Stan's TV Dump: Mid-Fall 2015

Plenty to discuss here at the end of the year! So much, in fact, that I'm splitting fall into three parts. There's just too much television!

Trailer Park Boys: Season 2

I'll apologize in advance - there will be a lot of Trailer Park Boys in this post. I enjoyed Season 1 just fine, but Season 2 is where I really started to see why this show became such a long-lasting cult classic. This season had Julian and Ricky getting out of prison and then growing weed in a trailer to sell back to the prison. They ultimately end up, of course, back in prison. Like I said last time, the show feels like a poor man's Always Sunny with even lower stakes. It works! Also, a young Ellen Page guest stars throughout this season.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 1

Speaking of cult classics, I finally got around to checking out Buffy. This first season aired back in 1997 and in addition to being gloriously dated it's got horrifically bad special effects. I loved it - though how much I was laughing at it instead of with it, I can't say. For what it's worth, the whole season gave me a huge retroactive crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar - something I never had during the original run of Buffy, from 1997 to 2003, as a nine-to-fifteen-year-old boy, somehow.

Trailer Park Boys: Season 3

Another season of Trailer Park Boys, another series of ill-hatched petty crimes from Ricky and Julian and friends. It's the third straight season to start and end with Julian in jail, but in a surprise twist (sorry), Ricky manages to avoid jail time this season. Moreover, he ends up taking over as the trailer park supervisor when his arch-nemesis Mr. Lahey ends up in jail. Looks like we're in for a doozy of a fourth season!

Trailer Park Boys: Season 4

It happens to every cult classic that runs for a long enough time, and for Trailer Park Boys it happened in the fourth season: a good old-fashioned shark jump. Where the show used to dabble in subtle humor based on character beats, the fourth season brought in plots like backyard wrestling, a mountain lion on the loose, and a deranged hand puppet with a mind of its own. Still hilarious - but very broadly a situational comedy at this point.

Master of None: Season 1

I really liked this. Aziz Ansari has always been a favorite of mine and I was looking forward to his new Netflix show for a long time. It's "fictional" in the broadest sense, and the main character is pretty clearly just a stand-in for Aziz. Episodes tend to have focused themes - dating, parents, being Indian, working as an actor, having kids - and at its worst the show could feel a bit on-the-nose and preachy. It felt a lot like Louie without all the surrealism, and it was definitely more consistent than Louie. I'm definitely on board for a second season of this one.

The Bastard Executioner: Season 1

It was with hesitation and reluctance that I set a series recording on my DVR for The Bastard Executioner, figuring that mixing Kurt Sutter and medieval warfare could lead to just the worst kind of show. But then, the same show's ceiling could be like a Game of Thrones-flavored second season of Sons of Anarchy. So why not give it a try? Sure enough, this thing flat out sucked. I gave up on trying to follow any sort of plot in about three episodes, and spent the remaining seven just putting this on in the background for any notable violent action scenes. And there weren't even that many! Apparently, the world at large agreed with me that there was nothing to see here; the show's been canceled after just one season, which is almost unheard of on FX.

Trailer Park Boys: Season 5

These seasons all sort of blend together - particularly the middle-of-the-run group. If this season was notable for anything, it was being ten episodes long instead of six or seven.

Trailer Park Boys: Season 6

Again, it's just not clear to me that I need to say anything special about this show at this point. Notably, this season didn't end with anyone going to jail. What a twist!

The Last Man on Earth: Season 1

I kept meaning to check this out last spring, but by the time I was ready to do so, the season was over and none of the episodes were readily available. Gah! Will Forte is the last man on earth - at least at first. I thought the season started out much stronger than it ended, with Forte slowly going insane from existential dread while doing all sorts of ridiculous "the world is a post-apocalyptic playground" things just to stave off boredom. By the end of the season, six other people have shown up - trickling in one by one, usually arriving with perfect comedic timing to foil something for Forte. I don't think the first season ended up being quite as good as its premise would have allowed; it quickly settled into a weird mostly-straight-played suburban sitcom with feuding neighbors, which was funny enough, but not quite as unique as the original premise. I'm looking forward to the second season, at least.

Man Seeking Woman: Season 1

Here's a surreal one from FX that feels like a series of high-concept sketches about modern dating. At its best, this was really clever and very funny. Unfortunately, the episodes varied pretty wildly in quality and the whole show felt pretty hit or miss. Brilliant in one episode, and then ridiculously stupid in the next. Even at its best, Man Seeking Woman felt like a poor man's Master of None. I'll watch Season 2, but it'll probably end up being DVR fodder at most.

Trailer Park Boys: Season 7

Maybe it's just a classic case of diminishing returns, but this seventh and then-final season of Trailer Park Boys just felt like it was going through the motions. Nothing notably funny happened at any point across ten episodes. The main conflict in this season involved smuggling drugs across the U.S.-Canadian border in toy trains, which seemed far-fetched even for this show. The season (and at the time, the series) ended with all the main characters from the trailer park enjoying a little cookout. Understated and pleasant, though not really tonally fitting. This all happened back in 2007, and Netflix has just recently made an eighth and ninth season; there's more for me to watch - I'm just not sure I'm in any rush at this point.

So yeah. I'll be back a month from now with the rest of what I saw in 2015.

Tomb Raider (2013)

Well, the new Tomb Raider just came out, and it seems like everyone loves it. This inspired me to go back and finally check out the last Tomb Raider - the reboot from 2013. I played it for four hours on Thursday and seven more on Friday to finish it off relatively quickly. So yeah - I liked it! The series has come a long way from where it was the last time I played it in 1999, and for better or worse this kind of felt like an entirely different game with an entirely different protagonist.

