How the Mind Works

Good news and bad news. The good news is that upon completing this book - a book I've been reading on and off for more than three years now, dammit - I'm at 10,502 pages on the year for 2016, giving me an average of just barely a hair over 500 pages per book. So, yay! The year of #BigReads or #LongReads or whatever the hell I was calling it was a success! The bad news is that, as you can see if you've done the math, I only read 21 books in 2016 - a whopping three under my goal of two per month, which is especially disappointing considering I was perfectly on pace at twenty books through October. Oh well!

Next year, I'm not giving myself any goals or resolutions beyond "keep reading." I'll be back at work full time and likely still trying to cram in plenty of television and video games, so something will have to give, and everyone on the blog knows that the easiest logging habit to give up is reading. So I want to keep on reading! No page count goals, no overall counts to try to hit - just keep on reading. There are still plenty of books on my backlog, after all, and a limitless number beyond those. Far, far too many books for one lifetime, of course - but it doesn't hurt to keep on reading.

Oh, right - this book. This one's actually been on my backlog for close to ten years now - maybe even more? Written by one of the world's foremost cognitive scientists, it's an eight-chapter deep dive on the human mind and how it functions. Starts with the physiological properties of the brain and its components - how language is processed, how physical spaces are understood - and slowly transitions to the more abstract notion of the mind, including human behavior and evolutionary theories about how we got to be the way we are. I'm reasonably interested in psychology and social studies and evolutionary biology, and as such, I found the second half a lot more interesting than the first - especially since Pinker uses all kinds of unfortunately dated computer analogies that were surely more apt back in 1997 than they are today. (An updated version of this book might be able to milk a lot more out of "computational algorithm" metaphors, particularly given the huge advancements made in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the last two decades.)

Still a fascinating read with plenty to offer, and if you ever get a chance, check out some of Pinker's lectures and debates on YouTube. Guy's good at what he does!

And that's a wrap for me in 2016. Happy New Year, everyone!

Final Fantasy XV

When the night
has come 

And the land is dark 

And the moon
is the only
light we'll see 

No I won't
be afraid 

Oh I won't
be afraid 

Just as long

as you stand

stand by me

Oof. Right in the feels.

This was great. Certainly flawed, and definitely downright frustrating at times, with a few design elements that left me shouting at my controller, and they could have told the story a little more clearly (rumor has it some upcoming patches will add important cutscenes for more context), but, yeah, this was great.

I dumped over forty hours into this game - par for the course really, for a Final Fantasy main series installment - but it seemed like half of those hours were spent on optional sidequests. The open-world nature of the game has not been overstated, and you spend so much of it just driving around in the Regalia (your car) on the streets of Eos (the, uh, world) from outpost to outpost.

I have so much more to say about this game and the wide variety of elements they threw into it, and how well it all seems to work without any visible seams, but that can wait until more of you have played it.

And yes, it's better than XIII.

The Turing Test

The Turing Test is a 2016 first-person puzzle game that feels like a Portal knock-off in all the right ways. You play as Ava, an astronaut on Europa some 200 years from now, trying to reconnect with the rest of her crew after something goes wrong. When you enter the Europa base, a series of puzzle rooms stands between you and your objective. There are seven chapters with ten regular rooms and a bonus room for 77 total puzzles.

The puzzles consist of using orbs and boxes to provide power to and cut power from various devices - most of them doors - in order to progress through the rooms. Some of these puzzles are extraordinarily simple, and serve mainly to teach you about the mechanics of puzzle solving in this game; the entire first chapter is pretty trivial - lots of "move that box to that slot to proceed" and "learn how to use your orb gun" and things of that nature. Even toward the end of the game, some puzzles will just seem to click. In a lot of ways the game played like The Witness - just with platforming puzzles rather than grid-based mazes.

Throughout it all, you interact with an omnipresent AI system called T.O.M. At the beginning of every room, Ava and T.O.M. exchange some words and ideas, and through this - and some scattered audio logs - we are told what small amount of story there is to tell here. Anyway, some of you may have seen the game's title and immediately thought of the Turing Test. That and many other philosophical musings about artificial intelligence pop up throughout the game, and about two thirds of the way through, the rug gets pulled out from under Ava regarding a certain assumption she'd made about her own relationship with Tom. I was just fine with all of this. Give me two characters bickering and debating philosophy any day while I lug boxes around a room. Tom spends a lot of time trying to convince Ava (and us?) that he's got a real and valid mind of his own; he may not be a human, but he's sentient, dammit!

None of this was amazing, but the puzzles were challenging without ever feeling genuinely unfair - something I can't say for every puzzle in The Witness at all - and the gameplay, despite a few lengthy load times and one or two glitchy-looking textures, was smooth and bug-free. All in all this was a pretty solid puzzle game, and it's absolutely worth grabbing if it ever goes on sale or, better yet, gets offered for free under Games with Gold. It probably took me about five hours to complete, 1000 gamer points and all, and I only needed to look to the Internet for hints three or four times. (And two of those were for bonus rooms.)

Stan's TV Dump: October/November 2016

Okay! Let's do this.

Jane the Virgin: Season 2

I managed to catch up on this one just in time for Season 3. It's good! Not just good "for a CW show" or anything. No, this is just a fun quick-paced show that knows how to milk its telenovela tendencies just enough (secret twins! betrayals! love triangles, quadrangles, pentagons!) without betraying an earnest heart at its center. There's nothing wrong with feel-good television! I've got as big a cynical streak as anyone, but that doesn't mean I didn't love Friday Night Lights, dammit! Assuming I stick with this for a while, it'll be the first broadcast network hour-long show in my rotation since, shit, I dunno - yeah, probably Friday Night Lights. Was that a DirecTV exclusive in its final seasons? Then let's say Lost. But even Lost was built like a cable drama with only sixteen episodes a season starting in 2008. You know what? None of this matters. Jane the Virgin is easy, fun, and worth checking out on Netflix. I'm serious!

Bajillion Dollar Properties: Season 2

I just reviewed Season 1 like a month or two ago, right? This was more of the same, really. Paul F. Tompkins and six less-known but funny enough actors star in this Property Brothers spoof. It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but semi-improvised nonsense like this has always been good enough for me. There's really no reason anyone should sign up for Seeso based on what I've seen, but if you head there for the free one month trial, meh, this is worth a look see.

Documentary Now!: Season 2

Pardon the Season 1 poster - I couldn't find a newer one! As with the first season of Documentary Now! I thought this was a real mixed bag. Credit to Armisen, Hader, and Seth Meyers for digging deep and spoofing such a varied array of documentaries from the last hundred years; I'm not sure if I've seen a documentary film that was made before this century, let alone any of these classics getting lampooned. Of course, if you have to be familiar with the source material to find the spoof funny, then the spoof isn't really that funny, is it? I genuinely enjoy most of the Documentary Now! episodes even when I have no idea about what inspired them. If anything, I've been more apt to look into the originals thanks to Documentary Now! - not that I've seen any yet; I'm oh for eleven on that front. Anyway, yeah - a bit hit or miss, and it seems like the quality is very subjective, but there's some good stuff here for sure.

Atlanta: Season 1

Solid stuff. I'd been looking forward to Donald Glover's FX project ever since it was announced more than a year ago, and it lived up to my expectations. That said, didn't he call this Twin Peaks for rappers at some point? Because it wasn't that, at all, whatsoever, and if that's the show he actually thought he was making... what? At any rate, I liked this, and I think Marissa liked it even more. For me it was a little inconsistent. Still pretty good! But some episodes were a riot and others barely registered for me. Your mileage may vary.

Luke Cage: Season 1

I need to learn to ignore the Marvel hype. I mean, I knew I wouldn't love this nearly as much as everyone else seemed to love this, but I figured I'd at least like it, you know? And maybe I did like it. But I definitely didn't love it and I definitely thought it was - once again, Marvel - eight episodes' worth of story stretched out into thirteen hours. Ugh. There were aspects of Luke Cage I genuinely enjoyed, but taken as a whole this was one of the least consistently interesting seasons of television I've seen all year.

