Stan's Movie Dump: Late March 2016

Hey, the month is over. It's time for another move dump!

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Bland and forgettable Woody Allen screwball comedy with an unlikely couple and a self-deprecating main man. No reason to seek this one out; I just caught it on HBO.

Advantageous

Lump this one in with all the low-budget indie sci-fi flicks that explore cool concepts but can't quite tell a compelling story at a reasonable pace. It's set in a near-future dystopia (of course) where body swap technology is in its early testing phases. There are interesting takes on aging and gender roles in here, but damn if I can remember more than three scenes with any specificity. A smart film, but one without any momentum.

Dope

Picture two high school kids. One's a straight-A student from the suburbs with geeky hobbies like video games and '90s hip hop. He's applying to college. The other's a drug dealer from a rough neck of the woods who's been shot at more than once. He's seen a friend or neighbor or several get killed by gang violence and he's barely holding it together. Ready? The protagonist of Dope turns out to be both of these high school kids. Imagine that! Someone called this "Hipster Friday" and Sweeney called it one of his favorite movies of 2015 (asterisk: small sample size). I'm just going to call it an interesting coming-of-age flick and move on.

The Kings of Summer

"A better pile of whimsy than other piles of whimsy but enough with the piles of whimsy." That's Scott Tobias on The Kings of Summer and it's a sentiment that probably perfectly captures the consensus reaction to this movie. It even came out in 2013, before plenty of "piles of whimsy" I'd throw in the same sorting bin. In this one a trio of high school seniors decide they're sick of living with their respective parents and set out to live in the woods for the summer. It's a little bit Stand By Me but not nearly as charming, since these kids are seventeen or so and not ten. It isn't precocious at all, which is nice. Nick Offerman plays one of the kids' dads, and he's just great. Allison Brie plays the same kid's sister, but she's - dare I say it - not very memorable here. All in all a fun little movie, but if you're done with all these "piles of whimsy" I can't suggest it in good faith.

The Inbetweeners Movie

Oof, a third straight movie about young adult men just making their way in the world today. I watched all three seasons of The Inbetweeners a couple years ago and posted about it on the blog. (British show - eighteen total episodes - worth a look.) The show ran from 2008 to 2010 and this movie, meant to be its finale I guess, came out in 2011. I liked it! I also liked the show. I wouldn't recommend watching the movie without first watching the show, but I'm sure it's pretty easy to do. As far as bro-comedy TV show movie finales go, this is everything that Entourage movie could have been in that it gave each of its four main characters a reasonably compelling arc to endure. It was like an extended episode of the TV series but it also forced these four twenty-ish characters to grow up in different ways. But mostly it was just crude and raunchy and funny, like the show. Again, check out the show. It's on Netflix!

Black Mass

Yeah, it's a gritty Boston crime drama about five years after people got sick of gritty Boston crime dramas. I'll give him credit - Johnny Depp was awesome here as Whitey Bulger. Menacing and frightening and basically just unrecognizable as "Johnny Depp, scarf-and-makeup-clad eccentric oddity." So, praise for Johnny Depp! Unfortunately the rest of the move was pretty forgettable, or at least an entirely by-the-numbers affair.

The Inbetweeners 2

Yep - the first movie was a hit, so a few years later they made a sequel. And it was fine! Funny, even, just like the show and just like the first movie. But this one had nothing to say. Which is fine! But not great. Here, the boys are all well into their college years (and the actors portraying them were all pushing thirty) and they decide to take a lengthy trip to Australia. Only instead of taking advantage of that unique shooting location, the movie seems content to use water parks, crazy ex-girlfriends, and shitty hippie kids to drive most of the plot and the jokes. The third act is also a bit of a head-scratcher; the boys drive out into the middle of the Australian Outback without food or water and when their car breaks down, it very much looks like they're all going to die. There's something poignant there - the boys facing their mortality together, going down as friends and brothers after all the shitting on one another they do - but the movie doesn't really earn the abrupt shift toward that poignancy. It just doesn't mix with the tone of the rest of the film (or the series) in which the stakes are rarely more than "well this will be quite embarrassing" - never as extreme as near-death experiences. Anyway, the cast and creators have all been emphatically clear that there won't be an Inbetweeners 3, which is probably just fine. This movie wasn't as good as the first one - although if you've seen all eighteen episodes and the first movie, it's not like you're going to skip this one.

