For All Mankind: The Life and Career of Mick Foley

I never have much to say in these posts, but this is a pretty strong documentary as far as WWE docs go. I attribute that mainly to Mick Foley's career being intersting in its own right. From Foley's first experience at a wrestling live event to losing his ear to his crazy matches in Japan involving C4 explosives and barbed wire to his time in WCW then ECW then WWE, there's rarely a dull moment. It's great to see faces like Vader, Terry Funk and Paul Heyman chiming in on what makes Mick special. There are a lot of people outside WWE on this doc, which isn't the case with the Triple H doc I watched earlier. Anyway, this one was better than the Triple H doc, but neithe is going to appeal oa non-wrestling fan.

12 Years a Slave

This movie tried so hard to be artistic. So, so hard. The story itself is such an intriguing one and the performances were great, but everything else about the movie annoyed the hell out of me. From the random shots that last way too long of people's faces as they stare off in the distance to the same goddamn shot of swampy waters to show the passage of time, I just can't understand why the movie was made the way it was. It was 133 minutes, but at least 20 minutes of it was spent on trying to make the film appear artsy. Sometimes I just want movies to focus on telling a compelling story. All this stupid shit took away from the story. Still, a story about a free man who was forced into slavery for 12 years is compelling as hell. This movie is worth a watch even though the filmmakers did everything they could to to detract from the overall experience. I honestly have no idea why this won the Oscar...

Triple H: Thy Kingdom Come

It's Wrestlemania time and I'm on a real wrestling kick. I heard good things about this documentary so I sought it out. I love wrestling documentaries. They are just a lot more enjoyable to me than to go back and watch old matches from a wrestler's career (most wrestling dvds are just compilations of matches rather than documentaries). Watching wrestlers from the past and present talk about someone's career is something of which I will never get sick. It's a little tough for me to not watch one about Triple H with a cynical eye, however, because he is now married into the McMahon family and everyone is going to put a positive spin on anything they say about him. Some interesting aspects of Triple H that I've never really seen discussed before:

The beginnings of his relationship with Stephanie McMahon and how the locker room initially reacted.

His relationship with Undertaker.

His dealings with Eric Bischoff.

His upbringing in Nashua, NH (his parents are pretty weird).

Anyway, this isn't the greatest documentary in the world, but it's pretty interesting to me. It certainly gave me a bit more respect for Triple H. It's easy to forget how much hard work and motivation it takes to get to the top of any business, especially one as difficult as professional wrestling.

Gathering Blue

Marissa and Keith both read this one last year, and I've got little else to add. It's a spiritual sequel to The Giver, and two more remain. This is my first foray into young adult fiction since reading Little House on the Prairie in September of 2012 - that's a year and a half ago! Not a bad rut to fall into after I spent so many early Back-Blogged posts lamenting how shitty children's literature was and how much of it I had left in my backlog.

Anyway, I've got little to say here; I'm guessing the tetralogy taken as a whole will feel greater than the sum of its parts, but that's not to say Gathering Blue was an uninteresting or worthless read on its own. Still, there's so much young adult dystopian fiction these days that I can't imagine this one is particularly special in any way. Time will tell; I'm sure I'll finish off these next two books in little to no time at all.

24: Season 4

Day four and the show just keeps on delivering. This time Jack is dealing with nuclear threats... again. 

Already closing in on the halfway point of season five, so these "days" are starting to blend together for me. Trying to compartmentalize this season, here are the highlights I recall best: Jack is the bodyguard for the Secretary of Defense now, and has fallen in love his daughter (Audrey); terrorists hold the US hostage threatening to meltdown every major nuclear power plant in the country; Air Force One is shot down losing the President and the nuclear deployment codes; IMHOTEP IS THE HEAD TERRORIST!; an EMP takes out downtown Los Angeles; Tony and Michelle are split up; Tony and Michelle get back together; terrorists manage to steal a nuke and deploy it on a carrier missile headed for LA; Jack saves the day at the last second and is then forced to fake his own death before taking off into the sunrise to start a new life for himself. 

Really fun season with a bunch of great episodes. My two favorite have to be the one where Jack and Paul make a last stand at a sporting goods store as a bunch of mercenaries move to storm in and kill them, and the other is when that random couple camping in the desert have to keep the Football out of the hands of the terrorists before Jack can rescue them. Then there's the one element of this season that really bugged me. There's that son of the two terrorist you meet at the start of the season -- Behrooz. After everything has gone to shit and both of Behrooz's parents are dead, CTU uses him in a trade to get Jack back from the enemy's custody. We see the trade happen, Behrooz gets thrown into the terrorists' van, they cut out the implanted locator chip on him, and that's it. We never hear from Behrooz again (unless I'm missing something). I'm assuming he's been killed, but it's just weird that no one ever talks about him again even when the day is done and the threats have all been neutralized. As Jack struts off into the sunrise in the final scene, I really wanted him to freeze for a second and just shout out, "Ah shit!! Behrooz!" Then just shrug his shoulders and keep walking. 

Onwards to season five. 

Les Misérables (2012)

This is the second time I've seen this movie and the third time I've heard it; my sister watched almost the entire thing in the backseat while I took the wheel on a family road trip last summer. It is the second distinct Les Misérables movie I have seen. I have seen both a professional rendition and a high school rendition of the musical. I have seen two separate "Les Misérables in concert" blocks on PBS, one from the mid-'90s and one from a couple of years ago. The entire original soundtrack to the musical is in my iTunes library and several of the songs appear in my "Top 50 Play Counts" custom playlist. I have read Victor Hugo's original 1400-page novel. I am, in short, ridiculously and intimately familiar with this production and its story on nearly every level. I'm not even a big theater guy, and while plenty of people are more into Les Misérables than I am, I suspect very few of them love it as uniquely and specifically as I do.

I had anticipated the movie - a film version of the musical, I mean - for years and years. First came the years where I hoped it would one day be made. Then came the years it was rumored to be in pre-production. Then came all the casting news and the various disappointments and sighs of relief that accompanied them. Then there was close to a year of filming news, sneak peaks, and eventually advertising. And finally, a day I had anticipated for close to a decade had arrived, and "Les Misérables the Musical, the Movie" was a real thing. Given all that hype, there were only two outcomes possible when it came to my personal reaction to such a project. The movie could meet every lofty standard I had set for it in my head, or it could fall horribly short and disappoint me in so many ways. Of course, it did neither of those things. I saw it, digested it, reflected on it, and came out thinking that it was just fine. Not excellent. Not a travesty. But just kind of fine. And then I barely thought about it again for an entire year and then I recently watched it again, trying this time to figure out what exactly made it so blandly passable for me. And I think I figured it out on this second go-round. I'll try to state this simply and carefully.

What I wanted this movie to be was a faithful film adaptation of the musical. I wanted to hear all of my favorite songs, but to witness their power in a new way. I had already seen plenty of talented singers belting out the stirring and emotional lyrics in different ways, and I knew there would always be new renditions of those songs to discover or look forward to seeing one day. As a point case, take "I Dreamed a Dream." This is a song about how far Fantine has fallen from a lifetime of idyllic summers and passion and love, to a destitute fired factory worker unable to provide for her own daughter, and it's arguably the entire production's most representative number. I have heard singers more talented than Anne Hathaway just nail this one; what I wanted, in a film version, was to see flashbacks, for instance, of Fantine's pleasant memories of her life with her former lover; I wanted to see a montage, I guess, packing all kinds of visual information in for the sake of the character and her history in a way the stage version is unable to do. In general, I wanted a more visually rich version of an already wonderful story. I understand through her lyrics that Fantine has suffered greatly, but now that there's this big budget movie, show me. "Don't tell; show." That's what I wanted.