Better Things: Season 1

From the first time I saw ads for Pamela Adlon's Better Things I thought, hey, this looks like a more grounded Louie with a single mother instead of a single father. And that's pretty much what it was. Episodes consisted of loose vignettes that don't really connect to one another thematically or narratively. The show was rarely a laugh-out-loud type of funny, but it always seemed to maintain my interest. It was nothing spectacular, but it was good enough! I'll be back for Season 2.

Last Week Tonight: Season 3

I don't watch The Daily Show with any regularity and didn't do so back when Jon Stewart was hosting. Ditto The Colbert Report. And I never got into The Nightly Show or Samantha Bee's Full Frontal or Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell or anything else out there. But ever since its second season, Last Week Tonight has been appointment viewing for me. What seems to set this show apart from its many predecessors is its structure; the first ten minutes of every episode tend to be filled with the events of the previous week and all sorts of jokes about them (the election being particularly fruitful and brutal), but instead of spending the remainder of his show on interviews or debates or consulting with subject matter experts, Oliver and company (ha!) devote a solid twenty minute chunk every week to raising awareness about an issue in America today. These are always slanted to the left - although maybe after what happened in the Midwest on Election Day, Season 4 will cover more "poor white folk" issues - but at their best, they're pretty informative and eye-opening. For instance, I'd never really been overly concerned with the likes of voter ID laws until Oliver and his team spelled out with a mixture of anecdotes and data just how difficult it is for so many (inner city, generally poor) people to obtain the IDs they're forced to have in order to vote. Granted, some topics of the week were just total snoozers and others felt a little bit like he was preaching to the choir. In fact the whole show can feel like an echo chamber at times - the only people watching Oliver "eviscerate Trump" week after week are the ones who, you know, already weren't going to vote for Trump. And I'm sure it'd be cringe-iducing to go back and watch some episodes from early in the year when Oliver - like almost everyone else in the media and real life - dismissed Trump's support and momentum as some sort of terrible joke. But this isn't a show to be judged with hindsight, and week in and week out it's been a pleasure all year.

You're the Worst: Season 3

Here's a show that made quite a leap in its second season from "fun but disposable comedy" to "dark comedy willing to explore some serious mental health issues." Where can such a show go in Season 3? Why, even darker, of course. This year our central foursome faced down dead parents, chronic depression, severe PTSD, and a cuckolding fetish among other things. I think Season 3 was probably even better than Season 2, but it also arrived with such loftier expectations, so I was slightly less impressed by it. Does that make sense? Either way, it's become a great show after a mostly forgettable first season and I look forward to where things go from here. I mean, it can only get so much darker, right?

Stan Against Evil: Season 1

Oof. I came for the "how's John C. McGinley doing all these years after Scrubs anyway?" and stayed for the "eight half-hour episodes spread across four weeks, why not?" But this just wasn't any good. In fact, it was actually very bad. I've never seen a single minute of Ash vs Evil Dead, but Stan Against Evil feels like a very poor man's knockoff of Ash vs Evil Dead. The premise here is that a retiring sheriff in a small New England town has come face to face with a centuries-old witch's curse that seems to make him (and his daughter and the new sheriff) encounter all kinds of demons. It's overtly campy, and McGinley's sheriff is written as the broadest stereotype of "cranky old New Hampshire guy" you've ever seen. I just wasn't into it. I'm not even sure who would be.

An Idiot Abroad: Season 2

I'm not sure what made Karl Pilkington agree to put himself through this again (that's a lie - "it's a job, isn't it?" he says) but, sure enough, here are eight more episodes of him traveling around the world and being put through his own personal hell by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The theme of this second season was Karl's "bucket list;" Ricky and Steve presented him with a list of a hundred "things to do before you die" and asked him to choose a handful of them. Very predictably, Karl opts not for adrenaline-pumping activities like skydiving and bungee jumping and instead sticks to things like "travel down Route 66" and "swim with dolphins." But even more predictably, Ricky and Steve throw enough curveballs at him to make for a decent season of television. "Travel down Route 66," for example, ends with Karl tied to the top of a two-seater airplane doing loop-de-loops somewhere over the Midwest. "Swim with dolphins" is replaced with "swim with sharks" almost immediately, with Stephen merchant opining that they're basically the same thing. Maybe my favorite moment of Season 2 came when Karl traveled to a "dwarf village" in China after a grueling week on the trans-Siberian railway. He's just so into it, loving the idea of a whole town full of happy little people, before an actor friend of Ricky's - also a little person - shames him on the phone from half a world away for getting a kick out of what's clearly a blatantly exploitative violation of human rights. It turns out the dwarf village is an amusement park - a zoo, almost - full of little people acting like the Lollipop Guild for the entertainment of others. The look on Karl's face as he realizes this - after arguing for its legitimacy since the people "have a king and everything" - is just an all time cringe moment in reality television. Anyway, I think Season 2 was just a hair worse than Season 1 if anything (diminishing returns?) but there's a third and final season of just four episodes that I'm sure I'll get around to soon enough.

Brain Games: Season 1

I found this little obscurity tucked away on Netflix. It's just three episodes long and it's a series of optical illusions and other brain-teasing games. I'm a sucker for this stuff - watching flashing lights start to slowly disappear as you alter your focus, for instance, or thinking that one line looks much longer than another line of equal length. This first season was from 2011 or 2012 but I have to imagine "the dress" would have made an appearance had it been from this year. I looked into it, and there are several more seasons, but only a few are on Netflix and I wonder how long the appeal would last anyway. I'm sure I'll be back for another season. Beyond that, who can say?

An Idiot Abroad: Season 3

Okay, turns out this was three episodes instead of four, and it turns out "soon enough" meant "immediately." The premise of the very-shortened third season - "The Short Way Round" - was that Karl had a traveling buddy in the three-and-a-half-foot tall actor Warwick Davis, another friend of Ricky Gervais'. (Ugh - that subtitle pun.) Together the pair recreated Marco Polo's journey in miniature, spending an episode each in Venice, India, and China. But we've already seen Karl in India! And we've seen him in China twice. Huge countries, sure, and worthy of more than one episode, but all the same, this third season felt a little needless and half-assed. One aspect in which the season did shine was that Warwick's generally more cheerful and upbeat attitude toward things only made Karl's grumpy dourness more pathetic. Watching Karl refuse to do things like bungie jumping got old long ago, but when Warwick ends up doing it, and Karl still won't - okay, yes, it's new all over again. Anyway, this concludes An Idiot Abroad. I'm sure Ricky and Karl could go ahead and make a fourth season whenever they wanted to, but I'm also not sure if either of them will ever feel the need to do so.

The schedule winds down immensely in December, and it'll be a great time to catch up on a few things I missed earlier this year so as to include them in my 2016 TV rankings. I know you're all so, so excited for those!

Stan's Movie Dump: November 2016

Lengthy post this month, as movie-watching picked up a bit with TV and schoolwork both dying down a bit, particularly for Thanksgiving. Enjoy these fourteen takes.

Han Gong-ju

Total late-night on-a-whim streaming choice. This one had great reviews and ratings across the Internet but, meh, I dunno, nothing great in my book. It's the South Korean story (based on a real one) about - well, it's not clear what it's about at first. A new girl with a dark past or secret shows up and when we eventually learn why she was exiled from her hometown (it's not because of something she did), yeah, it's absolutely infuriating. I'd shake my head at the South Korean justice system, but frankly, what happened there wasn't all that different from plenty of our own dark episodes here in America. Okay, if you don't care - spoilers - there was a big old teenage gang rape scandal, except the cops bungled the investigation and prosecution something brutal, and poor girl Han Gong-ju ends up needing to live elsewhere. Does that sound depressingly familiar or what?