Spy

This one exceeded my expectations by a good margin, which is always a pleasure. Melissa McCarthy reunites with Paul Feig, who always seems to get the best performances out of her, and Rose Byrne is here too, and she's just fantastic in everything she's ever been in. Jason Statham and Jude Law play minor characters with tremendous success - Statham especially - and the cherry on top is Allison Janney. I didn't like this secret agent spoof as much as I liked last year's Kingsman, but this one's got an undeniably broader appeal. I liked it, is all I'm trying to say, okay? Sheesh.

The Rock

Want an idea of how far movies have come since the 1990s, a decade some consider the greatest in film history? Take The Rock. This has a pitch-perfect Sean Connery, a quintessential '90s Nic Cage performance, an intense score from Hans Zimmer, and Michael Bay directing with a modicum of restraint. And despite all those elements - despite being a legitimate '90s action classic that people remember fondly to this day - The Rock doesn't hold up! It's simple and dated and over-the-top in all the wrong ways. It holds its audience's hand by having both good guys and bad guys explain what they're doing as they do it. The primary characters are broad and simplistic and there aren't many shades of grey. Ed Harris is probably the most morally complex guy in the movie and it's only because despite being the main villain he has reservations about killing hundreds of innocent people. I'm not trying to rag on The Rock - honestly, I'm not! It's good! But it's interesting to me to consider what a higher standard we hold movies to these days.

I'll see you all in April. Which starts in, you know, two and a half hours.

Stan's TV Dump: March 2016

Let's see what's been good on the old boob tube lately.

Fuller House: Season 1

Yeah, I bit. What can I say? I watched a lot of syndicated Full House as a kid - always loved Stephanie - and when every member of the cast not named Olsen collectively realized that they had nothing better going on and made this hunk of shit, who was I to refuse a helping? Fuller House is pretty bad. It's probably going to end up being the worst show I watch all year. But I still enjoyed watching it! A lot was cringe-worthy. The entire pilot is bad, bad, bad, and the first ten minutes alone are loaded with exactly the callbacks and catch phrases you know will pop up eventually, but not necessarily in the first ten minutes. The kids are pretty terrible, and the show was at its worst when it had to give them things to do - but that doesn't mean the Tanner sisters and Kimmy Gibbler made for compelling characters. At least Fuller House never pretended to take itself seriously; episodes never ended with little heart-felt hug sessions the way Full House tried to wrap up every half hour with a life lesson, and the show even offered up a handful of decent self-deprecating jokes. (And also some Olsen-deprecating jokes that were weirdly mean-spirited but come on now let's not pretend the Olsens can't endure some mean-spirited ribbing.) Somehow this show was renewed for a second season. Why? The entire draw of this first one was "holy shit, haven't seen the Tanners in a while!" This was supposed to be a one-off Full House reunion, not a full-fledged Full House sequel. And yet... I just might be back. This is perfect low-stakes who-cares background viewing.

The 100: Season 2

I've got nothing more to say about this show than I did last time around. Season 3 is currently airing, but I've got no desire to catch up via On Demand and DVR. Maybe one day. They can't all be winners, folks!

Downton Abbey: Season 6

The big problem with Downton Abbey was always its pacing issues. After zipping through the sinking of the Titanic, the outbreak of World War I, and the Spanish flu pandemic in its first two seasons (1912-1920), the period piece slowed down to a near halt in order to linger in the early '20s for far too long. (Imagine a show about America's rise as a superpower that begins in the Great Depression and makes it all the way through World War II in two seasons only to park its ass in the 1950s. Why?) At any rate, Downton Abbey rebounded and rallied hard in its sixth and final season, providing happy endings for virtually everyone important and also gently suggesting without outright implying that the aristocratic lifestyle we'd been watching for six years would soon phase away entirely. It took too long to get there, but Downton stuck the landing. Good job!