We'll touch on gameplay first. The new Tomb Raider borrows liberally and shamelessly from the Uncharted series. We've got cinematic cut scenes now, we've got cover-based gunfight mechanics, we've got a gorgeous open world, and we've got buttloads of quick time events. The game isn't exactly a clone; there's more emphasis on raiding and looting in Tomb Raider than there is in Uncharted, for instance (thought not much more) and while Uncharted has always been strictly level-based, Tomb Raider takes place on a big open island where you're encouraged to backtrack and revisit places and discover secrets, not unlike in a Metroid game. I don't think there's anything wrong with this! When I first experienced Uncharted, I quickly noticed that its DNA was crawling with Tomb Raider genes, along with virtually every other person familiar with both franchises. Video games have come a long way since the 1990s, and Uncharted was a pretty big part of that evolution; that a 2013 Tomb Raider game would play more like a 2011 Uncharted game than like a 1996 Tomb Raider game isn't really that surprising, I guess.

But it's not just the gameplay that's different. The Lara Croft in this reboot is such a far cry from the traditional Lara Croft. That Lara Croft was such a unique character not just in gaming but in pop culture. A high-class posh British woman with a sprawling estate and an insatiable desire to explore ancient ruins. She was brash, cocky, and loaded with swagger. Her cannon-chested, pencil-waisted attributes were cartoonish and absurd; her true sex appeal came from her confidence and "don't give a fuck" attitude. Do you guys remember the training tutorials in the early Tomb Raider games? They encouraged you to use Lara's feeble old butler for target practice! Truly, this rich-as-fuck Jessica-Rabbit-bodied devastatingly lethal British duchess did not give a fuck! She was basically a lady Batman, but instead of helping other people she spent her time trying to acquire more treasures. This is a woman who, pretty early on in the first game, just shoots down a motherfucking T-Rex! Just the ultimate badass.

The Lara Croft of 2013's Tomb Raider is, by contrast, a sheltered 21-year-old girl with a heart of gold. She's a college student who survives a shipwreck during an archaeological expedition and breaks down in tears the first time she's forced to kill a man. She's exceptionally loyal, unwilling to leave any member of her expedition behind, and motivated by survival rather than by the allure of the ancient ruins all around her. Moreover, she's tough and gutsy, but clearly somewhat fragile - just like a real human being would be. She grunts and winces and keels over constantly. She even pants and breathes heavy. It's funny, in a way - gone entirely are her cartoonish proportions, but they've been replaced by a very different form of hyper-sexualization, what with the cries and the whimpers and a sadistic amount of pain endured in general.

Granted, the drastic change in personality makes sense. The new Tomb Raider game serves as an origin story of sorts, and it does a great job walking Lara through the journey from "victim just trying to survive" to "conscientious gun-toting heroine." There are a few great moments in the game that almost delineate the progress in that journey, from a bloodied and battered Lara catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror to her newfound propensity for gun violence. It's certainly possible that "this" Lara ultimately becomes "that" Lara over the course of a few games. I kind of doubt it, since this Lara is a sympathetic character who's much easier to build a compelling story around, but it could happen. It's more likely that the series has truly been rebooted, and that new Lara is simply a softer, gentler, better person than old Lara. And hey - I like new Lara! I feel terrible for her. I kind of just want to give her a hug and tell her everything will be okay. But old Lara - imagine what she'd do if I tired to give her a hug? Holy shit, I'd be dead.

Here are some images for comparison, to really drive the point home:

It's in the eyes! It's all right there in the eyes.

At any rate, Tomb Raider was a lot of fun and I'd have to call it a very successful reboot. It even ended with a quick time event that brought back an element of the original Tomb Raider I'd been waiting for all game. I definitely want to play its brand new sequel, but I can't imagine I'll do so any time soon.

The Dresden Files: Books 2 - 9

This is… this is a little weird. I’ve been away for so long, it’s like coming back home from college. Sure, it’s the same house, but the furniture has been rearranged, my bedroom has been converted to my parents’ decoupage station, and clearly someone forgot to feed my hamster, Colonel Snugglebutt, while I was away.

All that said, it’s great to be back. Stan you did a fine job holding the joint up all by your lonesome, but let’s see if you we can’t bring some people back together over the holidays… sans Colonel Snugglebutt – you will be missed.

So… Dresden Files. If you’ve talked to me at all over the past year, you are likely aware I’ve developed a strong affection for a certain hardboiled wizard-detective saving the world from the supernatural foes lurking deep within Chicago’s underbelly.

This is a fantastic series that does a great job as building suspense and excitement while providing a unique twist at mythical or religious folklore that can then be grounded in our day and age. Albeit, there might be an extra note of affection for these stories as they all take place in Chicago, so that added be of context definitely accounts for something.

But with 15 books already written (and with a total of 20 proposed by the author to be released with an additional trilogy exploring Dresden fighting against the End of Days – don’t quote me on this, though), I have found my way onto book 10. With my second to last post being on my first chapter into this series, it only seems appropriate that I bring you all up to speed on this experience thus far with Dresden and his adventures. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick about this.

Dresden Files Book #2: Fool Moon

Aaaaaah-Oooooooh, Werewolves of… Chicago? Several months following the events of Storm Front, book two brings up the conflict that there is a werewolf (or wolves) loose in Chicago causing havoc and killing people. Dresden must stop this, but it certainly doesn’t help that CPD and now even the FBI are breathing down his neck and believe, once again, that Dresden is responsible for all that is wrong in their city. However, if you learn anything from Butcher’s storytelling… not everything is as it seems.