In the Heart of the Sea

This could and should have been a better movie. Based on the true story of a whaling ship that gets wrecked by a white whale two-thousand miles out to sea - the very event that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick - and directed by Ron Howard, on paper this looks like a prestige drama with an outside shot at some Oscar nominations. But dramatically, there's so much juice the movie never bothers squeezing out of some very ripe and appetizing fruit. The captain and first mate hate one another, for one thing, but after their managerial differences come to a head in an early storm, the rivalry is never revisited. It doesn't linger and it doesn't resolve. It just sort of goes away as a plot point. The whaling sequences are satisfying and well-paced, but after the big whale attack that sinks the ship and leaves the surviving crew drifting through the South Pacific in three little whaling boats, the pace slackens. These are desperate, starving, thirsty, sunburnt men, but the movie's content to just note the passage of time with "38 days stranded" intertitles rather than digging deep into their misery. Chris Hemsworth lost a lot of weight in order to look like an emaciated poor bastard, but if you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't even notice it; the movie doesn't seem to care whether or not you even do. There's a brief philosophical discussion about two thirds of the way through about man's place in the world - the kind of shit Melville made hay with for hundreds of pages in Moby-Dick - but as soon as it starts, it's gone. And the most harrowing part of the historical incident - when the desperate crew turns to cannibalism in order to survive - is, frustratingly, referenced and mentioned but left off screen entirely. I guess they really wanted that bloodless PG-13 rating. It's just annoying - there were so many elements of a genuinely great movie here! But no one seemed to care enough to actually make one out of them.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

There are smart comedies and there are dumb comedies, and both kinds can be good and both kinds  can be bad. At their worst, "smart" comedies are kind of boring and toothless. At their best, "dumb" comedies are laugh-a-minute exercises in simple-minded escapism. (Oh yeah - there are also absurd comedies - dumber than dumb comedies - with over-the-top characters who behave more like cartoons than real people. Anchorman, Zoolander, Austin Powers, Dumb and Dumber. They can be good or bad too. But I digress.) Anyway, one thing it seems like every dumb comedy struggles with - the good ones and the bad ones alike - is maintaining a level of humor through the transition to the third act. You see it all the time. First act is loaded with jokes and hilarity as we meet the characters and establish the very simple story beats. Second act, hijinks ensue and everything escalates, and occasionally we're taken a little too far over the top, maybe even approaching the aforementioned "absurd comedy" status. But almost invariably, the movie pumps the brakes on the humor as shit gets real for our bottoming out heroes - usually fuck-ups to one degree or another - and we've gotta press pause on the comedy for a moment so that the ten-minute redemption arc can play out. It's a catch-22. The third act is tough to push through without the laugh rate dropping off, but without some sort of resolution, the story feels aimless and the movie can suffer anyway. Credit, then, to Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, for neither softening up nor abandoning any pretense of a narrative arc. No, this movie managed to be pretty funny - stupid, of course, but funny! - from start to finish and didn't deviate from a safe but formulaic structure, either. That's not to say it was a great movie - I've called it both "dumb" and "formulaic," haven't I? - but for what it is, and what it's trying to be, it's not bad at all. (Anna Kendrick's wig, though - why? There's just no reason for that wig. That wig was distracting and weird and made Anna Kendrick seem miscast even though she wasn't and man, just, really, why?)

The Intern

So as the results rolled in on #ElectionNight2016 and the unthinkable began to unfold, Marissa and I agreed that we didn't need to watch the coverage anymore. We decided to watch a movie. She insisted it had to be one she'd already seen, since she knew she'd be glued to her phone looking at election results and would pay no attention to the movie. I insisted it be something I hadn't seen, so as to distract me from doing the exact same on my phone. Hence: this. And you know what? Marissa had the right idea; I didn't pay a lick of attention to whole ten-minute chunks of this thing, refreshing my phone and reading all sorts of punditry on what was happening. (Why I ever thought a middling romance-free rom-com would distract me from the most important night of the year, I can't say. Wishful thinking?) To whatever extent I actually saw The Intern - eh. Not my bag, really. Cute story I'm sure, but when Election Night 2016 is happening, who could possibly care about Robert DeNiro proving his value to Anne Hathaway? (Yes - he's the intern, if you didn't know from the previews.)

Ghostbusters

This was fine - just fine - up until the third act, which was a mishmash of CGI nonsense and humorless, no-stakes action-packed fuckery. I think the pre-release backlash to this movie's very existence was an embarrassing shame, but I also think this movie never really needed to exist in the first place. Not because the first Ghostbusters is such a sacred treasure; quite the opposite. There's just nothing compelling about Ghostbusters that made it something we had to revisit, all-female cast or otherwise. (Okay, guys - confession. I have never seen the first Ghostbusters all the way through. Just bits and pieces, including the whole ending. It came out four years before I was born. What do you want from me?) At first, this was funny enough. But the funniest person in it was Chris Hemsworth. (Not a hot take - Marissa agrees!) I dunno. It wasn't great. But it wasn't not great because it was a female-driven action-comedy; it wasn't great because it was a needless and kind of shitty remake of a movie that maybe itself wasn't all that great in the first place. Is that okay? That's okay, right?

Secretary

Way earlier in the year, Marissa and I watched Fifty Shades of Grey and it was about as terrible as expected. Shitty plot, distinctly unsexy, no chemistry at all between the two leads, and a complete lack of an ending - what's more to hate? Anyway, I've had my eye on this 2002 kinky cult classic for a long time. You may be familiar - Maggie Gyllenhaal is James Spader's secretary, and he treats her like absolute garbage and emotionally and physically abuses her, but she's totally into it, and as such, hey, here we've got a BDSM-positive movie that predated the Fifty Shades phenomenon by at least ten years. (James Spader's character's name here? I shit you not - it's Mr. Grey!) So yeah - all in all a much better movie than Fifty Shades of Grey, as these actors have chemistry and this narrative has stakes and the kinky scenes are - for the most part - sexy. However! I'd venture to say that this is a much more #problematic movie than Fifty Shades; that film makes a distinct effort to show us all the consent that's being given from the bottom to her top. And in that film, it's not an employer-employee relationship. In Secretary, on the other hand, there are no scenes where consent is given, where boundaries are defined, where safe words are laid out. And this is, again, a boss abusing his secretary. She enjoys their relationship, and it's clear she consents to everything he's doing, and the movie is probably better off for skipping all the legalese and paperwork in Fifty Shades. But still! Non-affirmative consent doesn't fly here in 2016, no sir!

The Neon Demon

Let's talk Nicolas Winding Refn. I absolutely loved Drive. It's one of my favorite movies of all time, and yes, that has more to do with its aesthetic and its vibe than with its actual story. Refn's follow-up, Only God Forgives, was poorly received and in my mind it lived down to the non-hype. Even with low expectations I couldn't muster a fuck to give; the movie just never grabbed me. So, fine - Refn's capable of making great movies and shit movies alike. Where would The Neon Demon fall on that spectrum? My answer is somewhere in the middle. This is a movie about young models in Los Angeles and what a vapid and cutthroat industry they work in. And it looks and feels like a great movie. The style here is just fantastic. The substance? Meh. Some too-obvious metaphors and a weird third act kind of left me wanting more. But, holy crap, this is a gorgeous movie. It isn't a good one, but damn is it pretty, and maybe even pretty enough to be worth seeing on that much alone.

Everybody Wants Some
Absolutely loved this so much more than I should have, except, hey, it's Linklater, maybe there's no reason not to love it. It's a two-hour movie about college baseball players just hanging out on the first weekend of school in 1980. That's it. It's been called a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, and it is, but there's no arc here. There are no stakes. These are just a bunch of jocks shooting the shit and fucking around and getting competitive with each other and trying to have sex with women. There's seriously barely a plot, and there's no drama or conflict, but this was still one of the best movies I've seen this year. This is what more comedies should strive to be. Just giant hang out sessions. For real, I would watch a TV series about these guys. There are seven or eight "main" characters and a handful more of supporting guys and bit players, and with one lone exception - a black guy whose race is never even brought up - there's no diversity here whatsoever. Everyone is white and straight and a bit of a meathead, and it doesn't even get old or stale. The movie's just such a treat from start to finish. It'll never be as famous or well-known as Dazed and Confused but for my money it was even better. I can't gush enough here. See this! I found it at a Redbox - hopefully it's Netflix-bound soon.