What this movie turned out to be was the musical itself, with impeccable production value and set and costume design, played back to me in close-up tracking shots. Many of the most emotional songs were sung in single takes, always by the actors themselves with no dubbing whatsoever. And while this was impressive and a great display of true singing ability and all, and while Anne Hathaway won an Oscar more or less entirely because of that single-take performance of "I Dreamed a Dream," I simply didn't want to see actors face-acting their way through these songs. Anne Hathaway sure can sell anguish, but I would have preferred for the movie to let the song itself sell that anguish; we got that much in the musical, and no one comes away from that song wondering just how anguished Fantine is, even before we could see the pain on her voice or hear the gasping imperfections in the song's performance. There's a song late in the production called "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," in which Marius, the sole survivor of the battle at the barricades, laments the loss of so many friends. It's totally powerful stuff in the musical, especially when his fallen comrades filter in behind him under an intense spotlight, looking totally ghostlike and just sort of lingering there. It's a simple, easy stage trick, but it helps sell the point - so many young lives lost! - a great deal more than a solitary shot lingering on an actor's face

So, yeah. the details were impeccable and the scope was enormous, but ultimately the movie didn't quite deliver me what I had hoped for. I suppose now I can go back to spending ten years hoping for another film adaptation of the musical. That's all it took for a Spider-Man reboot, right?

A few more thoughts, mostly positive, and then I'm done.

• I loved that Taylor Swift was not cast as Éponine. That's the singular most endearing character in the musical, and one you're just completely capable of falling in love with. Taylor Swift can sing and maybe she can act, but she doesn't have the necessary pathos for such a tragic figure. A Taylor Swift Éponine would have found a way to throw some sassy attitude into "On My Own" and given it some independent woman vibes. There's a place for those - most places in this world, really - but Éponine's signature performance is not one of those. Furthermore, I loved that Samantha Barks was given the role. She absolutely knocked the part out of the park in one of those aforementioned PBS concerts I'd seen a few times, and I could think of no person better suited for the movie.
• I also appreciated the way the movie tweaked the order of the songs so that they flowed more naturally as a story. For example, in the original musical, "I Dreamed a Dream" is sung after Fantine is fired, but before she resorts to prostitution. The movie flips it around so that "Lovely Ladies" comes before "I Dreamed a Dream," which makes so much sense that I don't know why the musical does it the other way. Maybe it's got something to do with the real-time, real-space aspects of a stage production, and certain set pieces needed preparing, or certain performers needed adequate breaks, or something.like that. I don't know. Similarly, in the movie they've bumped "Do You Hear the People Sing" to come immediately before the battle at the barricade, rather than coming on the night before the battle, and prior to "One Day More." It also makes sense to stick "On My Own" in front of "One Day More," since Éponine shares the same sentiment in both songs, and why not use her solo performance to establish those feelings before repeating them in the cast-wide collaboration later? Frankly the biggest improvements made here were based on the order of different performances.
• I did not care for the movie adding a new song, "Suddenly," to the show. The song itself is fine, but one beautiful aspect of Les Misérables is the subtle and symbolic repetition of so many little strings and chords and melodies. To bring in an entire new song that shared no elements with any other number just felt unnecessary to me, especially given how drastically they reduced so many other songs for time-related purposes.
• Seriously, where's the four-hour extended cut where we get every song in full? Don't tell me they never even filmed significant chunks of some of those songs. Even if they knew they'd be cutting them, they must have filmed them, right?
• Casting is a sticky issue here. Obviously the studio went for big name screen actors who can sort of sing in most cases, fleshing out the main ensemble with small time stage actors who can really sing. That's fine by me, and given that what I wanted all along was a movie version of the musical, I suppose in a nutshell I preferred having great actors with non-excellent voices instead of tremendous singers with limited screen acting talent. But, given the way the movie was shot and edited - long shots on faces, with songs in single takes - some of the actors' singing shortcomings were really put under a spotlight. He's taken a beating for it already and I don't need to pile on, but this was especially true for Russell Crowe's Javert. That's just such an authoritative role of unwavering absolutes, and the movie really could have used a stronger performance on that front. Javert shouldn't be so utterly outdone by Valjean, especially when Valjean is just Hugh Jackman. Elsewhere, Jackman and Seyfried were passable, Hathaway was great, and Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter were fine in a vacuum but made for a tonally inconsistent pairing between his hammy sleaze and her dark edge.
• For all of my complaints about the lost opportunities that came during all the powerful solo songs when the available screen space was wasted on long shots zoomed in on singing faces, I need to give credit where it's due, which is on most of the ensemble pieces. Never has "Look Down" been more amazing than it was taking place with hundreds of people amid stormy weather and rough waves. And establishing songs like "At the End of the Day" are greatly served by a camera jump-cutting from gritty downtrodden extra to gritty downtrodden extra. Still, nothing tops the way the finale, a reprise of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" was shot, using the barricade as the gates of heaven with all the fallen characters singing joyously and waving flags. Powerful shit, guys! Potent stuff.

Okay, last minute final note. I realize as I read over this whole post that I sound fairly blasé about this movie. Make no mistake - it's a solid B execution on an A-plus production, for an overall A-minus. Pretty good! Pretty, pretty good.

24: Season 3

The sun has set on Day Three, and Bauer is still kicking ass and taking names. In season three, the threat is biological. 

Man, what a good season and what a scary nemesis. This story arc revolves around the danger of super deadly virus being released in the country unless the US government follows the demands of another vindictive psychopath. This season has huge, game-changing events. First off, Kim is now working along with her father as an analyst at CTU (and is dating Jack's partner in the field); an entire hotel is exposed to the virus killing hundreds; Jack is forced to kill his boss and the head of CTU; Jack is addicted to heroin; and, possibly the most exciting part of the season, Jack has to go rogue and break a prisoner of his out of jail and return him to Mexico all outside of CTU's help. (That Russian Roulette scene... so good!) However, all of that pails in comparison to easily the most shocking moments during the season finale -- a fight on the LA SUBWAY. I lived in LA for about 7 - 8 years and have never seen or rode the subway. Heard fables of its existence. Once I even thought I caught it out of the corner of my eye. A glimpse of the entrance while passing through Hollywood and Vine, but when I looked back it was gone. To see it here, and to see that it's big and filled with real people, that was mind-blowing. 

Three seasons down... five to go.

24: Season 2

Another day is done. This time, the threat was nuclear. 

24 cranked out another great season. Jack picks up the pieces of his fractured life following the tragic events of the first season and returns to help save the day. Now some terrorists are once again holding the country hostage as they attempt detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, with the possibility of hiding larger, more devious plans for America. Jack is on the ground floor butting heads with CTU as they try and figure out who's on first, Kim is running away from a psychopathic, murdering father who she works for as a nanny, and President Palmer is doing his best to prevent the country from entering into another World War. Just another day...

The show is still gripping with big cliffhangers at the end of every story arc. It's easy to binge on. Though, I'm beginning to think that we're missing another story here. The story of how Jack Bauer's great, great grandfather accidentally ran over a gypsy with his horse back in old country, who later inflicted a curse upon the whole Bauer family. A curse that states once a year for 24-hours, everything is just going to go horribly wrong. It's kind of ridiculous how crazy everyone's stories can get. Kim is by far the most confusing. While trying to escape a murderer, she gets stuck in a snare trap, is taken in by some forest recluse who tries to capture her, escapes, makes her way to a local convenience store to phone for help (already thinking her father is dead), then some lunatic holds-up to the store... I mean, it just doesn't end. 