Dresden Files Book #3: Grave Peril

This is where things get real. If you started reading this series from the beginning and are not hooked by the end of this book, then just stop reading. It’s hard to get better than this guy, so there might be a good chance you’ll never get into Dresden from this point out.

The story involves Dresden fighting against waves of vindictive ghosts and tormented souls… but who’s tormenting them? And why? There’s someone responsible for making the things that go bump in the night, kill in the night, and the closer Dresden gets to the truth, the more dangerous things become. This time around, Dresden is doing more than just protecting Chicago, he’s about to wage war against an ancient evil. A war that won’t be simply concluded in one measly book.

Dresden Files Book #4: Summer Knight

Faeries. They’re not always like Tinkerbell. Most times they are ruthless killing machines set on world domination. And when you’re caught in a rivalry between the creatures of Summer and the creatures of Winter, you know there’s going to be trouble.

Dresden Files Book #5: Death Masks

Another great excellent addition to the series that sets up another villain who will be in a constant battle with our hero. Point of context: Every fives books, Dresden will be dealing against this, one of his greatest foes... The Denarians.

The Denarians are the legion of 30 fallen angels bound to 30 silver coins – the same coins Judas was rumored received as payment for his betrayal of Jesus. And when a person receives one of these coins, physically touching it, the demon imprisoned within the silver is freed taking over their host’s body. It’s ugly business. Ugly business made even worse as they have one item on their agenda… bringing about the apocalypse.

Dresden Files Book #6: Blood Rites

This is a bit of a weird addition to the series. Plain and simple, Dresden is hired to solve a string of pornstar murders all taking place on the set of this major porn film shoot. Yup. But, hey, without giving too much away, there’s a lot of life-changing information Dresden receives that will… um, change his life forever. Oh! And he also gets a puppy. A Caucasian Shepherd named "Mouse," despite the fact that they look like this full grown:

Dresden Files Book #7: Dead Beat

Necromancing. It’s a big no-no in the wizard world. Punishable by death. No exceptions. But that’s not stopping a string of necromancing attacks from popping up all over Chicago. As Dresden tracks down the party (or parties) responsible, he quickly learns that he might be in over his head for this one.

All things aside, this might have the most iconic scene in the series thus far. Won’t spoil anything, but next time anyone is in Chicago, I highly recommend paying a trip to the Field Museum to see “Sue” – the world’s most complete and best preserved fossilized remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dresden Files Book #8: Proven Guilty

Horror movies. They’re all fun and games until the monsters come to life and climb out of their movie screens killing everyone in their sight. Am I right people? Dresden is once again on the case trying to figure out who or what is causing this mayhem of bringing horror villains to life. Doesn’t help that Chicago is in the midst of hosting a giant horror-movie convention at the same time.

Dresden Files Book #9: White Night

Dresden is called in by the Chicago Police to investigate a string of suicides. Upon closer inspection, Dresden finds out the victims all have something in common. They all are practicing wizards. Not fully-trained and talented wizards, mind you. More like budding apprentices. But wizards nonetheless. That doesn’t make things any less terrifying when Dresden learns that there’s a villain afoot that can lure his or her victims to take their own life. Especially when that killer looks to be your own relative.

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And there it is. As part of my re-introduction back to the blog, I give you where I am at with the Dresden series. Currently book 10 is sitting in the back of a mail truck somewhere en route to my house. I don’t know much about book 10 other than it should bring me to Dresden’s second major encounter with the Denarians. I’m looking forward to it.

Curious if this will get anyone else interested in the series. Despite these books being a super popular series in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, I rarely have anyone I can talk to about these aside from my roommate. So… if anyone’s looking for something fun to read. You know who to call.

Also, it's good to be back.

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

First off, how much does this book cover remind you of the Back-Blogged backdrop? Ah? Ah?

Ron Currie is an author I've gone over more than once here already, most recently just earlier this month with God Is Dead. This is his third and latest book, published a few years ago. On its surface, it's the story of an author who fakes his death and then watches his unfinished novel get published and become the best-selling book since Harry Potter. But that's not really what the bulk of Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is concerned with. The narrator also recounts his father's brutal battle with cancer and his own tragic on-and-off love story with the girl of his dreams. He also consistently brings up the idea of the "Singularity" - the not-so-distant future moment when we'll all merge our minds with machines and, in addition to being able to live forever, we'll never feel pain or discomfort again.

It's part narrative, part memoir, part speculative fiction - and the real kicker is that it's metafictional in nature. The main character in the book is named Ron Currie and he's an author from Maine; the real author Ron Currie, writing the book, lost his father to a battle with cancer. Right up front, the character-narrator Currie promises the reader that everything he's about to say is one hundred percent true, without any embellishments - which of course runs up against the idea that this very person is fictional.

There's a lot going on in Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, but it never gets absurd or hard to follow and the various threads of the story don't ever end up getting pulled through the fourth wall; the fictional nature of the book and of the character Ron Currie are never pointed out or even hinted at within the book itself - they're just kind of there on the margins as an inside joke for the reader to consider when the narrator Ron Currie says things like, "again, this is one hundred percent true," or bemoans that his publishers would rather see him write "memoirs" than "fiction."

Currie has earned several comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut so far in his career, and although he's separate and distinct as has a voice of his own - far less silly, in general - I think "modern day Vonnegut" is a fair and apt description. Even the way this story unfolds - meandering, out of order, more concerned with people and emotions than events and interactions - feels very, you know, Vonnegut-like.

