long as they stay as good as this, I'll be fine with it.

Favorite Song: "Give Up the Ghost"

5. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this considering my vague memories of having heard St. Vincent before, but I guess it turned out to be her most straightforward record. It's pretty much her guitar, her voice, and some drums, with a few bells and whistles here and there. It's accessible but also unique, a nice match of elements that are familiar with ones that feel distinct. She has a really nice voice, and most of the main vocal hooks have a tendency to get inside your head and stay there for a while. It turned out to be a really good blind buy.

Favorite Song: "Chloe in the Afternoon"

4. TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light

Perhaps the band's least exceptional album, but the core of what they do is just so interesting me that I can't help but like it a lot every time I hear it. I'm not sure if they'll ever get back to a dirtier and more soulful sound, but simple high quality indie rock infused with the influence of African American culture is plenty fine on its own. Just a fun album all the way through.

Favorite Song: "Will Do"

3. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

Hurry Up is a double album, but a pretty slight one. On one hand that's a bit disappointing since it doesn't feel as grand as some other albums in the same format, but on the other it's pretty remarkable that something that lasts this one is so easy to get all the way through. The music freely mixes elements of electronic and rock, and produces a number of catchy, memorable songs. Maybe a bit too much time is spent on minor experiments and mood pieces, but the overall effect is a highly enjoyable listening experience.

Favorite Song: "Midnight City"

2. The Antlers - Burst Apart

Bust Apart is not as emotionally powerful as The Antlers' last record, but it was never going to be. They decided to shift gears a bit and do something with more of an electronic sound to it, without abandoning their roots, and I like it a lot, if maybe not as much as Hospice. There's nothing too showy over the top here, it's just a bunch of songs that flow well together and are filled with beautiful noises. It doesn't demand attention, but if you do listen, it's very good.

Favorite Song: "No Widows"

1. Panda Bear - Tomboy

This is a case where I'd probably have a hard time really identifying and explaining why I liked this album so much, or why I'm so comfortable calling it my favorite of the year anyway. I'm also noticing just how many of these artists are heavily using synthesized elements and becoming mildly concerned. But it's all probably pretty simple. I've mellowed out and don't really look for aggression in my music much these days, and a lot of artists who grew up when popular music was no longer exclusively relying on traditional instruments are finding new ways to use different sorts of sounds and create something unique and meaningful with them. Tomboy is not really unique, but it's finely crafted and infectiously entertaining throughout.

Favorite Song: "Afterburner"

Best Movies of 2011

2012-01-10T18:14:00.000-05:00

I was pretty awful about going to the theater this year before autumn rolled around, but I did okay after that and Netflix helped me catch up on a bunch of movies from earlier in the year. This is probably the first year that I've seen at least ten movies I'd consider very good before the year actually ended since... ever. I think it was a solid year, considering I enjoyed all of the Marvel movies and none made the cut.

Best of 2011

10. Source Code

Duncan Jones' second science fiction film is more accessible than his first, and that's not a bad thing when the core idea behind it is still totally solid. The advertising made me really skeptical, but the material ended up working a lot better than expected, and supported a moving human story without overshadowing it. This might be the first time I've seen Jake Gyllenhaal in a heroic leading man type-role, and he does a good job playing a guy who's not perfect but has a good heart and a good head on his shoulders. He carries a movie that's a bit brief but totally memorable.

9. Bridesmaids

Maybe one of the most successfully gender-neutral comedies ever made, Bridesmaids is laugh-out-loud funny without ever forgetting to tell an honest and occasionally really harsh story about a woman gliding through life who starts to see how many things are broken when her best friend gets engaged. The performances are great, and there are very few moments in the film that seem ill advised or that don't at least serve the story. Not the easiest comedy to watch, but a very worthwhile one.

8. Attack the Block

The second best movie about kids trying to survive aliens appearing in their neighborhood this year, Attack the Block combines elements of horror, sci-fi, and comedy expertly to create an experience that is more original and distinctly of a time and place than maybe anything on this list. Some bits are maybe a bit heavy-handed, but the thuggish teenagers are likable, the aliens are scary, and the film succeeds at pretty much everything it attempts.

7. The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is less about really understanding what's going and more about just soaking in an experience that Terrence Malick puts on the screen. I can't claim to understand everything that happens in this movie or how certain parts related to each other, but it's always beautiful to look at and I found myself at times profoundly affected by how well certain elements of life, particularly growing up, were captured, understanding things that I wasn't aware anyone besides me could remember. If you let it grab you, it's hard to get it to let go.

6. The Adventures of Tintin

An adventure film so relentlessly fun and exciting that I almost breathed a sigh of relief once the credits started rolling. There's not a lot of meat on these bones, but what is there is always driving forward with a sense of innocent wonder, asking "why not?" and latching onto possibilities that live action productions just wouldn't have the budget to try out. Steven Spielberg maybe isn't as deep as some of the other famous directors, but when he can still make movies as sharp and enjoyable as this one (along with the help of hundreds of animators, I'm sure), I still can't help but consider him one of the best alive at his job.

5. Hugo

A movie that made me believe in the possibilities of 3D again. Although it's mostly about kids, Hugo is one of Martin Scorsese's most personal movies, reveling in his love of cinema, both overtly and more discretely with the way it celebrates and pays homage to what has come before. The cast is solid, the story is intriguing with a sweet sentimental core at its center, and it's hard to overstate just how nice the movie is to look at, whether you paid for the 3D tickets or not. In case you forgot, Scorsese can do a lot more than gangster movies.

4. Super 8

This was my most anticipated movie of the last summer, and it delivered on pretty much every expectation. It combines the more charming elements of older family science fiction movies with the more visceral thrills of something closer to horror, and does so without either side really getting short shrift or feeling underdeveloped. There's not much here that hasn't been done before, but usually it just isn't done this well, and I had a hard time worrying about small problems when the whole thing was just sitting right with me otherwise. And it's hard to get over just how good the kids in it were.

3. Warrior

The biggest surprise of the year was just how much I ended up loving this movie, despite it resting on material that sounds like a mix of movies made for Lifetime and TNT. The simple fact though is that Gavin O'Connor knows what he's doing behind the camera, and he had three actors working for him who fit their characters perfectly, and were simply great in their roles. It's not the most realistic sports story, and it doesn't have the benefit of being based on anything true. But the human element that drives it makes it work, and it's so spot-on emotionally that the end result is much more powerful than I was expecting.

2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Another case of the people behind a film elevating relatively mundane (if notably popular and gritty) material, although in this case it was pretty much entirely expected. David Fincher is able to apply a specific feel and general standard of quality to his work without ever getting too flashy or obvious with it, and that continues with Dragon Tattoo, the first film in a planned trilogy that he actually hasn't signed on to finish yet. I can only hope he does, but I can't imagine having to get through parts two and three done by someone else, wondering what he could have done with it. The two leads give totally magnetic performances, and it's just so well shot and scored that numerous flaws inherent in the story just don't add up to much in the end.

1. Drive

I'm giving you a night call to tell you how I feel
I want to drive you through the night, down the hills
I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear
I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear

There's something inside you
It's hard to explain
They're talking about you boy
But you're still the same

Best Games of 2011

2012-01-09T18:21:00.001-05:00

Being employed for all of 2011 might not have been great for my free time, but it did allow me the freedom to try out pretty much any new game I was interested in, which worked out pretty well. I don't think I've ever managed to play this much new stuff around when it came out before. I haven't finished playing a couple of these games yet, which would normally mean they wouldn't make the list, but I feel I've played both of them enough to say about where they stand compared to the other stuff.

Best of 2011

10. L.A. Noire (Multi)

I don't look back on this as fondly as other games on the list, but a lot of that is probably reaction to all the horrible stuff we heard about the game's development and a bit of revisionist history. At its core, Noire is a very fun game that managed to mix adventure game-style mysteries with open world action effectively. The post-war Los Angeles setting was realized beautifully, the facial animation is pretty staggering, and the tale it weaves has all the elements of classic film noir. There are plenty of small issues, but the experience matches the ambition well.

9. Battlefield 3 (PC)

It's really too bad that beyond the graphics, sound design, and a few standout moments, the campaign of Battlefield 3 is otherwise so bland and fails to take advantage of what makes the franchise unique, because they could have helped make the game one of the best shooters in a long time. Instead, it's merely memorable as something that failed in its ambition to beat Call of Duty at its own game. The multiplayer saves it, though, combining all the best elements that they've found over the years into something addictive, rewarding, and very fun to play, whether you can maintain a decent kill ratio or not. And man, it really does look and sound fantastic.

8. Batman: Arkham City (Multi)

For an open-world game, Arkham City isn't that big, with a map that only takes a few minutes to get across even if you have to glide all the way around its weird shape, and not much to do beyond the main story besides collecting a whole ton of Riddler trophies. But the core gameplay they brought back from the last game is still so good, that actually playing it beats most open-world games on the market. The combat and stealth get a better chance to shine when there's more groups of goons to stumble across, and the more focused stuff once you get indoors is still a lot of fun. It would be hard to capture the thrill of being a super hero better than this.

7. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (PC)

The first game in the series had a lot of cool ideas, but it was ultimately a bit hamstrung by its nature as a sort of strange European RPG by a first-time developer. They used that experience very well though in crafting the sequel, a much better game that smooths over some of the rough edges well enough to let the good stuff underneath really shine. The game looks fantastic, with graphics that compliment the visual design and impress without being flashy, and the gameplay is a solid mix of discovering and learning about the game's world with a combat system that is tough but fun and rewarding. A really nice success story.

6. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

Another surprisingly good sequel, Human Revolution learns from the mistakes of the last game that tried to follow up on the original classic and stays true to what was actually interesting about it while updating things that needed updating for the modern day. The game is not without significant flaws, notably in the design of the boss fights, but the core experience is so solid that it's hard not to get sucked into it. The game is really meaty, with plenty of interesting content and very little in the way of filler, giving you twenty solid hours of science fiction roleplaying and action and allowing for a variety of approaches to almost every situation. It's hard to really connect with the story, but the act of playing it is always compelling.

5. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)

I feel like the Zelda series has gotten a raw deal from many gamers in the last few years, perhaps starting with some backlash there was towards Twilight Princess when it came out earlier in the Wii's existence. Some complaints about the way they've decreased freedom and increased the tedium are valid, but I think sometimes these people are looking for something that they're just not going to get from the series anymore, which has always been meant to be friendly to kids. Taking into account changing standards and some of those now-systemic flaws though, I think Skyward Sword is perhaps the best game in the series since Majora's Mask. After a slow opening, the game opens up, and there's a lot of fun to be found in its world. Trying to tell an origin story again makes for a pretty interesting narrative, the use of motion controls is better justified, and the dungeons are as fun as ever. It's not the game-changing Zelda people probably wanted, but what it is is a very fun and comfortable adventure.

4. Bastion (PC)

A lot of times I get really into smaller games like this despite the gameplay, because their stories and presentations are unique and enchanting. That's true here, but the actual game part is really good as well. Bastion is a short but satisfying action RPG that hooks you both with its myriad of fun weapons and powers and all the ways it has to enhance the whole experience, from the unique setting and art style to the wonderful soundtrack and the unforgettable narration. And it might just have the most affecting story of any game on this list.

3. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (PS3)

I find it odd that Uncharted seems to be held to a totally different narrative standard than other action games. Most of the time it's fine for a shooter or platformer to jump all over the world for very little reason, but since the characterization and voice acting in Uncharted is so good, people expect consistency in the plot too, and complain if a part of the game is only there because it's cool and certain threads get lost in the shuffle by the end. I understand hoping for a little more, it just seems unfair to me. Anyway, Uncharted 3 isn't the revelation that Uncharted 2 was because of course it isn't, but it still manages a fun mix of shooting, jumping, and puzzle solving, it's still funny and exciting, and its big moments are still staggering in their technical complexity and ability to impress. If it's Naughty Dog's last Uncharted game, it's a great note to go out on.

2. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)

I played Oblivion for well over one hundred hours and called it my favorite game of 2006, so you know when I say that Skyrim is better in almost every way, I must really think something of it. It again captures the joy of exploring and getting to know an immensely large world, but improves on pretty much everything about that experience. Skyrim is a land with an intriguing history and sense of culture, and it's absolutely filled to the brim with cool stuff to do. There are six major questlines all with their own little twists and wrinkles, and their stories are generally much more interesting than what you'd find in the earlier games. There's more side stuff to do, and the basic experience of finding a dungeon and then raiding it for all of its treasures is more fun and less repetitive. If there's one thing the game doesn't do as well, it's come up with individual quests that feel as special at certain memorable moments. But the overall feeling of playing the game for many, many hours is undeniably superior.

1. Portal 2 (Multi)

I said Portal 2 was my favorite game of this generation of hardware, and I stand by it. It's just the right length, with its story mode being a significant chunk of content lasting just the right length, and the co-op being a meaningful addition. The puzzles are just as mind-bending as before, relying less on reflexes and more on your ability to think through a problem, and having plenty of new tricks and elements to keep things fresh the whole time. The story is funny and intelligent, expertly told in ways both direct and indirect, with well-written dialogue being superbly delivered by the small voice cast and the environment being carefully crafted to tell you everything about Aperture you'd ever want to know without saying a word. It's just the best example of both good game design and good execution of that design on this list, and it's my favorite game of the year.

The Walking Dead, Volume 15: We Find Ourselves

2012-01-08T14:47:00.001-05:00

Either the book has started to just throw new characters into the story without properly introducing them first (valid given the current situation in the plot), or I'm forgetting some of them in the time it takes for a new volume to come out. My guess is that it's the latter, and that's probably just the reality of reading a comic while it's still coming out, but only in the trade paperback collections. I think part of it though is that things are a bit muddled at this point. There are a whole lot of living characters right now, possibly more than there's ever really been at any point, at least only counting ones that have been given names and things to do. And none of them are really doing that much. There's a bit of a struggle in this volume between some people, but it's over quickly and doesn't have any real consequences. There's very little threat from zombies, either... they're out there, but there's nothing major. It's just sort of a transitional part of the story, taking place shortly after some major events and presumably setting up others. But it's a little underwhelming when it's the only stuff I've read in a few months and I won't read any more for another few. So, yeah. It's fine, there's nothing wrong about it, but at this point it's inessential.

Movie Update 35

2012-01-04T18:18:00.000-05:00

Here are a few movies I saw before the end of the year. I won't keep you in suspense: I liked them all.

Dreams

One of Akira Kurosawa's last films, Dreams is more like a collection of shorts, all based on various dreams he had and presented in very different ways. You can detect some progression as it goes on, as the early segments feature children as the central characters, while later ones are generally darker, and the last few all star the same person. But mostly it's just disjointed ideas brought to life in usually interesting ways. I liked the movie more than I thought it would, from its bizarre fantasy imagery to its more unsettling moments. I've never felt more cold watching a movie than I did watching the blizzard segment. It also features Martin Scorsese in a cameo as Vincent van Gogh, which is weird.

The Limey

I kind of like the idea of Steven Soderbergh, but I haven't actually really, really enjoyed a movie he's made until now. The Limey is an extremely sharp and tight revenge thriller starring Terence Stamp as an older British career criminal who takes a trip to America after getting out of jail to get even with the man responsible for his daughter's death. There's really no nonsense about the movie, it's pretty short and has very few characters who aren't directly related to the single central story thread. It's not the most exciting movie ever, but it's occasionally quite tense and sometimes even pretty funny. It also has a lot of nice little touches, like Soderbergh inserting snippets of a much younger Stamp from another movie to establish his backstory. The whole thing is very minimal and hazy, with its frequently jumping around in time in moments of reflection. Not quite great, but a very good take on some pretty basic material.

Miracle on 34th Street

I've seen pieces of this movie before, but the part that I didn't know, and what I think is totally brilliant about it, is that it never answers the question of whether the "Santa Claus" in this movie is actually Santa Claus. It doesn't answer the question because the answer doesn't matter, what matters is the message he's trying to give to the people around him. Well, I thought it was clever, anyway. Otherwise, it's a charming old Hollywood movie with charming old Hollywood acting, and it's sort of interesting seeing Natalie Wood this young even if her character is pretty annoying. A really nice family holiday movie, that nicely skirts a lot of issues with that subgenre.

Running on Empty

Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty is an odd little movie, combining elements of crime and soap opera. The story begins years before the film itself starts, when a couple decides to bomb a laboratory owned by a company that made napalm, and accidentally severely injures a janitor that wasn't supposed to be there and goes on the run. Years later, they're still on the run, changing identities and moving every time they suspect the law might be on their trail, with two kids in tow. They're pretty used to it, but the older son, played by River Phoenix, is getting a bit old to be staying with them, almost ready to graduate high school. Things really change when he both meets a music teacher who's impressed by his piano skills and wants him to go to college for it, and falls in love with the teacher's daughter. Family drama ensues. It's the kind of thing that probably shouldn't have worked, but Lumet is a director who seems to be able to do a lot with some slim material. It's far from his best movie, but it's a pretty good one with some strong emotional moments.

Television Update 8: Fall Finales '11

2012-01-03T18:14:00.000-05:00

This is a bit later than I usually do this, but... what, do you want your money back?

American Dad! - I haven't been into this season as much as I have been in previous years, though I did watch the three-part hurricane crossover with the other two Seth MacFarlane shows, and it confirmed that Dad is still easily the best of the bunch. Maybe it's relying a bit too much on violence and shock value these days, though.

Chuck - NBC has had no qualms about burning off this show's remaining episodes and putting it out of its misery, airing two episodes during the holiday period when there is basically never anything actually on television. The show's the same as it's been the last couple years - charming, silly, and occasionally infuriating. They do seem to be heading towards a respectable conclusion though, possible.

Community - Unfortunately, the show won't be back in the Spring, and we don't know when we'll see it again. The only hope right now that it avoids cancellation rests in NBC's complete inability to put together a compelling lineup. Season three wasn't as strong out of the gate as the show was last year, but there were at least two truly outstanding episodes to remind me why I love it. And even the weaker stuff is still totally fine.

Fringe - I kind of don't like how this season has hit a big reset button and erased a bunch of character development just for the sake of yet another slightly tweaked alternate universe. I do think things picked up though when Peter came back, and I hope once they really get things going it will be as crazy as ever. For now though, still pretty much early-season Fringe.

How I Met Your Mother - This show hasn't been amazing or terribly original for a while, but it's still a consistently entertaining, comfortable watch every week. I've given up on hoping for consistent development in the overall plot, though time is running out on doing what it needs to do without stretching into unbelievability. If you just accept it as a sitcom, it's hard not to like it, and the cast is still great.

Modern Family - I feel like the Modern Family backlash is starting to kick into full gear, especially after another big batch of awards. Personally, I still think the show is usually pretty funny, the problems being the same as they've always been - it's secretly a heinously unoriginal show. If anything's gotten worse, it's just that the stereotypes all the characters fit into are getting harder to hide. But it still makes me laugh so I'll keep watching.

The Office - I've gotten a few chuckles out of this season, but the show really lacks a direction without Steve Carrell. James Spader is good, but he's a bit too toned down from his appearance last season to really be exciting, and while I was right in guessing that Andy would slip easily to Michael's shoes, the transition was just a bit too easy, and it seems like we're just doing all the same things over again. The show's definitely close to losing me after this year.

Parks and Recreation - Probably my favorite show on this list right now. I love the continued expansion and development of Pawnee as a fictional place, I love the cast about as much as any ensemble a sitcom has had, and I love the way the story is balancing comedy, romance, and small-town politics. It's very rare for me to watch a new episode without smiling the entire time.

The Walking Dead - The brief first season was very inconsistent, and the second is much the same so far. I like when the show just exists as a depiction of life in a very different world, where death is always a constant threat and people struggle to deal with it. I hate when the drama gets too forced or stupid and the writers struggle to justify what any of the characters are doing. I had a poor gut reaction to the twist in the midseason finale, but if it leads to a series with much clearer stakes and less pointless squabbling, it might have been worth it. I just worry that the budget cuts were too harsh for the show to ever gain real momentum, though. Spending this much time in one place is hard to justify when there's so little happening.

Game Update 19: Some PSN Games

2012-01-02T11:41:00.000-05:00

These are all games I got on PSN in 2011 and never got around to talking about. They're all worth playing, although I didn't actually have to pay for half of them.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition

I got two Street Fighter games on PSN because Street Fighter Alpha 3 was the only one I owned, and I figured I ought to have a couple more, if only for history's sake. Street Fighter III is kind of an oddball, with only a few familiar characters and a whole bunch of strange new ones on the roster. Like there's a weird experimental creature than can change shape and a little goblin guy with one arm. I actually liked it more than the other one I got though, because the animation is kind of amazing to watch, it has a fun and deep fighting system, and the challenges that you're always making progress toward add something to the experience. I didn't manage to actually find any opponents online, though.

Super Stardust HD

One of many, many downloadable shooters this generation that you control by moving your ship with the left stick and aiming your fire with the right. I never played the original games Stardust HD is based on, but it doesn't take long to figure it out - you fly around the surface of various planets and protect them from asteroids and other threats with a variety of weapons. The game looks and sounds very nice and is pretty smooth to play. I wouldn't have gotten it if it wasn't among the choices for free games after Sony finally got PSN back up last year, but it's a fun little game.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix

As far as I can tell this is a graphical overhaul of what was considered the definitive version of Street Fighter II, with a couple other bells and whistles added on. The new backgrounds and characters look nice, but because the game has to stick to the same animation cycles in order to keep the gameplay the same, there's a weird disconnect between the smoothness of the images and the stutter with which they move. I ended up switching to the traditional sprites, though of course then you have the disconnect between the fighters and the backgrounds, which you can't change. Still, the core gameplay is full intact, and though it's not as smooth or modern as Street Fighter III, it's still pretty fun. Couldn't find any online opponents in this one either, though.

WipEout HD

The other free game I got when PSN came back was this, complete with the Fury add-on. All of the various futuristic racing games sort of blend together in my head, but WipEout seems like a popular one, and this HD version of it is enjoyable if not particularly original. The standard races are fun, but the game seems more fresh in its other modes, particularly the ones that Fury added. I'm not a huge racing game guy, but WipEout HD looks really nice and doesn't have any major issues.

Movie Update 34: Alfred Hitchcock

2012-01-01T18:39:00.001-05:00

A bit of the master's earlier British work, a movie from his golden age, and the last one he ever did.

The 39 Steps

I think this is considered one of Hitchcock's better early films, but I thought it was merely pretty good. A man gets involved in a spy conspiracy after a woman asks him for help, and he has to uncover the secret of what the 39 steps are before he gets captured or worse by the people behind it. The main character runs around a lot but the way the mystery gets solved is kind of silly and there really isn't much to the movie besides him running away. North by Northwest is pretty similar, but I think it was done much better.

Dial M for Murder

I think Hitchock was definitely at his best in the 50s, and Dial M is another feather in his cap. It actually came out the same year as Rear Window, but while it's not as good as that movie, it's still a solid thriller, and one that similarly takes place almost entirely in a single location. A man tries to put the finishing touches on a very elaborate scheme to murder his cheating wife, but of course the plan goes wrong and he desperately tries to cover his tracks while the police sniff around his apartment. It's a very cerebral film, and it's very easy at a number of points to go "wait, what?" as the little tricks and traps the characters place for each other start going off constantly. It comes together very well by the end, though.