Sausage Party
Marissa's pick! She heard it was funny. She ended up hating it. I can't blame her! This was bad. Not terrible, but about as funny as a latter day Family Guy episode and even more crude and offensive. There are moments where this felt like a decent satire on religion; people are gods, and all the food at the grocery store just wants to go out into the "great beyond" for eternal happiness, but eventually they begin to realize it's all a great big lie, and that all that waits for them through the supermarket exit is death (and lots of torture beforehand). But how sharp can your anti-religious takes be when your C-story involves a bagel and a lavash hashing out an Israel vs. Palestine dispute. ("It was our aisle first!" "Well where were we supposed to go after the sauerkraut kicked us out of our old aisle?") This isn't clever; it's dumb. But it's also pretty funny from time to time. When the food turns against the people, it escalates rather quickly - and ten minutes later the whole thing ends with the biggest orgy ever animated. I laughed!

Finding Dory

Back in 2003 I was a sophomore in high school and everybody was losing their shit over Finding Nemo and I just didn't get it. It was fine! Cute! A decent movie! But nothing about it blew me away and it just never clicked for me the way it seemed to click for so many of my peers. (Girls, mostly, but still.) Snap back to today and, yeah, that's kind of how I feel about its sequel - not that anyone I know is obsessed with this one. It was fine, and cute, and a decent movie, just like Finding Nemo was. At the very least it wasn't a bad or lazy sequel. Not the most ringing endorsement, I know, but what do you want? This is Pixar being Pixar - no better, and no worse.

Louder Than Bombs

This underwhelmed me slightly, in that I was expecting a 7 or 8 and got a 5 or 6 instead. It's a movie about a family moving on from their matriarch's untimely death and likely suicide. I don't really give everything I stream an equal opportunity, I'll admit, and sometimes I'm on my phone or my laptop for the majority of any given movie. This was one such movie. Still, something more compelling would have kept me more engaged, no? 

Arrival

Mainstream hype, once again, is so dangerous. It's only November, and no one's even talking about Oscar contenders yet, but when a wide release science fiction movie with an original script and a reasonably big budget like this one pops up - and when it's led by Amy Adams - you almost can't help but preemptively judge it as an Oscar nominee rather than as, simply, a movie. (What, just me?) Lose the big names in this one and a few of the special effects, and it's an incredibly impressive independent film with an interesting twist and an important message. But somehow with bigger stars and a bigger budget, it feels less impressive. Does that make any sense? All of that said, this was a good movie. A solid 8, let's say, since apparently based on the last paragraph, I'm rating movies now. The twist was a little predictable - which is fine, and in some ways a credit to the movie's foreshadowing capabilities - but my issue with it was that it didn't seem to match the thematic content of the movie at all. For me to say anything else would flirt with spoiling something outright, so fuck it - just go see Arrival. I'll leave with a quick synopsis. Twelve massive UFOs have appeared all across the earth and Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner need to figure out a way to communicate with them before the Russian and Chinese militaries start firing nuclear weapons at them.

Hell or High Water

This was great. From a director I've never heard of (David Mackenzie) comes a neo-western bank heist movie for the Bernie Sanders era. Taking place in No Country For Old Men territory and exuding a similar vibe to that Coen brothers masterpiece - it's even got Jeff Bridges in the Tommy Lee Jones role of the grizzled lawman getting too old for this shit - Hell or High Water is a textbook example of keeping it simple. This is a simple story with simple characters who have simple motivations, and it all leads to a simple conclusion. And it's great! Just wonderful, really. Marissa thought it was a little too slow, but I disagree - it's got multiple action sequences and plenty of tension, especially as it builds to its climax, all in an hour and forty minutes. Besides, it's West Texas. What happens quickly in West Texas? (Disclaimer: I've never been to West Texas.)

Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing

Jesus Christ. This HBO documentary was exhaustive in its coverage and exhausting from an emotional standpoint. The subject matter needs no introduction, particularly since I think everyone reading this either lives or has once lived within ten miles of both the finish line in Boston and the region of Watertown where the ensuing manhunt took place, but... fuck, man. Two hours in length, this thing pulls no punches in showing not just the explosions (waiting for those to go off made for the longest ten seconds or so of any movie I've seen all year) but also their harrowing aftermath. Not just the immediate aftermath - blood and severed limbs and arteries all over Boylston Street's sidewalks - but the ongoing aftermath for the survivors of the attacks. Three people died in the bombings and seventeen others lost legs, and this documentary spends a lot of its time on their stories of recovery and hardship. It's depressing, in many cases. Inspirational, sure - and I'll always tear up at the idea of the entire fucking region coming together in the days and weeks that followed to donate blood, money, time, and effort to the victims - but to the documentary's credit it's really never emotionally manipulative or melodramatic. It treats triumphs as triumphs, sure, but acknowledges  and shows us all sorts of ongoing hardships associated with those triumphs. I'll have a significant bias toward any coverage or retelling of the Marathon bombing for the rest of my life - really dreading that schlocky-looking Mark Wahlberg movie, guys - but I found this to be such a powerful documentary. Not cathartic, thank God - no loved ones or limbs or loved ones' limbs lost for me - but gripping and informative and tragic in that too-close-to-home way. There's one pair of victims in particular - newlyweds, twenty-somethings, young professionals in the city - who filled me with that hokey self-tragic sense of "that could have been me and my wife." They each lost a leg after the bombing, and together they seem to span both ends of the recovery spectrum. He ran the Boston Marathon on his prosthetic leg just three years after the attack; she, waiting for him at the finish line, still can't walk comfortably. Oof. Seek this one out and see this. You'll immediately regret doing so, but I think it deserves a watch all the same.

Bring on December! Last year I watched close to 30 movies in December in order to hit 100 on the year. This year, I'm already at 145 heading into December. (Thanks, grad school.) That's double my pace from last year - can I also double last year's December, collect 60 movies in 31 days, and somehow hit 200 this year? Uh, fuck and no. But I'm sure I'll rack up plenty.

Firewatch

This one's been on my radar for a while - another 2016 indie darling - and last night I got around to purchasing and playing it. It takes around three or four hours and there really isn't much in the way of additional content. I'm hard-pressed to imagine anyone could take more than five hours to beat this thing without really trying to "stop and smell the roses."

The game takes place in an isolated portion of a national forest or park or something in the middle of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. It's been a really dry summer and you're part of a seasonal firewatch crew, tasked with sitting in an outpost tower (seen above) and just calling in any fires you see. Your name is Henry, and you're spending your summer out in the middle of nowhere for... reasons. Your only contact is your boss, Delilah, who converses with you via walkie-talkie from her outpost miles away. 

What unfolds is mostly an interactive narrative. Sooner or later - no shocker - something weird starts going on in the park, and Henry and Delilah task themselves with getting to the bottom of things. But is there really anything "going on" or are Henry and Delilah just bored out of their minds and falling prey to their own conspiracy theories? Is Henry simply hallucinating after weeks and months without any human contact? Are they overestimating the danger they're in? Or perhaps underestimating it?

As a story, Firewatch was pretty good. It doesn't leave a lot open to postgame analysis and interpretation, which is kind of refreshing after playing titles like Inside and The Witness earlier this year, but that also makes it slightly less memorable. As I said, I beat it last night, and aside from an interesting character motivation theory I read about Delilah, I haven't really thought about Firewatch since then at all. Its also still running a twenty dollar pricetag, which is sort of high considering its brevity. If anything  makes me want to replay it, it's the idea of multiple dialogue options; I spent most of the game being friendly with Delilah and a little guarded about Henry's history, which I think aligns with my own personality pretty well. But I imagine the game would play very differently if I was, say, a total asshole to Delilah. Or is I ignored her radio calls entirely, which I think is something you can do for the most part. Still - Oxenfree is more enticing on a "different dialogue creates a different replay experience" regard.