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 11

Speaking of shows that just seem to linger on and on, seriously, at what point do we want a curtain call for Always Sunny? When the show premiered in 2005, the cast were all between 28 and 30 years old. Now they're all 40. Danny DeVito is 71. Don't get me wrong - this is still funny, I still enjoy watching it, and I'm sure everyone involved still has fun making it - but rather than being impressed by its lasting power, year after year I find myself more and more apathetic to its existence. That's natural - when things have been around forever, it's easy to take them for granted - but play along with this thought exercise for me briefly. Two realities. In one of them, Always Sunny gets canceled after next season but then gets brought back in 2022 as It's Still Sunny in Philadelphia on Netflix or wherever. In the other reality, the show just stays on FXX churning out ten seasons a year until concluding with its eighteenth season in 2022. Which 2022 version of the show are you more excited for? Absence makes the heart grow fonder...

Man Seeking Woman: Season 2

Rarely does a show "go for it" as hard as Man Seeking Woman does. Every episode consists of one to three high-concept sketches as the show consistently blurs the line between reality and metaphors, bending genres all along the way. As a result, the whole series can be extremely inconsistent and hit-or-miss. One episode might have me laughing harder than I have at anything all week, but the next might completely miss its mark for me. Still, that high-risk high-reward tradeoff is commendable here in our oversaturated era of scripted television shows, and as such I give a lot of credit to Man Seeking Woman even if, on average, it's only an okay show. This second season was an improvement over the first, but that's nothing unique - a show's second season should be an improvement over its first!

Alpha House: Season 2

Speaking of second seasons - sure enough, I liked the second season of Alpha House more than its first. This show suffered in my mind the first time around from a misallocation of hype, when I took a coworker's "the funniest show there is" endorsement at face-value. I described the premise last time - four Republican senators live under one roof in DC and each one represents a different subsection of the GOP. John Goodman's at the moral center of the show and he's a moderate old-school Republican who wonders what's happened to the party he used to know. The other three senators are (left to right, above) a tone-deaf and incompetent religious idiot, a ruthless Bush-Cheney style politician with conniving tactics, and an "up and comer" in the vein of Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio before these last few months. Back when I talked about the first season, I as disappointed by the show's commitment to lampooning the Republican party. I think I used the phrase "low-hanging fruit." But given the way the last few years have actually unfolded - and in particular, this election cycle - I take that back. This show isn't so much mocking political ideologies as it is lampooning the current GOP identity crisis. There's no third season (yet) but honestly the way the current primaries are unfolding I don't think there even needs to be. How do you poke fun at at institution that's turned into full-blown self-parody? This is on Amazon Prime, by the way. Check it out.

Workaholics: Season 6

Take what I said above about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it seems to apply to Workaholics after only half as many years on the air. I guess it's just difficult to write meaningfully about ten-episode chunks of low-stakes cable comedy hijinks. Adam, Blake, and Anders are funny guys, but their hijinks seem to be growing more and more routine by the year. Plus there's that whole "time moves on" issue here; when the show began, the characters were barely out of college, and all of their jackassery was understandable, relatable, and laughable. Now they're all pushing thirty yet only getting less mature and more destructive. Yes, this happens on virtually every goofball comedy - "how hasn't this guy been dumped/fired/arrested yet?" - but it's a particularly noteworthy curiosity here. All the same, I'll be back for Season 7, so who am I to feign being above this type of humor?

Baskets: Season 1

Someone at some point described this show as a "slapstick drama" and I've never been able to come up with a more succinct description. Zach Galifianakis stars as a rodeo clown (there's your slapstick) with a green card wife, an overbearing mother, and no real success or path forward in life (there's the drama). One of the biggest trends I've seen on television lately is that the best and deepest tragic stories seem to be coming from ostensible "comedies" - Bojack Horseman, You're the Worst, Togetherness, Transparent, et al. - rather than dramas. And hey, that makes a certain kind of sense - you can mine a lot of pathos from humor. And what's more of a gut punch than sadness in the midst of absurdity? The show's a bit of a slow burn, and it's neither laugh-out-loud hilarious nor instantly emotionally compelling. Two characters were more or less the whole reason to watch this first season. The first was Martha, a sad-sack insurance agent who deals with everything life throws at her in the blandest and most monotone way possible. The season's funniest scene could have been the one where Martha gets bitten by a snake and reacts by sort of yelling and mildly cursing in a complete monotone manner. The other standout character? Mama Baskets, played by none other than Louie Anderson. Yes, Louie Anderson dons a wig and a dress and just straight-plays "Middle American older woman." Mama Baskets is depressingly chipper about the smallest things in the world - her bucket list includes "going down to Pixar to see how they make a Pixar movie" - and she absolutely loves Costco. She's one of the best television characters I've seen in years.