Family Plot

Sort of an odd note for Hitchcock to go out on, Family Plot is half mystery and half sort of weird comedic thing. Certain bits that you wouldn't expect to be played for laughs are, but other moments are pretty dark. It stars a psychic and a cab driver/investigator who get a lucrative job to find an old woman's long lost relative, who turns out to be a murderous jewel thief. Espionage and hijinks ensue. Family Plot is not a bad movie at all, but it's definitely an unusual way for one of the best filmmakers ever to end his career.

Sabotage

A woman begins to suspect that her husband is a terrorist, but not before a lot of bad stuff happens to her. There are a couple nicely tense moments, but ultimately the only thing I'll probably remember about it is that it's the origin of the old clip from Inglourious Basterds in the scene where the narrator explains the combustible properties of nitrate film. It's quite short, and simply put, not much at all happens.

The Adventures of Tintin

2011-12-31T10:01:00.001-05:00

My only previous experience with Tintin was seeing a few episodes of the cartoon when I was a kid. They made enough of an impression though that I was interested in seeing the movie as soon as I heard about it, especially based on the amount of talent involved in its creation. Directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson, written by three talented British writers, and starring a pretty solid cast. It's actually a pretty darn small cast - if you don't count the bad guy's many henchmen, the film has only a handful of characters with real roles, and there are all of maybe two women who have any lines at all. But it's not really a film focused on dialogue, or subplots, or anything that doesn't relate directly to the central quest. If there's ever a movie that earned the term "breakneck pace", it's this one. It stomps on the gas pedal in the opening minutes, and never lets up until it's all over. Even the exposition scenes are packed with action and visual trickery. That and the fact that the script crams together elements of three different Tintin stories lends the movie a sort of rushed feeling, like there was just too much adventure to get through and not enough time. But while it can be tiring by the end, the movie is so packed with charm and fun that I couldn't help but enjoy it the entire time.

Jamie Bell stars as Tintin, a young European journalist (Bell is British, though in the original books he's Belgian) who frequently gets involved in larger-than-life adventures when following a story. He finds a scale model recreation of a famous lost ship, and when he refuses to sell it to a man played by Daniel Craig named Sakharine, he gets kidnapped and brought on board a boat. There he meets its captain, Haddock, played by a drunken and bumbling Andy Serkis, and the two (along with Tintin's dog Snowy) escape, attempting to find the treasure that Sakharine is really after. The treasure ties into Haddock's family history, and he and Tintin become unlikely friends on their quest to solve the mystery of his past. Serkis gives quite a fun performance, even if he resorts to rhyming exclamations a bit too often. Bell fits well as Tintin, it's fun to see Craig play a villain, and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are once again a likable pair as Thompson and Thomson.

Of course I haven't really mentioned the fact that the film is animated, or any of the controversy around that. I've seen numerous people complain about the realistic look the movie goes for, rather than exactly mimicking the original art style. There have also been repeated references to the uncanny valley, though I've come to accept that people will now complain about it every time something animated even attempts to resemble reality. Maybe some people really are instinctively put off by any computer animation that isn't completely cartoony, but I was able to watch this entire film without noticing anything that really bothered me. The movie walks a very fine line by obviously being animated but still having extremely detailed nuances in the texture and animation of its characters, but I thought they pulled it off for the most part. I also think they really took advantage of the animated medium, especially in the crafting of the action scenes. There's a heck of a lot of them, and almost every one manages to do things that real life action wouldn't. The highlight of the whole film is a chase scene in a single take, through a Moroccan city and with numerous different characters involved at various points in both the chasing and being chased. Obviously being animated makes such a scene feasible, but even with that caveat, it's still a complete marvel of planning, design, and coordination to pull it off. That it isn't quite the film's climax is a symptom of the fact that the creators might not have known when enough is enough, but it's still a great scene. The last moments of the film are pretty explicitly setting up a sequel, and I hope the movie is successful enough for one to get made, because they did a great job of establishing a really fun and endearing setting, and I'd like to see Peter Jackson take his turn at the wheel.

Batman: Arkham City

2011-12-30T13:50:00.000-05:00

Some people didn't seem to be into this game as much as they were into Batman: Arkham Asylum a couple years ago, but I think the only real difference is that this game wasn't a surprise. People were blown away to play a super hero game that actually captured the essence of being that hero and was a fun experience to boot, and despite doing it even better this time around, a lot of Arkham City is more of the same. The biggest change is obviously in the environment. Rather than exploring the grounds of a large prison complex, you're gliding and grappling your way through a larger city area. Most of the time you end up entering various buildings that end up feeling much like the different locations in Asylum, but there's enough to do outside that the game does end up feeling different.

The main gameplay remains essentially intact, though. You will alternate between investigating crime scenes, using your gadgets to traverse obstacles, and taking on groups of thugs. Those thugs will either be armed, which means you have to use the environment to sneak up on them or take them by surprise, or not, which means you can beat the crap out of them with the game's smooth and always-interesting melee combat system. You basically start the game with all of the gear you had last time and then add even more on top of that, so while it's easy to get overwhelmed and even totally ignore certain equipment, it all ends up being pretty useful if you try it out, and it really sells the idea that you are Batman, along with your ability to instill fear in and then cripple your opponents.

While Arkham Asylum featured a wide variety of familiar faces if you're at all a fan of Batman, Arkham City almost goes too far with bringing out all the villains and allies you can think of. Basically everyone is back fro the first game with a small exception or two, and there are plenty of new ones added in. It threatens to become too much and muddle the story, but luckily enough of the characters are limited to cameos or side content that the game never loses sight of its main plot. It's actually kind of a surprisingly short game considering the scope of its world and the number of characters, especially if you don't spend a lot of time fiddling with the endless supply of Riddler challenges. The critical path probably takes less than ten hours, though it's a lot of fun while it lasts, digging deeper into Batman's character, the history of Gotham, and how exactly the people in charge agreed to section off a part of town and hand it over to Hugo Strange in the first place. It's all kind of silly, but it fits in with the game's unique combination of the sillier and grittier sides of the Batman franchise.

Though the boss fights once again often revolve around either large groups of enemies, an unreasonably huge villain, or both, this time they bothered to make each one unique and actually have their own methods to take them out, which is a big improvement. By removing the one significant flaw the original game had, you could say it's a superior product, though I didn't really feel like it was better, just tweaked and a bit more refined. They did add a new annoyance too, with having to download the Catwoman content, and if you don't have a new copy, you'll have to pay for it. You can finish the game without playing as Catwoman, but it will create gaps in the story, and you won't be able to collect certain Riddler trophies or see a couple of the villains. Actually playing as Catwoman is fine, as she has some unique abilities that make up for the other things she can't do, though I can't say I was ever particularly thrilled when one of her missions came up. The game definitely goes a bit too far with making her a sex object, too. You can make a character alluring without having every line out of her mouth be a double entendre.

The world of Arkham City itself is a somewhat interesting one, and it changes over time as things get worse off for the people inside. I can't say I liked the design of the city itself, which due to its central area being locked off except for an underground path through, takes on a horseshoe shape which is a bit annoying to navigate when you just want to get somewhere quickly. I also thought it could have been easier to locate side missions - I only finished about half of them, with no indication anywhere on how to advance the others besides just scouring the whole place. Just flying around as Batman though is fun, and it's a very well polished game for the open world genre. It's maybe a bit limited compared to other games of the same type, but it's a fair enough trade off. It seems mostly like they just wanted to make another Batman game but thought they needed something to point to so they could advertise how much bigger and better it is, and luckily the increased scope doesn't damage the main game, besides maybe cutting it a bit short. The important thing is you get to be Batman again, and that's still a lot of fun.

Movie Update 33: Woody Allen

2011-12-29T14:22:00.001-05:00

These movies are all from the mid seventies to early eighties, and show off Woody Allen's more serious and philosophical side. They're also funny though, with one big exception.

Interiors

The only pure drama on this list, and the only pure drama by Allen that I've seen. It's the story of three (though really mostly two) sisters and what they experience after the separation of their parents. They frequently butt heads and have very different takes on their parents, especially how their delicate mother is handing being away from her husband. She dives even deeper into her interior decorating, but it might not be enough to keep her going anymore. The film is very obviously heavily influenced by the style of Ingmar Bergman, and it's mostly a well acted and filmed drama, but I mostly wasn't interested in the characters or their plights. It also seemed just a bit forced in the shots it creates - Bergman was able to create similarly striking images without them seeming so intentional. Still, it's not a bad departure for a guy previously mostly known for silly comedies.

Love and Death

Possibly the last purely goofy Allen movie, Love and Death still has hints of what he would try out later, both in its repeated Bergman references and the constant philosophical debate among its main characters, even if that debate is mostly played for laughs. It's about a Russian played by Allen who stumbles his way to being a war hero, marries his cousin played by Diane Keaton, and eventually they attempt to assassinate Napoleon together. It's a fun little spin on classic Russian literature that manages to be funny throughout without completely ignoring the subject matter it tackles.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

Yet another Bergman-influenced film (boy, did Allen ever love that guy), and his first collaboration with Mia Farrow. It's about three couples that go on a weekend together to a cottage in the woods in the early 1900s, and end up struggling the whole time with conflicted feelings. Farrow is marrying an older professor, but she had a previous experience with Allen and is very attractive to his other friend. The professor is drawn to the friend's new companion, and Allen also has feelings for Farrow further risking his rocky marriage with Mary Steenburgen. There are some sillier elements like his flying machine and a strange device that can show the past, but it's mostly a very entertaining mix of comedy and romantic turmoil.

Stardust Memories

Allen claims this film is not autobiographical, those it's easy to see how it could be seen as such, with him starring as a film director who wants to be serious but is constantly told by fans that they prefer his earlier, funnier work. It's again a mix of humor and more serious elements, this time with an occasionally trippy feel. We frequently see snippets of the films his character has made, and they mix with real life and odd dream sequences which make it easy to get a bit lost as far as what the movie is trying to say. It's a pretty divisive film, and I myself was unable to decide whether I really liked it or thought it was too muddled.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-28T18:26:00.000-05:00

If you started looking closely at the structure of the story of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you could probably find a number of flaws and weird issues with it. It takes a long time for its two leads to meet and the plot to really get going, and there's a very long final section after the film climaxes before it actually sputters to an end, which might work in a book, but seems unnatural in a movie. But there are times when the effect that a film has goes beyond how well its story adheres to standard conventions of the medium and the odd little things stop bothering you. The script for this second film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's book is definitely flawed, and it's hard to say how much of that is the fault of the book itself. But everything else about the movie helps elevate the material and create a movie that's not quite my favorite this year but darn close. Everything from David Fincher's impeccable direction to the work by people like the cinematographer and editor to the outstanding performances from basically everyone in the cast to the once again pitch-perfect music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

There are some bells and whistles, but at its core Dragon Tattoo is a mystery story. I started trying to write a quick synopsis here, but it quickly got too long, so I'll try to make it more succinct. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who agrees to look into the apparent murder of a girl forty years earlier, a member of a family that runs a large business in the country. Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander, another journalist and an unfriendly, possibly psychotic girl who's been a ward of the state since childhood. Eventually they both end up working on the case together, though not before there's a lengthy sequence ending in a very satisfying revenge as a long way of establishing who Lisbeth is and what she's willing to do. The film is somewhat disjointed up to this point, but once the pair get really cracking on the mystery it picks up, with a suitably creepy series of twists and revelations leading to a tense and thrilling conclusion. That the film goes on for a while after that conclusion is mostly irrelevant.

As I mentioned, the cast is quite strong, with film veterans such as Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright, and Stellan Skarsgård turning in solid supporting performances to help drive things forward. Craig is good in pretty much everything, and he is nicely out of his element as the middle-aged Blomkvist, who occasionally gets in too deep for his own good. The star of the show really is Mara though, having the tough job of portraying both an eminently skilled researcher and hacker and a highly vulnerable and damaged woman, and making them be the same person. There's a lot of tough material, and she nails all of it. It just wouldn't be the same movie without her succeeding as totally as she does. I questioned Fincher's decision to tackle material another filmmaker had already brought to the screen in apparently fine fashion, but while I still haven't seen Niels Arden Oplev's version I can't imagine it being this memorable. It's a Fincher movie through and through.

Monster

2011-12-27T12:43:00.000-05:00

Monster is sort of interesting in how it sometimes combines both the best and worst aspects of what you can find in anime. It has a tone that isn't exactly typical to the medium, telling a tense and moody story about a larger-than-life serial killer, manipulating others to do his bidding and working towards some unknown, probably terrifying goal. It plays to the strengths of being an anime by being unafraid to go anywhere or do anything with its story, and by allowing certain moments to have huge impacts that can be difficult to pull off in text or live action. One common fault of anime though is that it takes a long time to get anything done, and the show does seem to suffer a bit from having filler. It frequently deviates from its main plot to tell another little isolated story, ignoring the main characters for a few episodes. These side stories usually end up tying back in to the main show, but it's a bit odd to see it seemingly meander so much. Monster is interesting, but it should have taken 74 episodes to reach its ending.

The show stars a Japanese doctor called Kenzo Tenma, living in West Germany before the fall of the wall. He's an extremely talented neurosurgeon, but his career takes a bad turn when he saves the life of a small boy over the town's mayor. But then some murders start happening that benefit him, and he becomes a target, both of a former patient and the authorities who believe he's responsible. He goes on the run, both to prove his innocence and stop the killer from making any more victims. It soon becomes clear though how futile that is, as the only thing that surpasses the monster's derangement is his ability to realize it. Kenzo meets a lot of people on the way, helping who he can and avoiding those who want only to stop him. I think I might have preferred something that was a little tighter, with fewer extraneous pit-stops and dramatic revelations, but the show itself usually worked and pretty creepy throughout and occasionally devastating. It's too flawed for me to consider it great, but it's worth watching if you'd like to avoid most of the medium's worst parts. Besides the whole taking-too-long thing.

Mission: Impossible III

2011-12-26T11:06:00.000-05:00

Obviously the fourth Mission: Impossible movie just came out, but I still haven't seen the third yet, so I decided to correct that last week. Each movie in the series has had a different director and subsequently a different tone, and the third installment was the first feature film made by J.J. Abrams. It sort of mixes and matches elements from the first two movies. The first was a paranoid spy thriller, and the second was pretty much a Hong Kong action movie. The third film has some of the same kind of bombastic action and huge scale of the second, but it's ultimately closer to the first film in terms of realism (which itself wasn't exactly totally authentic, just look at the climactic scene for proof). Some elements definitely seemed silly - there were several one-liners and over-the-top moments that probably didn't need there, and got in the way of the story a bit. But the setup was smarter and the payoff better than the mediocre second film, and the darker tone seemed to fit the series well. I don't think it was quite as good as the original, but it was close enough.

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt, though he is no longer a regular spy and instead trains recruits for the agency. He's even trying to settle down with a woman played by Michelle Monaghan, something his friends and colleagues are skeptical of. He gets pulled back into action when one of his trainees played by Keri Russell is kidnapped on a mission, a job that kicks off a plot involving someone bad inside the agency trying to stop him while a black market dealer played by Philip Seymour Hoffman tries to sell something that's potentially extremely dangerous. Backs get stabbed, explosions go off, and complicated heists get executed. The movie is completely packed with recognizable actors, and most of them do pretty well in their roles. It's fun to see Ving Rhames and Tom Cruise together again, and their team is rounded out competently by Johnathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q. Laurence Fishburne plays a fairly predictable but solidly slimy higher-up at the agency, and Simon Pegg only gets a couple scenes to do his wisecracking nerd routine but does it well anyway. Hoffman plays a totally creepy and intimidating villain despite his lack of physical prowess, and the mole subplot ended up being more interesting than I expected. Abrams makes a few unexpected decisions and shoots the action very well, and I thought the distinct color palette of the film worked as well. It's not a particularly special action movie in most ways, but it's done well enough to be pretty enjoyable throughout. It got me interested in hopefully seeing Brad Bird's take on the series before it leaves the theaters.

Hung - Season 3

2011-12-25T11:06:00.000-05:00

When I heard that Bored to Death and Hung got canceled at the same time, I felt slight disappointment at the former and a bit of remorse at the latter. Hung's second season didn't do much for me, but the show has some likable elements and I thought I ought to at least see how they ended things. I blasted through the third season in one sitting using HBO's on demand service, and I found it to be mostly enjoyable. It doesn't give itself a proper conclusion and there are a few annoying elements, but it was possibly the best year the show had. There was a definite arc, the story had definite stakes, and there was some really strong character work. Plus Tanya seemed less awful this time. Not a bad note to go out on.

After having a falling out with Lenore last year (right?), Ray and Tanya need a way to get their business going again. They manage to finagle a loan and start up a wellness center for women as a front for their prostitution business; Tanya runs classes and talks to the women, then setting them up for Ray's "private consultations". He then proceeds to have sex with lots of women for money. What a good show to be talking about on Christmas. Anyway, Lenore is still angry and has a number of attempts to get her cut of the profits, including finding a second guy to make money with and trying to stick Ray's ex-wife in the middle of things. There's a nice back and forth, and it actually felt like people had a purpose this season and had things to fight for. Also we get a lot more of Lennie James' pimp character, and any scene he's in is a good one. Anne Heche doesn't have much to do besides be put upon, and her kids are even less of a factor than before. But they don't really get in the way, and the show is pretty strong based on its decent humor, the competent plotting, and Thomas Jane's once again totally affable performance. There's no proper ending this time, but they did a good job with fixing the show in the time they had.

Warrior

2011-12-24T10:30:00.000-05:00

I wasn't quite sure what to think about Warrior, which got good reviews but just sort of sounded like a rehash of The Fighter with a less respected sport. It was quite good though, and is honestly probably my favorite sports movie since Raging Bull. Like all great sports movies, Warrior is not about sports. It is about the trauma that can break a family apart, and the hope that someday it can be put back together again. It is a film that wears its emotions on its sleeve, and while a lot of the elements are familiar or obvious, they're executed so damn well that it's hard to care. It's a movie that is thrilling, cathartic, devastating, and uplifting in the best ways.

Nick Nolte is a broken old man, a former alcoholic who saw his wife leave him with their two sons many years ago. The family was splintered yet again when Joel Edgerton's character, the older son, left his mother and brother for a woman. Tom Hardy is the younger brother, tormented by abandonment issues, the death of his mother, and whatever happened to him while he was a soldier in the Middle East. One thing the two brothers share is a skill for mixed martial arts, though they have both been out of the game for a while. Hardy has been off being a solider, and Edgerton agreed to give it up and become a teacher to support his family. But circumstances bring them both back into the sport, specifically to enter a winner-takes-all tournament with a huge purse. Obviously it is their movie fate to both get into the tournament as underdogs and eventually fight each other in the final match. The only mystery is what will happen once they get there, and if it will have a payoff for all of the emotional turmoil they go through to reach that point.

I think it's a sign of a good sports movie when it can make you enjoy that sport, even if you're predisposed not to. I've never been very interested in UFC or MMA in general, because I don't really see the appeal of watching men hurt each other that badly. But I'll admit to being caught up in the bouts in this movie, which show a lot of different sides of it, from the brutality of the hits to the technique of pulling off a crippling submission to the perseverance it takes not to give in. The fights are very well shot, and also do a great job of giving insight into the two brothers who fight in very different ways. Despite being older, Edgerton is definitely the physically inferior one, looking quite cut for a normal guy but puny next to the other fighters. He has to rely on his toughness and his knowledge to survive the beatings he takes long enough to sneak by with a tricky sleeper hold. Meanwhile, Tom Hardy is a brick shit house and demolishes his opponents with scary efficiency. Eventually you realize that it's not exactly a double underdog story, but an underdog story with one of the best developed and most sympathetic antagonists ever.

The two don't get a lot of screen time together since they're estranged, but we do see effectively the pain that they share as well as the shreds of family that still remain. Nolte might actually give the best performance, incredibly remorseful over his complete failure as a father but unable to break through the walls his sons built up after they left him behind. They're three very damaged men, and their performances are good enough to make them seem real without any of them seeming like jerks despite their animosity. It builds to a conclusion that is pretty obvious but still feels totally earned. I thought there were some weird elements to the script - by having the tournament take place over a 24 hour period, there's a lot of time spent on training and not a lot of time left for character interactions once the fighting actually starts in earnest. It also kind of forces a lot of late-story revelations and developments to be explained through match commentary and news stories on TV, which works but isn't as natural as what came before. Still, the work done beforehand was strong enough to carry the film through to its end. I was surprised by how much I loved this movie, but there's not much you can do when it touches you in your manly emotional parts this well.

Midnight in Paris

2011-12-23T15:47:00.002-05:00

Somehow this is the only Woody Allen movie I've seen that's been released since 1989, though my Netflix queue tells me that will change soon. He doesn't appear to have changed that much as a writer or director since then, though I've gotten the impression that this is his best work in a while, and since it wasn't actually all that great, it makes me wonder how much he's slipped. Midnight in Paris isn't bad at all, and in truth I enjoyed most of it. But there are some things about it that bothered me too, and it really isn't anything new for him.

The most surprising thing about the film is its fantasy premise, which I didn't really know about. Owen Wilson is a stand-in for the definitely-too-old Allen, playing a pretty standard Allen character - a Hollywood writer who hates his job and would prefer to be a novelist. While on vacation with his fiancé and her parents in Paris, you see many cracks in their relationship. They don't fundamentally agree on most things, and you question how they got together in the first place. He's hopelessly romantic about the city and the past and being a real artist, and she wants nothing to do with it. But then while on a walk at night he gets into an old car with some people and taken to a party where he meets many famous artists from the period he's nostalgic for, from Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso. At first I thought it was just a costume party or something, but before too long it's apparent that he's actually somehow visiting another time. By day he fakes being interested in what his future wife is doing, but by night he's showing his writing to Gertrude Stein and falling in love with a woman played by Marion Cotillard.

It's kind of an odd story, but it's an effective one about career and life in general, how we may not always be totally happy and satisfied, but maybe we're not supposed to be, and trying to hide in the past isn't a good way to deal with it. I liked how Wilson's relationship with Cotillard eventually allows him to learn what he needs to, and while it's not exactly the funniest comedy, there's some pretty enjoyable scenes. It's fun playing spot the famous person, both in the older artists being portrayed and the actors playing them. My favorite was Adrien Brody playing a Salvador Dali who's apparently become obsessed with rhinoceroses.

As I said though, there were flaws too, most notably perhaps being that the film is so yellow that I was often distracted by it. I understand wanting to create an aesthetic, but I'm pretty sure Paris isn't that damn yellow in any time period. The characters also often seem underwritten, or not fully thought through. Owen does a decent job with the character, and has a few genuinely very good acting moments, but it's sometimes hard to like him when he acts like one of the most deluded and unreasonable people ever. Actually experiencing time travel only gets you so far. And I think the story of his obsession and drifting away from real life would have been more effective if the people in it weren't so shitty. His fiancé and her parents and her know-it-all friend are completely unsympathetic. The actors are fine, they're just written to be villains, and I don't think it helped the story. If you were with someone who started talking about how they were going off at night and partying with Hemingway, you probably wouldn't react well either. Midnight in Paris is a fine movie, but it's far from Allen's best work.

Homeland - Season 1

2011-12-21T18:25:00.000-05:00

Showtime is quickly becoming famous for green-lighting interesting television series with tricky premises, and then allowing those shows to continue airing long after those premises become strained and hard to take seriously. I can only hope that Homeland isn't destined for the same fate, because as of right now it stands as one of the most well-formed and intriguing first seasons of a new drama series in a long time. It's coming back for at least one year, and I think they could do a couple more after that. But I really hope in five years I'm not lamenting its continued existence right alongside everything else that the network has done. It's too good for that fate.