My one complaint - and it's really more of a concern than a complaint - is Currie's focus on his father's cancer and demise. He writes beautifully and succinctly about his father's final months and days, and this is obviously something that has affected him profoundly. But he already tackled the same subject with expertise in Everything Matters! to an extent where I thought there was little else to say. I mean, by all means, Currie's got plenty to say about what happened, and he's great at saying it. I just hope that he's got several more books to come, and I wonder how many of them can feature "father dying of cancer" as a story arc.

At any rate, this was another very enjoyable read from one of my favorite contemporary authors. Check this guy out, y'all. I know the rest of you like Vonnegut too.

The Fall

Quick recap. I read The Stranger in 2013 and absolutely loved it. I read The Plague last year and didn't enjoy it quite as much. Both are novels by the twentieth century philosopher Albert Camus, a man who described himself as an absurdist: someone who recognizes the dualism of man's need to search for meaning and truth in an apparently indifferent universe but being unable to find any.

The Fall is Camus's third and final novel, published in 1956 only a few years before he died in a car accident at 46. It's got to be his most complicated novel, and consensus opinion considers it his least-understood. It's less than 150 pages long, but it's structured as an enormous long-winded monologue directed by the narrator to his audience, the reader. To give a brief synopsis, the narrator was a wildly successful lawyer in Paris before coming to a stunning realization: that he and everyone else alive are all horribly guilty people deserving of harsh judgment. The narrator has made his peace with this, and further judges himself accordingly for doing so. He quits his noble job and moves to the slums of Amsterdam in order to lead a life of debauchery and debasement. The book ends with an invitation to the reader to join him by confessing to a general guilt, accepting judgment, and moving on with that burden while trying to ignore it.

It's a complex and enigmatic text made all the more unclear by the fact that Camus died so soon after writing it. Is the narrator a mouthpiece for Camus, or is he meant to be ironic? Are our sins and transgressions forgivable, or should we suffer from guilty consciences? The narrator suggests that we all deserve to be judged harshly for our actions and inactions alike, but he also seems completely at peace with the judgment he casts upon himself. Is the moral here that judgment is inevitable and not worth worrying about, or is Camus casting some degree of accusatory shame on society at large? The narrator seems deeply bitter and cynical - not unlike the main character from The Stranger. But then, The Plague gave off a moderately optimistic view, and one could take the same vibes away from The Fall: in a certain light, it reads like one giant self-acceptance piece. So how does Camus really feel?

I came away from this one without a very clear understanding of Camus's message, but that's probably okay; so did everyone else, and it was still a beautiful book to read regardless. I enjoyed it more than The Plague, even if I understood it less. Still, The Stranger ranks as the top Camus book all around as far as I'm concerned. Check it out!

The Island of Dr. Moreau

Back in the earlier days of the blog, I made three separate posts on novels by H. G. Wells, one of the most imaginative and famous science fiction writers in history. He's responsible for some of the earliest takes on broad concepts like time travel and alien invasions. Here in his well known The Island of Dr. Moreau, from 1896, he explores the slightly less original realm of biological engineering. Mary Shelley had already written Frankenstein, the godfather of the genetic-tinkering-as-horror trope that can be traced right up through Jurassic World, some eighty years prior. And with Darwin's theories and findings exploding in popularity in the late nineteenth century, biology and the link between animals and men was already on everybody's mind.

In any case, this book was just fine. It was a short and easy read, like everything else I've seen from Wells, and it holds up better today than so much else from the 1800s. The title character is an remorselessly mad scientist who lives on an island hybridizing animals and trying to turn them into people. By splicing sections of, say, a boar and a dog together, he's somehow created a strange array of man-beasts. The science in this one is particularly bad with hindsight, but that doesn't really matter. What matter are the themes and questions Wells touches on here. Do these creatures suffer? Are they men, or are they beasts? Is it okay, or at least less bad, for beasts to suffer than for men to suffer? Wells doesn't dig very deep. but these are still interesting topics to consider.

Red Rising

Brace yourselves, because here's the next big hit in dystopian young adult sci-fi. I've got plenty of scattered thoughts on it.

First, why? Young adult sci-fi is everywhere these days and the genre is only growing more and more crowded (and derivative) as everyone tries to come up with the next Hunger Games. These books have mass appeal because they're easy to read and generally based on simple, broad themes like "coming of age" and "fighting oppressive regimes" and "people are violent" but also "people are also good." Red Rising is no different, really. It's set in a dystopian future, its narrator comes from society's lowest caste, and the bulk of its story is set during a giant war game where a bunch of eighteen-year-olds fight for glory and prestige as part of their college experience.

Still, this one feels a little different from the rest. It's not high literature, but it crams an impressive bit of world building, characterization, and dramatic storytelling into its 400 pages while moving at a fast and furious clip. I say this a lot, but one of the easiest metrics for measuring how much you enjoy any given book or video game or TV show is how quickly you burn through it, and how readily you pick it up during your free time. I knocked this one out in just over 24 hours, which says plenty in its own right. Despite a few criticisms I have with it, Red Rising was a true page turner.

If the blog was half as active as it was back in its heyday, I'm confident this book would become a hall-of-famer. Six of us read all three Hunger Games books, after all. So I want to tread lightly and not spoil the plot. Instead, here's an overview that, hey, sorry, does spoil the first hundred pages or so.

Darrow is a Red. He lives down below the surface of Mars and spends his life toiling away in the helium mines in order to harvest the resources with which to terraform Mars. He and his Red peers are overseen by a class of people called Grays who in turn report back to the ruling class, the Golds. It's fairly standard stuff - simple folk, oppressed, told that their sacrifices are for the betterment of mankind - and within the first hundred pages Darrow's world is turned upside down; his tribe is denied their drilling wages, his wife is killed in a protest, and he decides to end his own life. While unconscious, he's taken in by a terrorist group - called something like the "Sons of Ares" - who reveal, in some clunky exposition, that everything Darrow knows is a lie. They bring him to the surface of Mars where he discovers that, holy crap, it's already been terraformed. In fact, it's been terraformed for hundreds of years. There's a great big world up there where Golds live in luxury off the labor of the Reds and others. Darrow is understandably pissed off and he agrees to take part in a scheme on behalf of the Sons of Ares.