Ultimately, I'm just not sure Firewatch stands out. It's a very pretty game, for sure, but not really any prettier than The Witness, which had much more going on and lasted significantly longer. And I just brought up how it pales in comparison to Oxenfree from a dialogue-driven perspective for me. Actually, for my money, Firewatch is at its best in the very beginning, when it outlines Henry's circumstances with effective text-based narration. In fact if anything I think the game gradually loses steam as it becomes less about exploring the wilderness around you and more about unraveling a conspiracy.

This is certainly worth three or four hours of your time, but maybe it's best to hold off until some sort of sale knocks its price down by about half.

The Last of Us

Back in September I finally caved and bought myself the (then new) PS4 Slim. Ever since the 4th grade when I was first put in the very difficult position of making my own Sophie's Choice of whether to become the owner of an N64 or a Playstation, I chose Nintendo over Sony. In the years since, the only other Sony gaming device I've ever owned was the 2nd generation PS2. Needless to say, there have been plenty of games in the span of the PS3 and PS4 that have always intrigued me, but one game has by far been the most enticing of all: The Last of Us. 

Despite being a big zombie fan back in high school, I'll admit I've grown weary of the sub-genre. That's not to say I'm completely over zombies (and Disney/LucasFilm... if you guys ever adapt the Han Solo space, zombie-survival novel Death Troopers, I'll plotz myself), but I need something fresh to bring some life back in this world of death. Here we have The Last of Us. Critically praised to no end, I felt confident that this was the title that would do just that. While I wasn't disappointed, I wasn't astounded either. 

To put it simply, The Last of Us feels like what Cormac McCarthy would write if tasked to tell his own zombie story. Even though every zombie story I've ever experienced focuses on the survivors and usually the struggle they find trusting each other to survive, or lack thereof, this one took that motif in a very intimate direction. The story of an older man -- a man who lost his daughter at the beginning of the "outbreak," not due to the virus, but due to the violence of society -- who forms a relationship with a young girl that contains the hope in stoping the virus once and for all. I thought the game did a great job in exploring this relationship in various ways and really showing how these characters change for better... or for worse. Like any McCarthy book, the story doesn't shy away from the brutal truth we all fear might be buried deep down in our own human nature. 

If I had one criticism to this game it would be the lack of freedom the player has in shaping the story. The gameplay and plot is very linear forcing audiences to keep to the designated story. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, for a game that's constantly challenging our view's of morality in a world where ethics might be more of a luxury than necessity, it would be nice if I was actually able to control what choices my characters made... at least some of the time. Now I can already hear some people (likely Kieth) bitching that this game is designed to specifically force the player into those morally uncomfortable places. To make you live out awful, yet sometimes necessary, decisions. 

That's a point I can't really argue with. 

The game certainly made me squirm by forcing me through tough decisions that went against how I wanted to play. If that's what the developers wanted from their audiences, then they succeeded. Still... I like games to treat me how someone might teach me how to ride a bike. At first, hold my hand. Help me make some of those decisions on how to peddle and steer being sure I understand how to keep the bike upright. But by the end, it's time for the developer to let go and see if I can manage to keep the bike upright. And if I choose to take that bike a bomb it down a steep hill into a perilous canyon that ends into a volcano filled with fire-spiders, then, fuck it... let me do so. But don't pull me down with you assuming that's how I want to experience things. 

In case I didn't make this clear through my bitching in the last few paragraphs... I did love this game. It was beautiful to look at in the remastered version and an excellent reintroduction into the gaming world of Playstation. I just get a little bitchy when games force me into uncharacteristic predicaments. But, hey... with the way this game ends... it's totally possible this story isn't done. There's still time for redemption, Joel. There's still time!

Daria: The Complete Series

Here's one from my youth (1997-2002) that I've been looking to revisit and see in full for a while now. Daria is probably a show you all remember catching on MTV now and again. You remember deadpan Daria and her popular little sister Quinn, and Quinn's fashion club friends. You remember the dumb-as-doornails quarterback-cheerleader couple of Kevin and Britney, right? And Jane? And Jane's brother Trent? And Daria's successful but overstressed parents? I remember! Anyway, I have no idea what night this show aired on, or during what stretch of the year, and I never did; this was just one of those shows that must have aired reruns before or after TRL or something.

Now, right off the bat, there's a huge component missing from Daria on DVD, and it's the ten or twelve different tracks that played per twenty-minute episode. Seriously, every scene in Daria started out with five seconds or so of a then-new single - a "brand-spankin' new" one I'm sure, remember those MTV intro bumpers? - that always seemed to fit the scene perfectly. Everything from Guster to Blink-182 to Train to Jay-Z to Ricky Martin to Jennifer Lopez was used to set the scene, which makes perfect sense since this was a show about high school on MTV. Sadly, the music licensing costs associated with bringing samples of more than 500 different songs to a DVD set was just prohibitively expensive, and Daria must live on with generic fill-in background tracks instead. Oh well!

Five seasons, sixty-five episodes, and two made-for-TV movies. This wasn't a quick undertaking, and I've been working on it on and off since August or September. Sometimes, going back and revisiting an old show is a bad idea. Hindsight tends to shade things with a certain rose color, and they're often best left that way. But I'm glad I went back this time and saw Daria from start to finish. The show started out slow, content for a season or two just to let its heroine be a sarcastic wallflower passing snide deadpan judgment on everyone around her - her family, her teachers, her classmates. (Yes, jocks are dumb. Yes, it girls are vapid. No, parents just don't understand. We get it, MTV!) But over the course of five seasons - and in the final two in particular - there was some real character progression and growth. The show finally let Daria lose her cool once or twice, showing she was only human after all. In the fifth season, she has a boyfriend - Tom - and the relationship brings out all kinds of new anxieties and unwanted feelings from Daria. Hell, in the final episode, she greets her old friend Jane with a sentimental hug after a rough day, and Jane's face is as full of surprise and concern as the viewer's could be after five years of seeing Daria barely so much as crack a smile or raise her voice.

The series ends with an hour-long movie called "Is It College Yet?" where all the kids apply to college, and I think it's a suitable end note. It paid service to most of the major characters, sending them off in various directions that made sense. And you can't help but feel like, as much of a wallflower as Daria was, she's going to do just fine in college and the world outside it.

And lastly, just because the casting is spot on (I mean who else would play Daria?) here's a mock trailer from CollegeHumor for a Daria ten-year reunion movie.

The Witness

I figured, heading into my fall semester, that at one point I'd hopelessly derail myself from my studies for a week or two thanks to a video game. But I assumed that game would be Final Fantasy XV, an epic-length JRPG that was supposed to be out in late September, and not a little indie puzzle game from Jonathan Blow. Yet here I am, panic-stressed about everything I've got to do in the next month in order not to fail out of grad school at the proverbial eleventh hour, and what did I spend at least twenty hours over the last week doing? Yep - playing The Witness.

Sween and Trev have already played through this one - I think Trev is waiting to complete it before posting it - but for anyone else curious about this game, it's essentially a sprawling collection of hundreds of line puzzles found across an open world island environment. When I say line puzzles, I mostly mean mazes. Each puzzle consists of a panel with a starting point and an ending point, and you need to traverse a continuous line from the one to the other. Sounds easy, right? Who would spend forty dollars or hours on a bunch of mazes? But here's the rub - there can be hundreds of ways to get from the start to the finish in each puzzle, but most puzzles only have one or two correct solutions. Subtle rules start to pop up in the puzzles. Early on, for instance, you learn that if the grid contains black and white dots on some of its squares, the line you traverse needs to separate the black dots from the white ones. (Insert segregation joke here.) An entire area of the island includes puzzles whose solution becomes apparent only when viewed from a certain angle. One are even includes puzzles whose solutions can be derived by listening to birds chirping nearby.