Homeland is produced by some of the same people who worked on 24, but while it's about similar themes of terrorism and how far people will go to protect their country, it is an altogether more intelligent and less sensationalistic series that manages to hit harder despite fewer fireworks due to its strong work making you actually care about its characters and what they do. Having half the number of episodes to tell their story in, there's less time wasted on plot tangents that become irrelevant and piling twists on top of each other, and we really get to the core of who the principal figures are and what they believe in. The overarching terrorist plot isn't without a couple holes, loose ends, or convenient leaps in logic, but it holds together well enough to support the story. And since the acting is so good, the flaws in the plot become unimportant in the face of what it means to the characters. The body count isn't very high, but every big moment in the show has enormous impact. It's not the best drama on television, but it's pretty special.

Claire Danes stars as a CIA operative, who like many such people, focuses almost entirely on her work, to the detriment of anything resembling a social life. When she hears that terrorists have flipped an American soldier who's coming home, she suspects it's Damian Lewis' character, a marine finally returning to his family after eight years of captivity. Her only real support is from her mentor played by Mandy Patinkin, another man who puts his job before anything else. At first it seems like the show will be about paranoia and surveillance, as Danes installs cameras in Lewis' house and watches his every movie. But it was fun to realize that was only the first part in the story, and the show was not afraid to blow through story developments quickly and move on to new ideas before the old ones even had a chance to turn stale. The three central performances truly are special, and they allow the show to get away with the slightly sillier parts in order to reach some great high points. By the season finale I was completely invested in the central conflict, and it was a wonderfully devastating episode, full of great little touches, memorable scenes, and more than enough justification for a second season. I didn't immediately latch onto the series as much as some others, but by the end I was a believer. Let's hope they really know what they're doing for next year.

Dexter - Season 6

2011-12-20T18:23:00.000-05:00

You know a show has fallen on hard times when its new episodes are so bad that they make you question whether the earlier ones that you really enjoyed were actually good. I'm still pretty sure that it's not just a series wearing out its formula to the point of extreme degradation, that it's been getting progressively worse at coming up with competent stories and interesting supporting characters, but I'm at least wondering why I liked it quite as much as I did for the first couple seasons. It's kind of been a slow breakdown in every aspect of the series over time - it started as an adequate police drama with an utterly compelling protagonist portrayed very well by Michael C. Hall. As time has gone by, the police drama has become less adequate as the cases they tackle become less original or even coherently written, and the supporting cast has gotten more and more time to expose just how uninteresting their characters are and how little talent their actors have. Season four showed the show could still live with that, when it had John Lithgow doing a great job playing a horrific counterpoint to Dexter, but since then, they've failed to come up with interesting villains, and even Dexter himself has not been immune to simple bad writing, especially when it comes to his increasingly unnecessary and irritating narration. If I hear him mumble "dark passenger" one more time, I don't know what I'll do.

The show has had ups and downs, and season six was definitely the biggest down. I knew things were shaky when they introduced this year's big theme: faith, specifically in the form of religion. Edward James Olmos and Colin Hanks play serial killers who are using the Bible to justify their crimes, and Mos Def (or Yasiin Bey, I suppose) plays a reformed criminal who now uses religion to keep him on the straight and narrow. Dexter tries to learn about how faith can be good from Bey's character, but he gets pushed aside and eventually it just devolves into a hacky doomsday psychopath plot without really saying anything interesting or new about the subject. Bey is easily the best thing about the first half of the season, but he doesn't stick around and unfortunately his exit isn't the most graceful. Olmos' character never does anything interesting, and Hanks is either ill-suited for his or just doesn't have the talent to pull it off. A lot of the season is the show just shuffling in place as Dexter goes on ill-considered detours and offs very boring random bad guys, and a lot of weight is again placed on the folks at the police station, who repeatedly prove to be some of the dumbest TV cops who ever lived. The show doesn't even pretend that law enforcement is a threat to Dexter this year, and their failure to notice all of the little things that don't add up about him is becoming farcical at this point. Deb is the only one who has anything remotely resembling a passable storyline, and even that can't avoid veering into some seriously ill-considered territory by the end. And yet... I might have to watch season seven, depending on how it looks once we get closer. Because those writers, incompetent as they might be, finally recognized the need to do something to actually move toward what could be considered an ending, and they did that in this season's finale scene. I still might not watch, since sitting through these twelve episodes was a pretty terrible experience, but at least it's better than what Weeds did.

Jailbird

2011-12-19T18:19:00.000-05:00

I've probably said it before but it bears saying again. While Kurt Vonnegut is best known as an author of unusual, satirical science fiction, some of his best work takes place in the real world, or at least something very close to resembling it. Jailbird proves this once again, and after I found his previous book to be underwhelming, it was nice to read another great Vonnegut novel again. He was getting older at this point, which is reflected in the story's main character, a man in his sixties who's seen the world change a lot over time and has stopped taking it entirely seriously. Jailbird reads more like a fictional autobiography or memoir rather than a traditional novel, and has the protagonist telling the story of his first couple days of freedom after being jailed for two years for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, though it's fairly rambling, covering at different points many different periods in his earlier life and also obliquely referring to his state at the time of the writing a few years later. There's also a very long prologue (it is literally more than 10% of the book's text) written from Vonnegut's own perspective which mentions things that inspired pieces of the story and also expands on some fictional events that are referred to but left unexplained in the main text.

So there's the typical Vonnegut playfullness in the writing, and the topics he decided to brood on here are pretty expected as well. He talks pretty harshly about the history of the treatment of certain American citizens, from laborers who wanted to start unions to communists who were persecuted by the government after the war. He weaves the different characters into the fabric of America from the 30s to the 70s, as the protagonist goes from a reluctant Harvard man to a successful bureaucrat during World War II to an unemployed loser to a forgotten small part of the Nixon administration before his eventual incarceration. The RAMJAC corporation is a creation of Vonnegut that pops up repeatedly and proves essential to both the plot and his most biting condemnation in the book, giving not just corporations but our entire economic system a pretty thorough lashing. For all of it's preaching though it wouldn't be a very enjoyable book without his trademark oddness and sense of humor, and luckily both are also fully intact here. As he gets older he seems more willing to touch on taboo subjects, and some of the laughs in Jailbird are as strange and biting as they've ever been. It's not quite one of the best books he's written, but it's certainly right up there with other great things he's done.

Movie Update 32: Nolan and Scorsese

2011-12-18T09:47:00.000-05:00

Martin Scorsese is one of the best directors who ever lived, and I think that Christopher Nolan is on his way to earning that distinction. In the last week I've watched the few remaining movies by both of them available for streaming on Netflix.

The Age of Innocence

Love stories are often passionate, but few let that passion boil just under the surface as much as it does in The Age of Innocence. Daniel Day-Lewis plays a lawyer from a wealthy family in 1870s New York City (only a few years after the chaos and violence depicted in Scorsese's other film Gangs of New York) who becomes engaged to a woman played by Winona Ryder, but when her cousin played by Michelle Pfeiffer returns from Europe, he realizes how much stronger his feelings are for her instead. Wealthy families always want to avoid scandal though, and Pfeiffer is already damaged goods since she's considering divorce from her powerful husband, and they struggle with whether to take a chance or avoid causing a stir. Innocence is a well made movie with really good lead performances, but because it's so wrapped up in that distant old wealthy people mode, I didn't really find it gripping for most of its duration. A good movie, but I didn't find myself very invested.

Boxcar Bertha

Boxcar Bertha was Scorsese's first film that wasn't connected to his student projects, and it took a while for me to figure out what was off about it. Eventually though, it hit me - it's an exploitation movie. Not a terrible one, and it's one based on unusual concepts for that sort of thing, but it's still an exploitation movie. It uses issues like labor unions and race relations to make a movie about a girl who gets naked sometimes and robs banks and shoots people with her partners. It's sort of a second-rate Bonnie and Clyde with worse acting. I don't want to be too harsh on the movie, because it does some interesting things that most B movies you'd compare it too wouldn't. But it still never reaches very high, so even its solid execution results in a movie that's decent at best.

Following

Following is Nolan's first film, shot independently in black and white on a very small budget. It concerns an unemployed aspiring writer who decided to start following random people to learn about them and get inspired. Eventually he repeatedly follows the wrong guy, and gets pulled into a world of small-time burglary and betrayal. Much like his next film Memento, Following has a complex plot that is further complicated by the script's non-linear approach to structure. It jumps back and forth between time periods, always revealing things that end up clarifying or contradicting what came before. The actual truth behind what's going on when it's finally revealed can be looked at in two ways. On one hand, it's really kind of an absurdly complicated scheme to resolve what wasn't that difficult of an issue, and it's sort of unlikely that the whole thing would come together correctly. But on the other hand, it's still a really fun mystery to unravel, and the fun of noir movies is always that moment of realization when it all finally makes sense. It's a really good first effort.

Insomnia

Insomnia is the only film Nolan's directed that wasn't based on his own screenplay, and it shows a bit. He was proving to studios that he could handle a larger budget and more recognizable cast, and he does a good job of that, though the movie underneath is merely solid and definitely the least interesting thing that he's done. It's pretty much a boilerplate detective story with a plot that wouldn't be out of place in a random episode of most cop shows, but there are a few things that make it work. The first act twist that provides Al Pacino's Detective Dormer with an internal conflict does a good job of complicating an otherwise standard plot, and the ensuing insomnia that plagues him adds a lot of flavor to the whole movie. The acting by him and Robin Williams is good, and it's a really well-shot film, particularly in a few really tense sequences that are unlike what you'd usually see in this type of story. Hilary Swank's character seemed really badly written, and there are a few other hiccups, but mostly it's an above average Hollywood mystery/thriller. Nolan's best asset is probably his screenwriting, but I think with Insomnia he shows it's not the only thing he can do.

The Last Temptation of Christ

Based on a book besides The Bible, The Last Temptation of Christ tells the story of Jesus Christ in a very different way than we're used to. Willem Dafoe's Jesus is tormented by his knowledge and his communications with God, and he is a much weaker man than he is ever depicted as being in the New Testament. The movie hits a lot of the expected notes from the few years that he worked as a prophet, from his wandering in the desert to his sermon on the mount to turning water into wine to the healing of the sick and of course, his arrest and crucifixion. But it shows these moments in different ways than we're used to, and considering these stories in a different light, seeing them as the actions of a man with weaknesses and desires that he must sacrifice rather than an all-knowing and serene son of God is very interesting. The most memorable and controversial sequence comes near the end, when we see Jesus as a man who raised his own family rather than one who died for our sins, but the resolution of this sequence, when everything finally comes together, is extremely powerful, and strikes me as something that would restore faith rather than challenge it. Definitely one of the best religious movies I've ever seen.

Game Update 18: 3DS NES Ambassador Games

2011-12-17T11:51:00.000-05:00

With the recent release of the Game Boy Advance "Ambassador" games for early adopters of the Nintendo 3DS (which seem pretty cool so far), I realized I never wrote anything about the NES games that were released in the same way a few months ago. There's a pretty good reason for this: four of the games are interesting and probably worth playing through, and the other six are basically garbage and I'll be glad to never look at them again. These are those six games.

Balloon Fight

Essentially a rip-off of Joust, Balloon Fight is a game where you try to pop the balloons tied to enemies on screen while protecting your own balloons from the same fate. Repeatedly tapping the button causes you to rise, and neglecting to do so causes you to fall. Don't ask me how these mechanics are actually supposed to translate to a real world situation involving a man fighting birds attached to balloons. If you are above an opponent when you collide with them, congratulations, you win that confrontation. There's also a mode where you try to float through an obstacle course for as long as you can. Not a bad idea, but the controls are terrible and it's no fun to play.

Donkey Kong Jr.

A sequel to the original Donkey Kong, and probably the only game where Mario is the antagonist. You have to get through a series of levels, trying to reach the top and rescue your father before moving to the next one. The gameplay is pretty familiar, although there's a lot of gripping onto and climbing of vines. Donkey Kong Jr climbs vines slower than any other ape who's ever lived. Not a bad idea, but the controls are terrible and it's no fun to play.

Ice Climber

Although you play as both climbers when they appear in the the Super Smash Bros. series, you only get one in this game's single player mode (none of the Ambassador games actually have multiplayer implemented yet despite the options appearing in the main menu, though Nintendo has said they'll add it in). Your goal is to climb a series of mountains, which are really just vertical platforming levels with bonus areas at the top of them. The way up is often blocked, but you can smash your way through with your hammer. Not a bad idea, but the controls are terrible and it's no fun to play.

NES Open Tournament Golf

A golf game with a few different courses, I'm not sure if it set the standard for pretty much all golf games that would follow but the archetype you're used to is here. You choose the direction to swing in, the speed of your swing, where you hit the ball, and what club to use. It has a swing meter where you press a button to start the swing, press it again to set the power, and press it again to set the accuracy. Unfortunately it's not a very easy to use swing meter. Not a bad idea, but the controls are terrible and it's no fun to play.

Wrecking Crew

A game where Mario is a demolition expert rather than a plumber. Your goal is to smash all of the walls in the level without getting killed by strange alien creatures you don't seem to be able to defend yourself against. There's also a few different types of objects that there's no clear way to interact with. You can't jump, but the levels do wrap around, giving me the impression that they all take place inside silos. Not a bad idea, but the controls are terrible and it's no fun to play.

Yoshi

Yoshi actually isn't that bad, it just doesn't have the addicting quality that all great classic puzzle games are supposed to have. It's a pretty simple set-up, though still maybe a bit more complex than it has to be. Much like Tetris, a variety of objects fall from the sky in pairs, and you have to rotate columns to try to stack like objects and make them disappear. Also two of the objects are the bottom and top halves of an egg shell, and if you manage to get the latter to appear above the former in a column, then they and any other objects between them also disappear. The speed increases over time, and eventually there's too much crap and there's no where to put it and you lose. I actually played quite a bit of a complete rip-off of this game on my scientific calculator in high school. It was just a way to pass the time in study hall though, and I can't say the real thing is any better.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Season 7

2011-12-16T19:06:00.000-05:00

The seventh season is around the point where most comedies on TV start to lose their ability to really surprise you or affect you in meaningful ways, or at least stop making you laugh quite as much as they used to. I will say that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia definitely feels like a show that's been around for that long, and it's reaching the point where they're running out of new gags and new ideas and has to rely on calling back to classic guest characters and running jokes in more extreme ways to stay exciting. Despite that, it still might actually be the funniest show I watch. Other comedies are newer and fresher and smarter and inspire greater passion and affection in me, but I just don't laugh as hard at them as I do at Sunny. A lot of this season's biggest laughs were based largely on shock value; creating situations so unexpected and unusual to see on TV that the novelty was a major part of their success. But who cares how carefully thought out or crafted a joke is when it makes you laugh until you start crying?

Despite having a lot of success recently in movies and other projects, at least compared to the rest of the cast, Charlie Day doesn't really dominate screen time like some people were maybe expecting. It was actually a pretty low-key year for his character, though he had a few inspired moments, including a scene that made me laugh as hard as anything I can think of in my entire life. Dennis continues to deliver great, increasingly disturbing performances, gradually continuing to develop into a fully deranged, secretive monster. Frank was the focus of a flashback episode that despite including a fun appearance by Lance Reddick stands as one of the series' only truly bad episodes, but Danny DeVito is so fully in control of the character at this point that it's always a joy just to watch him react or eat something. Sweet Dee got a lot of mileage out of her increasingly creative and filthy mouth, and while they didn't quite capitalize on the whole "fat Mac" arc, they did get some good jokes out of it and he's still a solid character. The show's been renewed for two more years, and I'd be feeling at least a little anxious about that with most sitcoms, but they only have to put out 13 or so episodes per year and they really haven't shown many signs of slowing down. I'll be glad to continue spending time with these freakish, vile lunatics for a while more.

Attack the Block

2011-12-14T18:11:00.000-05:00

I usually like to avoid directly comparing things to other things for too long, but sometimes they're so similar that it's hard to avoid. That's the situation with Attack the Block, which has a lot of things that make it different from Super 8 but they share enough of a core that I can't really ignore it. They're both science-fiction movies that introduce a likable group of kids in their natural environment, and then turn that environment upside down with a violent event that brings hostile aliens into the mix. Their influences seem pretty different, as Super 8 is sort of an homage to older family-friendly genre movies that happens to be a lot louder, while Attack the Block is much more of a straight-up horror movie. I liked Super 8 more, but Block is a very good film in its own right.

It starts with a small-time gang of teenagers mugging a young woman on some holiday in England before getting distracted by something crashing into a nearby car from the sky. The woman escapes, and Moses, the leader of the little gang, investigates the car and gets scratched up by a strange alien creature. They corner it in a shed and kill it, and then take it to show some other people they know, including Nick Frost as a charmingly detached tenant in their building who maintains a weed farm for a local criminal. While there they see more things crashing in the neighborhood, and gather some equipment up to go defend their block. Soon though they realize these aliens are much bigger and more dangerous than the first one, and all hell breaks loose as they try desperately to survive.

Like Super 8, Attack the Block builds up a good rapport between the main characters before anything really bad happens, making the emotional core of the rest of the film much stronger. It's a much quicker process since the movie is only a scant 85 minutes or so, but despite their criminal leanings, the kids have an enjoyable interplay amongst themselves and the film has a surprising amount of social commentary on how crummy upbringings and flaws in the system of law help create young scoundrels like them better than they deter it. It was kind of surprising to see a horror movie where underage people are actually the main victims, and because of how deftly they were made sympathetic, it's genuinely distressing sometimes to see what happens to them. It's also just a really effectively creepy and unique creature design, with the aliens being large, hair black masses with their only distinguishable feature being their mouths full of glowing teeth.

Joe Cornish has never written or directed a movie before, but he shows skill at both, deftly weaving together strong comedic moments with an effectively tense and exciting sci-fi horror atmosphere, and managing to tell a simple but strong story very quickly and effectively. I can see why he's started writing together with Edgar Wright, as both have a lot of talent at bringing together humor with competently handled genre elements. There were a few bit of the story that seemed a bit rushed through or too convenient, but taken on its merits and its limited scope, it's a very successful film. The kid actors are really good, and I really think there should just be more small experiments like this one happening all the time.

Boardwalk Empire - Season 2

2011-12-12T19:08:00.001-05:00

When the first season of Boardwalk Empire aired last year, I was impressed by the quality of its production and enjoyed its variously interconnected characters and sense of humor. I was less enamored by the plot, which was mostly fine but a bit slow-going and nothing too new. That hasn't exactly changed too much this year, but the show definitely felt more confident and original in what it wanted to be, and that along with an extra year of time to deepen and explore the show's ideas and themes resulted in something ultimately more satisfying and exciting to watch. At the very least, my anticipation for what would happen next was more breathless, and the big moments packed a bigger punch.

Although the ending of season one wasn't exactly a complete upheaval in the show's world, it did provide a number of developments which played out over the course of season two. Nelson Van Alden's upright, do-gooder image was tarnished when he started committing crimes of his own and got someone besides his wife pregnant, and this year we spent a lot of time watching that veneer peel away in public, which made him more sympathetic despite him still being a self-righteous bastard. Jimmy and Eli joined forces with the Commodore and other influential men to challenge Nucky's supremacy in Atlantic City, and their back and forth along with the other organizations in other cities that get dragged into it makes up a lot of the season's most overt conflict. Margaret decided to stay with a man she knew was a criminal in order to provide for herself and her children, and this year she definitely struggled with her own feelings on the matter.

On top of these, the show piles on even more little struggles and battles. Chalky's operation is attacked by white supremacists, and he has to manage both his duties to the black community and his loyalty to Nucky. I thought Chalky had the weakest arc of any that really lasted a significant amount of time this season; Michael K. Williams' performance is strong but they just didn't put the time into making me buy how hamstrung he appeared to be. Perhaps most significantly, Nucky himself is charged with a number of crimes, and finds out who his real friends are as he struggles to keep himself out of jail. He was pretty put upon all season, with the law and a lot of his former friends working against him, and really only having the Irish and Arnold Rothstein (still a fun character even if he doesn't have much to do) on his side consistently. By the end of the season though, he's cemented his ability to fight his way out of jams and win some allies when he needs them.

They've done a good job of building him up from a shrewd manipulator of men and money into more of a complete criminal mastermind, not exactly invincible but smart enough to find a solution most of the time. We do see though that there are still chinks in the armor, and I look forward to the continued development of the character. As far as the content itself goes, it seems like they definitely cut back on unnecessary nudity this year, but they increased the violence to compensate. Boardwalk Empire's first season drew a little criticism for being mellow now and then, a complaint that seems weird to me since The Sopranos and The Wire are two of the best crime dramas ever, and aren't exactly dripping with blood from week to week. Boardwalk was definitely more brutal this year though, and I won't deny that the unflinching nature of the violence enhanced the intensity of the show's most shocking story moments. Maybe just a bit over-the-top though, I was watching the show at the same time as The Walking Dead and it was often the former than was the most disgusting. In any case, I still don't think Boardwalk is quite the classic drama it wants to be just yet, but it's still a very fun and often poignant one, using its period setting to highlight issues that cut across centuries, and always trying to get better. I'm easily on board for season three.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

2011-12-11T12:44:00.001-05:00

Skyrim came out exactly one month ago, so now seems like as good a time as any to write about it. I haven't been playing it constantly that entire time, but I have spent quite a few hours with it. I haven't finished it, of course. Not in the sense of seeing all the things there are to see, or even just completing the main story quest. I'm maybe about a third of the way through it. As far as the other quest lines, I've joined three of the five major factions, and I've only finished doing work for one of them. I've done some other side jobs, but I still have a dozen unrelated side quests sitting open in my journal, and a couple dozen other miscellaneous objectives on top of that. I've only visited seven of the nine cities, and I'm sure the other two will give me plenty of more stuff to do one I check them out. And of course I won't really ever run out of stuff to do, since the game can keep generating easy little tasks even after you get through the more detailed ones. Most games that had this much content would be maddening, but there's just something about The Elder Scrolls that makes me relish visiting its gigantic, endlessly explorable world rather than getting tired of doing the same thing over and over again.

I was about as big a fan of Oblivion as anyone, but I can't deny that that game had certain problems. Its main plot had problems; it got pretty repetitive after a point, it wasn't always the easiest thing to know why you were doing what you were doing, and there's a certain sense of letdown when you realize you aren't the chosen one, but just a guy helping the chosen one out. It also had serious gameplay balance problems - it used the same skill system as Morrowind, where you had certain skills designated as major ones, and using them caused them to improve, which is how you would level up. But it was easy to accidentally build a character that could level up frequently without actually improving your combat ability much, and since enemies always leveled up to match you, serious difficulty problems would pop up. You should feel stronger by leveling up in an RPG, but it was often the bad guys who were beefing up more than you. Skyrim fixes this mostly by removing the distinction between class skills and other skills, so working on anything will give you progress toward leveling up, and dungeons are scaled based on a range rather than an absolute value, making some places certainly tough enough to match you, but others easy enough that you can get through them with no problem. If you spend all day improving your non-combat skills without raising your combat to match, you could still run into issues, but the balance seems better.