Here's where everything takes an abrupt record-scratching shift. Darrow agrees to infiltrate an elite academy for the Golds, posing as a Gold, in order to become some sort of prodigy with an inside track to a position of power. Then, when the time is right, he can help take down society from the inside. The remainder of the novel takes place in the aforementioned war game. Darrow makes allies and enemies out of an impressive number of characters as they fight and plan and scheme. So for the first hundred pages or so, we're down underground with the Reds, learning what their world is like and empathizing with them, only to leave that shit behind entirely to spend the rest of the book among the elitist and entitled Golds. It's oddly effective - especially since this is clearly the first book in a trilogy - and the lack of any payoff or resolution with the Reds is forgivable. It's also pretty impressive how quickly we (and Darrow!) go from hating all Golds (fuck you, one percent!) to understanding that there are all kinds of different types of Golds (not all Golds...). Some are scared shitless, some are terrible rapists, and most are just kids trying to make their families proud. Oh, and lots of them die. Not most of them, but enough of them so that whenever it happens, it makes an impact.

Some of the characters are painted a little too broadly, and the color-based class system is embarrassingly on-the-nose (space racism!) but it all made for a very effective story. Sometimes it was too fast-paced for my liking, and there were more twists and turns - betrayals, identity reveals, stunning realizations - than the book probably needed, but in the end I really enjoyed my time with Red Rising. The book ends in a manner that, naturally, sets up the second book in the trilogy - Golden Son - and I'm hopeful that it zooms out a little more and goes back to exploring the strife between the Golds and the Reds and everyone else.

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla

Damn - only a month and a half left in 2015, and I haven't read a Dark Tower book all year. Until now, of course. To the bullets!

• First things first - this monster was 925 pages long. Stephen King sure knows how to churn out a word count, and, credit to him, his books rarely feel quite as long as they actually are. I'm sure that has to do with his simple sentence structures and penchant for dialogue-driven exposition, but it's nice to be able to describe a 925-page book without calling it a "trek" or a "slog" or something similar, you know?
• My issues with this author and with this series in particular have always been about world building, character development, and self-consistency. By now, most of these criticisms no longer apply; regardless of how poorly I think Jake was pulled into Mid-World, or how badly defined Roland was back in The Gunslinger, we're now several thousand pages into this story, and I've come to terms with the basic premises here. The characters have enough definition, by now, that it's notable when they begin to act differently, for instance.
• There's actually a lot going on at once in this book, which I enjoyed. The previous books in The Dark Tower played out more or less serially in nature. Roland follows the man in black; Roland opens three doors on a beach; the ka-tet must save Jake; the ka-tet must make it to the Dark Tower. And so on. Here, I thought there were three fairly major arcs all playing out at once, which made for a more interesting read.
• Those three arcs? One, referenced in the title, was really more of a side quest; Roland and his crew had to save the children in a town from being kidnapped by "Wolves" and returned "roont" - absent-minded and devoid of all personality and intelligence. This never felt like more than a side quest to me, and I was strangely okay with that. Roland is ostensibly a hero - why not give him a little village to save for a few hundred pages? I mean, maybe this all turned out to be an essential step in making it to the Dark Tower, but if it was, I missed that.
• Secondly, there's an arc in which the ka-tet must travel to 1970s New York - by ingesting some magical muffin-like mushroom things and tripping balls for a while - in order to purchase a vacant lot. In that vacant lot grows a rose in danger of being crushed or otherwise destroyed if someone else purchases the lot. And that rose, it turns out, is the Dark Tower itself. So, yeah - the ka-tet needs to trip balls several times in order to go back to New York City and acquire the means to purchase the lot, or at least prevent the rose from being destroyed.
• Lastly, Susannah's got... issues. She's preggers, but not from Eddie. Remember that demon she had sex with back in The Waste Lands during the Jake-extraction process? No? Well that happened, and now she's got a demon bun in her oven. She also gets her legs back when she's tripping balls in New York, because she's not herself in that scenario, but instead a demon-woman named Mia. Makes sense, right? I mean, she's already got three distinct split personalities - what's a fourth? The book ends on a huge cliffhanger when Susannah, possessed by Mia, sprints through a dark portal of sorts to New York City in order to birth her hellspawn child. It makes perfect sense, then, that the sixth book in the series is all about the quest to find and save her, what with it bearing her name and such.
• Oh yeah, and the ka-tet runs into Father Callahan, who's apparently the main charcater from Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, a book that had been totally isolated from The Dark Tower to this point in time. Callahan recounts the plot of that book in some detail, then mentions how he became a vampire and how that led to his murder back in his own world; like Jake, upon dying there, he just kind of woke up at the Way Station in Mid-World. It didn't make any sense back in The Gunslinger and it doesn't make much sense now, but at least King is using an established device to get Callahan to Mid-World instead of concocting an entirely new asinine method for doing so.
• One of the coolest moments of the book came at the end, when Callahan finds a copy of 'Salem's Lot and suddenly doubts the reality of his own existence. I mean, wouldn't you? It pulls at this giant multiverse of metafiction that Stephen King is clearly having fun with; so do the existence of light sabers and Harry Potter snitches in Wolves of the Calla. I know that in the next book, Stephen King even makes an appearance as a character. That's going to be groanworthy as hell, I'm sure, but come on - are we not already groaning? I learned to make my peace with this series a while back; don't hope for it to make any sense - just enjoy the ride.