Ultimately, the show is good. Still good. Hopefully will continue to be good. However, it's a little crazy how bad things go for everyone on a constant basis. It's even crazier how Jack Bauer isn't dead yet. The guy jumps out of a plane right before the nuke it's carrying detonates and survives. Gets tortures --- literally -- to death, but comes back to life and survives. It's bonkers. For that, I get pulled out of the show a bit just because it's absolutely so damn over-the-top. The show is like Jack, though. Despite how crazy and bizarre it seems, it yields results. Good results. 

Space Jam

When rumors broke that LeBron James was going to be involved in a sequel to Space Jam, my reaction was the same as every other twenty-something American man: something like, "Aww man, really? You're going to ruin that part of my childhood with LeBron James?" But that lasted about three seconds before two cold truths occurred to me. One, I could care less what LeBron and Warner Bros. did in their free time together. How many times have the Ninja Turtles been rebooted at this point? How long until Spider-Man gets another reset? Just because something I loved as a child had the audacity to come back and try something new doesn't do anything to diminish the original product I loved as a child. Right? And - far more importantly here - two, in no way was Space Jam an important part of my childhood. I hadn't even seen the beginning ten minutes of the movie. I was never all that into basketball. It was with this glaring second issue in mind that I decided to watch Space Jam last night for the first time in at least fifteen years. I was stunned. Nothing about this movie makes any goddamn sense.

Someone has already covered, in great detail, the absurdity of the basketball game itself that takes place in the movie. (Here's a link.) The game doesn't feature a single block, rebound, or foul, and 86% of all points scored come by virtue of the dunk. There's just one missed shot in the whole game. The score changes abruptly and inconsistently at times. The Monstars turn the ball over just once, miss one shot, and score nine three-pointers to the Tunes' zero, yet somehow the Tunes win the game. This is literally impossible. Anyway, reading that breakdown is well worth your time and I won't dwell on any other details from the game itself.

No, what I want to tear apart is everything outside of the game. The plot, if you will. Now, quick disclaimer. I get that this is a kids' movie. I get that it's not going to feature intricate character arcs and I know some sloppy dot-connecting will be hurrying us through a good chunk of the story. But even for a kids' movie, this made no goddamn sense. The story starts with Danny DeVito's reptile businessman character, the bad guy, worried about the future earnings prospects of his run down outer space amusement park. Long story short, he discovers Looney Tunes on TV and decides that he will kidnap them and bring them back to "Moron Mountain" where they'll essentially be some sort of slave labor zoo exhibit. Anyway, he sends his minions to Earth in order to kidnap Bugs Bunny and friends. It turns out that Looney Tunes takes place in the center of the earth - seriously, had this ever been established in any way? - and once the space minions get there the Tunes surrender almost immediately. But Bugs Bunny is a wiseass, as we all know, and he convinces the little space bugs to play a game of basketball with their freedom on the line. The space bugs agree, then go off and siphon the talent away from real NBA all-stars and Shawn Bradley. The Tunes respond by kidnapping Michael Jordan through a golf course hole in order to enlist his help for the upcoming game.

Let's throw the brakes here and revisit some of that nonsense before we get too far ahead of ourselves. First, an advanced civilization capable of space flight has arrived to take prisoners, but they have enough integrity to say, "hey, fine, if you can beat us at basketball, we will not kidnap you." What the hell? And then they steal NBA talent and spend the whole game viciously fouling the other team anyway, so where exactly do they stand on the moral spectrum? Secondly, Shawn Bradley? Thirdly, the Tunes are faced with the prospect of being kidnapped and forced to perform their craft in a strange and foreign land... so they kidnap Michael Jordan in order to force him to perform his craft in a strange and foreign land. More moral ambiguity, no? Who are the good guys here? Who are the assholes? I've got a whole host of other questions, ranging from how the interconnectivity of the regular universe and Looney Tunes universe works; we see Jordan's kids watching Looney Tunes on TV, implying that it is a cartoon created and broadcast by actual humans much like in our world, so if it's a real actual series of events going on at the center of the Earth, I mean, why? How? No time for that, of course - Bugs or someone else could have delivered a two-sentence C-minus explanation of this and it would have sufficed. Instead, it's never even mentioned. And what about the prospect of Elmer Fudd playing on the same team as Bugs Bunny? Or Sylvester playing alongside Tweety? Half these charcaters actively try to kill each other whenever Looney Tunes is on - can they really work as a team?

It turns out, they don't need to do so, because they've got a one-man team in Michael Jordan. But we're getting ahead of ourselves; they also get Lola Bunny, a character specifically created for this very film. She gets all of three scenes. In the first, she schools Bugs on the basketball court and warns him not to make eyes at her. In the second, she does the exact same thing in the real game to one of the Monstars. And in the third, she's about to get absolutely pancaked by one of the Monstars doing a WWE style body slam off the backboard, but then Bugs shoves her out of the way and takes the hit instead. That's it. That's the entirety of Lola Bunny's screentime in the entire goddamn movie. Furry fetish fuel forevermore, all thanks to three meaningless scenes. (Do not do an extensive image search on "Lola Bunny" at work. But, do one at home. You need to see this stuff.)

Oh, meanwhile the NBA has decided to postpone every single game because four all-stars and Shawn Bradley are suddenly unable to play basketball. Imagine that!

So at any rate, the game happens. At the end of the first half the Monstars are up something like 60-18. I dunno, it's in the box score if you follow that link from above. By the way, reptilian Danny DeVito is here now, watching the game, even though its taking place at the center of the earth and he never made the trip to Earth in the first place. Just roll with it. Anyway, DeVito gets all pissed that his minions didn't siphon the talent away from Michael Jordan, who is clearly the best player of them all. But wait! DeVito was never in on the plan to play basketball in the first place. He just said, "bring me the Looney Tunes," and has no right whatsoever to be upset about his minions' methods of doing so. Regardless, here's where an already shaky movie just stops mattering on any level beyond watching cartoons dunk basketballs. Jordan cuts a deal with Danny DeVito, saying that if the Monstars lose, they need to give the NBA players their talents back, but if the Monstars win, Jordan will go to Moron Mountain in place of Bugs and company. DeVito accepts.

What the fuck, Space Jam?

Jordan, a family man with a wife and kids and a career and a life back on earth, suddenly doesn't give a shit about being abducted by aliens.

Reptile DeVito, who shows no regard for human rights in the first place, actually accepts the deal instead of just kidnapping everyone, Jordan included, regardless of the game's outcome.

If Reptile DeVito wants basketball players, he already has five in the form of NBA all-stars and Shawn Bradley, who have shown slavish loyalty to him all movie long, and so if it's basketball you want to bring to Moron Mountain, why not just blast off right now with this team in tow?

And the Monstars have already shown that they are able and willing to siphon away the talents of any NBA player, so why the hell aren't they doing that to Michael Jordan here and now!?

It's all inconsistent and horribly plotted and worst of all it makes no goddamn sense! Even for a movie that exists solely to show a cartoon basketball game, it makes no goddamn sense.

It probably isn't worth worrying about. The Tune Squad wins, but not before Wayne Knight and Bill Murray get involved in the game for no reason. How do they win? What magic gameplan switches were made by Jordan in the second half? None. None at all. Jordan just tricks his teammates into thinking they're chugging down steroids when he uses a water bottle labeled "Mike's Special Juice." So, a placebo effect. A placebo effect is the difference between getting outscored by forty in one half and outscoring the opposition by forty in the other. That's an eighty point swing. This implies that the Tune Squad on the placebo effect is worth about 160 net points a game more than the Tune Squad without the placebo effect.

I'm done here. This was just so fucking stupid. It had every right to be, and I expected no less, but holy hell.