Sherlock: Season 3

I never did come to appreciate Sherlock as much as it seems like everyone else did, but I like it enough to finally check it out live whenever Season 4 rolls around. Apparently there's a Christmas special I still need to see, but who knows when that will happen?

And that's it for March. Hooray!

Sweeney's TV Dump- March 2016

Mr. Robot Season 1

This was cited in most places I looked as the best show I wasn't watching on 2015, so finally halfway between its debut and sophomore seasons I decided to catch up with Mr. Robot. It's pretty good! I don't think it's the best thing on tv, and I won't push it on anyone, but I did for the most part find it smart and entertaining. It's the story of a young and cynical hacker, Elliot, played brilliantly by Rami Malek, drawn into an Anonymous-style activist group known as fsociety, led by Christian Slater's mysterious "Mr. Robot". The group plans on bringing an end to world debt by hacking the global bank that just happens to be a client of Elliot's cyber-security day job, so he provides a unique opportunity to fsociety to complete the task. It's a little by-the-numbers for the first half of the season, hitting all of the expected counter-culture beats you'd expect- Elliot does a lot of drugs! He casually sleeps around! He hallucinates! But dammit he's an amazing hacker! The back half of the season really cranks things up though with some really well done twists. I'm not really sure where season two will go, but I'm excited to be along for the ride.

Downton Abbey Season 6

What a comeback! Downton Abbey was a show that was really good for two seasons, then turned to crap for a few more, but finally wrapped itself up in a very satisfying way. This was the type of show where you knew everyone would eventually get a happy ending, and they basically did- new couples and job opportunities seemed to pop up out of nowhere in season six. Hell, even a suicide attempt late in the season somehow results in yet another happy ending. It may be a little too saccharine to be realistic, but I was smiling the whole way through Downton's sixth season and just loved the series finale, which is far more than I can say about the previous two seasons. Well done, Julian Fellowes.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 11

Same old Always Sunny. This show continues to make me laugh with every episode, although its hard for many episodes to stand out this late in the series considering how well-worn all of this territory is. For that reason, I think the most memorable from this season for me would be ones that really switch up either the setting or the format of the show. This divides pretty neatly for me, as the season seemed like half experimental, more memorable episodes (Being Frank, Mac & Dennis Move to the Suburbs, The Gang Hits the Slopes, and the two-parter on a cruise ship, The Gang Goes to Hell), while the other five episodes I already can barely recall basic plot points.

Man Seeking Woman Season 2

After the uneven debut of Man Seeking Woman, I wasn't sure if I'd stick around for season two, but I'm glad I did, because the show seemed to improve a lot. It's a show that commits itself to bizarre ideas and storylines, centering around a sad-sack protagonist Josh just trying to make sense out of the world of dating. To give you an idea as to what this show is all about, here's the three-act plot that takes place in this past season's premier- Act 1, Josh has a new girlfriend who he's spending all of his time with, and his good friend Mike suddenly starts acting like a unionized employee, demanding better benefits and treatment from Josh. Act 2 sees Josh taking a weekend trip with his girlfriend to meet her friends at a house in the woods, and he feels left out when a chainsaw-wielding serial killer starts tearing all of the friends apart except for him. Finally in Act 3, Josh breaks up with his girlfriend and returns to Mike, who insists they need to pay more attention to their child- a kid who has never been, and will never be mentioned again on the show outside of the last five minutes of this episode. It's a show that loves breaking rules of logic just because it can, and in its second season it was a lot funnier doing it. Season 3 seems unlikely at this point, but I'd be back if it happens.