That's not the only improvement either; almost everything about Skyrim seems like it can be described as "like Oblivion, but better". As I said I haven't finished the main quest yet, but so far it feels suitably epic enough to be the primary focus of a game this big, and I've already done some things that were more interesting than anything that really happened in Oblivion's quest. The other factions also seem to have really interesting central plots this time, and are better integrated with the setting of Skyrim itself. Rather than their being a generically named guild chapter in every city, they all have headquarters in one location, and histories and reputations within those places that make them feel like part of the world rather than a trigger to generate quests. The Daedric side quests are back and as subversive as ever, and have a lot more variety in how you come across them. In general, it's impressive how much effort the game put into making sure you always have plenty of choice in what to do next. It's hard to go pretty much anywhere without picking up a bounty on some bandit or a lead on where to find something interesting.

I also really like the place of Skyrim itself. Oblivion drew complaints for being a pretty generic fantasy setting, and I always defended it as being a nice looking and pretty interesting place. Besides, as the central political and economic hub of the whole continent, it was all-encompassing and non-specific by design. But I can't deny that Skyrim is a more intriguing place. It has a real sense of local identity that Cyrodiil mostly lacked, and thanks to the technological innovations of the last nine years, they are able to present that identity more effectively than Morrowind did. The Nordic culture is heavily influenced by, well, Nordic cultures from real life, and is a cool blend of Scandinavian and fantasy influences. And the game also represents a big shift in the culture of the continent itself, taking place some two hundred years after Oblivion, and shaking up the entire political landscape. The world just feels alive when you hear people talking about the great war between men and elves and how the citizens are no longer happy with the empire's control over them, and just adding the concept of real open conflict to the setting makes it feel more important and dangerous, even if only affects the world in a significant way when you decide it does. And oh yeah, dragons are a pretty cool enemy.

I haven't even touched on all of the things they've added for you to do if you're interested in making your own equipment. Alchemy is back, and lets you mix potions without actually knowing their properties before hand, which feels more natural. Enchanting makes more sense, as you learn effects by taking them from already existing items, and it's a more intuitive system than there was before. And crafting is really significant. There's a purpose to hunting, as you can use the hides you take from animals and tan them to make leather. You can mine ore and smelt it into workable material, and then combine the leather and the metal to make weapons, armor, and jewelry. Which you can then enchant, of course. You can also chop wood for money and cook food to give it different effects, both minor activities but ones that enhance the idea that this is a world people live in and not just a playground for you to kill monsters in. Jeez, I just realized I haven't actually talked about combat. Or the perk system, which is the main focus of leveling up. God, this game is huge.

Anyway, the game engine is definitely improved on what they had before, but it's still basically the same engine, which means it's not the most elegant experience at all times. The combat system has the same general clunkiness as before, though I won't say it isn't greatly improved. The main addition is the dual wielding system, which lets you use any combination of one-handed weapons, spells, and shields in your two different hands, allowing for a greater variety of play styles. There's still bows and two handed weapons as well, and they're also effective ways to take on monsters and bandits. My personal approach is to sneak as much as possible, and pick off enemies with my bow before they know I'm there. When I do get into a scrape, I usually pull out one of the swords or maces that I've enchanted myself, and try to keep enemies off balance while I keep myself alive with a healing spell in the other hand. But I could have a spell in both hands, or a sword in one and an axe in the other, or anything else really if I wanted to. Every time you level up you pick a stat to improve (health, stamina or magicka; they've totally gotten rid of the other stats that those three used to be derived from), and a perk, which is either a bonus to or an extra ability related to one of your skills. It could be a reduction on the magicka cost of casting spells from a certain school, or it could be the ability to zoom in when aiming with your bow. It's a system that encourages you to level up and experiment with different skills, and helps reduce the occasional monotony of taking on the hundredth dungeon full of undead or spiders or necromancers or whatever.

As I mentioned it's the same engine, which means the same occasional technical hiccup, which might cause an NPC to act strangely or an object to not appear properly or any number of small issues that can pop up. I don't fault Bethesda for having some glitches in a game this big, and I also have to note that in the time I've played I've experienced the fewest number of issues that actually break the game from any Elder Scrolls game I've tried. There's been one or two crashes, and a single objective that won't resolve itself properly, but that's about it. And there really have been improvements to the engine - more subtle animations can still be awkward, but people do interact better, and the game just looks really, really nice. It's both the graphics and just the visual design of the world. When you're on top of a mountain looking out over a grand vista, or walking through a valley and seeing the Northern Lights play off a sky full of stars and Tamriel's two moons, it can be as breathtaking as any image you've seen in a game. And then a wooly mammoth might accidentally spawn in midair and plummet to its death. And that's Skyrim.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

2011-12-10T11:41:00.000-05:00

Remember when I said watching Part 1 when it was on disc meant I could go see Part 2 in the theater and be really fresh on it? Heh. Anyway, the final film in the long-running Harry Potter series finally brings the story to a conclusion, answering a few questions and putting an end to the reign of the evil Lord Voldemort once and for all. I hope that isn't a spoiler. Having now seen both of the films that were made from the final book after it was chopped in half, I definitely think they should have been one movie. I understand why Warner Bros would want to increase their profits by splitting them up, and avoid a running time that was too long. But they could have easily cut the two films into a single three hour one, and I think it would have been a better movie.

Part of the fallout of splitting the story up is that Part 2 has a pretty odd structure. It has a low key little beginning sequence where Harry talks to a few people and establishes his goals for the rest of the film, then cuts to a partly comedic, partly exciting sequence where he and his friends break into a bank to retrieve one of the doodads they need to defeat Voldemort. It's a solid first act, but then the film skips the second one entirely and jumps straight to an extremely long and drawn out climax for the whole series, when the gang returns to Hogwarts to find the last pieces of the puzzle and fight off the evil army, with help from the other students and pretty much every friendly character from the series' history. There's an ebb and flow of excitement and drama during this part that prevents it from straining too hard or forcing its momentum to a grinding halt, but I can't say it entirely avoids feeling off from time to time. The larger cast outside of the main three kids gets more attention here than they did in Part 1, and it was nice to see a lot of these characters get a last moment or two even if they never got developed in the movies nearly as much as they did on the page.

Besides some of the night scenes being too dark to actually tell what was going on, I didn't have many problems with this long sequence until near the end, after all has been revealed and the game is finally on. A couple things just didn't quite work. The Deathly Hallows themselves were a last minute narrative device already in the books, and they come off even more so here. They were already explained in Part 1, but that needed to be reiterated here in Part 2 for those who might have forgotten, and the explanations are brief and incomplete. They seem less like well-considered keys to victory and more like cheap explanations for why the good guys are able to win without actually having to be smarter or stronger than their opponents. And the final battle itself is just a bit clumsy - it's bigger and more spread out than it appeared in the book, which doesn't really do it any favors and seems like a poor reaction to the less than perfect ending J.K. Rowling crafted in the first place. I don't know if I'm presenting my issues well, but the main thing is just that this series has great production values, but the final scenes presented in this film don't quite live up to the decade of preparation that led up to them. I think David Yates did a solid job bringing the second half of the series to life, but he rarely rose above that mark. It was ultimately an entertaining movie though, befitting a likable if imperfect franchise.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

2011-12-09T18:20:00.000-05:00

I honestly was less disappointed when I found out this game was going to star Ezio than I was when I learned the same about Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. After all, with that game they had already established a willingness to reuse the same protagonist, and it makes a certain amount of sense to have a trilogy within a larger trilogy, that being the one about the series' meta-protagonist Desmond. I don't know that the game released next year will actually be called Assassin's Creed III, and I wouldn't be surprised if it features another new or returning central character, but I am reasonably confident that it will resolve Desmond's story without killing off potential for future games in the series. Revelations does a lot of work toward setting up that sort-of conclusion, both in the resolutions it gives to Ezio and Altair and the small steps forward it takes in the larger narrative. Also, that narrative has hinged on the end of the world happening in 2012, and of course it would be silly to have a game about that come out in 2013 or later.

Revelations was advertised as being a game to finish the stories of Ezio and Altair, and I'd say it does so, though in a slightly odd way. Despite them both appearing on the cover, you will spend the vast majority of the game playing as Ezio again, with only five missions as Altair, all relived through keys Ezio finds (and relived also by Desmond too obviously, in a weird Inception-style layering of realities), all taking place in the Assassin stronghold at Masyaf, and mostly being pretty limited from a gameplay perspective. But Altair actually gets a more purposeful send-off as a character, as we see snippets of his entire lifespan, struggling to keep the Assassins on the right path and make the proper preparations for his descendents to follow their own paths. There are some really strong moments in these missions, that finally made me care about a character who was mostly just a jerk in his own game. Conversely, we do see Ezio accept what the true purpose of his life is and get closure on some things, but there's less of a finality to his arc. Still, he also had some good moments.

Looking at the game itself though, while Brotherhood won me over with what it brought to the table in terms of new concepts and systems for the series, Revelations seemed a bit light on actual new gameplay content that was enjoyable. While the first game obviously established the vital climbing and combat mechanics, and the concept of the series, and the subsequent games added fun features like core combat improvements and an economy that allowed you to purchase better equipment and renovate businesses in exchange for more influence over the world and the ability to recruit and level up new Assassins who could help you on missions, there's not much new about Revelations that I really liked. I will say the hookblade is a very good addition - it doesn't have much effect on combat, but it does make getting around easier by letting you climb a bit faster and use suspended wires all over the city of Constantinople like ziplines.

Otherwise though, the additions were either a wash or actively irritating. Bomb crafting is interesting in theory, but there's really not much that they allow you to do that you couldn't do before in another way. It's not like you need more ways to kill enemies, smoke bombs already existed to allow for obscuring your movements, and there are other methods of distraction like poison or hiring citizens to help. Adding a control component to the assassin training missions provides a new source of revenue but is also a money sink on its own, and the new stuff with notoriety and defending your territory is almost a total disaster. Now instead of permanently taking over Templar strongholds, they can be retaken if you're a wanted man, and the only way to defend them without taking them back again is to engage in an undercooked and uninteresting tower defense-style minigame. Luckily you can avoid that altogether by keeping yourself off the radar, but now renovating businesses increases your visibility, and the methods to reduce it are decreased in number and less effective. It's just more of a chore to build up your power over the city than it was before, and I really don't see the benefit.

On top of the questionable additions to the available distractions from the game itself, the game itself seems a bit slighter than it was on the past. I'm not sure if my perspective is skewed or what, but it definitely felt like a shorter game to me, especially in the second half when the plot kicks into high gear and every memory sequence seems like it's over in an hour or two. There's not exactly a shortage of side content, and I know for a fact there's a number of optional missions I can finish as soon as I get back to the game. But the critical path through the story definitely felt a bit rushed to me, especially in the end, when the game teases what could be a big confrontation but it never comes. It's just like there was supposed to be one last twist and one last big Templar you'd have to track down and assassinate, and that final act doesn't really come. Really, you don't do much actual assassinating in general. Those silly scenes where you stab a guy in the neck and the environment turns into white nothingness and the victim gives a final confession or Ezio just blesses them are a staple of the series, and they're unfortunately in short supply in this game.

It did have some strong spots - the game has the best development of a human relationship in the series, and the underground tomb missions which focus on more specific platforming are better than they've been before, and make a nice effort to remove some of the sterility from the series' level design. I even liked the first person platforming levels you unlock by finding small objects in the city, which aren't terribly fun but are a nice break from the game's regular hustle and bustle and do a good job of establishing an interesting past history for Desmond, though they're light on any real surprises. And of course the multiplayer is back, and it's still fun as long as the other players aren't idiots. Of all the main games in the franchise, Revelations feels the most like a stopgap. It felt less connected to history, and had the smallest cast of characters, and the least momentum in the overarching story. But it did hit a few important beats, and it's still fun just to run around the city and mess up fools, and I'm still looking forward to what's next. It's a bit unfortunate that Ubisoft has felt the need to push out a game every year to keep the series relevant, but I'm not going to pretend I haven't enjoyed playing them every time.

Sons of Anarchy - Season 4

2011-12-07T18:31:00.000-05:00

It's a shame last night's final episode of this season of Sons of Anarchy was so disappointing, because up until it aired, they were putting together a very successful and at times amazing season that could have ended up as something really special. Coming off a year when a lot of people were questioning the show, to come this close to bringing it all back in grand style and then failing at the last second is just kind of a tragedy. It's not even a bad episode of television in a vacuum - it's well acted and shot as Sons always is, with some powerful scenes and good humor sprinkled throughout. The problem is what the episode represents as far as the rest of the season is concerned - that is, it reveals that the dramatic moments they've been building toward have all been a lie, and the huge stakes they put up never really existed. This seemed like a season that could really be a game changer for the show, and while a few things happen that will definitely have consequences next year, perhaps significant ones, they really don't come close to matching what the show has been hinting at all along.

It sort of felt like this was a back to basics season, after the much delayed and drawn out visit to Ireland (which I enjoyed) last year caused some people to question the show. It's just the sons in Charming again, trying to stay afloat while making some deals, avoiding trouble with other gangs, and trying not to get caught by the cops. Over the course of fourteen episodes, more and more conflicts pile on, small and large, that threaten to cause the club to collapse under its own weight and take everyone connected down with it. They use the technique very effectively, to the point where you worry that there's actually too many conflicts and they won't be able to satisfyingly resolve them all. And that ends up being the case. In the end, I doubt in the long run this will ever end up being seen as much more than a filler season, and you never want an entire year of effort you put into something to end up feeling like that. I can sort of see what Kurt Sutter and his team were going for in doing this, but in the end they teased some inevitable story beats that they weren't quite prepared to deliver on yet, and the result was a letdown.

The main cast was great as always, and their supporting cast was perhaps better than ever, with lots of recognizable faces joining both sides of the law. The show definitely gets a bit over the top with the sex and violence now and again, with a couple issues this season being firefights that are just too big for me to believe the cops wouldn't get wind of them in time and the very casual way the club members seem to regard violence against women. But the show wouldn't be the same without its edge, and I'd rather they lean too far toward over the top than too far in the other direction, and you can't really say there's another show on TV that pulls off action scenes better. And while they shied away from some big moments, the ones that they did have were pretty darn special. I'm definitely watching next year, because the season was mostly very good and I'm really invested in most of the characters and I know they can do better than this and there are plenty of things I know the show will eventually do that I still want to see. But it's definitely hard to shake that feeling of disappointment.

Movie Update 31

2011-12-03T11:20:00.000-05:00

Crank: High Voltage

Remember when I said that the original Crank was actually less over the top and insane than it advertised itself as? This sequel, which brings back most of the significant characters in some way and attempts to escalate on everything the first movie did, corrects that issue. Instead of having to keep his heart rate up by doing things like getting into fights and having sex with Amy Smart, Jason Statham's heart has been replaced with an artificial one and he must keep its battery charged by doing things like electrocuting himself and having sex with Amy Smart (because it generates static electricity through friction, obviously). There's a lot more violence and nudity and general zaniness in this movie, so it succeeds at surpassing the first movie in that way. It does have a different problem though, which again prevented me from really liking the movie - it just seemed too mean-spirited. People don't just get hit in the nuts, their genitals get destroyed. A man is forced to punish himself for messing up by graphically cutting off his own nipples. Just lots of messed up stuff like that, and I thought it was usually more gross than entertaining. Otherwise, it's as kinetic and crazy as advertised, with a few moments of inspired originality.

Hoosiers

Hoosiers is as predictable an underdog sports story as you're ever likely to encounter. Gene Hackman comes to a small Indiana town to become the high school basketball coach, and he struggles to gain the acceptance of the locals before molding the team into an unlikely winner, more successful than they've ever been before. Dennis Hopper plays the father of one of the players, a drunk and embarrassment to the town who actually knows a lot about the sport. Barbara Hershey is a teacher at the school who questions Hackman's methods but eventually warms up to him. There's a kid who's supremely talented but unwilling to play, and a bunch of ignoramuses who have it out for the interloper. Though it's nothing you haven't seen a bunch of times, Hoosiers is still a charming and well-executed version of that formula. The acting is solid, and the basketball scenes are authentic and exciting. It was a bit weird for the only black people in the movie to appear at the end as players for the big bad final opponent (the movie takes place in the 50s), but otherwise there's not much to really hold against the movie. Pretty likable stuff.

The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming

A weird mix of comedy and politics, The Russians Are Coming tells the story of a Soviet submarine crew that accidentally runs aground on an American island and attempts to get back in the water without causing an international incident. Unfortunately, they run into difficulties, and things are exacerbated by the locals who are alarmist about the threat and quick to gossip. Things almost totally boil over in a remarkably tension-filled stand-off before the film remembers it's a comedy and deflates it in a pretty cheesy, feel-good way. It's a likable movie, with some frustrating side characters and maybe too long a running time but not much else to complain about. The best part is probably Alan Arkin's lead performance as one of the Russian crew members, who doesn't actually get a ton of dialogue but when he does always manages to make a lot out of very little. I'm honestly not totally sure what it was trying to accomplish, but it's a pretty good movie.

Tom Jones

There's something about 18th century England that is just inherently interesting to me. The British accents, the horrible class inequality, the technology still stuck in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, it's just... I don't know. Interesting. Tom Jones is based on a serialized novel published during that period, and features Albert Finney playing a bastard who's been raised in kind society and grown up to be a womanizer, well-liked by many but hated by some. The movie actually won Best Picture, which seems kind of strange, but I guess movies could do that back then without being dramas about serious issues or mediocre. Wow that was pretty harsh, I've actually really liked most of the recent winners of that award. Oh well, whatever. Tom Jones is funny, has an intriguing little plot about the secrets people sometimes keep, and has some nice performances. It also frequently features characters talking to or just looking at the camera, which somehow never gets old. And now that the movie has expired from Netflix streaming, the site doesn't have it at all. What's up with that, Netflix?

Bridesmaids

2011-11-30T18:15:00.000-05:00

In a lot of ways, Bridesmaids is just a regular comedy produced by Judd Apatow, and that generally seems to be to its benefit. I don't make a habit of watching comedies aimed at women, but a lot of them seem pretty dull in concept and execution. Bridesmaids aims a bit more toward the middle, featuring a mostly female cast, but with a familiar feel to guys who liked movies like Knocked Up, and I think the approach pays off well. I believe it is Apatow's most financially successful film to date, which shows that that kind of wider targeting can pay off. It's a movie about women, but that doesn't have to mean anything negative. The cast is fantastic, and laughs come just as frequently as they ever do in movies like this.

Kristen Wiig co-wrote the film and stars as a woman stuck in a rut with a bad job and a bad quasi-boyfriend played by a very goofy Jon Hamm. Things look up when her best friend played by Maya Rudolph gets engaged (to Tim Heidecker in a marvelously enjoyable non-role) and names her the maid of honor, though they turn sour when she realizes she has competition in the form of Rose Byrne's character, the beautiful wife of the groom's rich boss who clearly wants to step into the role of best friend for Rudolph. The oneupsmanship between the two competitors provides a deep well of humor and awkwardness, and provides the bulk of the tension in the plot. The other bridesmaids are played by Erin from The Office and Johnson from Reno 911!, and I suppose most famously Melissa McCarthy in a role that seems designed to steal the movie but doesn't quite. It's a similar role to Zach Galifianakis' in The Hangover (she even has an oddly symmetrical relationship to the characters getting married), but whereas he was easily the best part of that movie, there's enough good stuff happening constantly in Bridesmaids that no one scene or character really has a chance to do much overshadowing.

So the film plays out about the way you'd expect, with the main conflict damaging the protagonist's friendships and interfering with her own romantic subplot. If I had a complaint about the movie, it's that it's a bit too intense emotionally. The funny moments are very funny, but like most regular comedies, there comes that part in the second act where things get darker and angrier, and the movie goes a bit too far dragging its protagonist through the mud before she inevitably redeems herself. I watch comedies like this to laugh, and while I did that quite a bit during Bridesmaids, the last third was pretty light on the humor. It's a nice story though, and Wiig is a great lead and she's surrounded by terrific supporting performances on all side. It might be the only pure comedy I've actually seen that came out this year, but I doubt it would have a lot of competition for best of 2011 even if I had seen more.

Bored to Death - Season 3

2011-11-29T18:17:00.000-05:00

I can't talk about this season of Bored to Death without first mentioning how completely bizarre and messed up the final scene is. I don't want to really say what happens, especially because the whole story of that point was reached is convoluted and the meat of a lot of the season. I'll just say that it involves the main character of this show deciding to do something that is at once dishonest, wrong even if he was being honest about it, and illegal. It was very unsettling, especially since the show seemed to be treating the concept like it was no big deal, just something that might happen in a slightly weirder reality than her own. It just seemed like a big leap to take, and I don't see the value in taking it.

And that messed up finale is just part of why I thought this season was a bit disappointing. When it was working, it was as funny as the show's ever been, with three really great comedic actors playing very well off each other and getting into some truly exciting and amusing capers. The supporting cast featured great guests both returning and new, such as Olympia Dukakis and Stacy Keach. When the show knew what it was doing, it was a heck of a lot of fun. But some of the time it just didn't seem to know what it was doing. Part of what was neat about the show in the first place was how it just played off hardboiled crime stereotypes by taking familiar case concepts and having them get solved by a pretty unlikely detective in the innocent, pleasant Jonathan Ames. That he often got to do so while getting high with a depressed independent comic artist and an eccentric older gentlemen added to the fun.

But that aspect of the show seemed somewhat sidelined this year, as both Zach Galifianakis and Ted Danson seemed to get a lot more to do than Jason Schwartzman despite him being the theoretical character. Danson's performance was definitely off the charts this year, but I like the show more when it's a play on detective stories and not a light-hearted drama about a man trying to come to terms with his selfishness and be a better father and lover. Several story threads lasted for multiple episodes, and there just wasn't enough space for what the show started as in the first place. I'm all for TV series evolving over time, but a lot of the stories weren't interesting enough to displace the core concept as much as they did. It's still a fun show, but there were a lot of small issues this season that got capped off by a major one. The show's ratings are abysmal on Monday night so I don't know if it will be back, but I'm fine either way at this point. I'd like to see more, but 24 episodes is nothing to sneeze at for something this odd.

Hugo

2011-11-28T18:10:00.001-05:00

A lot of people were loudly skeptical when they heard that Martin Scorsese would be directing a 3D family movie, but for some reason I wasn't. The main things I thought were that his films are successful because they are well crafted, not because they're violent, and he is a strongly visual director, so he could probably handle the third dimension as well as anyone in the business. Both of these proved to be true when I saw Hugo, based on a book that weaves a small part of the real history of film into a nice story about a young boy who finally makes some friends.

Hugo Cabret is a young orphan who lives in the walls of a Paris train station, and is left to maintain the building's clocks on his own when his drunk uncle skips town. He's also trying to repair a broken automaton that his father found in a museum and was working on before he died, and his quest to do so introduces him to Ben Kingsley's character, the owner of a small toy shop in the station, and his adoptive daughter played by Chloë Moretz, who loves reading but has never seen a movie. He takes her to the theater, and shows her the automaton, and they eventually stumble into revelations that that bring the seemingly disparate elements of a broken robot and the love of film together.

Visually the film is pretty stunning, whether you see it in 3D or 2D, though I saw the former. The sets and costumes are impeccably gorgeous on their own, and the depth from the 3D further brings the world to life in a pretty incredible way. I was definitely more impressed than I was by Avatar. This movie proved to me that the argument that 2D film is inherently superior because it is more dreamlike is absolute garbage. The visuals in this movie make it seem almost like it's animation even though it was filmed with live actors, and they bring you into a fantasy setting that doesn't seem real, but much more imaginative and fun than that. I don't like the over-saturation of 3D in the theater market, because most films aren't made with it in mind and don't seem to really benefit from the process. But Hugo was made to be shown this way, and the effect is great at pulling you into this other place, in the same way that many people probably felt when they watched a movie for the first time.