Breaking Bad: Season 5, Part II

I want to talk about two things here - Breaking Bad's finale and the show's overall legacy.

First, the finale. A lot of Internet chatter back in September - not the majority of it, but still plenty to notice - suggested that perhaps the show had given Walter White too much moral redemption and had allowed him too happy an ending in what had always been a show about, you know, "breaking bad." I understand this criticism; while avoiding moral absolutes, the show had absolutely pushed its main character into increasingly darker places throughout its run, so to end things with Walt going out on his own terms was a bit of an eleventh hour tonal shift. Still, let's review what Walt accomplished.

Yes, it's true that Walt ended up accomplishing these things that he had set out to do:

• Died before being taken to prison
• Left a sizable amount of money behind for his family
• Created a lasting legacy for himself

And it's true that he also did the following noble or otherwise decent things on his final day:

• Took out a murderous gang of Nazi drugrunners
• Freed Jesse Pinkman, an on-and-off son figure, from slavery as a meth cook
• Killed Lydia
• Confessed to his wife that it was his ego, more than his family's wellbeing, that kept him cooking meth for as long as he did

But he also:

• Did get caught, if not arrested
• Ended up utterly despised by his son and wife
• Caused extreme financial and emotional hardships for his family
• Indirectly got his brother-in-law killed
• Spent several months dying of lung cancer, alone, in a New Hampshire cabin
• Lost the vast majority of his drug money fortune
• Bled out in a meth lab

I don't think the Walter White of Season 1, were he to watch the series finale, would think that anything really went according to plan. Walt only "went out on his own terms" insofar as he had hit absolute rock bottom in the third-to-last and second-to-last episodes. I'm curious how the "that was too tidy and happy" camp wanted to see the show end. With the Nazis prospering? With Jesse dead? With Skyler and Flynn just completely broke and forever ruined? With Walt having learned nothing at all during his his horribly depressing stint in New Hampshire? Make no mistake - Breaking Bad did not give Walter White a happy ending; it gave him a sliver of redemption after chipping away at his code of ethics for six solid years.It gave him no more than what he deserved, or what he had earned. After all, at the end of the day, Walt was still the show's protagonist and main character, and no matter how obvious it was that we were meant to root against Walt by the end, if not much sooner, we'd be lying to ourselves if we pretended not to love his ability to think on his feet, to improvise, and to essentially MacGyver his way out of so many drastic situations.

All I'm saying is, it was okay to root for Walt in the finale, since Walt had repented and suffered to such severe degrees. Maybe the biggest problem with the final season is how rushed the ending is; we see Walt at his absolute lowest in the gripping "Ozymandias," we see him soften up a great deal in "Granite State" as some six months or so come to pass, and then we see just about everything go right for him, one last time, in "Felina." "Granite State" was the least memorable of those three episodes, but perhaps it could have and should have been stretched out even longer. I understand the show not wanting to drag out its ending, but as viewers I don't think we fully come to appreciate just how much time Walt has spent in self-imposed solitude, disowned by his family and unable to contact another living person. It's that lengthy sentence, after all, that transforms him from the angry, stewing asshole he was in "Ozymandias" into the tired, broken, and sort-of remorseful guy he was in "Felina." For me, this off-screen time lapse is essential to appreciating the ending of Breaking Bad. The show could have ended pretty easily with "Ozymandias" or even a modified "Granite State" if it wanted to be about one man's absolute fall from grace. Instead, they gave us "Felina," intentionally ending the story of Walter White with a glimmer of redemption... while still avoiding any semblance of a happy ending at all. (Where does Jesse go now that he's a known and wanted felon? How will Marie and Skyler ever mend their bridges given what one's husband did to the other's? Is Skyler really still safe from persecution, given her total complicity in Walt's money laundering? What the hell is in store for Brock going forward? What kind of daddy issues will Holly grow up with?)

I said I wanted to talk about the show's legacy, but I've run long here already, and frankly, I don't have much to say beyond heaping praise on the show, and praise for Breaking Bad is abundant here on the Internet, so why bother? I'll say that whether or not Breaking Bad was the greatest show ever, it made for an absolutely beautiful eulogy to the "angry white man" antihero genre that's been so in vogue for fifteen years now. I mean, how do you try to follow this act, Low Winter Sun? What more can you bring to the table, Ray Donovan?

I've probably seen about a hundred TV shows from start to finish. I'll miss this one dearly.

Pikmin

Here's a treat. One of the oldest games in my backlog, in terms of both original release date and time spent on my shelf, Pikmin has now been vanquished. I liked it! But it could have been much better with a few simple tweaks. Heading into the game, I knew that the consensus biggest issue with Pikmin was the in-game thirty-day time limit; Captain Olimar only has enough life support to last him thirty days, so if you haven't reassembled his ship by then, you're shit out of luck. There are thirty parts of the ship to collect and you only need twenty-five in order to successfully lift off and beat the game; you can average slightly less than a part a day, then, and wind up just fine. That's what I did, and the time limit wasn't really much of a challenge. It was, however, an unfortunate limitation. I wish I had been able to take my time and really explore the nooks and secrets of the well-developed world. First party Nintendo games rarely disappoint, and this was one I'd have loved to slow down and really enjoy. But no! There's simply no place for idle wandering in Pikmin, where days pass in fifteen minutes' time and any time wasted could render an entire day mostly useless. I had a few such days during my time with Pikmin, where I didn't collect a single ship piece, and they were a little frustrating. They were easily compensated by the days where I found two or three ship parts, but they left a bitter taste in my mouth all the same. Also, the real-time elements of Pikmin gave the game an emphasis on pipelining your engine, so to speak; any of your one hundred Pikmin not engaged in a task at any given time are being wasted. I worry enough about time management and scheduling algorithms at my day job, and prefer my video games to be relaxing and to unfold at a taste suited to my own preference. Pikmin wasn't a frantic or chaotic game by any stretch, and people have hundred-percented it in eight or nine days out of the thirty available, but I'd have liked it a lot more had it been a take-your-time-and-figure-out-this-puzzle type of game. Granted, that would have made it just a little more like Metroid and Zelda, and I suppose it's good for Nintendo to branch out. Also, apparently Pikmin 2 has done away with the thirty-day time limit. I haven't heard that the concept of discrete days has gone away entirely, which likely means it hasn't, but still, I'm looking forward to something I can take my time with just a little more. All the same, if you're looking for a highly-polished Nintendo game that doesn't take more than eight hours to beat (by design) then you can't go wrong with Pikmin.

Broken Age: Act I

Oh, Tim Schafer... will you make anything as good as Grim Fandango or Monkey Island again?

Schafer definitely has a cult following in the video game world -- an industry where creators are relatively unknown. What stands out most in his games are the bizarre, colorful characters settled in vibrant, original worlds. Take Grim Fandango. It's a story of how grim reapers are actually travel agents in the afterlife helping people "move on" to their final destination until one reaper discovers there's corruption within his business and embarks on an adventure to expose the truth. A truly great game that still holds up today. (On a side note: I would love to say that Psychonauts is one of my favorite games of all time, but I have yet to beat it and likely never will -- game freezes during what I think is the final boss battle.) Point is, Schafer has set the bar high on what great storytelling in games can accomplish. The big question here is how does Broken Age hold up?

At first glance, it's a great game. We're going back to Schafer's roots where he's designed another adventure genre game we saw all the time in the 90's. A game where you talk to various characters, collect items, and figure out how the hell to use those items to solve puzzles. The game has an interesting element, though, in that there are two stories going on simultaneously. You can freely switch back-and-forth between this girl on a planet who's been selected to be sacrificed to big monster that threatens to destroy her city, and this boy stuck on a space station that looks like it was built by Playskool. Neither character knows about the other as they go about their respected quests (either to defeat the monster or escape the space station). The graphics are beautiful and resemble a living painting, while the characters are generally interesting, funny, and original. I only have one major complaint:

THE GAME IS NOT FINISHED!