The beauty of the game is in how well it all builds. Early on, you'll find panels everywhere you have no idea how to solve - doors containing symbols you've never even seen, for instance - and that's your cue to just leave well enough alone and come back later. Every puzzle has an answer you can work through - often with pencil and paper in hand, like in the good old days - and the game offers you no hints whatsoever. That's another great strength; any other game, in today's game design culture, would nudge you along in some way. "Let's check out the quarry," it might say. "Hmm, haven't seen these symbols before - let's come back later." But The Witness trusts you to figure out everything on your own - that's really the entire point of the game - to the point where using a walkthrough for even one puzzle feels tantamount to lying. I'm not opposed to walkthroughs, and use them frequently, but when a game's entire purpose is to be studied and understood and slowly figured out, I mean, what's the point of using a walkthrough at all?

After completing enough puzzles in the same general area of the island that share a similar theme, you unlock what can only be called "lasers." These lasers point directly toward the top of a distant mountain and, after activating seven of them, you can enter the mountain and begin the "end game" puzzles. I found nine such lasers before deciding to tackle the endgame, and I'm aware of at least two more, and possibly more. Will I go back for these? Probably one day - I'd love to. But maybe not until the semester winds down a little.

Anyway, this game absolutely isn't for everyone. It's a very "adult" game, not in its themes or content but in the patience it requires. So much of the game consists of failure, learning from failure, and knowing when to return to the spot of previous failures. There isn't even an in-game map of the island  that lets you see where you are, or where previously unsolved puzzles exist. The island isn't that big - it only feels big at first - and eventually you begin to get a feel for what areas connect to one another and how it all aligns. But it takes time! Hell, individual puzzles - and I think there are over 600 in the game - can take as much as an hour to work through. But it all depends on the person!

Above all, this game - like Blow's Braid before it - seems best enjoyed with friends. Having more eyes on one puzzle speeds up the solve time, and having multiple voices bouncing ideas off of each other can help people see patterns they hadn't considered. Marissa sat next to me and went through probably twenty or thirty puzzles with me, and while she said she mostly felt like "dead weight" as I solved several puzzles without her even understanding them, I can vouch for her solving about five of them well before I did. Sween also watched me play the game for a good four hours or so on Twitch, and while he seemed impressed by the speed at which Trevor and I found lasers and, uh, "hidden environmental puzzles," saying we both found things way faster than he did, I was certainly thankful for his hints and suggestions, sparse though they were; sometimes I'd be stuck on a puzzle for a legitimate half hour before he'd say something like, "the first line is up," and everything would click. I should reiterate - this is a game best enjoyed with friends! In fact, based on the difficulty associated with finding some of the environmental puzzles out there, it might be a game best enjoyed with a community at large - a perfect game for the age of the Internet, where solutions and walkthroughs lurk around every corner.

But it's also a game best encountered totally blind. I knew nothing about this when I began playing it, except that Sween and Trev loved it and it was made by the guy who made Braid. Good enough for me! I've already described, above, far more about the game than a newcomer should probably know going in. I've rambled plenty. If this sounds like something you'd be into, by all means, check it out. I can't say it'll go down as my favorite game of the year or anything, but it's one of the most unique gaming experiences I've ever had. Just be warned - you'll fall down a rabbit hole and wonder where the hours and days have gone.

Trev's Movie Dump: October 2016

I need to keep up with these better. It's getting harder and harder to remember anything I've seen once a few days have passed. 

Swiss Army Man

This film really deserves a second watch on my part. In short, I liked it. Not a lot, but I liked it. Perhaps on that second watch I'll learn to appreciate it even more as Swiss Army Man does frustrate me on a few levels. Let's be really clear... this is a weird fucking movie. Is it as weird as The Lobster (that I posted last month)? While both are completely original and totally out there, it's hard to compete against a film with a farting corpse that can also pop a boner that doubles as a compass. That said...

This movie is essentially a whole surreal take on how society can make us feel like we have to keep everything bottled in (emotions, thoughts, love, etc.), and it's only when you just let it all fart out that you can truly discover who you are and find personal happiness or enlightenment. Something like that.

I strongly encourage anyone to watch this film just because it's something entirely different from a lot of things that are out there. (A good counter-balance to the rebooted and sequel superhero franchises out there.) And if you ever find it too hard to grasp such a silly concept of a farting dead body helping a guy stuck on a deserted island find his home (and love) again... at least you can find joy in a really astounding soundtrack. 

The Others

This was really the only horror film I imbibed on this Halloween season. (Sad, I know. What can I say? I was busy pushing through five different PS4 game that I'll post soon, I swear.) The film seemed to make a lot of online horror fans' larger lists. A guess a mid-tier horror film, if you will. For me... it was alright. 

Spooky is the best way to describe this film. A lot of bumps in the dark without ever really seeing anything. And I applaud that. Sometimes less is definitely more. I will, however, say it didn't take me long to start guessing there was going to be a twist ending and what that twist ending was going to be. Maybe that's just because I've seen a lot and it's harder and harder to surprise me. Maybe that's because there were some obvious clues as to the direction of the film. 

Who knows?

But I did enjoy the viewing for what it's worth.  

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

For those of you that don't read French, this is Beauty and the Beast. Rather, the very first film adaptation (I think?) to the now famous story of a cursed monster-man living in a castle who imprisons a helpless girl that eventually warms his heart and helps him breaks the evil curse. 

This French version is a little out there and a little cool. The story is a slightly more convoluted than the Disney cartoon that most people will resort to in comparison. (There's also a lot of homosexual metaphors buried in it, but I won't tackle that here.) In regards to similarities to the Disney film, we do have an old man who first gets trapped by the Beast. And his daughter is the one that eventually saves the day. But Gaston is gone and replaced by Belle's equally douchey brother. There's also an attempt by the brother to break into the Beast's secret treasure room. So, yeah... needless to say, there are differences from the story we're all familiar with.

Artistically, this movie is really surreal. Especially whenever a character enters into the Beast's castle. Just check out Belle's first trip to the castle below:

There were other scenes trippier than this, but YouTube has limited selections.

Despite its age and relatively slow pace, it was a fun movie and definitely has some aesthetic features that still hold up after all this time. 

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

The less said about this one, the better. What a disappointment.

There are two or maybe three fundamental aspects of modern JRPGs. You've got the framework of statistical progression - some of it menu-based, and some of it hidden below the surface - the leveling system, tech trees, item drops, and so on. You've got the battle system, which is very closely related to the aforementioned interior workings, so maybe "battle gameplay" shouldn't even be separated from "framework." And then of course you've got the exploration aspect - environments, puzzles, dialogue, side quests, story.

And man, in terms of both gameplay and exploration, oof. I had my issues. Thing is, to call Lightning Returns flawed wouldn't really be accurate, because the game designers definitely crafted a well-balanced game that isn't really broken or overtly shitty. But what were they thinking?

I shouldn't bury the lede. This game sucks because you're on a strict time limit. Like Pikmin, Majora's Mask, and plenty of other games I'm surely forgetting, if you don't beat Lightning Returns within a set number of days, the world ends and it's game over.

This is so terribly out of place in a JRPG, let alone a Final Fantasy game. Deep exploration and lengthy grindfests are such an integral part of the genre. To discourage the act of, say, retracing your steps just seems so misguided. When I play these games, I like to chew on the scenery a little and take my time making decisions at item shops and the like. If I find a group of enemies particularly difficult, maybe I want to go spend an hour leveling up somewhere before coming back - especially in this day and age, when I can do so half-heartedly while watching TV or listening to a podcast or whatever.

I thought the battle gameplay kind of sucked, too. I'm sure I could have gotten more into it, and explored it, and understood it, and probably even enjoyed it, if given enough time to do so. But I wasn't.

The story is also a bit surreal and insane, even for a Final Fantasy game, but who cares? Read about it online if you want to. Just don't play this game.

Blech.