So, yeah. I'm enjoying the ride. At least a little. I doubt I'll jump back into The Dark Tower in 2015 - these are long books, no matter how quickly they read! - but my goal is to finish off the final two installments some time in 2016. Time will tell.

Saw: The Final Chapter

Finally. Let's end this. No need for a live blog - especially since, believe it or not, my PS3 froze and wouldn't restart as soon as I put this DVD inside it... holy shit.

At any rate, here's the seventh and final installment of the Saw franchise - called Saw 3D in theaters because it came out when that fad was a thing.

There's not much left to say at this point. I think this was the goriest Saw yet, and it probably had the highest body count, but the series abandoned any thematic consistency a long time ago. Back when these movies were about testing guilty people's wills to live, there were some elements of karma and justice that at least made things interesting. This movie, by contrast, has a man lose his wife, employees, and best friend for a lie that he told, while meanwhile an entire police department gets slashed up by a serial killer hellbent on murdering Jigsaw's widow. It's all just torture and death - which, granted, is fine. That's always been what Saw movies are known for, and it's at least somewhat impressive that here in the seventh movie the writers were still finding new Rube Goldberg death traps to fuck people up.

I'm not sure what people want from these movies; this is the lowest rated one in the franchise on Rotten Tomatoes with a 9% freshness rating, but I thought it was just fine. Meanwhile the second-highest one on the same site is Saw VI, which I thought was just ridiculous and absurd and terrible. Were critics that tickled by seeing health insurance interns get slaughtered back in 2009?

I'll admit that this was easily the most over-the-top and unbelievable movie in the series for a few reasons, which is really saying something. The opening trap features a love triangle with two angry bros and a two-timing whore. One must die - will the two bros struggle to kill one another or will they decide that their mutual girlfriend deserves to take this one on the chin? Thing is, where every other Saw trap in the entire franchise takes place in a dark room or an underground bunker, this one takes place in the middle of a crowded plaza, full of onlookers filming the ordeal with their phones after some half-assed attempts to shut the trap down or call the police. That's insane, even by Saw standards!

There were also some glaring bodily harm continuity errors. These are gory, gross movies, but this one featured a guy yanking teeth out of his own head and another guy ripping half of his face apart to escape a trap. In their respective ensuing scenes, both of these men are fine. The guy who was just spewing blood out of his mouth is entirely clean and seems to have all his teeth and the guy whose face was ripped open doesn't even have a visible scar from it, let alone a bloody residue.

Eh, whatever. I've already spent more time on this post than it merits. These movies were fun, but I'm glad they've gone away.

God Is Dead

Here's the debut novel from Ron Currie, Jr., whose Everything Matters! was one of my favorite reads of 2014. It's technically a collection of short stories, but they're of the "linked" variety, best read sequentially. And the collection definitely works better as a whole than as the sum of its parts.

In the first story, God decides to go to war-torn Darfur in the guise of a young Sudanese woman. He's killed by the Sudanese government in a raid on a refugee camp and that's that; God is dead! The rest of the stories deal with the aftermath of God's death and explore a very specific vision of a world without God. How is it different? And how is it alarmingly similar? It's far more speculative than theological in nature.

The nine stories, with some brief descriptions and reactions, are:

"God Is Dead"

This one isn't even really about God's death; it's told from the perspective of Colin Powell on a foreign relations mission to Sudan. Powell remembers an incident from his youth - and this is God's doing - in which a white cop beat his black friend to death right in front of him. This book came out in 2007, so this was well before the Obama Era, and Powell was at the time the most powerful black man in the world. At any rate, Powell snaps and - understandably, feeling suddenly like nothing more than "the world's most powerful house n-----," throws his forty-year political career down the drain by refusing to leave Sudan.

"The Bridge"

A successful high school graduate without a care in the world decides to leave for college the day after graduation. On her way out of town, she witnesses a priest jumping to his death from a bridge. This one's short and sweet and well-written, but most of its impact - for me, at least - comes from what follows. We never see or hear about this young woman again, but we do see what happens to the world around her, and it makes this story feel all the more like a tragedy in hindsight.

"Indian Summer"

The world has unraveled into chaos pretty immediately, and before too long neighbors are killing each other for gasoline. After a summer of partying without jobs or parents, and without any colleges to return to in the fall, ten young men make a suicide pact. This was probably my favorite story in the set, taking that youthful fantasy of an endless summer and turning it into a depressing nihilism where these kids would rather be dead than bored and hopeless. The ending is also a bit of a gut punch, as the lone survivor reveals that - of course - society figured itself out before too long and ultimately things turned out to be pretty similar to how they were before God was dead. The whole thing felt like Stephen King at his rarest and best.

"False Idols"

Here's another favorite. Once people have stopped worshipping God, they begin to worship their own children, each assuming their own children are the most sacred and special of all. (It really isn't a far cry from the way most parents are today, right?) The narrator in this one is a psychiatrist who spends his days reminding people that their children are stupid, lazy, ugly, and any other number of types of "unremarkable." Naturally, he's the most hated man in town. All of this is great and a number of his sessions are hilarious, but the story turns touching when the psychiatrist's own background is explored. How would he feel about having his own kids?

"Grace"

This one was only a few pages long and, if I'm being honest, totally forgettable. I remember it involving a father-son landscaping team encountering a dead or dying man on the side of the road. I'm sure it was better and more meaningful than I can give it credit for being.