I bought this guy from Steam. When you make your purchase for Act I, you preorder Act II which I think is set to be released in the fall. Still, why the hell would Schafer just wait until the game was complete before releasing it? I will say there's a very interesting cliffhanger Act I ends on, but it's just at the point where things really begin to move along. 

Another slight shortcoming is that fact that the game is easy. I think I beat this in just under four hours... and I'm slow. I'm sure others could beat it much faster than me only because the puzzles are fairly straight forward. What I mean is that if there's some sort of obstacle you have to overcome, chances are that the item you need to solve said problem is probably located right next to you. Not that hard to connect those dots. 

That aside, the game is ultimately fun. I'm looking forward to playing the second act, but I'm pissed I have to wait for it. If Schafer's intention was to keep his audience wanting more, then he's succeeded. 

Heat

Heat was pretty critically acclaimed, and yet I have little acclaim for it at all. Yeah, just like Stan's post on the action-packed Bourne movies, this was just uninteresting background stuff for me. Pacino and De Niro turn in solid performances although I didn't quite get the feeling that this was two legends of acting at the top of their game in the same movie. I mean, you've got a cop with family problems chasing after a career criminal looking for one last big score. The plot doesn't really have any wild twists and turns or anything and while some scenes built up a nice bit of cat-and-mouse tension, there was little aside from the reunion of Pacino and De Niro to keep me interested here.

The Bourne Ultimatum

I think if I'm being honest with myself, I need to admit that these types of movies just plain bore me. It's ironic, really, that action movies can leave me so untitilated, but here we are. Shaky jerky cameras, screeching tire car chases, glass shattering, bullets whizzing around, tension-tightening music with dramatic effect thumping bass - it's all just so mundane to me. I have little doubt that the Bourne movies have earned their reputation as phenomenal action thrillers, but I just couldn't find it in me to give enough of a shit to even follow a basic plot thread here beyond the first half of the first movie. These movies haven't made me laugh, haven't made me cry, haven't surprised me, and haven't even made me think at all. They've elicited virtually no reaction at all from me, really. Some of the action sequences were pretty cool, but absent anything else redeeming, I just can't muster up a positive reaction here. Oh well. No loss of respect for Matt Damon here or anything, but these Bourne movies have been little more to me than violent background noise.

Falling Down

I feel like this movie's poster has endured more than anything in the movie itself- look at Michael Douglas up there, standing in the middle of a park in some run-down part of Los Angeles, looking at once both incredibly nerdy with his short-sleeved collared shirt and incredibly dangerous with a huge gun. He's the iconic "angry white male", and Falling Down is a simple story of what happens when this middle-aged man snaps. After divorcing his wife and being forcefully kept out of his daughter's life, he gets fired and then stuck in traffic on his way home, so Michael Douglas basically goes insane and spouts talking points about how much society has changed since the old days and how everything's gone to shit. He uses this as an excuse to just go on a rampage, killing whoever bothers him in an attempt to get to his daughter's birthday party. Credit where credit's due, Douglas puts on a great performance as someone who doesn't take pleasure in the destruction he's causing, but just seems like a confused man who's tired of the way things are. The movie can definitely be construed as a very very dark comedy as many of the little annoyances that set the guy off are things we can all relate to even if they don't send us on a killing spree; still though in a few months I don't think I'll remember much about Falling Down past its lead's great performance.

Annie Hall

Midnight in Paris was the only Woody Allen movie I had seen before this, so for my next one I jumped into his most beloved romantic comedy- Annie Hall, and I see why everyone seems to love it so much. Despite later revelations that Woody Allen is a major creep, the movie itself is pretty funny and charming. Woody stars as Alvy, a pretty obvious comedian stand-in for himself, recounting the one true love of his life, the free spirited Annie played by Diane Keaton. The two have an obvious chemistry and Woody fills the movie with funny bits and loads of fourth-wall breaking- Woody will frequently ask complete strangers on the street deeply personal questions, or for advice concerning things they have no idea about, and they casually answer like it's no big deal. One memorable segment sees the couple flirting for the first time with captions describing their thoughts in real-time, revealing how insecure the two seem to be about everything. Later when detailing how the movie Snow White warped his child mind, the movie turns into Disney-style animation for a few minutes. The whole thing's enjoyable to watch because Alvy is just a very relatable character, which is kind of scary considering again what a weirdo Woody Allen turned out to be. Still though, considering how many classic old movies just don't seem to hold up all that well when watching them now, I think Annie Hall is one that has aged well over the last 37 years.

Cloud Atlas

So despite not really liking the Wachowskis' The Matrix, and having zero interest in Speed Racer, I did check out their most recent flick, Cloud Atlas. It received some pretty wildly mixed reviews- some praised it for being epic and ambitious, while others derided it as a giant mess full of questionable choices. It's nearly three hours long and constantly jumps back and forth between six separate stories and six different time periods and locations, and rarely do any characters show up in more than one story. We also get six different protagonists played by six different actors, and through the magic of Hollywood make-up, most of these actors show up in all six different stories as six different characters... seriously, among the six main actors and actresses you've got 31 separate characters. Then of course you've got supporting characters also playing up to six different characters each too. Sometimes they had to bend the rules to make this work, and this led to the big controversy the movie faced- racial make-up! For instance, Korean actress Doona Bae is the main character of a futuristic segment in Korea, but since there were no other roles for a Korean woman in other stories, they made her a white woman in the 1840's, and a Mexican woman in the 1970's. Halle Berry also plays a white woman. Keith David, a black actor, and several white British actors somehow becomes Korean (this was the really controversial part!). And just for the hell of it, Hugo Weaving plays a woman in one of his six roles, extending this to gender-bending. Of course it's tough to break down my opinion on this choice down to a simple "I approved" or "I disapproved." Obviously the subject becomes touchy when you have white people playing other races, but the Wachowskis had a diverse cast of interesting characters and were clearly very committed to the idea that lives several generations apart can be intricately connected, and as such it seems like the racial make-up was necessary to tell this story correctly. Then again, almost every one of them just looked undeniably goofy and it was a bit distracting every time they came up, especially Korean Keith David which took me out of the movie completely. Still though, what happened here was a bit more complex than Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Aside from that, I mostly liked Cloud Atlas. It managed to keep me entertained throughout, constantly bouncing from one story to another, rarely sticking with one for more than a minute, and intertwining the stories made for some great moments, especially when you learn about how one person's choice in one story has made huge, lasting effects in another. I wouldn't say it felt messy at all, in fact I'm surprised at how cleanly they pulled off such an ambitious idea. There are certainly a few moments that feel a bit out of place (Tom Hanks' hallucinations specifically) but there are more than enough great ones for me to forgive them. Still though, there seemed to be little consensus when this movie came out and as many critics hated it as loved it, so I'm curious- did anyone else see it?

Iron Brigade

This wasn't all that great, either. Miles better than Shoot Many Robots, but nothing incredibly fun or memorable. The best way I can describe this game is as MechWarrior in World War I. The idea is that you've got some big old steam-powered robot, atop which you remain entrenched behind sandbags and such; the game's original name was Trenched until some sort of preexisting copyright forced a title swap. Ultimately this one was mostly tower defense, but there was enough real time third person action to prevent a completely stale feel.