In a funny way, that 3D thing does really well to tie into the idea of the dawn of filmmaking and the newness of the concept when the film takes place. It's a couple decades after the cinema had become commonplace, but the characters do a good deal of digging into the medium's origins, and a good portion of the running time is just devoted to celebration of the art form. Scorsese is a big proponent of film preservation and film in general, so it makes perfect sense for him to get attached to this concept, almost to the detriment of the main plot of the movie. There were some flaws with the movie that detracted from the overall good feeling I got from the experience. I thought Asa Butterfield's performance was a little uneven, and while I liked Sacha Baron Cohen's inspector character, he only seemed to be in the movie because the story needed an antagonist. I definitely liked him more when he was awkwardly trying to be friendly than when he was the villain rounding up orphans.

And for a family movie, I don't know how much kids would actually like it. A good deal of what's interesting about the film is referential to things they probably wouldn't understand, and it was neither terribly funny not terribly exciting most of the time. There were a couple really fun moments, but what I liked most about the movie was the setting it created, and pretty much every kid's movie is decent enough at that. But if you enjoy Scorsese as a filmmaker, and still have a sense of wonder, and an appreciation for the history of human entertainment, you'll probably like the movie a lot.

Movie Update 30

2011-11-26T09:27:00.001-05:00

Here are some Alfred Hitchcock movies! And a couple others too I guess!

Blackmail

Alfred Hitchcock's first sound film is a pretty decent one. It features a lot of elements that would become his signatures - normal people in great distress, tension building as the result of bad decisions, dramatic climaxes in famous locations. It also seems remarkably dark for the period, with the plot kicking into full gear as the result of murder to avoid a sexual assault. It still feels like a silent movie in some ways, with many scenes going on for ages with little happening, but Hitchcock shows a lot of ability in not just his first attempt at a sound picture, but one of the first ever.

Chicago

Chicago is a pretty poor choice for Best Picture, not just in its year but probably most. Laughable, even. But it's not a bad movie. I have a feeling the voters wanted to give the award to a musical again, and the most acclaimed one since Cabaret was a decent opportunity. It's actually sort of the opposite of that film stylistically, with most of its musical numbers being fantasies in the protagonist's head rather than regular performances at an actual music club, but that's not really terribly important. The plot is simple and I have no idea why I'm actually supposed to be sympathetic with Renée Zellweger's character, and some of the pieces being a bit simple for the medium of film. But the acting is pretty good and there's an energy to the movie that's enjoyable to watch. Definitely not bad.

Easy Virtue

An even earlier Hitchcock movie, still stuck in the silent era, and unfortunately this one doesn't show a whole lot of skill from the Master. My main problem with the movie is that nothing happens in it. It begins with a woman going through a messy divorce, and then she meets a new man somewhere else, but eventually her past catches up to her. There's nothing really interesting about any of it, the fallout isn't exactly dramatic and the movie doesn't even really seem to care if you're sympathetic or not. All it really seems to be saying is that women shouldn't do inappropriate things if they want to be happy. Which uh... okay?

Foreign Correspondent

Released the same year as Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent isn't as good, but it's still a solid example of what Hitchcock could pretty much do in his sleep. A reporter gets caught up in a web of spying and secrets that could eventually lead to a World War (paralleling the one that was actually happening), but his ability to tell the truth is compromised when he falls for a girl who's a little too close to the conspiracy. It's one of the weaker American films I've seen by him, but I eventually warmed up to it, especially after its surprisingly exciting climax. It's really more comedic than his work tends to be, maybe because Joel McRea is the lead, and it took me some time to adjust, but it's a fine little international caper.

Rumble Fish

Boy, Francis Ford Coppola's post-70s career is hard to get a bead on. It almost seems like he's a different person. A lot like Tetro, Rumble Fish is a black and white film with splashes of color that partially exists to examine the director's own relationship with his older brother. Matt Dillon plays a young punk who looks up to his brother, played by Mickey Rourke, and who has difficulty finding a way to fit in with the world around him. He hangs out with friends at a pool hall, gets into gang fights, and treats his girlfriend played by Diane Lane like crap. Eventually things start going badly for him, and I can't say I really minded. It's just kind of a weird movie, but some parts worked well enough that I wasn't bored.

Deadhouse Gates

2011-11-25T09:41:00.000-05:00

It ended up taking me most of a year to read this book, but that was more because I've been short on free time and reading tends to take a backseat when that happens, and less because I didn't like it. I ended up liking it probably more than the first book in the series, though it again took a while to really get into anything resembling a groove. It features four returning characters, but they only occupy two out of six or so main story threads, with the rest focusing on new faces, and again it's quite a bit of time before most of them seem to start connecting and involving themselves in something that could be called a plot.

It's hard to say whether this struggle early on in the books is a fault of Steven Erikson's writing or if it's just my failure to consistently read them, but usually I can only focus on doing so when I can tell what's happening and am enjoying it. Compared to some other series I've read, The Malazan Book of the Fallen can be pretty obscure. Your eyes can glaze over an entire paragraph if there are too many strange words in it, and if anything really happens in that paragraph, you can struggle with understanding it for a while. But when it works it works really well. I know the series gets weird with its chronology later on, but Deadhouse Gates is a straight sequel to Gardens of the Moon, and it expands on ideas from that book without necessarily requiring you to have just read it. The book uses some pretty dark and violent imagery to effective sell the significance of its events, and at some point it really does get gripping with me reading the last hundred pages in a couple hours. 11 months is definitely too much time to spend on a single book, but I'm prepared to blame that on myself and say I want to continue reading the series.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

2011-11-21T18:09:00.000-05:00

I'm really curious how close this game is to what it would have been had Jason West and Vince Zampella not been fired by Activision and taken a lot of the higher level talent at Infinity Ward with them. Was the plan for the game already in place, or did the people left behind have to come up with the whole thing? If there was a plan, how detailed was it? I'm curious because I had fun with the game, but it doesn't do much besides meet the standards of the previous ones without bringing much new to the table. This is the fifth Call of Duty game in this style in as many years, and both the formula and the graphics engine are feeling a little old at this point. At full capacity, might Infinity Ward have brought their A game and raised modern military shooters to a new level? Or was Modern Warfare 3 always destined to be yet another solid Call of Duty game?

There's nothing really wrong with that, I'm just not sure that I need to play many more of them. Modern Warfare 3 has everything you'd expect and little you wouldn't. There's a campaign that will last you five to six hours which features lots of dramatic explosions and firefights. The Spec-Ops mode returns with plenty of new missions and a survival mode, because every multiplayer shooter needs a survival mode. And there's the traditional online which feels basically the same with a few tweaks and additions. If it's worth it to you, there's nothing really wrong with the package. It's just that it's a very familiar package by now.

One thing in the campaign's favor is that it actually manages to bring the overloaded plot of the Modern Warfare sub-series to a mostly satisfying conclusion, as long as you're okay with the series' practice of resolving story threads by killing off every character involved in them. It seems like shooters are always trying to outdo each other now, and MW3 definitely tries to build that excitement by going as big as possible, essentially portraying what a modern World War III would look like. On one hand you'll be playing alongside familiar characters from the first couple games, chasing down the series' biggest villain, but on the other you'll be hopping all over the place, fighting battles in familiar locations and very extreme conditions. You'll start by saving New York City's harbor from a Russian naval fleet, and then hop to various hotspots all over Europe with your squad of celebrity voice acted comrades. At times the plot justifications for each new location will seem thin, but when all you really want is to shoot bad guys and see exciting stuff happen all around you, it tends to work really well. I don't really buy that Russia would be able to cause this much trouble for the US and Europe all by themselves, but it's an easy thing to let slide. The series' ability to create unique, memorable moments is certainly a boon, as it makes the campaign seem a lot more noteworthy than the one in Battlefield 3, despite featuring similar gameplay and a less technically advanced presentation. The Uncharted series might be the only one that pulls off huge spectacle better in the world of action games.

Not everything is great, though. In what might have been a constraint due to the labor issue surrounding the game's creation, you sure spend an awful lot of time in the campaign driving or riding in vehicles instead of moving on your own. It's not that these sequences are boring, but most shooters use vehicles as a way to occasionally change the pace a bit, and here it seems like a design crutch for when they needed you to kill a lot of guys without finding a more clever way to do it. They did manage to avoid the sort of frustrating choke points that have frequently plagued the series in the past, but instead the game seemed almost too easy on regular, until the final mission which ended up being pretty annoying. You gotta get the bad guy! You only have three minutes! But there's a ton of guys between you and him and they can all shoot you with deadly accuracy the second you leave cover! Go faster! No, slow down and let yourself heal! There are better ways to make a conclusion dramatic than the way they handled it. It seemed odd that some of the biggest twists in the story involved a new character that we didn't have time to really learn much about, and it's hard to be shocked by anything the series does anymore. In the past the series has effectively used the deaths of characters to create memorable moments, but when you get the point where you basically assume everyone is a goner, it stops seeming special.

Also, I'll be honest - I haven't tried the other modes. Battlefield's larger, objective-based multiplayer is more interesting to me, and most of my time is being taken up by other games anyway. Some of the things they've added like ways to get bonuses in multiplayer without being skilled enough to earn a kill streak seem neat, and Spec-Ops was pretty fun from what I played before. I know some people only care about Call of Duty for the online, but I bought it because I wanted to see the end of the Modern Warfare story, and I'm pretty sure I got that. It wasn't exactly a unique or inspirational game, but it was a fun one, packing plenty of interesting moments and enjoyable gunfights into the amount of time it lasted. I'd like to see the series do something really different before I try picking it up again, but it's hard to complain about this as a temporary send-off.

Robot Chicken - Season 5

2011-11-20T09:27:00.000-05:00

I guess this was the year I got tired of Robot Chicken. This season won't finish airing until early next year, but the whole thing is already on DVD, and I rented it on Netflix so I know what's up. And yeah... I was watching it, and waiting for it to make me laugh, and it just didn't really happen. There's a few things about the show that have always been abrasive, and gotten in the way of what works about it. It relies on violence an awful lot, and that seemed particularly true this year, with many sketches lacking any real punchlines at all, resorting to just going through various action/thriller/horror cliches with out of place characters in hopes that the novelty would be enough. But it's not really novel anymore. There have been 100 episodes of this, and I'm not even counting the Star Wars specials. A lot of the other humor is just unusual swearing that never seems particularly memorable, or typical gross-out stuff. In the past the show has been clever when the writers really tried, but I'm not really seeing that effort anymore. And the frat mentality is there more than ever. One thing I did like was the season finale, which actually turned the intro featuring a cyborg chicken and his malevolent creator into a story, but even that couldn't avoid certain issues. Seriously, if I have to hear one more "my one weakness!" joke any time soon, I'm gonna flip out. I don't know if they plan on bringing the show back, but if they do, I don't think I'll be making sure to catch it every time a new episode's on.

Rango

2011-11-19T10:11:00.000-05:00

I had heard that Rango was a good animated movie for people besides little kids, but I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. It's probably the best non-Pixar American animated movie I've seen since The Iron Giant, which is a lot of qualifications, but it's still a solid accomplishment. It's definitely not a movie designed to appeal directly to children; I'm sure plenty would like it, but the story and characters have enough maturity and older-skewing references built into them to make it probably appeal more directly to someone with at least more knowledge of the history of film. There's a lot of Western character archetypes and homages to a bunch of different sources, the stuff that's supposed to be fun for parents who brought their kid to the theater. It goes beyond that here, though. The whole movie seems more designed with the parent in mind than the kid.

Again, not that I don't think kids would like it at all. It's a pretty silly movie in places, and not very difficult to follow. I just thought it was aimed at me more than I expected it to be. The cast is pretty outstanding and varied, with the right idea being used when the voices were picked - they do use celebrities you've heard of, but they're cast to play characters, not to be famous and recognizable. I know Johnny Depp at least was moving around on a set to help create the character, and his Rango is pretty loveable. He's a pet iguana who ends up stranded in the desert and meets up with a small community of wild animals who are struggling to find water. There's a love interest played by Isla Fisher, and a cute little girl played by Abigail Breslin, and a wise but suspicious authority figure played by Ned Beatty. It could pretty much have been a live action Western with the same general characters and worked the same, and that's what's interesting about it. The animation enhances the movie though, providing great opportunities for little moments of humor and some pretty spectacular action sequences. There's just something about complete freedom and control of moments of excitement that really brings out the potential of the form. It's kind of a simple and predictable story, but it works because of the solid humor and charming cast. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it dethroning Pixar in the Best Animated Feature race early next year.

South Park - Season 15

2011-11-17T18:23:00.000-05:00

I'm at a crossroads with South Park, as I am with a number of other shows. It used to be I could just pick a show I'm interested in and watch every single episode, but now that I'm working full time it's harder to justify that. There has to be something more to keep me watching, or else I might have to stop watching a show before it actually ends its run on television. I've already done it a few times, and I'm sure I'll do it again. It doesn't take a lot for a show to stay in my rotation - all it has to do is be consistently very entertaining, or compel me to stay interested in its plot or characters. South Park does very little in the way of ongoing character development or story elements, so it has to rely on the former, and I'm not sure South Park does that. With the news that the show will continue to keep running through at least 2016, should I keep watching, or should I stop while I'm ahead and be glad to have gotten 15 mostly enjoyable years out of it?

The problem with the show now is that in its heyday, South Park was special because it was shocking and original. Both of which are hard to maintain after being on the air for over a decade. It's not that the show is afraid to tackle delicate current events, now - it was pretty much expected for them to react to the Penn State scandal, and they did so last night with a character who constantly cracked inappropriate jokes about it. It's just we're so used to their lampooning of pop culture what's in the news that it's not really fresh anymore. It eventually falls to our affection for the characters to keep us watching, and they're still an entertaining group, and there were actually a few episodes that teased at doing something different with them, like the cliffhanger where Stan's parents separate (again) or the one where Cartman has to move on from his doll collection. But while I enjoyed most of this season's episodes, I'm not sure if I still care enough to keep watching, especially when I know there definitely isn't any sort of end goal in sight. It's not like it's a terrible sacrifice to give up a half hour on fourteen Wednesday nights every year though, so I guess we'll see how I feel later on.

Squidbillies - Season 6

2011-11-15T18:13:00.001-05:00

Another year goes by, and Squidbillies trucks along as strong as ever. It's hard to really compare different seasons of the show, because the division is meaningless. A new season just means another batch of episodes, and each episode is pretty much the same concept. Early will be an asshole, the people around him will be hurt because of it, and there will be some slight satire of certain cultural or political concepts involving the south. It's a basic formula, and it works because it's consistently funny and that's all it has to be. I'm coming to appreciate how good of a character Early is - he's possibly the most despicable television protagonist there is, hateful and ignorant and moronic and violent. And yet he's just so damn amusing that you love him anyway. It's partly the writing, which always finds new twists on some combination of those characteristics, and it's partly Unknown Hinson's consistently brilliant voice acting. I don't think there's a sentence in the English language he couldn't at least make partly amusing if he wanted to.

This was also a good season for the sheriff, although most of them probably are, because he tends to get the most good material besides Early and maybe Rusty. Granny definitely gets a lot more jokes, but they're usually pretty easy ones based on stuff we already know about her, while the sheriff's always optimistic take on things seems fresher for some reason. There's nothing much I particularly want to point out, other than this Sunday's season finale about transporting illicit cargo with high speed truck chases might have made me laugh out loud more than any other episode of the show, which I find consistently entertaining but rarely elicits actual chuckles for me. Mostly I just smile at the wordplay and cleverly deployed violence. For what it's worth, Squidbillies has been the better of the two shows that David Willis works on for a couple years now. It's a similar situation to Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy and American Dad! - the former is more popular with America and is maybe saddled with certain expectations, while the latter is able to do its own thing and is much more consistently funny for it. Squidbillies is not anything close to a world changing show, but it's a really enjoyable one, and that can be enough.

Movie Update 29

2011-11-14T18:14:00.001-05:00

Well, here we are again.

The Castle of Cagliostro

Hayao Miyazaki's first film as a director, before Studio Ghibli was a thing, is based on the Lupin III television series he worked on, which was based on a manga created by Monkey Punch, which was inspired by the Arsène Lupin character created by Maurice LeBlanc. The film's plot is also based on one of the original Lupin stories. So yeah, there's a lot of adapting going on here. Cagliostro is a lighthearted action adventure about Lupin and his buddies stumbling on the world's biggest counterfeit currency operation in one of its smallest countries, and trying to both thwart their plans and rescue a princess at the same time. I've only seen a bit of the show, but it doesn't take much of that to get familiar with the principal characters, and they all show up here and have fun little parts to play. It's a simple movie, but there's a nice energy to it, a reasonable amount of excitement in the twists and turns, and like all works by Miyazaki there's a nice feeling to the animation, which isn't the most fluid ever but does what's required to set the right tone. It's kind of a standard adventure movie, but it's a well executed one.

Killer's Kiss

Not Stanley Kubrick's first feature film, but the first that's readily available for public consumption. It's also his weakest that I've seen. There's nothing very bad about the movie, but there's just not much to it. A boxer meets up with a dancing girl, and they try to leave the city and start a life somewhere, but her crook of a boss isn't a fan of the idea. It's a pretty bare-bones noir story, with the only thing that really makes it work being Kubrick's great photography. There's lots of great little shots that stick out as distinct for the era, including use of reflections, some stuff with shadows that I haven't really seen before, and a memorable conclusion in an unusual setting. There's not much to the characters though, and the tacked-on ending doesn't really work. Its only real use is to show the potential Kubrick had for his work later on.

The Killing

The very next year Kubrick made this, his first really good movie. It actually feels a bit less distinctly his than Kiss, but it's certainly a lot more fun to watch, and might actually be the most purely enjoyable movie he ever made. In one of the few instances I can think of of him using an actor more than once, he has Sterling Hayden as the main character, a criminal trying to pull off one last job, robbing the take at a horse track, with a complicated scheme that involves multiple people both inside and outside the place. It's a pretty good plan, though there's also a lot of moving parts, and of course things get screwed up and the situation eventually gets pretty hairy. There's a lot of build up, and the pay off when it all starts falling into place is pretty great. Stylistically, there's not much in the movie that wouldn't be in another noir movie from the period. But it's also just a really good example of the genre, and sometimes that's all you need to be successful.

The Tree of Life

This is a film about life, and growing up, and pretty much everything that entails. I said before that I imagine a film by Terrence Malick entirely in his reflective/observing-nature's-beauty mode might get tedious, and that's somewhat true here, but the film is so beautiful and poignant that it's hard to be really bothered by the slow bits. The film isn't exactly in chronological order, but what it's basically about is Sean Penn remembering his youth growing up with his parents and two brothers, and also experiencing some sort of vision of the birth of the universe and what possibly lies beyond it. It's a staggeringly gorgeous movie at times, especially in the scenes showing the early moments of existence, with visuals that avoid computer animation in favor of more natural means. The more normal stuff looks great too, though it's mostly just people walking through houses or the woods. Brad Pitt plays his father, and does a really great job making him into a terrible dad that should really be feared and despised without being over the top about it. Just the way he touches his sons on the neck is enough to establish that loving parenting doesn't come naturally to him. I don't think the movie needed a name like Penn to play the adult version of the main character though - he doesn't really do much acting besides walking around and looking at things. The Tree of Life is a bit ponderous and in love with itself at times, but what it does right is memorable and unique enough to make the film worth watching, especially if you're a fan of film as a visually artistic medium.

Hanna

2011-11-13T10:38:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed Hanna, but it was a film that relied on its style alone more than almost any I've seen in a long time. Director Joe Wright is known for his serious period dramas, but Hanna is very different. It's an action movie; a revenge thriller where the protagonists are always on the run and trying to get back at the person who wronged them years ago. Eric Bana is a former CIA operative who has been raising his daughter played by Saoirse Ronan in the woods, and training her her whole life for one mission, to kill a woman from the same organization responsible for her mother's death. Hanna is not only a very adept hunter and fighter, she's also unusually strong for her age and fluent in many languages. The secretive nature of her past and larger-than-life skill set hint toward the inevitable plot revelations, ones I won't spoil here but which are pretty easily guessed at and honestly not kept all that secret.

I think if I played fewer video games, I might have enjoyed the story of Hanna more. But as it is, the concepts it deals with are very familiar to anyone who's spent some amount of time with the kind of outlandish stories that games trade in, or just pulpy genre fiction in general. The craft with which the film is made doesn't discount the familiarity of what it's doing. I also wasn't really thrilled by the subplot where Hanna learns what life outside the forest is like and comes to regret her upbringing, which is another idea that's very familiar and is hard to make interesting anymore. Also, while Bana and Ronan are both good in the movie, I really didn't like Cate Blanchett's work as the villain. The American accent she put on was pretty terrible, and the character in general wasn't as interesting as the movie wanted her to be.

Where the movie succeeds though is definitely in the presentation. Wright definitely has a handle on action, creating some memorable sequences that don't rely on super fast cutting to be exciting, and he knows what he's doing in the personal scenes as well. Two moments that definitely stood out were a pair of long takes that were gripping for their entire duration, even though I'm sure I spotted where a cut was masked in one of them. Apparently they're a trademark of his, and while most people can hold a camera in one place for a while or even move it through a crowd, it takes a lot of effort to shoot scenes like this in that style. It definitely reminded me of Children of Men, even though they weren't quite that impressive. Elsewhere, I generally liked the look of the film, even if the use of color was a bit over the top and places, and the score by The Chemical Brothers was as interesting as promised. Hanna is certainly a flawed movie, but it's a unique one, certainly worth a watch if you like to see a different take on the action genre.

The Heart, She Holler

2011-11-12T12:43:00.000-05:00

Well, that was pretty great.

The Heart, She Holler was a six episode miniseries on Adult Swim, created by PFFR, the same people who brought us Xavier: Renegade Angel and Wonder Showzen. So two things about it were pretty much be guaranteed: it would be totally disturbing, and pretty damn funny. And Holler was definitely both. It begins when the head of the Heartshe family, rulers of the town Heartshe Holler, dies, and leaves his inheritance to his son, who he had previously kept secret, hidden in a cave behind a wall. That son is played by Patton Oswalt, and after he learns how to dress and say "hot dog" and gets his penis swapped with his father's through a misunderstanding, tries to run the town while coping with his own insecurities and the meddling of his power hungry sisters; one who can read minds and has other mysterious powers, and another played by Kristen Schaal who will sleep with anything that movies and his pretty impressive physical strength.

That that summary only begins to describe the insanity of The Heart, She Holler should say plenty. There's plenty of gross moments, including repeated references to incest and bizarre imagery like a wall socket being connected to some sort of intestine, but the show doesn't just rely on shock value to get laughs. It's mostly a bunch of insane rambling, but it's clever insane rambling, and running jokes like the former patriarch's seemingly infinite supply of instructive video will VHS tapes and the tons of jabs at religion and insular southern towns keep it from relying on disgust to drive the story. The whole thing barely lasts over an hour, and by the end I was wishing there was more to see, especially because of the distinct lack of closure in the ending, even though describing what came before as a plot would be very generous. It's well cast, funny, and just has the right amount of horror to definitely be a PFFR creation. If you're really into alt comedy, it's definitely worth seeing.