Archer: Season 6

Back to back one-off TV season posts for me. Hooray for DVDs, which are still a thing in my backlog. There's not a lot for me to say about Archer at this point, particularly the sixth season. The show was recently renewed all the way through Season 10 - which creator Adam Reed says will be its last one - and Season 8 begins in a few months. Now, not long ago, Adam Reed wanted to end the show after eight seasons, but he says a creative explosion one night gave him enough ideas to mix things up for another two years. Because that's the only way Adam Reed can keep giving a shit about his television shows, is by constantly tweaking the formula. Sealab 2021 was never really grounded in any sense, but it grew increasingly wacky and flung itself far off the rails somewhere around when Harry Goz died midway through Season 3. (RIP, Captain Murphy.) And even though Frisky Dingo only lasted for two years, it seemed to reinvent itself three or four separate times across those 26 episodes. Frankly, the fact that Archer remained as consistent (within its own niche genre) as it did for four whole years is kind of astounding.

It wasn't until Season 5 that Reed decided to shake things up; that season was unofficially called Archer Vice and it followed the characters as they turned away from working at a spy agency and embarked on new careers as country music stars and cocaine dealers. Season 7 saw the gang move to California to open up a private investigator agency. And Season 8 will allegedly take place in the 1940s - entirely in a comatose dreamland as one main character was left dying at the end of Season 7. Who knows where Seasons 9 and 10 will go?

At any rate, that leaves Season 6 - yes, the one after the Archer Vice season - as what looks to be the last "regular" season of Archer. The crew worked once again as an international spy agency here, albeit one under the thumb of the CIA, and as such it dealt primarily with the exact same sorts of stories and adventures that filled Seasons 1-4. And you know what? I was fine with that. I loved Seasons 1-4, and, no surprise, I really enjoyed Season 6. By comparison, Season 5 was great but it felt a bit like it ran out of steam late - perhaps, like South Park, Archer isn't quite up for the task of making serialized arcs and should stick to more individual episodic outputs. That said, Season 7 did exactly that, and it was also a bit of a letdown for me. Eh, oh well. We're onto Season 8! Could be wonderful. And if it isn't, well, it's not like Seasons 9 and 10 will also take place in a 1940s dreamland.

Community: Season 6

Man, am I wrong, or have none of you seen the sixth and final season of Community? I mean, I get it - that Yahoo streaming service sucked something awful, and the show was down to four of its original seven main cast members anyway, and frankly you didn't miss any late-breaking entrants into the Community episode hall of fame or anything. But still - it's Community! Didn't we all love Community?

That this thing made it to six seasons is a well-documented miracle, but the age was certainly showing. Down to four main characters - Jeff, Abed, Britta, and Annie - the show leaned as heavily as it ever has on Chang, the Dean, and - wait, no, really, that's all we've got left here. Even John Oliver is long gone, off on his sweet little HBO gig. Joining the cast are Paget Brewster (to fill the "adult female" role left behind by Yvette Nicole Brown's departure) and Keith David ("are you black Pierce or old Troy?") and while they were plenty serviceable, the characters never seemed to really,  I dunno, matter. That said, neither did any of the main characters, now in their sixth year at a community college and no longer taking classes together (save for in an episode or two). There were thirteen episodes in the season, and given that Community wanted to get in another paintball episode and another documentary episode, and spend a couple episodes introducing the new characters, and wrap things up nicely with a poignant finale, that only left like eight to ten episodes to play around with.

But as much as it felt like Community went out with a whimper - and it was nothing but bang bang bang in its first three seasons - there's a certain grace and dignity when a show "dies of old age" or whatever. The finale wasn't perfect, and one scene in the third act felt downright lumpy and out of place, but it was such a good Community conclusion; the characters, sitting around the study table (and later a bar) as summer begins, each envision what "Season 7" would look like. And after lots of goofy pitches, the saddest one of all belongs to Jeff, who suddenly realizes that the eight-person study table might one day soon include the likes of Garrett, Vicky, Leonard, and Todd. It's as if Dan Harmon was coming to grips right alongside Jeff - "sure, we can keep on going, but at a certain point, what are we even doing here?" Jeff then defiantly reimagines his own pitch, and suddenly it's a future where the whole crew is hanging out in the teacher's lounge - Annie's teaching criminology, Abed's got a pop culture class going on, Britta's the school shrink - and when he's done pitching this one, he just kind of gets a lot of sad, blank looks. Annie and Abed are young and have their whole lives ahead of them - why would they want to hang out at Greendale forever? (Again, I picture Harmon coming to grips with Alison Brie and Danny Pudi leaving the show sooner rather than later in order to test their star power elsewhere.)

Before the finale came out, and long before Yahoo Screen folded, Harmon and others had publicly stated that they were happy to keep Community going as long as someone would allow it to do so. But the finale suggests that he never really meant that - the hashtag was always "six seasons and a movie," after all, and, yeah, it was just time.

But damn do I still want that movie. (Come back, Donald Glover!)

One last thing - the tags at the end of the episodes in Season 6 got really damn dark. Most of them had nothing to do with characters we'd even seen on the show before - they were almost like little two-minute films only barely inspired by the preceding episode. Anyway, here are some of my favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=patEl5GN14k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46zqv0AUO7I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=083NxNzhmCU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1Pf_X_mgwM

Stan's Movie Dump: Late October 2016

And as October hit its homestretch, with Halloween fast approaching, I switched gears and stopped watching horror movies entirely. I'm an enigma, you know that?

No Men Beyond This Point

A little-known speculative sci-fi mockumentary. In an alternative world, women acquire the power to reproduce asexually somewhere in the 1960s. Since all women are XX, this means they can only make daughters. Eventually heterosexual reproduction becomes impossible and men are literally doomed. (In the present day, the youngest man on earth is 37 years old.) Now, it's important for me to note that this really isn't a feminist or anti-feminist film. We've all seen those misogynistic "if women ran the world..." articles that just sort of mock how much they love shoes and don't understand cars. But we've all also seen episodes of science fiction shows from Star Trek to Rick and Morty that presume female-led societies are more enlightened, advanced, and peaceful than our own since the trope is that men are overly aggressive and focused on sex. This film sort of gently dabbles with both sides of that coin, but more than trying to make a point about why the world does or doesn't "need" men, it's more concerned with presenting a hypothetical world without many men and exploring all the different mindsets one might have in such a place. Suddenly "men's rights" actually is a thing worth worrying about in a broad sense, but you've likewise got all sorts of women dismissing their plight, with some even suggesting they're looking forward to the day there are no more men at all. (Kind of like the way your most racist aunt views Black Lives Matter, right?) I dunno - this wasn't a particularly good movie, but it was an interesting premise that seemed not to have an overt agenda attached to it, and at only eighty minutes or so, hey, it's on Netflix if you're interested.

Deadpool

I went into this cautiously. Every friend of mine who's seen it had nothing but good things to say; on the contrary, every professional film critic I follow had plenty of bad things to say. Having finally seen Deadpool, well... yeah, I'm with my friends! This was great. There's something so refreshing about a comic book movie with a "hard R" rating. Blog readers know how sick I am of seeing the same old formulaic movie (and show) year after year from Marvel. But this one's got so much gore - so much satisfying gore - which, really, any movie about superhuman creatures fighting and shooting one another ought to! The humor was a little sophomoric at times - hey, it's Ryan Reynolds after all - but so what? There's nothing wrong with a dumb movie that has as much fun as this one does. I have some complaints, sure, but give me five or six more of these before Thor 4 or Black Panther vs. The Wasp and I'd be a very happy audience member.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

This just felt like such a pale immitation of the original Sin City, almost like a movie struggling to understand what made the first one so enjoyable. If I didn't know better I'd be convinced this was directed by a completely different person (or people) than the first one, but no! Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez did this - it's on their hands! I mean, A Dame to Kill For wasn't terrible, but it felt limp and schlocky where Sin City felt exciting and authentic. Could just be a case of lightning not striking twice, I guess.