Shoot Many Robots

This was garbage. Thankfully it was free - another Xbox Live "games with gold" giveaway from some number of months ago - but dang, was it just a big old pile of shit. It was repetitive as hell, it wasn't fun, and it wasn't worth spending more than a few hours on. It didn't even give me more than one achievement for my troubles. Seriously. Beating this piece of shit doesn't even net you any of those sweet sweet gamerscore points. This was easily the worst free game I've played yet on the Xbox 360, and I'm including three Doritos creations in that cesspool.

Castle Crashers

This was one of four PSN games I bought about a month ago on the cheap. (Eighteen bucks for all four.) It's a fairly well-received four-player hack-and-slash. I beat it in two sessions with Stevie, with the second and shorter session coming last night.

It was... fairly mindless, simple, and not quite funny or unique enough to justify the time spent playing it. This was a real button-masher in every sense of the word, complete with like twenty different characters who didn't even have different base stats. It wasn't broken or even definitively bad, and I've played plenty of more boring, more difficult, and less enjoyable games. Still, there's just no replay value here, and even co-op with a buddy couldn't make this a worthwhile purchase. I suppose maybe if two more friends had joined in the fun and we'd taken advantage of the four-player potential, the chaos and insanity could have made this better. Alas, I only have so many friends, and only one who likes to come over on weeknights to play video games.

By the way, this is eight straight days with a post for me, which could possibly be a Back-Blogged record. Can I DiMaggio my way into, nay, through the upcoming weekend? (Probably not!)

Wet Hot American Summer

Now this one I've definitely seen before, but it was so long ago that I've forgotten almost all of it and I felt a re-watch would warrant a posting. All I remembered was that it was hilarious, and sure enough it still was. Wet Hot American Summer parodies 80's camp movies and teen movies in general, combining overdone melodrama with absurdities like kids drowning while being ignored by counselors, or a trip into town in which all the counselors get addicted to hard drugs. It's got a stellar cast of mostly unknowns at the time who have turned into some of the biggest names in comedy over the last decade- specifically Amy Poehler, the guys from Stella, Paul Rudd, and H. Jon Benjamin. It's even got Bradley Cooper and Elizabeth Banks in very early roles. If you need any motivation to see this film- check out how unfunny Roger Ebert was in his attempt at a scathing one-star review.

Now You See Me

So I find magic in general to be one of the most stressful things to watch, but I guess that that's a bit of the intended effect. I remember thinking the ads for this movie looked pretty cool even if I thought the movie would be kinda dumb. I mean isn't a major part of the appeal of magic that you're actually seeing a real illusion right in front of you? How am I supposed to be impressed by the tricks in this movie when they can just be created with special effects in post-production? Still though it looked like this was going to be more of a caper movie with magic as a twist, and those are usually pretty fun to watch. And I guess Now You See Me was fun enough. Sure, some of the actors here are kinda phoning it in, and the big final twist was just a bit too much for me to approve of, but along the way there's plenty of clever ways to integrate magic into heists, and seemingly innocuous scenes of character development turn out to be integral to the plot. Consider it good enough to stop on if you find it on TV, but nothing you need to go out of your way for.

Civilization Revolution

Technically, I've beaten this game before. I did so on the DS, long ago and before there was a Back-Blogged site on which to talk about it. Still, when I learned that this was Xbox 360's free game of the half-month for early March, I knew I had to grab it; already beaten or not, Civilization Revolution has a ton of replay value, like any Civilization game, and why not load up on some quick and dirty Xbox achievement points while having fun with a great franchise? Last night I fired up the Xbox and started playing a "quick game." Big mistake; there's no such thing as a quick game of Civilization.

More accurately, there's no such thing as a short session of Civilization. The game itself probably only took about two hours, and I blew every other civilization out of the water as Abe Lincoln's Americans, so it was really just a prolonged process of having fun with a detailed world-and-war-and-culture simulator. My cities and military units and technology quickly grew exponentially more advanced than that of my neighbors and as such the game only got easier as it went on. I'll credit that to an unseen difficulty setting that I'll assume started out on "easy." But then, maybe Civilization Revolution is just meant to serve as an entryway into the franchise for console gamers. I'll be back soon enough, I'm sure, trying other playthroughs and getting more achievements. I'd love to try some online multiplayer, but I fear it'd be slow as hell, withe me spending 80% of my time waiting for other people's moves in a 5-player game. Or maybe they've streamlined it in some way.

Anyway, this one's still free with an Xbox Live Gold subscription for a few more days. I highly, highly recommend it. The game isn't for everyone and it has a steep learning curve but there's substantial variety to the game including something like a dozen different civilizations to play as and four different victory conditions. And given that you can play through a game in two or three hours, it's really not a significant burden to any backlog.

24: Season 1

Like everyone else, I saw the teaser for the new season of 24 that aired during the Super Bowl. At that point I had never seen the show aside from the pilot back when it first aired in 2001. (For whatever reason it never hooked me, and even all the hype that everyone seemed to have for it in high school and college still could not persuade me to tune in.) Well, just that one piece of footage of Bauer unloading his gun, screaming, while marching through a bomb-ravaged London looked intense. So I'm tuning in...

Finished the first season off in less than a week. It's pretty damn satisfying, but I'm not going to say this is amazing television. At least not something like Breaking Bad mostly because I wouldn't say it's particularly smart writing. It feels like an action movie mashed with soap opera-like drama topped off over-the-top acting -- lead by the cliche cop who plays by their own rules and can't be controlled (Bauer is really just another Riggs or McClane -- not that there's anything wrong with that!). Formulaic, cheesy plot twists, high dead body count; none-the-less, it's entertaining. 

There's also an endearing side for me with the fact that the show is so... Hollywood. It's another action movie taken from the streets of LA. From sky scrappers to oil derricks, the show features all of the wide and vast terrains that LA has to offer. They even made use of the iconic LA river channel that we've seen dozens of car chases in. LA action movies is something we used to see a lot of, but now I feel as though they're fairly rare. Even though this show is nearly 15 years old, it's still nice to see Hollywood being Hollywood. Guns, sunglasses, and stale acting. Got to love it. 

I will hopefully be able to burn through the rest of these seasons before the new one airs in a few months. Sheridan did explain things start to get a little boring around season six, so we'll see if I can keep the momentum going. 

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

It wouldn't be right for me to make this post in any other way than a series of loosely connected bullet points containing positive and negative thoughts alike. Away we go!