X-Men: First Class

2011-11-09T18:22:00.002-05:00

When you think about it, this was a pretty remarkable year for films based on Marvel comics. No real classics, but they effectively build up The Avengers for next year, and they managed to put out three films without any of them stinking, or even being less than pretty good for summer action blockbusters. X-Men: First Class might be my favorite of the three, not just looking at the whole X mythology in an interesting way, but being the second best X movie that's ever been released.

At this point, the whole continuity of the X movie franchise is pretty messed up. The Wolverine movie probably did the most damage, but the whole thing is fraught with issues arising from recasting and changing things that needed to be changed. As a way of pushing a big reset button, First Class mostly works while still acknowledging what's been done before for the most part. It shows the early lives of Professor X and Magneto, depicts them becoming friends during a conflict that alerts major governments to the existence of mutants, and sets the stage for their antagonistic relationship that defines the rest of the series. It doesn't do all this perfectly, but it gets the job done, and considering how little time Matthew Vaughn and his cast and crew had to put it together, I think it's fairly impressive work.

The best part of the movie is very easily the development of Erik and Charles as characters and as friends, and it's what the whole movie builds from. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender both give very good performances, especially considering it's a comic book movie, and there's a real camaraderie that builds and a sadness when their relationship inevitably turns sour. The other stuff isn't as good, but it isn't too bad either. Kevin Bacon and January Jones play Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost, the leaders of the Hellfire Club, are the main villains who want to start a nuclear war and create a paradise for mutants in the aftermath. Tying the main external conflict of the film into the Cuban Missile Crisis is a pretty clever move, and it works to ground the story in a period of history and play around with what we already know. There's not much else to the plot that isn't maneuvering to get characters in place for where they should be later, but there doesn't really need to be.

A good deal of time is spent with the main characters working with some members of the CIA to essentially create an early version of Xavier's school for mutants, with some familiar faces and characters new to the movies both getting introduced. One of the best single moments in the film comes from the recruitment montage, where Charles and Erik find a certain popular X-Man and get a rude response from. Otherwise, the whole training and preparing thing kind of slowed down the movie a bit, and none of the new mutants or their little subplots were particularly interesting. In general, the script definitely feels a bit thrown together, with a climax that goes on for a while but doesn't always have a clear purpose, and a few silly bits that took me out of the story. But as I said, the central story of Xavier and Magneto definitely works, and resulted in a pretty good movie. I'm definitely more interested in more of this than another Wolverine movie.

Battlefield 3

2011-11-08T20:03:00.001-05:00

Since Battlefield 2 was released in 2005, the series has seen plenty of games get released, but it is only now that we're getting a new numbered one. Battlefield 3 seems to be both a return to the series' roots, and also a culmination of the changes it's gone through since 2 came out. It combines a lot of the strengths of the original games with some of the improvements by offshoots like Battlefield: Bad Comapny, resulting in a product that seems like the end result of years of tweaking and experimenting, and is being positioned and marketed to take on big bad Call of Duty for leadership in the modern military shooter market. I don't think 3 will do better than its competition, but at least it's a pretty fun game.

Originally, Battlefield was all about online multiplayer, allowing up to 64 players to split up into teams and take each other on in huge maps filled with a variety of outdoor locations, peppered with various structures for hiding in and vehicles to drive. The first game took place during World War II, but the second main release brought things to the modern day and added in squads, which allowed for closer teamwork and a more direct sense of having a goal in these gigantic marathon battles. The online in 3 is pretty much like this, though they've taken a number of additions from the Bad Company games like more frequent and incremental unlocks rather than getting a new weapon every once in a while, and the Rush mode which can be a nice breather from Conquest. The game feels more up-to-date than Battlefield 2, with some streamlining in effect like the removal of a commander for each army and the paring down of the number of available classes, and a more rewarding progress system without any of the annoyances of other popular contemporary features like kill streaks that unfairly reward players that are already better. Yes, players who have played for a long time are going to have better guns, but it doesn't seem significant enough to really impact gameplay.

I haven't sunk more than a few hours into the multiplayer, but it definitely seems to live up to the legacy its predecessors cemented in my mind of being one of the most fun online shooters on the market. Some technical issues still need to be worked out, but the Battlelog web browser is a quick way to look up stats and other players, customize your options, and find matches, and the actual in-game stuff runs pretty well. If there's one thing that might impede the gameplay slightly, it's actually the quality of the graphics. On one hand they're very impressive, but on the other I'm wondering if the fidelity of the animations and lighting actually prevents me from spotting and taking on opponents in a timely manner. It's possible I just continue to suck at games, but more than once I felt that I would have been better served if the environment around the enemy wasn't so nice looking. There's also a co-op mode, which I haven't tried yet. It seems to remix encounters from the single player campaign, but I don't know how interested I am in that when the regular online is so consistently engaging.

Speaking of the single player, those graphics might be their greatest asset. Whatever flaws the story mode might have, at least it looks really nice while you're experiencing it. I can't really recall an experience that convinced me better that I was actually in a war zone, and it would have been better if I wasn't constantly staring at the back of someone else's head with the word "follow" written over it. From what I can tell, I might be one of the only people who really enjoyed the campaign at all. Its one cardinal sin in my mind is that it almost entire fails to take advantage of the fact that it's the campaign for a Battlefield game. For all their faults, the Bad Company campaigns felt like they belonged in the world of Battlefield. Encounters took place in relatively open areas, and could play out in a number of ways. You frequently had full control of vehicles and a couple decisions to make about how approach a situation. Battlefield 3's campaign plays like a Call of Duty campaign almost exactly. There are no sections with respawning enemies, but you're generally led from set piece to set piece, watching some cool things happen, taking part in relatively static battles, and once in a while getting to use a vehicle to experience something slightly different, but only in one mission do you really feel like you have much control. It's not that any of the missions were spectacularly bad, I just don't see how they benefited from taking this course of action. There were even specific dramatic story moments that felt extremely similar to moments from past Call of Duty games. I generally had fun playing the campaign, but there was something ultimately disappointing about it. And if DICE doesn't actually make a sequel to Mirror's Edge with this engine like they were clearly teasing at a certain point, I'll be kind of upset.

How you feel about Battlefield 3 sort of depends on what you want out of it. The campaign seemed to lack a certain something for most people, and if you were hoping for it to be something special you might be let down. But Battlefield has always been a series with a focus on multiplayer, and I know plenty of people will dive into that without even taking a single look at the single player. And I think from my experience with the online, it's certainly a worthy follow-up to Battlefield 2, maybe not overhauling the experience but refining it and making sure not to ruin it. As someone who enjoys a solid six hours of action and thinks the series does online firefights as well as any, Battlefield 3 isn't exactly a revelatory experience, but it's definitely one that I think was worth the investment. Even if having to download Origin to do so was kind of annoying.

Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

2011-11-07T18:04:00.000-05:00

I would have seen this sooner, but I'm no longer in the habit of paying for DVDs of movies I haven't actually seen yet and Netflix took their sweet time making it available for rental. The second part of Hideaki Anno's theatrical retelling of the Evangelion story satisfied me more than the first, covering more of the original series' plot and doing so in a less easily predictable way. There were some slight differences between the events of the first movie and the handful of episodes it covered, but they generally weren't significant enough to pay much attention too. They really took strides towards their promise of doing something different with You Can (Not) Advance though, introducing new characters, shuffling around their appearances, and changing certain memorable events in significant enough ways to produce even more major changes down the road. It's often just the little things, but the twists they add in make the project seem worthwhile rather than just a way to cash in on the franchise's large number of fans.

If you don't already like Evangelion, I don't think anything about this movie will change your mind. It's definitely made for people who already know what the story is about. There's a certain feel to the proceedings that make them a bit esoteric, where it's much easier to follow what's going on if you've already seen the several hours of episodes that the less-than two hour film summarizes. It results in a film that's a lot of fun for certain people, but probably wouldn't play to a larger audience very well. Personally, it's hard to be bothered too much by that - I'm aware that the structure of the story doesn't fit the traditionally acceptable mold for a feature film, but I also don't care so much because it's really interesting to see these familiar events play out in a slightly altered way and with significantly higher production values. The animation and art design in general on these films is top notch, and with the right appreciation for the medium you might get something out of them even if you have no idea what's going on otherwise. The frequent fan-service is a distraction, but not enough to keep the movie from being the most enjoyable animated film I've seen in a little while. I know it's going to be another long wait before we get the last two movies, but I guess I can live with that.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

2011-11-06T17:44:00.000-05:00

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune managed to successfully blend together third person shooting and traversal-based platforming into something that was coherent and mostly fun to play, but it was the kind of thing where most people saw it as untapped potential. That potential was pretty much fully exploited in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which greatly improved the graphics, environmental sophistication, dynamism of the plot, and basically everything about the gameplay to be better, creating a unique and exciting shooter that could pull off large, spectacular events like few games even attempt. Really only the God of War series goes for the same concept of the environment changing around you like Uncharted does. It allows its shooting mechanics, which are a bit less solidly formed than some other games, to pass by without too much scrutiny, and makes just seeing what happens next as thrilling as actually playing the game. Uncharted 3 had a different goal - not to capitalize on potential, but to live up to a beloved classic. It's a goal that the game mostly succeeds at, though not without a couple bumps.

For better or worse, Drake's Deception is pretty much a second take on the same concept as the second game - let you play as a guy who trots all over the world, looking for clues, crossing dangerous gaps, shooting every bad guy in sight, and escaping from very dangerous and exciting predicaments. The story has a slightly different focus, feeling like the slightly darker sequel that series sometimes experience, but never veering too far from the lighthearted adventure tone we've gotten used to. A lot more time is spent developing the friendship between Nate and his mentor Sully, instead of leaning towards his romantic interests. It's just as well, since that part of the story plays out in pretty much the same way it did in the first two games. The plot even goes back in time on occasion, to show a much younger Nate, which provides a neat gameplay twist and some illuminating character development. The villain is also different this time, relying less on trying to beat Nate into submission and more on deceiving and outsmarting him. The cat and mouse is fun, though it falls by the sideline after a while.

In general, the last third of the game feels a bit rushed. It takes a more personal approach, showing the hardships and isolation he goes through, something we aren't really used to with this series, and I kind of missed the fun of him having his buddies around. It also results in the ending being undercooked, as we don't really fully learn what the villains are really up to or the meaning of certain plot elements. It's a bit disappointing to feel that way about the end of the game, but the benefit of the game not wearing out its welcome balances it out a bit. In the first two games I was definitely tired of the combat by the last couple chapters and ready for it to be over. That wasn't really the case here, as Uncharted 3, while having a couple annoying moments like every shooter ever made, managed to finish without it become a major burden. The changes to the gameplay from the second game are mostly small tweaks - Nate can now throw back grenades enemies toss at him, and it's less of a hassle to pick up ammo, and in general the encounters do a slightly better job of creating unique scenarios that play to the series' strengths. The platforming and puzzle solving are pretty much the same as they've always been - not too tough, but engaging enough that you look forward to them when they pop up. The game doesn't have any annoying forced stealth sections, which is nice, and they improved on the melee combat, occasionally making you take on groups, letting you worry about guys coming from multiples directions and make use of objects near you for more damaging blows.

And technically, the game is just outstanding. Even when things aren't going crazy, they look amazing. The textures and lighting are fantastic, Drake's dynamic running animations are more natural than ever, and the facial animations look better than ever. And when things do crazy, it's always impressive and memorable. Floating docks and boats rocking in the waves, entire structures turning sideways as you run through them, the ground collapsing underneath you, the plan sequence that it's unfortunately impossible to be spoiled on - these sequences both look incredible and provide gameplay experiences that other games just don't have. Fundamentally, there's not a big difference between climbing a fence and climbing the netting of a cargo truck hanging out the back of a plane, but just the feeling each one evokes is distinctly different. It's just a fun world to run around in, one made more fun by the memorable musical score and great voice acting by the familiar cast, which continues to grow and help create a very enjoyable story.

The single player is a great eight hour experience, that in my mind measures up to the general very high level of quality of the second game, and surpassing it in someways. The multiplayer is also a lot of fun, and helps extend the life of the game. I played through the entire co-op adventure mode with a friend, which was a nice, rewarding challenge, and also tried some other co-op stuff which was a good deal of fun. I didn't actually try any of the competitive stuff, but that stuff never interests me as much anyway. Uncharted 2 will probably be remembered better in the future for being new and original, but Uncharted 3 definitely deserves a spot alongside it as one of this generation of gaming's best action adventures.

Movie Update 28

2011-11-05T12:02:00.000-04:00

These are some pretty runty-ass movies! They weren't bad, though.

The Good German

I've only seen two films by Steven Soderbergh, which both happened to be very populist and not terribly original. But he's known as a very experimental filmmaker, at least by Hollywood standards, and even if you don't like The Good German very much, you have to admit it's ambitious. I ended up enjoying its modern day take on lots of old noir tropes, but more interesting than the film itself is the way it is dedicated to the style of the period. It's in black and white, and more than that the way it was filmed is very much the traditional old way, with old cutting and old blocking and everything. It doesn't really actually look like it was made in the 40s, because of the lighting, and because of the weird disconnect with the very modern standards of sex, violence, and language. I don't understand the point of going this far with replicating a look without replicating a tone as well. But you can't say the whole thing isn't interesting. And I think George Clooney and Cate Blanchett make a good pair on-screen, anyway.

The Red Badge of Courage

A war film by John Huston, based on a book about a soldier in the Civil War who fears death and yet yearns to earn his own war wounds and be looked well upon by others. It's an odd movie for a couple of reasons, most notably the incredibly on-the-nose narration, which not only directly quotes the original novel but also addresses the audience in a weird, hitting-you-over-the-head kind of way. It definitely wasn't surprising that this was added by the studio against Huston's wishes, and that they also cut the film down to its scant 70 minute running time, which is hardly enough time to develop themes, especially when so much of that time is just Huston's (admittedly well shot) war scenes. There's the potential for a great 50s war movie in here, but it was lost between filming and release.

Tetro

Francis Ford Coppola's post-70s career is frustrating, showing little evidence that a man who could create a film as perfect as The Godfather still knows what he is doing. Tetro is interesting though, a more personal project than most of his other work, about a couple of estranged brothers who reunite in Spain. It's shown in black and white except for flashbacks, and shows the devastating effect certain actions can have on family ties. It's not exactly the most entertaining movie ever, but there's definitely some stuff going on here that you don't really see in most other movies. It's also really nice to look at, with some stylistic experiments and just really good cinematography throughout. Definitely the best thing I've seen by him that was released in the last 30 years.

Thor: Tales of Asgard

That cover is misleading; it shows a grown up Thor, but the film takes place in his more formative years, before Loki was evil, and before Odin even allowed him to venture out of Asgard. At least they didn't extend the lie far enough to show him holding the hammer. Tales of Asgard isn't much different from the other Marvel movies, being competently animated and telling a pretty standard story, although being Thor, it's less a typical sci-fi action plot and more a typical fantasy one. Thor goes on a journey with Loki, hangs with the warriors three, gets help from Sif, and accidentally gets into some bad shit with the frost giants. As a supplement to the live action film... it's fine. There's nothing terribly exciting about it, but it doesn't really mess up anywhere either. It's a way to pass 70 minutes if you like comic books, I guess.

Source Code

2011-11-03T18:14:00.000-04:00

Duncan Jones is now two for two with science fiction films that are well made and visually appealing, have intriguing concepts, and are entertaining to watch reach their conclusions. Although Jake Gyllenhaal's central performance isn't as gripping as Sam Rockwell's in Moon, which pretty much had to carry the entire film, he's good enough to lead a film that I otherwise thought was a little better in most other areas. When I first saw the trailer for Source Code, it seemed like a silly idea. They seemed to be depicting the main idea as a simulation of the last eight minutes of a train ride before it blew up, not actually altering events but observing them to figure out what happened. Gyllenhall's inability to grasp the concept of being unable to save the already-dead victims made him seem dull. It works a lot better in the actual film, when they lay out that he's actually being repeatedly projected into an alternate universe that the source code creates, rather than basically just watching a static event over and over again. Some bits that don't quite make sense are hand-waved away with simple catchphrases like "genetic mapping" or whatever, and they don't really go into how these parallel realities are actually created. But it's not hard science fiction, and as a way to set up a twisty, exciting thriller, it's more than enough.

I really liked Gyllenhaal's character, a military helicopter pilot who wrestles with trying to grasp the situation he's in, helping with the mission he's been given to help prevent a larger attack, and striving to find a way to save the train passengers, especially the girl played by Michelle Monaghan that he sits across from. She doesn't have a lot to work with, being stuck in the same eight minutes of plot as along with the other passengers, but she's cute and likable and pretty easy for Jake to fall for. His attraction contributes to his larger attempt to do more than just solve the attack, something which his handlers tell him he can't do but you become unsure of over time. Vera Farmiga plays his main contact in the real world, an operator who has to balance her duty with her obvious sympathy for his situation, and does a nice job with it. I was less pleased with Jeffrey Wright as the creator of the source code project, who is a bit too obviously evil and uses an odd gravelly voice, but he doesn't damage the film much. The plot has the expected twists and turns, and resolves in a way I quite liked examining angles of the concept in ways I wasn't expecting, and bringing the different story elements to a united conclusion. There's lots of really good imagery in the movie, stuff that seems simple but helps add up to the sort of movie that could have been a lot weaker, but manages to capitalize on its potential quite well. It's too bad that Jones says he only wants to make one more science fiction movie before stopping for a while, because he seems to have a real knack for pulling it off.

Resident Evil 5

2011-11-01T18:16:00.000-04:00

It's not really a surprise that Resident Evil 5 is not as good as Resident Evil 4. It's not an insult to say that either, because the latter is one of the best games to come out in the last decade. 5 takes the core gameplay and design philosophy from 4, and expands on it in a new setting in some ways that are interesting, and in other ways that will leave you scratching your head. It's probably a more ambitious game, but on occasion its reach exceeds its grasp. When it's just following up on what 4 did right, it's a perfectly serviceable action game. It gets sketchy in other places, but at least it never goes completely off the rails.

The biggest change to the series is pretty obvious; the entire game is designed to be played with two people. The first player controls Chris Redfield, a recurring hero of the franchise who's worked out quite a bit since the last time he was seen. The second player controls Sheva, his lithe but functionally identical partner during his mission in Africa, where a nefarious biological arms deal is going down. They support each other through the entire game; healing each other, saving each other from danger, sharing equipment, and working together to get past certain obstacles. Even if you're playing alone, Sheva will still be there, controlled by the AI. This is the way I played the game, as more than two years after the game came out I didn't like the odds of finding a reliable co-op partner on the PS3. For the most part, the single player mode works just fine. Sheva stays out of danger reasonably well and isn't overly wasteful with her ammo. There are some situations though where she's kind of a millstone, notably when it would be best for no one to use any bullets at all or when the correct strategy is to attack an enemy from two directions at once. And unfortunately, these situations seem to pop up more frequently as you continue through the story. I was genuinely annoyed by the execution of the one player mode on a couple occasions before I managed to get to the end. All things considered though, it could have easily been worse.

Besides the two protagonists, it's more or less more of Resident Evil 4. You work your way through African villages and swamplands, eventually reaching more unexpected areas and the inevitable top secret research laboratory near the end. I never really stopped to think too much about the whole race thing. It is a bit odd to be playing a game about shooting a bunch of African civilians, though to be fair they're fairly racially diverse and trying to kill you. There were definitely some weird choices that seemed to be the result of ignorance or insensitivity though, especially involving the more natively tribal enemies you eventually run across. Just looking at it as an action game about fighting zombie-like monsters though, as well as their many amorphous and/or insect-like allies, it does a pretty good job of keeping things fresh and reasonably challenging without getting too frustrating. I became less happy with the general design as things went on, though. A chapter taking place in an underground temple was interesting in theory but not especially well executed, and later they implemented some pretty sloppy cover mechanics and poorly thought out boss fights that the controls didn't really support. When you're just trying to stay out of arms reach of disorganized, mindless hordes, Resident Evil 5's controls are fine. When you have to worry about guys firing guns and coming at you from multiple directions though, it gets dicey. It's never too bad to stop the game dead, but it probably wasn't the best direction to take the second half of the game.

As far as bringing Resident Evil to the current generation, I think they did a good job. The graphics still look nice now, with some really good character modeling and animation, especially on the main characters. The sounds are very familiar if you've played 4, and still work effectively. The voice acting also is a bit less terrible than series fans are used too, though some characters are just wretched in that way where you can't tell if they were serious or not. The story attempts to connect the Las Plagas plot from 4 with the Umbrella and Wesker stuff that came earlier in the series, and does a reasonable job of doing so, though honestly the entire history of the series' fiction is some pretty silly, stupid stuff. It's a weird pastiche of supernatural and science and horror and action, and while I kind of enjoy the absurdity of it all, I would hesitate to believe anyone who claimed to know whether this was actually going anywhere or care that it did. It's flimsy justification to have a game where a couple of special forces guys fight zombies on motorcycles, giant pulsating piles of tentacles, and guys in trench coats who look like they walked off the set of The Matrix. And that's all it really needs to be. The Gold Edition packs a bunch of extra content, mostly all the downloadable stuff that was released in the period after the original game came out. I haven't actually dug into that stuff yet, but it certainly seems like plenty of value for the package. It would have been really hard for 5 to reach the classic status that 4 did, and it didn't reach that goal. But it's still an enjoyable game anyway.

Gangs of New York

2011-10-31T18:14:00.000-04:00

I'll be honest, I usually find historical epics to be pretty boring. Even the good ones could use some trimming. Leave it to Martin Scorsese though to create one that's gripping from the first second of its nearly three hour running time to the last. It tells the story of New York City before it became the mecca of human civilization it is today, when the streets still ran red with the blood of the many warring factions that vied for influence and their many victims. The film isn't a true story, but besides some embellishments it may as well have been. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio in his first of four collaborations with Scorsese as the son of an Irish immigrant and leader of the Dead Rabbits, and Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher, the man who killed him. It starts with a war between two gangs for control of Five Points, a district in the city where the poor make do. The extremely bloody battle sets the tone for the rest of the film, establishing its main characters and their later motivations, as the plot quickly jumps forward to when DiCaprio's character has grown up.

The two best things about the movie are easily Scorsese's direction combined with the amazing work done to recreate 1800s New York and capture it on film, and Day-Lewis' performance. You could pretty much cut the protagonist out of the film and it could just be a great story about a leader of both crime and community in a city as it slowly develops into something resembling modern society. That's not really to slight DiCaprio, that's just how good Day-Lewis is. There's just something cool about the place the film creates, filled with hard men with curly mustaches, top hats, and razors and knives tucked into their clothing. And he epitomizes it with his glass eye and inscrutable nature. You never know if he's going to cut your throat or give you a pat on the shoulder. DiCaprio has his romantic foil, played by Cameron Diaz, can't quite measure up to his work, though they're perfectly fine otherwise.

The supporting cast is fantastic too, featuring recognizable faces in a variety of roles, supporting various sides as they see fit. Liam Neeson brings plenty of gravitas to the couple scenes in the beginning where he plays DiCaprio's father, which lends weight to later scenes where Bill shows clear ongoing respect for his former foe. The small time crew DiCaprio runs with features Al Capone from Boardwalk Empire and D'Angelo from The Wire, and Brendan Gleeson and John C. Reilly give interesting performances as former allies of Neeson who may no longer agree with his ideas. The film isn't without problems, of course. The entire third act is pretty messy, as though the screenwriters lost momentum and had to basically force things to make sure they managed to check off all the plot details they needed to to reach their conclusion. And that conclusion, while thematically appropriate, does result in a rather unfortunate anticlimax of an ending. With Scorsese at the helm though, all of those individual scenes manage to be good if not great, and he makes the problematic ending work because it's very clear what they're going for. He just knows how to make great movies, and this is certainly one of them.