"Interview with the Last Remaining Member of the Feral Dog Pack Which Fed on God's Corpse"

Exactly as it sounds, and easily another highlight. This is where Currie comes closest to being Vonnegut. The feral dogs who ate God's corpse have gained both a greater sentience and also a means of communicating with people. But this dog doesn't really like people, now that he understands them. (What dog would?) He's also gained some of God's powers, but these seem limited to omniscience rather than having any actual control over physics or nature. (Is that all God was capable of in the first place? He did, you know, die.) The dog also reminded me of Gulliver toward the end of Gulliver's Travels. He's just seen enough, and frankly, he's sick of this shit, happier to wander around as a recluse than to deal with other people.

"The Helmet of Salvation and the Sword of the Spirit"

Here's another take on religion not being the root of all conflict. We're another generation or two into the future now and there's a worldwide war being waged between the postmodern anthropologists and the evolutionary psychologists over which philosophical schools of thought should govern mankind. It's an unoriginal concept - hell, South Park made hay out of nonreligious futuristic warfare in a two-part episode almost a decade ago - but I loved this particular flavor of it and I loved Currie's specific slants. At any rate, a teenager in this one - Arnold - grapples over whether or not to join the army and the war, which breaks his mother's heart.

"My Brother the Murderer"

Not so funny, and really pretty sad - though with a title like that one, is that a surprise? The titular brother's murders are never explained in any detail or given any context; we just know they're horrific enough that the narrator himself becomes untrustworthy and avoided simply by association. It's one of the vaguer stories in the collection, but in keeping with the "God is dead" theme, the brother is found not guilty because he's clearly insane as he still believes in God.

"Retreat"

The final story in the book is also the only one that directly relates to another one; here, we rejoin Arnold from two stories ago, now eight years older and a decorated member of the military, holding out with his unit in a last stand in Mexico. Deeming his situation hopeless, he flees with another soldier in a tank toward America to warn the nation of the impending invasion. When he arrives at the border he finds a sign that says, essentially, "Hey there. We regret the role we played in escalating this tension and, as such, we've all had our memories altered in order to forget that this conflict even exists. Please don't kill us. Thanks!" Sure enough, on the other side of the Rio Grande all Arnold can find are blissfully ignorant civilians unaware of their own impending doom from a conflict they themselves created. The story and the collection end on that note, which cuts pretty deeply and poignantly.

Anyway, I loved the whole thing - not quite as much as Everything Matters!, but plenty all the same.

Stan's TV Dump: Early Fall 2015

I'm splitting fall into two chunks. Here are a dozen or so seasons of television that I finished up in September and October.

Olive Kitteridge: Season 1

This cleaned up at the Emmys and I figured it was worth a shot. Easy enough - four-hour miniseries, no big deal. I really liked it! But it was definitely slow and not for everyone. Frances McDormand was great, for whatever that's worth.

Enlightened: Season 1
Laura Dern plays a spurned fired employee from a giant corporation who goes on a spiritual retreat in order to try to put her life back together. I'd always heard, from a few TV critics, that this was a really underrated show. It isn't. It was fine, at best.

Enlightened: Season 2

The first season focuses on Laura Dern trying to get her job back and make a difference at her giant corporation. It ends with her deciding, no, fuck this place, I'm taking the whole thing down. Season 2 is all about her attempt to bring the corporation to its knees. It doesn't go so well, but the season - and series, thanks to cancelation - ends with Laura Dern literally burning the whole place down.

Review: Season 2
Forrest MacNeil essentially ruined his life in the first season of Review, so how do you turn up the stakes and calamity from there? I guess you have him ruin the lives of everyone he comes across. That's more or less what happens in Season 2, where there are multiple deaths, more than one home is destroyed, and nobody seems to suffer more than those closest to Forrest. The season ends with Forrest's apparent death, but who knows? This could easily get renewed for a third season.

Married: Season 2

This, however, will not; FX has canceled Married, and really, I'm fine with that. This was a solid and enjoyable comedy about realistic people dealing with realistic bullshit. It was fun and good and nice to put on while I folded laundry or something, but it was nothing special.

Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1

Good news - The Walking Dead finally got good a season or two ago! Bad news - this prequel series was as shitty as any six-episode run of The Walking Dead ever was! Blech. This was just boring and bad.

Rick and Morty: Season 2

In my mind, this season season of Rick and Morty wasn't quite as good as the first one was. Call it the law of diminishing returns, perhaps? Still, this is as funny as anything else out there, and here's hoping we don't have to wait another year and a half for the next season.

The X-Files: Season 2

The second season was better than the first one, but this show still isn't gripping me the way it seemed to pull so many people in back in the '90s. More than anything, I think David Duchovny is terrible in this show. He's so stone-faced and wooden in his delivery of every line. For a guy who's seen some ridiculously weird shit, Fox Mulder seems like an absolute dullard. And not a complicated dullard who drowns his sorrows and issues in alcohol or drugs or some other vice - just a boring, steely federal agent who seems to know - and believe in - every conspiracy theory in American history.

Trailer Park Boys: Season 1

Here's another one I should have checked out long ago. This is a silly show with quick seasons set in a Canadian trailer park. It's loaded with trashy, stupid characters who seem to spend as much time in jail as they do at home. There are wild gun fights in like every other episode. I understand the appeal, but this just feels like a very poor man's Always Sunny so far, and nothing more.

I'll be back in two months with the remainder of my fall TV seasons - and probably some more of  The X-Files and Trailer Park Boys and the like.

Stan's Movie Dump: October 2015

Things picked up a bit on this front in October. Here are 11 more movies from the likes of movie theaters, Netflix, and questionable websites.