• I'd been told by people, mainly Sweeney, that this book represented the height of the series; if I couldn't get on board with The Dark Tower here, I just wasn't going to do so. So I put a lot of pressure on myself, to whatever extent it's possible, to enjoy this book. I've got five more Dark Tower books, after all, and if I couldn't get down with the best one, it was bound to be a sad, years-long journey of half-hearted skimming and Internet synopsis checking for me.
• I liked The Waste Lands better than The Drawing of the Three, which I liked more than The Gunslinger, which I didn't even hate so much as I was frustrated by its vague and problematic writing. But I still wouldn't quite say I loved The Drawing of the Three. In fact, about 400 pages in - that's two thirds of the book - I was almost resigning myself to the aforementioned sad fate of half-heartedly reading the books and trying to feign excitement about them to Sween, to my own wife, and most of all to myself. The book just wasn't pulling me in; I'd been reading it for over a month, but rarely getting more than twenty pages at a time, and often putting it down for a few weeks at a time.
• And then something clicked, and I read the book's final 200 pages or so all in one night. (Series veterans, this turning point came when Roland and his crew began to cross a rickety bridge after leaving a small city. Gasher kidnaps someone, Roland and a new four-legged companion go off looking for him, the other two find their way onto the heavily foreshadowed Blaine the Train, and it's all high stakes riddles from there. Action, interesting character pairings, and suspense. That's good enough for me!)
• The book started strong, too. They all seem to do that. The Gunslinger gave us the Tull massacre, The Drawing of the Three gave us the lobstrosities, and The Waste Lands gave us Shardik, the gigantic bear cyborg. Stephen King has no problems luring me in! It's the non-action sequences that rely on dialogue and careful narration that tend to lose me.
• Here's a minor pet peeve indicative of King's overall shortcomings. Two thirds of the way into the book, and just before its climax, a strong wind picks up, and King just kind of casually drops a reference to this being the first of the great autumn storms of Mid-World. Yet to the best of my knowledge this is the very first reference to such a climatological phenomenon through three books set here, and even to the idea that it's now autumn. A better writer would have sprinkled in foreshadowing earlier in the book to alert an astute reader that the skies were growing darker, or the days colder, or something. Even just some idle dialogue from Roland or some other character, like, "Storm's comin' any day now, I reckon." Simple, easy stuff. Not King's style, though. Again, this is just a pet peeve, but it really comes across like the guy has all these cool ideas flying through his head and pouring out onto the page almost on a half-whim, which is awesome, but it's also apparent that he lacks the desire to go back and tighten up previous portions of his story, and it all suffers from a certain looseness as a result. Editing, man!
• Credit were credit is due, though; in past Dark Tower posts I've been frustrated by King's inability to "show, don't tell," especially when it comes to character relationships. "Roland suddenly realized he loved the boy." "Eddie slowly came to fall in love with Susannah." There's really none of that here, and every character interaction feels richer for it.
• I'm not sure how I feel about Oy. On one hand, he seems like a Scooby-Doo knock-off with no real place in a gritty fantasy Western. On the other, his face-licking, loyal, "who's a good boy!?" shtick serves as a nice comic relief from Roland's humorless one-track mindset. I don't dislike the character or the concept, but I do think it makes the whole series slightly sillier - which, granted, the series could use, I guess.
• It's really just cringe-worthy to read Stephen King, an able-bodied white guy from Maine, trying his hand at ebonics from the perspective of an angry legless black woman. "AW HELL NO, THESE HONKY-ASS MOTHAFUCKAS REALLY GOAN TRY DAT STUPID WHITE BOY SHIT ON DIS BITCH?" (Shudder.)
• It's really become apparent to me just how much The Dark Tower inspired the later seasons - the shitty ones - of Lost. Desmond floating between alternate timelines and needing a "constant" to set him straight, a man in black as the ultimate villain, the idea of a "ka-tet" being analogous to the gathering at the afterlife afterparty in the show's final episode. I can't hold this against Stephen King or The Dark Tower, but it's amazing how bad that show became when it tired its hand at these concepts.
• Partial credit for this one. My biggest beef with The Gunslinger was the complete lack of clarity or the establishment of any kind of stakes with Jake's death, rebirth, and subsequent re-death. He's died once, so why should I bat an eye at him dying again? I won't rehash it all here and now, but suffice it to say, King ties that loop back off in the first half of this book, and while a lot of his mechanics are hazy and unclear and frankly confusing, he gets the job done. It was a messy job, but the jury rigged solution seems steady enough to get us through the rest of the series.
• I did appreciate spending substantial time up front from Jake's point of view. It helped transform him from a weird plot device into a legitimate rounded-out character.
• Internal comparisons to the Bilbo-and-Gollum chapter from The Hobbit were going to be inevitable during all those riddles between Blaine and the ka-tet, but I'm sure King knew that, and I'll consider it an homage more than a rip-off or a stolen idea. Interestingly, Susannah makes a Lord of the Rings connection during the train ride, comparing the environment to Mordor, but she never stops and thinks about Tolkien's work with regard to the riddles themselves. Weird!

And yeah. That's The Waste Lands. Up next is the substantially longer and mostly-or-entirely flashback-based Wizard and Glass. I have every intention of getting through that one before the end of 2014, but how soon I dive back in is anyone's guess.

Eyes Wide Shut

Trev made an excellent post about Eyes Wide Shut a year ago, in which he confessed to understanding very little of what he'd just seen but showed an eagerness to understand it all the same. I find myself in the exact same boat - confused as hell by what I just saw, but confident that Kubrick was saying something meaningful and that the fault lies with me for not understanding it. I've already Googled "Eyes Wide Shut analysis" and clicked through a handful of links, and while I hate to throw in the towel on any movie that makes me think - seriously, how often do I whine here that a movie just wasn't all that special or memorable - I'm really at a loss here.

The movie is obviously about sex and marriage and temptation, but that much is clear even from a basic superficial viewing of the movie. There's definitely a deeper message here, and thanks to the Internet I've got multiple possible understandings of the film less than a day after finishing it, but nothing jumps out at me as an obvious ultimate solution - which isn't even to say that the movie is supposed to be a puzzle.

So, yeah. I'm still not sure what I make of Eyes Wide Shut, but I'm pretty sure I liked it, and I think it'll be something that benefits from stewing in my brain over time. A couple of years ago I reviewed Mulholland Drive here, and my first and last sentences were just, "What the fuck?" But without even having seen that movie a second time, I've come to really appreciate it; immediate confusion gave way to long-term satisfaction. Maybe that'll be the case here and maybe it won't be, but for now I'm willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt.

Game of Thrones: Season 3

The third season of Game of Thrones was the best one yet, but paradoxically I've got very little to say about it here. I've read the books and I know what's coming next, and virtually everyone I know watches this show by now, so there's no need for me to gush and try to push it on everyone. The show resumes with Season 4 in a few weeks, and consensus thought suggests the sixth book should be out within a year. There are great times ahead for Game of Thrones fans, and while the third book remains the highlight to date for the written series, I'm hoping the show doesn't peak here with Season 3.

Since I've got nothing else to say, here's a quick refresher for everyone as we head into the fourth season, regarding where the major characters and conflicts are when Season 3 concludes. I promise to spoil nothing with my book foresight, but obviously this is where you should stop reading if you're not up to date on the show yet. For the rest of you, onward!

Trainspotting

A lot of hype has preceded Trainspotting in my personal experience. For years now, it's come up routinely when people mention messed up or disturbing movies, and it also seems like the go-to "drugs will fuck you up" movie after Requiem for a Dream. I get that. The movie certainly depicts the ugly side of heroin addiction, and even its surreal hallucination scenes are more odd than inspiring. An early scene really set the tone for the movie, where Ewan McGregor shits some suppositories out into the world's most disgusting public toilet, then literally dives in after them, his heroin withdrawal symptoms overpowering the very basic human urge not to end up covered in shit water. The scene is cringe-worthy and borderline goofy, but you get the vibe that this isn't a rare enough occurrence in the real world. Nor, of course, is the dead baby imagery. Yeah, it turns out if you do nothing but hard drugs all day long, your baby is going to die in its crib and turn all blue and... yeesh.

But as powerful and dark as certain moments in Trainspotting were, the movie itself was a little too loose and light on its feet for me to compare it to Requiem for a Dream. Like, despite the dead babies and the guys covered in shit with no ambition in life, it felt just a little too silly to treat with the same gravitas as Aronofsky's fourfold heartbreaker. Instead, the movie I most readily compared to Trainspotting is a movie I haven't thought of in years or seen in at least a decade - SLC Punk. I can't quite figure out why I've made that connection, but I made it all the same, and couldn't shake it once I had. Must be the similarities in tone and editing; the movies lack a common actor, writer, director, or anything else between them as far as I'm aware,

Anyway, Trainspotting was solid, but it was no Requiem for a Dream.