Movie Update 27

2011-10-30T10:08:00.001-04:00

Three movie posts in a row? What the hell is this?

Assault on Precinct 13

A pretty early John Carpenter film, which can be seen as a super violent action movie before super violent action movies were really a thing. It has elements of westerns and zombie movies, and tells the story of a few police officers and criminals defending a closed-down police station from a fraternity of gangs on the warpath. There are definitely bits of the movie I liked a lot, as it manages to build suspense and have some solidly exciting scenes despite a low budget. There are definite issues with the script though, which is a bit lean in some places and is filled with tough action dialogue that I could barely tolerate, especially for the lead good guy criminal. Stop being cute and act like a human being for five minutes, man.

Going My Way

A Best Picture winner starring Bing Crosby as a priest who comes to a new church and helps make it a nicer place, mostly by using his musical talent to keep it going and form a choir with its population of young boys. There's not really a lot of depth to the movie, but I found it mostly enjoyable. On occasion the musical numbers (it's not really a musical, but does have a lot of singing) seemed to go on a bit long, but in the end it's a nice tale of spirituality and kindness and whatever. I like Bing. Bing's a pretty cool dude.

Last Year at Marienbad

When people talk about incomprehensible foreign art films, this is basically exactly what they're talking about. Marienbad is a French movie about a man who tries to convince a woman that they had met and had an affair a year earlier at another place, and either he's making it all up or she just forgot somehow or she's deliberately pretending she doesn't know what he's talking about. The movie never really explains itself, and I don't think there really is a straight answer anywhere. It's not that the scenes don't follow or are made up of gibberish, it's just that it's really difficult to tell when things are taking place or where or what's real or if any of it is. I appreciated the great artistry that went into filming it, but I also can't say I really liked it. There's just no way to make heads or tails of it.

The Long Goodbye

My favorite classic film noir might be The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Robert Altman and Elliot Gould revived the character in the 70s with The Long Goodbye, moving him into that decade and highlighting the anachronism of a 40s hardboiled detective living in a then-modern LA. Some people don't like the way the movie plays with the genre or the deviations from the original novel, but I thought it was a mostly entertaining movie. It's also funny to see a very early appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger as a thug who doesn't have any lines. Not a traditional detective story, but I think it's an interesting one.

The Phantom of the Opera

You know, I always got the impression that the Phantom was supposed to be a sympathetic figure, like his horrible visage masked a kindness and he was only secretive because of a life of torment, or something like that. But he really isn't. He kidnaps a woman and basically tells her he'll kill everyone if she goes back to her boyfriend instead of staying with him. Not cool, dude. This version of the story from the 20s is probably the best known film version, and it's pretty watchable, though not terribly exciting now. Lon Chaney's makeup is pretty good, but there's not much about the movie that's really scary. Not much of the good imagery from other silent horror classics. Still, probably worth checking out.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

I guess there's some disappointment that when Billy Wilder makes a Sherlock Holmes movie that begins by teasing that its story will be surprising and possibly controversial, and the ends up just being a pretty normal Sherlock Holmes movie. In fact, the entire opening sequence where he lies about his sexuality to get out of a jam and which is the only thing that's truly original about the story, ends up being kind of a waste of time as it only barely plays into the rest of the film. It's not a big deal though, because it's a well paced, interesting mystery for Holmes and Watson to solve, with plenty of clues that seem odd at first but end up coming together to make a strange sort of sense. No Moriarty here, but we do have Christopher Lee as Mycroft, which is pretty delightful. Not an outstanding movie but a fun one. Not sure about the new Guy Ritchie sequel, though. Is it just me, or are none of the jokes in the previews actually funny?

Rome, Open City

Italian neorealism! Catch the fever! Open City is remarkable for its depiction of the late Nazi occupation in Italy only months after the war actually ended, and for how unflinching it is in depicting the period. They didn't experience some of the worst horrors of the war, but it sure wasn't fun to resist the Third Reich at any point during their reign. The film suffers a bit from Italians Yelling a Lot Syndrome, but it's a well crafted piece of historical fiction, and I'm still impressed by it following so soon after the actual events it tries to reflect. A solid way to help kick off an important film movement.

Movie Update 26

2011-10-28T18:15:00.001-04:00

Sometimes movies are all you really have to talk about, you know? You've got other stuff going on, but there they are. Movies.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

One of the original horror movies, and a pretty good one. Dr. Caligari is notable for its early use of a twist ending and famous for the abstract design of its backgrounds, but it would be pretty effective even without those. The story is a bit slight, but the movie tells a fairly entertaining tale about a Frankenstein-esque mad scientist and his murderous somnambulist creation. Some nice creepy images, and just a solid mood that would help lead to more sophisticated takes on the genre concept. An important silent movie that manages to be watchable.

My Darling Clementine

Another black and white John Ford western, though I really didn't like this one as much. It had some nice scenes, but it was mostly just kind of slow. Henry Fonda plays an amiable Wyatt Earp, but that's about it. It's the story of the OK Corral, with a lot of inaccuracies and changes that don't really improve the drama of the story or make it more interesting. Ford knows how to shoot movies, and for its age Clementine is well shot. But sometimes he just forgets to make a truly entertaining movie, and this is one of those times. I think Westerns are among the genres most hurt by being confined to 4:3 black and white boxes, and while it didn't bother me much with Stagecoach, I think it definitely was to this film's disadvantage. I would have liked to have seen how it would have turned out ten years later.

The Palm Beach Story

Like the other Preston Sturges movies I've seen, Palm Beach Story is kind of weird. It's more overtly weird though, in that the plot ends up being completely silly. It's a pretty normal screwball comedy featuring the guy from Sullivan's Travels and the girl from It Happened One Night, only their story is one of a marriage falling apart rather than one coming together. Of course things end up about how you'd expect for them, but the ending kind of throws that away with a kind of bizarre plot twist. Like other Sturges movies it has solid actors delivering a lot of fun dialogue very quickly, but there's not much else besides that.

Pierrot le Fou

Sometimes I wonder who determines whether a film will be internationally known by its original title or a translation. It took a few tries, but I found a Jean-Luc Godard film that I really like. Fou combines some elements from other work by him that I've seen, like the vibrant yet natural cinematography of Contempt and the existentialism and fourth-wall breaking of Breathless, but puts them in a story I actually found interesting. The star of the latter film and Godard's eventual ex-wife play a couple that runs away from their responsibilities and some Algerian gangsters with a bunch of their money. It's not quite as exciting as that sounds, but the course of their relationship is intriguing and it's just kind of a fun movie to watch. Definitely very French, but not in a bad way.

Movie Update 25

2011-10-24T12:38:00.001-04:00

Seems sometimes like all I do is watch movies. But that's not true.

Amarcord

One of two films by Federico Fellini I saw this weekend, and the first I've seen in color. It's more autobiographical than his other work that I've seen, and thus more prone to not actually having a plot. It shows the crisscrossing lives of many people living in a small Italian village over the course of about a year during Mussolini's time as dictator. It pokes a lot of fun at the politics at the time, when it's not just depicting small town living. It's a fairly amusing film, but it didn't really grab me. I'm not against simple slice of life stories, but for whatever reason I wasn't really drawn into this one. Nicely done, but not much impact.

Au Hasard Balthazar

A good way to depict suffering and cruelty is to inflict it on something that's completely innocent, and that's what Robert Bresson does in Balthazar. It shows the parallel lives of a young farm girl and her family's pet donkey, as they grow older and face the harsh realities of growing up and being subject to the whims of someone stronger than you. I focused mostly on the donkey, just because it's such a pitiable creature and it's hard to watch what people do to it just because they can. If you want a prime example of a foreign art house movie that shows what's wrong with humanity without hitting you over the head with it... well, here you are.

Rio Bravo

Rio Bravo was made as a response to High Noon, which some such as Bravo's star John Wayne saw as un-American. It has a similar premise of the sheriff of a small, dusty town facing the looming threat of a criminal preparing to come and cause trouble, but rather than asking the town he protects for help, he faces the threat head-on. Of course, he has a couple buddies who are even better with a gun than him, and in general the town just treats him better. I liked Rio Bravo about as much as High Noon. Its approach is different, but it's a more entertaining, if less intense Western. The cast is solid, and Howard Hawks' direction is spot on. I liked High Noon because it was different from most films of its type at the time, but there's value to something just being well made too.

Stagecoach

John Ford's first sound Western, and the breakthrough movie for John Wayne. Solid character actors like John Carradine and an Oscar-winning Thomas Mitchell appear as well in nice roles. A stagecoach tries to make it through Apache territory to a town where Wayne's Ringo Kid intends to face down the man who murdered his loved ones, but there's a marshal riding shotgun who wants none of it. Parts of the movie are a bit slow, including the ending, which took a bit too long to resolve all of its little plot threads. There's some really good stuff here though, with Ford's direction seeming to be ahead of its time. A long chase through the desert that makes the film's climax in particular is just a brilliantly done sequence, and is easily one of the best action scenes from the era. One of the most important movies in the genre.

La Strada

The other Fellini movie I saw, and my favorite work by him. It stars his wife Giulietta Masina again (or first, as this was made the year before Nights of Cabiria) as a slow but well meaning girl who gets sold by her mother to a traveling strongman after her sister who filled the same role dies. She shows obvious talent as a clown, but when the two join a circus and a conflict erupts between him and a fool, bad things start happening. It has a predictably morose ending, but the journey there is at times heartwarming and devastating. Comparisons have been made between Masina and Charlie Chaplin, and I definitely see it. She definitely has that physical comic sensibility, and her character is the naive sort that reminds you heavily of the Tramp. Really good performance, even if there's no scene as great as the end of Cabiria.

To Be or Not To Be

A comedy made during World War II, depicting a troupe of Polish theater actors that use their stage talents to try to sneak their way out of their city, which has been occupied by the Nazis. It's a delicate balance between making fun of Hitler and Germany without ignoring the truth of the situation, even if at the time the full extent of what they were doing wasn't known. Still, I think it works as a comedy and as something that could lift spirits in the face of a devastating war. Carole Lombard unfortunately died in a plane crash a couple months before this was released, but it would be a fitting final performance for just about anyone.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

2011-10-23T09:40:00.000-04:00

I really liked a lot of what The Witcher did, but some issues with its pacing and technical prowess prevented me from loving the game. This year's sequel isn't flawless, but it does address some of those problems, and really cements the series as one of the premiere action RPG franchises in gaming. Not every change was welcome, but I think overall Assassins of Kings is a better game than the original.

The game begins not long after the first ends, with Geralt protecting the king of Temeria during the siege of a castle. The game introduces you to its systems without much hand-holding, before things take a bad turn and you're more or less on your own again in a backwater town with not much equipment and even fewer friends. You can use a save file from the first game when you start off, though its greatest effect appears to be just giving you the nice equipment you had when you finished, with the actual consequences of your decisions being subtle if even present at all. I sort of like the way the game just throws you right into the thick of it, but they might have taken it too far by limiting the information on how you play it to small dialogue boxes on the side of the screen that disappear quickly and are easily missed in the thick of the exciting prologue. Thankfully the team added a proper, separate tutorial mode as part of a big free update last month, which I waited for and made the game's new systems a lot clearer.

The combat will be somewhat familiar to people who played the first game, though it's different enough that the tutorial is useful even for experienced players. You still have two swords; a steel one for men and a silver one for monsters, and you still have the five magic signs from before, with slightly altered mechanics. The different stances for different types of enemies are gone, replaced with a more action-oriented control style that lets you mix and match quick and strong attacks and move around much more freely. You also can equip various throwing knives, bombs, and traps, and use them more easily in combat than before. It definitely increases the skill required to play the game, especially since Geralt seemed kind of gimped early on until you unlock some abilities, such as ones that allow you to block attacks from any direction and do actual counter-attacks. I mostly stuck with the combat path as I leveled, though there are also the magic and alchemy paths if those interest you, which might require more forethought but are still viable. Changing the combat from basically a button-timing game to a system that requires more thought and twitch skill might not be welcome to everyone, but I thought it worked.

How much the game feels like a real RPG sort of depends on how much you want it to. I mostly stuck to the main path and focused on improving my sword skill, which made the game sort of like a Mass Effect 2-style action game that happens to have a long story and a lot of decisions to make. There are lots of side quests to pursue though that I only pursued when I ran across them, and there's also a lot of crafting and upgrading options that I mostly ignored. The decisions were the main thing that reminded me of the type of game I was playing though, especially because of how deeply they impact the course of the story. Few games really even attempt dynamic plotting like this, and the game would be remarkable for its ambition even if it didn't work. Some games of this type are content to keep the main critical path of the game the same for everyone, with the major changes being events that might have a different outcome in the moment and a slight consequence later on. Other games focus on giving you freedom and let you approach the story at your own pace, but when you do approach it it's basically the same. The Witcher 2 is very linear, but there are a number of points where a decision you make affects events not only in the short term, but how the rest of the story might play out. The flow of time will remain constant, but the players involved and their motivations could be totally changed. It's not handled perfectly, but when it works it's impressive.

And it's an interesting story too, if not the best told one. I often felt like I was supposed to know kingdoms and nobles even when I didn't get a proper introduction, and I don't know if the game was expecting me to read up on these people in the journal or be familiar with the books the series is based on or if they were just throwing me into the middle of a complicated conflict on purpose. It's easy to get lost in the family trees and the history the game is always throwing at you, but if you strip that away, there is a plot there that's a pretty decent little fantasy tale, combining elements of political intrigue and powerful sorcery in a way that pulls you into its dark and unusual world. I've genuinely come to care about the characters that carried over the first game, and I'm invested in Geralt's attempt to regain his memory, and I'm intrigued by this grand new conflict that he's gotten caught up in, even if like him, I don't understand all of it. The presentation really helps, too. The game looks pretty outstanding even though my PC isn't top of the line, combining a nice, gritty, distinctly European fantasy aesthetic with an impressive graphics engine. The voice acting is good, especially when you consider it's being translated from the original Polish, and the original score (which I'm listening to right now) is well executed if a bit safe.

As I mentioned before, the game isn't perfect. I didn't have the same problem with the ending having trouble getting on with it; in fact it's about as perfectly paced an RPG I've played. You have two nice, lengthy acts with plenty of opportunity for screwing around, before the plot reaches its climax and resolves itself with proper speed. The problems are more mundane technical ones, and they're unfortunate when so much else of the game is put together very well. The first game is difficult at times, but I never got angry at it, because I always was able to find the right combination of techniques and equipment to get through it. There were moments in the sequel though that just seemed way out of line with the rest of the game. There's challenge, and then there's enemies that are just too difficult to damage or come in groups that are too large. I was also kind of disappointed in the enemy variety; you'd think a game about a monster hunter by trade would have a few more kinds of monsters. Maybe there were more in the various hunting contracts you can pick up, but if you focus on the main plot like I did, you see a lot of the same ones. The game also failed to use the Steam overlay for reasons I could not ascertain even though I bought the game through Steam, and the scripting in the stealth sections seemed to break when I actually tried to play them. Early on there's an objective to sneak somewhere, but if you get spotted you get brought somewhere else and the story changes. That's fine, and actually interesting. But later, getting caught means you die, which means I have to reload. And every time I did, enemies would fail to act the way they should, and there would be some glitch with the sound, causing most of the effects to disappear until I went to the main menu and reloaded the save. This occurred on a couple other occasions as well.

It seems like these are the kinds of problems that would be easily noticed in play testing and should be addressed, which is what makes them seem worse than regular glitches. Ultimately they didn't hurt the game too much for me though, which is good, because I wanted to like it as much as I did. It's clear from the course of the story as it draws to a close, and also from the solid sales numbers for a game like this, that there will be a third game at some point, and it's only a matter of when. I look forward to its inevitable release, though if I wanted more right away, I could always go back and try the other half of the game that I missed.

Movie Update 24

2011-10-19T18:15:00.001-04:00

Would you believe I've seen a few more movies since the last time I wrote about a few movies? The first three of these are the second film I've seen by their well-regarded directors, and the last is the first by another.

All About My Mother

This is a movie that could have gotten unbearably depressing, but something about the colorful way it looks or its deeply human characters or the faith it has in humanity or something kept it watchable, and made me really like it a lot. Pedro Almodóvar seems to be a director's who's a lot more in tune with women than many men in his profession, and even dedicated the movie to them at the end. It's about a woman who loses her son, and then journeys back to her old stamping grounds, where she meets some old friends and makes some new ones. Penelope Cruz is the only one I remember seeing anywhere before, but they almost all instantly become likable, even if they're flawed as people, and it's an interesting movie just to watch. A lot of bad things happen, but hope never completely runs out. At least that's what I took from it.

Chungking Express

Wong Kar-wai employs a very unusual structure with this film. It's not that weird to split a narrative between two different and only tangentially related stories, but it's a good deal weirder to separate them almost completely in editing, with one going through all its paces and then wrapping up before there's a quick transition to the second. They're both love stories featuring lonely policemen and a snack bar, and they both have thematic similarities, although there are definite differences as well. I don't like all of the choices Wong makes, such as the low shutter speed effect when things are happening quickly, but it's mostly a well made, well acted drama. Wong impresses me about as much as any Asian filmmaker who's still working.

Contempt

Made only a few years of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Contempt sure looks a lot different. It's in widescreen and color, and the differences don't really stop at an aesthetic level. It's a very natural film, examining the breakdown of a screenwriter's marriage while he's also struggling with his current project. He's rewriting a script for an adaptation of The Odyssey (why hasn't their been an actual legitimate film version yet?) which is being directed by German auteur Fritz Lang (playing himself), and he finds himself disagreeing with his boss and then his wife after she meets him. A lot of the film is just the writer and his wife talking, evading the issue of what's really going on while being cruel to each other. It doesn't sound that exciting, but Godard does some really interesting things with the presentation of the material that makes up for it. You can read a lot of symbolism and analogy into it, or you can just enjoy the impressive cinematography and Brigitte Bardo's figure.

Written on the Wind

In the past, critics have looked at Douglas Sirk's work in two different ways. When he was contemporary and his films were making money in theaters, he was criticized for making old fashioned, overwrought melodramas. Later though, others saw a certain irony in what he did, like he was prodding at the falsehood of the American dream without calling too much attention to it. Watching the movie, I could see it both ways, but I would tend to agree with the more recent interpretation, because I have a hard time believing someone who was so good at creating images on film could be so bad at depicting human interaction in the world of 1950s cinema. Maybe he just lucked into great directors of photography, but in any case, the irony is there, whether he intended to have it or not. Written on the Wind is a big movie with big emotions, and it's interesting to look at the absurdity of rich people at any point in history, so I had a good time watching the film and wondering about its real intentions. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty sure I liked it.

Drive

2011-10-18T18:10:00.001-04:00

The best word to describe Drive might be "specific". It is very specific in its style and the tone it tries to create, and you have to have a very specific mindset to enjoy it appropriately. Because despite what you might assume based on the trailers, it is very much not a typical thriller or car chase movie. I would call it moody and intense before I'd call it exciting, and I would say it's much more plainly violent than action-packed. Tension is built through the careful application of suspense, of waiting for something terrible to happen until it finally does, rather than with fast editing and big special effects. There are all of two scenes in the film that could be called legitimate car chases, and only a brief third one that I would really call action at all. The scenes are masterfully done, telling you a lot about the main character and delivering moments that really quicken the heart-rate, but that's about as far as it goes on that direction. The rest of the movie is more of a character study, broken up by flashes of brutality that let you in on how badly the driver's world gets turned upside down when he steps outside his normal routine.

That driver is played just about perfectly in my opinion by Ryan Gosling, who portrays a nameless, quiet young man who hides his capacity for ruthless self-preservation under a calm, if slightly disquieting demeanor. Gosling, his costar Carey Mulligan, and director Nicolas Winding Refn spent a lot of time trimming out dialogue where they thought the film didn't need it, and the lack of speech is a big part of the creation of the character. He doesn't say much unless he has to, and even then his sentences are as short as possible. It makes him seem unusual, almost like he might have some sort of slight social disorder that prevents him from being normal. It's most pronounced in his scenes with Mulligan, a neighbor with a young son and a husband in prison that he develops feelings for, who also doesn't talk much, making their relationship a very simple and sweet one. Some people have said that Gosling is just too pretty to pull off a tough guy role, but I think his looks actually benefit the character. They help explain why someone might find him charming and attractive even though his conversations consist of little more than a few words and a smile, and they also make the revelation of his darker side more stark and surprising. The rest of the cast supports him very well, most notable Bryan Cranston as his talkative mentor and Albert Brooks as a gangster who's menacing in just how indirect the threats he makes are.

I haven't said much of anything regarding what the movie is actually about. It's pretty simple, really - Gosling does stunts for movies and works in a garage by day, and occasionally works as a getaway driver for crooks at night. He gets involved with a job that goes bad, and failing to extricate himself and his new friends from danger peacefully, is forced to resort to much harsher means of protecting them. It's a basic crime movie plot, which succeeds in driving the action without getting in the way of Refn's direction, which is what made me truly love the film. The film is dripping with style, from the expertly crafted moments of violence to the uniquely slow paced character moments to the memorable way they shoot LA at night to the singularly memorable soundtrack, which features songs that sound like they were produced 25 years ago but match perfectly with the character's identity. Drive is a movie where I can see why a lot of people would not respond well to it, and I can only feel sorry that they aren't able to enjoy a movie that's not quite what they expected. It's so sure of itself in every aspect, and so mesmerizing to watch that even tiny moments that don't completely work are easily forgiven. It's one of the best movies I've ever seen in a theater. That's a significant caveat, but one that shouldn't detract from the message that I thought the film was brilliant, and it's still in my head a couple days after seeing it.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

2011-10-17T18:13:00.000-04:00

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a classic practically the instant it was released, and it still holds up as a fun adventure today. It's been repeatedly re-released over the years, but its port to the 3DS handheld brings some substantial new changes, including ones that don't involve a third dimension. It features the Master Quest from the Gamecube version, which changes up the dungeons and has to be unlocked by completing the original game, and has various tweaks and additions that either improve the gameplay slightly or give a little more help to people who need it.

If you somehow haven't played the game before, it set a lot of standards for 3D action adventure games. It has a targeting system that lets you keep an enemy in your sights no matter where you go, it features a meaningful day and night cycle that affects your options at a given time, and it brought the concept of dangerous, puzzle-filled dungeons into a more modern era in a way a lot of games still copy. It had a couple small flaws though, flaws that this remake weren't afraid to address. The dual-screen set up makes checking the map and your equipped items a lot quicker, and the map now has more useful waypoints for side activities. Boots are now considered items instead of gear, making switching them on and off in places like the Water Temple a lot simpler, and you now have five item slots instead of three, including one that's dedicated to your always-useful ocarina. A couple of the slots require using the touch screen, but it's a worthwhile trade-off. You can also look or aim weapons in first person by physically moving the 3DS, which makes things that require it easier, especially if you're sitting in a rotating chair. Another addition is a new kind of statue that you can find and use to view video hints for various puzzles that might be sticking points for people who aren't already intimately familiar with the game. I sort of missed the rumble in certain spots, but at least they found away around that issue with the stone of agony.