Room 237

Trev's post a while back gave me all kinds of interest, and after finishing The Shining (the book) I was finally ready to take a deep dive into the story behind the movie. Except, that's not what this was at all. This was a poorly assembled collection of crackpot theories about how Kubrick's movie was really about everything from the Holocaust to American Indian genocide to how Kubrick faked the moon landing. Half of the interview subjects don't even seem convinced by their own arguments - one of them even trails off halfway through all of his thoughts as if he's making them up on the fly while watching The Shining - and the ones who seem most convinced are clearly the craziest people. (One argument: "there's this poster of a skier, but it's not really a skier, it's a minotaur! And later Jack, in the maze, you know, a minotaur." Easy counterargument: But the thing on the poster was very clearly a skier. Another argument: "And the key, it says ROOM No. 237, and look at those capital letters, so clearly an anagram for 'moon,' it's right there you guys, Kubrick admitting that he faked the moon landing." Easy counterargument: "No, not even close, but an actual anagram for those five letters is 'moron,' you moron." The most generous thing I could say about this documentary was that it gives multiple firsthand accounts of passionate audience members forging their own deep reads, suggesting the power and imagination of film analysis. But really, Room 237 is just a tangled web of crap.

13th

Here's Ava Duvarnay's Netflix documentary on the mass incarceration epidemic in the United States and how we got here. After a brief overview of race relations in America from slavery through Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement, the focus of the story begins in the 1970s with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Then we see Reagan's war on drugs, Bush's hard stance on crime, and Clinton's mandatory minimum sentence policies, and a running tally of the U.S. imprisoned population just keeps growing while a number of talking heads (including, for real, Newt Gingrich) talk about how all these policies have led to the situation we have today, in which one in three black men in America will be in jail at some point in their lives. This is moving and important stuff, and that's before the film even touches on the recent apparent surge in police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement - and it culminates in a truly depressing sequence where Donald Trump's violence-inciting comments are laid over footage from the civil rights movement of black people being abused by police enforcement and white mobs. But at the end of the day I'm left wondering, what did I really learn here? Don't get me wrong - a documentary's worth can't be based strictly on its ability to provide new information, and this was very tightly structured and well made. It should be shown in colleges and maybe even high schools for years to come, and it's arguably the most relevant movie of what's been just a ridiculous election year. But I can't help coming away from it thinking, "yes, but anyone who has been paying attention already knows all of this." I guess not enough people are paying attention, but then, will those people gravitate toward a film like this one? Whatever - this was very good all the same.

Raising Arizona

I wanted to love this - a straight up comedy from the early Coen brothers! But I didn't. I liked it - parts of it, at least - and it was entertaining on a basic level to see late '80s Nic Cage and John Goodman playing white trash criminals in a sort of proto-My Name Is Earl vein, but this is far from the best comedy I've seen and far from the best Coen movie.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

Alright, fine - I didn't stop watching horror movies entirely. This, from Netflix, was all mood and suspense, very little else. There's power in using silence and negative space to build tension but it all needs to build to something. Still, this was well made and it might be worth a look for ghost story enthusiasts.

Cruel Intentions

I actually really enjoyed this. It stumbles in the middle after a confident first act, as so many movies do, and it ended on a bit of a melodramatic "really?" note that, hey, maybe didn't feel as cliche back in 1998 for all I know. But the premise here - rich, bored prep school kids make bets over who can take someone's virginity, make someone cheat on their partner, or otherwise ruin someone's reputation and life in general - is so delightfully 1990s. It's like Mean Girls with no lessons learned and a lot more sex. It's just so delightfully of its own era - Sarah Michelle Gellar, a young Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair (remember her?), and Ryan Phillippe in glasses and a turtleneck as the proverbial coolest kid in school. There's nothing outrageously graphic about this one - it's a rather soft R, as most teen movies tend to be - but when Gellar and Blair share an exploratory French kiss about a third of the way in, you better believe the camera cuts to an extreme mouth-on-mouth close-up, the movie completely aware of what it is and what it's doing. It's so easy for me - I was ten when this came out - to perpetually look at "high school kids in the late '90s" as these totally mature adults, but holy shit, allow me to zoom out for a second, and I realize that this is a movie about high school seniors trying to seduce each other. The basis of the plot revolves around a guy wanting to fuck his stepsister. Sarah Michelle Gellar spends her opening scene walking around in semi-public in what could only be called lingerie by today's standards - or were low-cut loose shirts underneath pantsuit-style corsets just something we were all letting underage women wear in 1998? (If that link is broken, just look at the movie poster above for a decent idea of what I'm talking about.) Help me out - were the 1990s a deceptively crazy-sexy time to be a sex-crazed high school kid? I mean, the teen pregnancy rates sort of suggest, "yes." But Ryan Phillippe in glasses and a turtleneck bedding all the ladies in his class suggests, no, not in the least, are you crazy? Okay, that's plenty of time spent talking about the high school sex politics of the Monica Lewinsky scandal era.

Love

Okay, an appropriate follow-up to Cruel Intentions. That was a sexy movie and all, but what about a straight up sex movie? Do you like porn? It's cool, no judgment here - I'm the one who sat through this thing after all. Now, can you imagine sitting through a two-hour pornographic video? That's more or less what Love was, and artistic integrity be damned, there's no need for porn to last two hours. Alright, yes, I'm exaggerating a little bit; this was an actual movie, a story on film, with characters and a plot and everything, but seriously, a good thirty minutes of this movie was spent on intermittent unsimulated sex scenes. It just gets old! And it certainly doesn't pass for bold or new or daring in 2016. (This was made in 2015. Fine. Still.) This wasn't good. Do not watch this.

10 Cloverfield Lane

This was a good enough movie, but it's an even more interesting case study in modern day franchise building. Just about everyone involved in making this, from the cast to the crew, thought they were making some sort of modestly budgeted thriller for J.J. Abrams' production company about a woman trapped in a nuclear fallout shelter with the man who saved her life. (And that's still the premise of this movie.) But during production, a few people started to say, "this feels a lot like Cloverfield." And eventually Abrams himself said, well, here: "The spirit of it, the genre of it, the heart of it, the fear factor, the comedy factor, the weirdness factor, there were so many elements that felt like the DNA of this story were of the same place that Cloverfield was born out of." So Abrams decided, fuck it, I'll stick "Cloverfield" in the title, even though this isn't a sequel or a prequel to that big disaster monster movie, and it'll make a hundred million dollars. And he was right! Anyway, filming ended in December of 2014. And in late 2015 the film still had no release date and no marketing campaign of any kind, leading everyone involved on the ground level to fear the worst. Then one day Mary Elizabeth Winstead got a call from her agent, who said something like, "good news - you're going to be the star of a movie in a major franchise." And Winstead's like, "cool, which one?" And her agent says "Cloverfield." And Winstead's like, "oh, they're making a sequel to Cloverfield?" And her agent's like, "they already did, and you were already in it." And the first trailer for the film - the first announcement of any kind - arrived in mid-January of 2016, and the film was out in theaters eight weeks later. Imagine that! In an era where studios use viral videos and YouTube trailers and Comic Con press conferences to build hype for movies literally years away, J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot were just kind of like, "hey, here's another way to build hype: don't." That said, the film's title sort of - sort of - spoils what I'm sure would have been an awesome twist reveal in the third act. Oh well; would I have even seen this if it hadn't been called 10 Cloverfield Lane? Probably not.

The Nice Guys

This was great. Just earlier this year I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for the first time and loved it. Shane Black's been on my radar ever since then - no, still haven't seen Iron Man 3 - and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got around to The Nice Guys from earlier this year. And again - just great. Ryan Gosling continues to be one of my favorite actors in the industry, showing off his underutilized comedy chops here as a sad sack alcoholic private investigator, and somehow Russell Crowe was even better. I'm still not quite sure how to make heads or tails of the plot - a fast-paced murder mystery of sorts revolving around the porn and automotive industries in 1970s Los Angeles - but first and foremost this was just a great buddy cop action comedy.

Good Lord, that was a lot of October movies. Time for a breather. Good night!