Rushmore

So I haven't really posted any movies in a long time and the few I have have been pretty infrequent. When voting on Stan's recent 90's movie tournament, I realized that there's just a ton of movies I want to see! I have no interest in starting up a DVD collection or anything, so my plan of attack is just to check what's playing on all the different HBO channels for a week and DVR whatever interests me. I have a limited assortment to choose from; not all of these will be obvious picks to watch. I'll start with Wes Anderson's breakout movie, Rushmore. I had seen bits and pieces of this years ago, but this was the first time I've seen the whole thing through. And I liked it! The whole movie gets carried by Jason Schwartzman as a young private school student with zero social skills. He's extremely outgoing and is a member of nearly every club in the school, and he manages to make himself somewhat charming to the viewer and a very small number of acquaintances despite being very smug about his successes. He befriends Bill Murray but ends up fighting with him over a female teacher who has not much interest in either, and the whole thing comes together with a surprisingly touching ending. I can see why his style can rub some people the wrong way- I remember really disliking The Life Aquatic when I first saw it, but that was a long time ago so I'd be willing to give that one another shot. But Rushmore was pretty great, and a perfect starting point for my potential re-introduction to Wes Anderson- I've got at least one more movie of his to post soon enough.

Deponia

I'm an idiot and as such I bought another PC game bundle, this time entirely focused on adventure games. What can I say, puzzling over a good point-and-click adventure just seems to work well with the tv on in the background- none of these games require constant attention, and most of them appeared to be very well-reviewed, even if I had heard of exactly zero of them before buying the bundle. Plus most of them seem like less than ten hour commitments. First up is Deponia, a game from Germany's Daedalic Entertainment, in which you do the standard adventure game tasks- picking up random objects, combining them with eachother and the environment, and navigating dialog trees to solve puzzles and move through a story. The gameplay is nothing revolutionary here, and nor is the story- a scrappy young man, Rufus, living on a poor junkyard planet sometime in the future, is desperate to leave and make it to the rich planet of his dreams, Elysium. Of course almost immediately after he starts on his journey, the entire thing is thrown completely off course and it's up to Rufus to both a) figure out a new way to get to Elysium and b) unravel a conspiracy that threatens everyone he knows on his home planet. The problem with Rufus is that he's a selfish prick who only thinks of himself, so he's not getting much in the way of help from his acquaintences. While his constant arrogance can get grating, he's at least mastered the art of the comedic pause. That, and the mostly good puzzles and gameplay would seem to make this a decent enough game. But damn, if I've ever seen a game just derailed by a plot, it's this one. Deponia is just so painfully misogynistic. I had to check some reviews afterwards and found out I'm not alone here, everyone's wondering what the hell is up with all the blatant objectifying of women. I mean, Rufus spends the whole game pining after this girl from Elysium, and winning her heart feels like the true goal of the game. So guess what her name is? It's Goal. GOAL. They named her GOAL. She's literally the "manic pixie dream girl" minus the "manic." When she falls to the planet, the men in the town fight to claim ownership of her. And when Rufus does something in front of her that she doesn't like, he has the ability to just wipe her memory and start fresh again with a back-up personality chip! She's one of two women in the game, and the other one slips comfortably into the bitchy ex-girlfriend trope. Rufus later interacts with her for a puzzle by drugging her. Fantastic. It wouldn't be so bad if by game's end you have Rufus learn his lesson, or if other people were calling him out on his shit, but no, this is apparently completely normal behavior. Two more games were released in the series, and from what I've read it only gets worse from here. The third game even brings in some racist stereotypes too! I mean, I get crude humor. I can see the appeal of how over-the-top a game like Duke Nukem or Leisure Suit Larry can be. But man, it just didn't fit at all here and I've got no interest continuing on with what was otherwise a decent enough adventure series.

Léon: The Professional

Before I even start talking about this movie, it's quiz time. Name the then-child actress from this 1994 movie, pictured below.

Maybe the rest of you can see it right away; it's Natalie Portman. I'm sorry. I know this shouldn't blow my mind - lots of A-list actors start their careers when they're young, and lots of people look a lot different before puberty than they do afterward - but it blows my mind all the same. I was about thirty minutes into this movie when I said to myself, "This kid is annoying as hell. I wonder if she ever worked again after this movie." The role was just so angst-ridden and hardened and cynical, and I was wondering if this actress had grown up to become some sort of character actor whose specialty was badass gritty anti-heroines in the vein of Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley or basically any role Michelle Rodriguez has filled. Nope! Natalie fucking Portman, one of the most sweet and wholesome actresses in the business. Mind blown.

Anyway, now that that's off my chest, let's spend some time talking about the movie itself. It wasn't bad! It's a French-made English language movie about a professional hitman and his apprentice. (Again, that's Natalie Portman. Young Natalie Portman played a hitman's apprentice.) The whole thing starts when Natalie's dysfunctional and mean-spirited family is murdered in their apartment in cold blood because her father pissed off the wrong corrupt DEA agent, or something. Natalie is taken in by her neighbor - Léon - who promises to teach her how to become a hitman herself. From there the movie is an interesting mixture of equal parts Man on Fire and The Karate Kid and The Transporter. A perpetual lone wolf takes in preteen orphan and trains her in his craft. He slowly comes to love her, because of course he does; she loves him too, but in an awkward half-fatherly half-sexual way, which I guess is par for the course among eleven-year-old girls? He teaches her how to kill other human beings and of course she gets pretty good at it, but Léon still needs to save her from the bad guys in the third act, which is cool, because she's given him something to live for.

There's really nothing special or unique about the plot; it's about as generic and predictable as they come. Does the girl get revenge on the guys who killed her family? Of course she does. Does her father figure crush risk everything to protect and save her after originally wanting her to go away? You bet. Does he wind up regretting nothing, despite all the trouble she has caused him by entering his life, since he's finally found someone to love and something to live for? You better believe it. Did all of this admittedly unoriginal plotting still make for a compelling movie? Indeed it did, thanks largely to the actors.

Oh, lastly - the main villain in the movie? A younger Gary Oldman, also barely recognizable. He was great, too.

JFK

Hahaha... Last I touched this one was back in November. Oh, sweet Jesus. What do I have to say about it?

Best editing I've ever seen in a movie. (Truly deserving of the Oscar it won in this category.)

Yeah, there's some good performances, music is by John Williams (so, of course, that's amazing -- another Oscar there, I believe), and -- in general -- I really enjoyed this movie. Though, it really does feel a bit more closer to a documentary than a piece of historical fiction. What I mean is not that I take Oliver Stone's account of the JFK assassination as truth, but that dramatic narrative begins to wear away after sometime and the film gradually begins to feel as though it's trying to educate me on these events rather than tell me the story about one D.A.'s struggle against the system in an effort to uncover the truth. (Not that it's boring or anything, just an idea that stuck me.)

I remember I went out to see this film (once again, back in November of 2013) during the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination when it briefly reappeared in theaters. I'm glad I got the big-screen experience of this gem, but I highly encourage anyone to see this film regardless on what size screen it's being viewed on. 

I will say this, Oliver Stone makes some fairly bold claims in this movie. There have have always been many, many theories about who was truly "responsible" in pulling the trigger to the assassination, but Stone, more-or-less, takes a stance on the culprit. Some say it was the communists. Some say it was Oswald acting alone. Stone, his stance is that the American government (mainly Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the heads of the Pentagon) plotted to kill Kennedy so that they would be able to carry out their war against the Communists and Vietnam which would be extremely lucrative to the Military Industrial Complex. In the end, we still don't know what really happened and the film ends with our hero D.A. losing his case in court, but at least it places the idea in the audiences head to question everything in search of the truth. 

Can't wait to post another artist's theory on the JFK assassination, Stephen King's 11/22/63.