The audio sounded pretty much exactly the same to me, but visually the game is a nice upgrade from the original version, even if you ignore the 3D effect (which I enjoyed, except for a couple moments where objects were very close to the screen). It may seem to look the same as it used to, but if you actually compare them, this port is a lot sharper and nicer looking. It basically looks the way your rosy memories of the original game are telling you it looked. Some objects are redesigned to take advantage of the hardware, and lots of things, especially characters' faces, are just a bit nicer to look at. When you combine the better aesthetics with the small gameplay improvements, I have a hard time picturing myself wanting to play Ocarina of Time again in the future and not picking this version. I wouldn't exactly call it definitive, because for some people sitting on a sofa in front of a TV will always beat staring at a tiny screen embedded in a less-than perfectly ergonomic handheld. But it's hard not to love a technically superior, portable version of one of the best games ever made.

Movie Update 23

2011-10-14T18:20:00.000-04:00

Jeez, why wouldn't I want to write about these movies? They're all pretty quick, with the longest only lasting 91 minutes.

Black Girl

A movie in French about a girl from Senegal who is hired to be a nanny for a white family, but when she is brought back to their regular home in France, realizes how poorly they think of her. Her job changes to a more demanding and less interesting one, and the mother kind of treats her like crap, constantly demanding things of her, berating her, and not even letting her wear nice clothes in the house. Eventually she gets fed up with the treatment and takes drastic action. It's less than an hour, and the plot is slight even for that time, as a lot of it is just shots of her cleaning or cooking while narrating how much her life sucks. But there's something likable about the film, in the simple way it was shot, that makes it work.

Earth

Another silent propaganda film from Russia like The Battleship Potemkin, though less plot-driven and more focused on creating mood and imagery. It's very dreamlike, and a unique viewing experience, though one that I was mostly bored by. I can't really see this movie succeeding in actually getting a lot of people passionate about its message. It's certainly an important film in terms of developing styles other people would borrow from, but there's not much else I took from it.

Videodrome

A bizarre little horror film by David Cronenberg, starring James Woods as the executive in charge of a small TV station that specializes in sex and violence. He is shown a pirated program that he becomes fascinated by, and is drawn into its world before realizing the true intent behind its creation, which is strange and sinister. I wasn't really scared much by the movie, but more intrigued by its practical effects, which are still effectively gross today, and by its weird, twisty plot. Based on limited experience, I don't think I like young body horror Cronenberg as much as older psychological Cronenberg, but it's an enjoyable movie anyway.

Viridiana

It's interesting to see the kind of movies that would get banned 40 or 50 years ago and wouldn't cause much of a hoopla at all these days. There's definitely some messed up things that happen in Viridiana, but the way they're portrayed is pretty subtle, or at least non-graphic enough that it would be hard to justify censoring it. It's about a woman who's about to become a nun, but gets drawn away from that life and eventually takes in several disabled beggars to help with an estate. You can read an anti-altruism message into it, but I'm not sure if that's really an agenda Luis Buñuel has or just something that happens in the movie. Like many black and white movies from the 60s, it's also really nice to look at.

Bonus Movie! Un Chien Andalou

Buñuel's first and probably most famous film is this, a short he wrote with Salvador Dali and directed. I had already seen the famous eye scene before, but this was my first time watching the whole thing. It's incredibly watchable for a surreal silent movie made with the intent of not having any of it actually mean something, with a big part of it probably being that you only have to sit through fifteen minutes of it. Lots of great off-the-wall images and cute visual trickery strings together a bunch of nonsense scenes with little connecting them beyond title cards that probably hinder understanding more than they help it. Definitely something anyone who's into film history should see.

Breaking Bad - Season 4

2011-10-10T18:20:00.001-04:00

For the third straight year it seems that television can be broken down into two categories: Breaking Bad, and everything else. The show wasn't as filled as last year was with wall-to-wall insanity, taking more of a slow-burn approach to the story this time, framing the whole season as one big, terrifying game of chess. Walt wasn't quite as front and center as he'd been in the past, with his character frequently getting emasculated and sidelined, while allowing the other characters more of an opportunity to shine. With Walt not really understanding the consequences of what he forced Jesse to do last year, a rift forms between them, and Jesse ends up developing a bond with Mike that's one of the most interesting aspects of the season. We learn a lot more about Gus, both who he is and why he is to a force to be reckoned with. Skyler is forced to take a larger role in helping Walt cover his tracks, and starts to realize just what kind of mess Walt got them into. Hank is still recovering from what happened last season, and we get to see a lot of different sides of him over the course of these episodes, even if he's still hobbled by the end.

There's a lot of character development that occurs, and lots of false starts and pieces being moved into place for most of the season. People who are only into the show for its crazier side might be a bit disappointed in that. It's all worth it though, because eventually the tension that's been building all season between Gus and the cartel, and Walt and Gus, and Walt and Jessie explodes in the last four episodes, which all easily rank among the show's (many) best. People die, things explode, plot seeds that have been growing into plot plants get sown, and it's all done in the show's signature style, combining humor with harsh, occasionally otherworldly violence and a directorial flair that no other TV series even attempts. The show's still as good as it's ever been, and now that we know the ending is only 16 episodes away, it's hard to put away my excitement for what will hopefully be one of the best conclusions to one of television's best series. All the pieces are in place for something great, and I have confidence that this show's fantastic writing staff, cast, and production team will put it all together once again.

Movie Update 22

2011-10-09T11:47:00.001-04:00

Another weekend of movies. A couple of these I really liked, a couple I didn't.

The Birth of a Nation

It's kind of hard to separate how important this movie is in terms of setting standards of filmmaking that would be followed for a long time, and how horrible the content of its second half is. The film is in two parts, the first of which depicts The Civil War, and ends with Abraham Lincoln's assassination. The second part is about reconstruction, which could have been an interesting subject if handled appropriately. It wasn't though. Black people are portrayed by white actors in make-up, and shown to basically impose their will on the poor white southerners, ruining everything and even trying to steal their women. Eventually the Ku Klux Klan manages to restore order by running out the vile usurpers and their enabling carpetbaggers. It's both inaccurate and terribly racist. Pretty hard to defend.

The Conformist

It's kind of hard to describe why I thought this movie was great, but there was just something very gripping about it. It's a very artful film depicting a member of the fascist party in Italy who is charged with assassinating an old professor who fled to France. He decides to do the job while on his honeymoon, and things get kind of messed up when he also falls for the professor's young wife. The movie uses violence very effectively, with it only being a factor in a couple scenes but having a huge impact every time. Bernardo Bertolucci probably gets a little too obsessed with depicting sexuality in his other movies, but it's wielded effectively here to set a specific mood and explain the film's characters without being too obvious. Definitely not for everyone, but I was into it.

The Leopard

I was enjoying myself with this movie for a while, but I eventually realized that it wasn't actually going anywhere and it started to seem like a waste of time. I think you can tell a story about the lives of royalty and what they experience when the nation they live in starts an inevitable shift towards a more modern form of government in less than three hours, but the director was more interested in painstakingly filming all of the lavish sets and costumes than doing that. It's a beautiful movie, but it just loses momentum at some point. It starts out pretty competently, with a rebellion and a love story, but eventually they get to a ball and it kind of just stops. Weird to watch the life drain out of a film like that.

The Verdict

A David Mamet screenplay directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Paul Newman is a formula for a great movie, and that's pretty much what they made here. Newman plays an aging, alcoholic, ambulance chasing lawyer, who sees a chance to redeem his career when he's given a case concerning a woman who was improperly anesthetized before surgery and then fell into a coma. He's up against a large firm and doesn't have much of a case to work with, but he still brushes aside opportunities for compromise, even against the family's wishes, all in the belief that what he's doing is right. It's ultimately a pretty simple film with a predictable ending, but it works because of the three guys I mentioned. Newman's performance is simply fantastic, not shying away from the character's severe flaws but still coming off as a guy worth rooting for. Lumet doesn't try anything too flashy, but every long shot seems carefully considered and just right for the scene. Definitely one of the best courtroom dramas I've seen.

NTSF:SD:SUV:: - Season 1

2011-10-08T11:56:00.000-04:00

NTSF:SD:SUV:: is a spin-off of Childrens' Hospital (in our universe, within the meta-fiction it's just another show in their nightmare world of silly, generic network TV shows taken to an extreme), and while it hasn't managed to become as good as that series yet, it's still a lot of fun and has enough promise to turn into a similar coming together of strong writing, a great cast, and a bunch of off-the-wall ideas. Paul Scheer stars as Trent Hauser, the lead agent of an anti-terrorism unit that protects San Diego from all manner of bizarre crimes. Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager plays his boss and two-time ex-wife with an eye patch, Martin Starr plays a computer expect who's not much of a character but still does a good job, and Rob Riggle plays the nutty President of the Navy. Peter Serafinowicz does the voice of the their robot assistant, and a couple people I don't really know play fellow agents, one who constantly makes reference to his native Alaska and another who ably fills every possible cliche of a female lead in a cop show.

Besides the main cast, there's plenty of great talent in the guest cast from week to week, like Jeff Goldblum as a high-stakes gambler who makes full use of jurisdiction laws and Adam Scott as a rival to Trent who's confined to a wheelchair. The cast frequently props up episodes even when their plots are a bit bare and reliant on a single wacky joke. Most of the stories are actually pretty familiar if you've spent any time watching shows like this, often with just a couple little tweaks that push them into the realm of the fully ridiculous. Once in a while they'll go for broke with an alternate universe episode or something, but a big part of the fun is how close the show really is to what it parodies at certain times. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what they can do now that they're more familiar with what they can get away with on Adult Swim.

Movie Update 21

2011-10-06T18:17:00.000-04:00

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

A German film that is somehow both very deliberately filmed and very quickly over. It tells the simple story of an older cleaning lady and a Moroccan immigrant laborer who find each other so nice that they decide to get married. They quickly realize the problems this causes when they are both ostracized and ignored by those they know, though the woman Emmi receives the brunt of the mistreatment. Eventually most people come to understand their relationship, though it happens just as it begins to splinter on its own. I really liked the plain way the movie was shot and acted, though it was a bit too sterile for me to really connect with any of it.

The Battleship Potemkin

I sort of assumed this movie would just be boring Bolshevik propaganda, but it's actually one of the most watchable silent dramas I've seen. It has a pretty short running time, and it tells the fairly interesting story of a battleship's crew rebelling against their horrible conditions, and the support they received from others. The sequence on the steps of Odessa is one of the most famous in film history, but it's far from the only memorable scene in the movie. It's just very well shot and edited together for something from the 20s, and unflinching in its depiction of their side of the story. Certainly something that can be enjoyed outside of film school.

The Manchurian Candidate

Partway through this original adaptation of the novel, I was sort of shocked by what I was seeing. An adequately filmed, mostly exciting fight scene in a movie from 1962! I had forgotten that From Russia with Love did the same thing only a year later and with better execution, but still, it was nice to see. It was just part of a pretty good political conspiracy thriller, featuring an elaborate plot by the Communists involving brainwashing of Americans who don't sound like Americans and manipulating dumb politicians. The story cuts a few corners to get where it needs to go, but ultimately it's a great, pretty early example of a darker sort of thriller that would eventually become more popular. Frank Sinatra didn't come off as a very good actor, but at least he had Janet Leigh to bounce off of.

Notorious

The other Alfred Hitchcock films I've seen to this point were either great or Psycho, so it was interesting to see something in between. Notorious didn't quite have the visceral thrills or shocking twists of some of his better work, but it's still a really well-done film, with some excellent sequences and one of his best casts. The most famous scenes involve a remarkable shot panning from the top of a stairway to a key in a woman's hand and a romantic moment that skirts regulations about the length of on-screen kisses allowed through a clever loophole, but the moments that struck me most were when its main characters were in the utmost danger while they were doing nothing but standing or walking calmly. With how bloody and loud movies tend to go these days to be exciting, it's fun to be reminded of how much Hitchcock could do with so little. Probably a really good second-tier movie for him.

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition

2011-10-04T18:32:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot of Zelda stuff going on this year, being the 25 anniversary of the original game's release in Japan. The 3DS saw the release of a 3D remastering of Ocarina of Time, the first two games were included in the batch of free downloads that early adopters of the system got, and later this year we'll get to play the first new console game in the series since 2006. The most recent part of the celebration was the release of the (temporarily) free Four Swords Anniversary Edition for download on the DSi and 3DS stores, which takes the special multiplayer mode from the A Link to the Past port for Game Boy Advance, and adds a single player option and a bunch of new content.

The one player mode functions well enough, giving you control of two different Links (they are separated by the power of the mystical and stupidly named Four Sword) and letting you switch between them or have one follow the other with a button tap. It's not nearly as fun though as the multiplayer, which was how the game was supposed to be played. I had only one other person to play with, but the game (obviously) supports up to four, letting you link up multiple systems and work together to save Zelda from Vaati. The structure is pretty simple. There are three different dungeons you can tackle in any order, consisting of two floors full of puzzles, traps, monsters, and rupees, and third with a boss. If you clear all three floors and collect enough rupees, a great fairy will reward you with a key. If all the players have all three keys, they can take on the final dungeon and beat the game. You can then unlock harder passes through the game, and new to this version, there are additional dungeons, some of which are based on previous Zelda games and are interesting in their own right.

It's hard to stress how much more fun the game is with multiple players. Instead of worrying about two different things at once, you can just focus on yourself, and put your heads together to solve the simple puzzles and work together to get past some of the obstacles, such as carrying your friends over a platform only you can walk on or defeating an enemy that requires you to throw it at another Link so he can slash it in midair. The dungeons are randomized so it's still fun to visit them with different people and improve your score. It's pretty lean as far as Zelda games go, consisting only of a few dungeons that take maybe 15 minutes each to clear per pass. But it's a lot of fun to play repeatedly with friends, and it's especially worth checking out for free if you have the right system for it.

Doctor Who - Season 6

2011-10-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

I'm still not totally sure on how I feel about the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who. The show is still written consistently better than it was during the Russell T. Davies run, and Matt Smith is definitely my favorite Doctor of the three I know. But I'm also not sure about his grand plan for the show. Not only does the show have a more persistent running storyline each season, it's pretty clear that he has one big story that he's taking years to tell. And while that's fine for some shows, I'm not sure it's really the best thing for this one. I like Doctor Who when I have no idea what's going to happen next. Is he going to discover something sinister happening on a seemingly benign alien planet? Is he going to get trapped with a bunch of scientists on some remote research station? Is he going to bump into a noteworthy figure from Earth's past and figure out what weird thing inspired their work? That element of surprise and the feeling that anything could happen is still there in the show, because only a handful of episodes each year dedicate more than a few minutes to the ongoing plot. But just the idea of there being a single story driving the 11th Doctor's entire existence seems anti-Who to me.

At least the story is fairly interesting. It involves the fate of the universe of course, as every major Who storyline does. It also involves his current companions, Amy and Rory; River Song, the fellow time traveler he met back in season 4; and a creepy conspiracy involving a sinister group that's out to get him for some reason. It's a bit too reliant on using time travel as a crutch, both an explanation for and a solution to every problem, though it's kind of hard to complain that a show like this uses a lot of 11th hour gimmicks and cop outs to resolve the ridiculous situations that arise. I just hope it ends up being worth it. It's a fun show to watch, but Doctor Who has a long history of conclusions that seem disappointing next to all of the events that build up to them.

In terms of this year's actual episodes, I don't think they were as a whole really stronger than last year's, though I thought there were definite high points. For one thing, having an episode titled "Let's Kill Hitler" is fun, even if that's not really what it's about. The two part season-opener introduced a great new Who monster in a similar vein to the Weeping Angels; creepy aliens called the Silence, who you forget everything about the second you can't see them anymore. "The Doctor's Wife", written by Neil Gaiman, is one of the show's great one-offs; a story about the TARDIS taking the form of a woman, and finally getting a chance to talk to the Doctor face to face. The second half went on a nice little horror kick, with a couple effectively creepy, well directed episodes that had a lot of fun with the spookier side of the show. As far as Who finales go, this year's was pretty acceptable. It was kind of just a bunch of crap getting thrown at a wall, and some weird choices were made, but at least I have a much better idea of where everything is going, and some weird loose ends were tied off. The next season of Who won't begin until next fall, and it won't end until 2013. But at least there's the annual Christmas special to look forward to.

Movie Update 20: The Work of Jean Vigo

2011-10-01T16:02:00.000-04:00

Jean Vigo was the son of an anarchist; a boy who was sent to a boarding school to be raised after his father suffocated in prison. He started making films in the 1930s, but died only a few years later of tuberculosis. His work was frequently banned or ruined by distributors, but his influence on French cinema far outlasted him or the attempts by others to ruin his life's work. It's too bad he didn't manage to have a longer career. I think he could have done a lot more with the talent obvious in his filmography, which lasts a total of less than three hours.

À Propos de Nice - A brief silent documentary, showing the cultural inequality in Nice. The narrative of the film is pretty loose, but it contrasts the easy-going lifestyles of the rich in the city with the brutal conditions and work of the poor. Simple, but very effective, especially with the score, which is occasionally playful without damaging the truth of the message.

Taris, Roi de l'Eau - A short lasting less than ten minutes, demonstrating the swimming technique of French Olympian Jean Taris. Very basic concept, but it's an interesting watch thanks to some of the techniques Vigo uses, such as slow motion and a few editing tricks. Not much else to say about it.

Zéro de Conduite - An actual feature film, though it lasts only about 45 minutes. It shows the lives of several boys living at a boarding school, who get fed up with their teachers and the principal and eventually start rioting. Not much about it jumped out at me. It was a precursor for similar movies like The 400 Blows, but it's more interesting as a historical footnote and an early demonstration of some techniques that would later see a lot of use than as a movie.

L'Atalante -The only really true, full length film Vigo ever made. It is the story of a ship captain and his new wife, and the angry jealousy he develops when she becomes bored by their uneventful honeymoon (which doubles as a work trip with the boat) and starts talking with his unusual first mate. The first mate is a pretty fascinating character, a scraggly old man covered in tattoos and devoted to caring for his many cats and his cabin full of mementos from stops in harbors all around the world. The main plot is a bit less interesting. There's a decent arc to the relationship between the two spouses, but it was a bit thin to carry a whole film. It's really too bad Vigo died when he did - I didn't love any of his work, but I think if he continued working on his craft he might have been able to.

Resistance: Fall of Man

2011-09-30T18:43:00.000-04:00

Despite being a huge fan of Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank series, I had for whatever reason to this point avoided trying their new franchise for this generation, Resistance. Now I wish I had tried it sooner, but not because it was really good and I was missing out. The first Resistance game was a launch title, and while it's probably above average by that standard, it definitely feels every bit like the five year old game that it is. Not only is it not up to the level of subsequent, groundbreaking games like Call of Duty 4, it doesn't even learn some of the lessons that earlier games like Half-Life 2 taught. There are just fundamental issues with the way it's designed that clash with the basic concepts that make today's shooters more fun than older ones. It's not a bad game, but I'd call it fairly mediocre. And while other games I'd say the same thing about perhaps had some interesting ideas and just couldn't pull them off successfully, Resistance is sort of the opposite; it's pretty competently put together for a game made in 2006, it just never gets very interesting.

I had always assumed that Resistance was about aliens invading the planet before World War II could break out, but that's not actually the case. The apparent alien antagonists of the series are actually people that have been infected by the Chimera virus and transformed into mutated, super-strong soldiers, and given access to powerful technology. They swept through Russia and then Europe, with the game beginning with you as Nathan Hale, an American dropped into England to try and help defend that country from being assimilated as well. Nathan quickly becomes infected with the virus along with the rest of the survivors from his unit, but for some unknown reason he manages to fight against it and stay conscious. It's also unknown what the source of the virus is, whether it's natural or created, though I'd suspect the latter considering all the technology that's been somehow created to develop the virus' victims into an army and equip them for battle. That raises another question about who exactly would be behind this, but the game isn't about answering all of these questions so much as just throwing you into a messed up, depressing situation and making you try to fix it, mostly by shooting a lot of guys.

And that's essentially what you do in the game. Levels usually revolve around putting you in some war-torn English village or city, and giving you a fairly linear path to run down while you shoot a ton of Chimera. They mix it up with the occasional vehicle sequence or a battle on a larger scale with some allies on your side. Much like Ratchet and Clank, the game tries to get a lot of mileage out of its unique weapons, although they aren't as successful as they were with their other franchise. There are basics like an assault rifle and a shotgun (the latter of which is useful only for mop-up duty, yet you inexplicably find ammo for it all the time in situations where its use isn't appropriate), but also a handful of more elaborate guns, some designed by the Chimera and some by your side. They all have a hook, like a machine gun that has tags that can cause rounds to home in on an enemy or another that you can eject the magazine from to turn it into a quickly expended, floating turret. Unfortunately, several of these only have very limited functionality, or are limited otherwise by a silly limitation. For example, the sniper rifle can be very effective due to its ability to slow down time (don't ask me), but you can only carry twelve rounds for it at once, despite being able to hold hundreds of bullets for the other weapons at the same time. I understand placing similar restrictions to try to keep things balanced, but that one just seemed particularly silly.

The game could be fine with a less-than-completely-satisfying arsenal of weapons, if the enemy and level design was good enough, but I think there are problems there too. The biggest issue is that the combat is set up a lot like the Ratchet and Clank games, where enemies will frequently come at you in swarms and fire slow-moving projectiles at you, which you have to avoid while returning fire. It works fine in Ratchet when you have a full view of the action and a very agile character. But Resistance is in first person, and Nathan isn't very fast, and you often just get pelted with tons of damage that you can't avoid effectively, instead of a more traditional shooter where you have a certain chance of getting shot that you can use cover and smart movement to avoid the risk of. The problem is increased by the game's strange hybrid health system. You can regenerate healthy by avoiding damage for a certain amount of time, but you can only heal up to the nearest 25% mark. So if you get hit for 20% damage, you can heal up to full, but if you get hit for 30%, you can only recover to the 3/4 level without finding a health item. It's a weird system that has no real benefit, and it makes you wish they had picked one type of health system and just gone with it. The encounters in the game rarely get more interesting than just a new swarm of bad guys, and while there's a decent variety to just what type of weird monster thing will be attacking you, few of them bring an interesting challenge. They either run at you and are pretty easily handled, or shoot at you from a distance and can be kind of a pain to deal with.

As I mentioned before, there's a technical competence to the game that makes it playable. There's a simple flatness to the graphics, as the environments and characters aren't as detailed as we've come to expect, and the sound design is fairly standard too, with functional sound, repetitive music, and voice acting that does little to spice up a pretty standard story. But it all fits together into a coherent setting, and a somewhat interesting universe, with possibilities that the two sequels may or may not have successfully explored at this point. I had enough fun early on when I was discovering new weapons and just getting used to the game, but that eventually turned to boredom and then frustration once the newness of everything worn off and I was left with an increasingly familiar and difficult challenge. At no point could I really point at the game and say that something was broken. All I could say was that I wasn't having fun, and there was no indication that the game was interested in changing that. They just stretched what they had for too long a period, perhaps believing that the game had to be a certain length to be acceptable, and perhaps not having enough development time to create more interesting and unique situations with the launch of the PlayStation 3 looming. This was before games like Call of Duty 4 made it okay to have a campaign that only lasted around six hours, after all. I wish I could have liked the game more, but the simple fact was I didn't. I got the dual pack which included the second game, so hopefully I'll have more fun with that one.