The Martian

Blog readers know I read this book back in January and looked forward to the movie - and the movie delivered! One of the best blockbusters I've seen in theaters in years. It's endearing NASA fanfiction. Check it out.

The Double

Apparently this was based on a Dostoyevsky short story, which is something I did not know when I saw it. Jesse Eisenberg plays a sad sack pushover who one day runs into his own doppelgänger - also played by Eisenberg, of course. The doppelgänger gets a job in his office and even shows interest in the same woman, and he's also got way more charisma and charm and social aptitude. Weirder still, no one seems to notice that he looks anything like the first guy, even though they're visually identical. I dug this one, and thought it was definitely worth the hour and a half or so on Netflix.

Upstream Color

Holy hell, I've got nothing. Ostensibly this was about some sort of pig-bacteria-human circle of life and the way two people are connected and something or other. It's from the guy who made Primer, and to me it was both way harder to follow and also less interesting. I'm sure there are smart analyses of this movie floating around on the Internet but I just didn't care about it at all.

Antichrist

So, Lars von Trier is all kinds of fucked up and so are his movies. But those movies are also absurdly beautiful. This one was full of some real grotesque shit, and to even begin to describe it would feel fruitless. Like, don't watch it - but if you do, get ready to marvel at something that looks like a Terrence Malick flick.

The Duke of Burgundy
I liked this way more than I expected to. Two women are engaged in a lesbian relationship in some sort of vaguely old-fashioned European area. There isn't a man in the entire movie. The women study butterflies together at a university. They do a lot of role play, particularly of the dominance and submission varieties. But the one who gets off on it most is the submissive; the dominant is quickly shown to be kind of tired and weary about the whole ordeal they go through. But she fears that her younger girlfriend will leave her if she stops acting so demeaning and demanding. It was actually pretty interesting, I thought. And funny, too! Your mileage may vary.

Extract
Mila Kunis, Jason Bateman, and a handful of other recognizable faces turned out for Mike Judge's follow-up to Office Space. It was funny enough, and felt a whole lot like a poorer man's Office Space. An idiot, down on his luck and upset with the way his life is going, concocts a pretty bad scheme that goes very poorly for him and a few other people. It's not Office Space by a long shot - not nearly as quotable or memorable or funny - but it's well worth a watch.

Ex Machina

Here's that British indie sci-fi movie that got some buzz last summer. It's about a reclusive billionaire designer who's trying to administer the Turing test to an android he has created. To do this, he hires an employee and observes that man's interactions with his robot. There was nothing too complicated about the way this one unfolded, but it was still an interesting movie with a few memorable scenes. The setting - a "smart cabin" of sorts alone in the middle of the woods - was absolutely perfect, and added a weird sense of unease to everything.

Glengarry Glen Ross

A year or two ago, Trevor made a post about this movie. I was glad to finally check it out. It's a stage play adapted for film, which meant it was heavy on dialogue and light on the setting, but that's fine - it was an enjoyable and entertaining movie. Perhaps the best part of it was Alec Baldwin's angry monologue at the beginning - his only scene - which gave us the phrase "always be closing." It's an easy watch at ninety minutes, and it really only has a handful of scenes.

Cleopatra (1963)

I'll generally bemoan the length of some three-hour contemporary movies, but this one - 52 years old now - exceeds four hours. I'm pretty sure I was on my laptop or phone for the entirety of the film, which is really the only way I could get through it. I only watched it because Netflix is losing it in November - which is weird, since if it had stayed on Netflix in perpetuity I'm not sure I'd have ever felt the urge to sit through it. Anyway, this one's a classic, more so for the stories surrounding the movie than for the movie itself. Elizabeth Taylor almost died from an illness early on, causing them to relocate filming from London to Rome - scrapping all kinds of sets and footage and castings in the process. Then she had an affair with Richard Burton, the guy who played Marc Antony, and suddenly roughly every other day of shooting was canceled or rescheduled because of some fight the two had gotten into the night before. Apparently 20th Century Fox wanted this to be two movies, initially - Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra - which would have made so much more sense, but then the studio wanted to capitalize on the Taylor-Burton affair while it was hot. The movie had a budget of $2 million that eventually ballooned to $44 million - which is like $350 million in today's dollars. Fox nearly went bankrupt. The movie was the top-grossing title of 1963 but was still an enormous money-losing bomb. The whole thing just fascinates me. The movie itself was a bit bland and slow by todays standards, the way 1960s sword-and-sandal epics were, but I can't deny that it was stunning, epic, and sprawling. There weren't any special effects back then, so virtually everything on screen from the costumes to the sets to the crowds of thousands of people were, you know, real. I dunno, there was something to appreciate here, is all I'm saying.

Scream

I really liked this. It wasn't nearly as scary as I'd been led to believe it was back in the '90s, but it was bloodier and gorier - and also much funnier. Joss Whedon earned all kinds of accolades for Cabin in the Woods and the way it played with horror tropes and flipped conventions on their heads, but that's kind of what Wes Craven was doing with Scream, where characters explicitly discuss horror movies and "wanting to live long enough to be in the sequel." Hell, the killer ends up being - spoiler alert - two teenagers obsessed with slasher flicks. But yeah, I really dug this, and I bet I check out the sequels soon enough.

Three Kings

Dang, how hadn't I seen this one yet? It started out stronger and funnier than it ended, but that was a hell of a war satire movie. Think "Desert Storm heist" and you've got the gist. Clooney and Wahlberg and Ice Cube are in it, but the guy who stole every scene for me was Spike Jonze in his first major acting role.

That's 65 movies on the year now in these dump posts - no wonder I don't blog about other things anymore!