Team Ninja Warrior Season 1

Yeah, I'm not just covering the scripted television I watch on the Blog anymore. Here's the first ever season-long spin-off of American Ninja Warrior, a summer guilty pleasure show that gets me pumped up and makes me think I could compete against a bunch of trained athletes in an obstacle course. This spin-off is Team Ninja Warrior, where a few dozen teams of two men and one woman compete against each other tournament-style in a series of obstacle course races. While the team course has a much lower level of difficulty than the individual courses as they actually want people to finish, it could be more exciting at times watching the come-from-behind victories that happen in man vs. man that you just don't get from man vs course. Still though, I think I prefer the original- the tremendous difficulty of the course, and the near-constant failure of contestants to complete even the easiest challenge stroke my ego even more- "I could totally do that. These guys all suck."

Dual Survival Season 7

Like I said, sometimes there's some un-scripted reality show trash that Katie and I keep on the DVR because you need some background noise television that's not asking for any real investment of your interest. Dual Survival is one of those shows. The premise is that two survival experts with differing styles are dropped into the wilderness with a few pieces of equipment that a hiker might have; they then have to survive a couple nights and find their way to civilization. The survival parts are rarely all that interesting- how many times can a guy struggle to make fire in the rain and stay compelling? What Dual Survival has going for it is its two hosts instead of one, unlike Survivorman and Man vs Wild. And let me tell you, there is a shitload of behind-the-scenes drama on this show because of this. For the first two seasons, the hosts were Dave, and army vet, and the hippy-dippy shoeless Cody. They didn't get along great, and after the second season it was discovered that Dave had been falsifying his military records, so he got replaced with the even more stern marine sniper Joe. Then in the middle of season four, Cody and Joe had a huge blow-up argument on camera in the middle of an episode, and hippie Cody walked off the set, never to return, still not wearing any shoes. I mean, this episode took place in a tundra, but he still was wearing shorts and no shoes! He got replaced with Matt, seemingly the most normal guy who's ever been on the show, despite the fact that he looks like he hasn't been inside a building of any kind for the last ten years. Joe and Matt got along great, finishing off the fourth season and cruising through the fifth. Then in the middle of season six, Joe went psycho and allegedly killed a dog on set, which prompted the series' cancellation. And yet Discovery brought it back again for a seventh season! Unbelievable! They brought in two completely new hosts for the first time ever, and while Bill the redneck fit the stereotype well, Grady the generic army man made no impression on me. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, this was probably the worst season of the show and I won't care if it's cancelled (I didn't the first time either), but if it does come back for season eight, I'll be watching. What else am I going to do, update my DVR?!!

 

 

Peep Show Series 2

I said I'd keep rolling with this show, and I did, since it only took like 2.5 hours to get through another season. It's funny and worth a watch if you can get over the heavy British accents and slightly dated references, and of course the first-person view that turns some off- to me it never gets in the way, but I understand how it could. Anyway this season again focused on both of the roommates looking for love- the neurotic Mark still desperately trying to win the heart of his coworker Sophie, while the cooler Jeremy ends up married to a beautiful American girl. Still they both fuck it up completely, which is always fun to watch. I'll give a similarly short post for season 3 next month, I'm sure.

 

 

Idiotsitter Season 1

I'm a fan of Jillian Bell's character in Workaholics- as a naïve, caring and friendly person she shouldn't fit in with the main characters' antics, but episodes where she plays a large role tend to be better in my opinion. So when she moved to her own show, I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately, it's just not any good. The premise of Idiotsitter is that Bell plays the horrible and stupid daughter of a seemingly just as stupid but extremely rich man, who has hired a desperate college grad (Charlotte Newhouse) to get his daughter to pass her G.E.D. That makes it sound like it could be something in the vain of an updated Billy Madison, yet Idiotsitter has no intentions of seeing its characters improve and triumph in the end, as very little is taught over the course of the year and the two ladies mostly just bicker. Bell's pleasant, likeable character from Workaholics is replaced with a complete dumbass who I would want to watch fail, if the show was more entertaining. It wasn't, so I'm done here even if this comes back for a season two.

 

 

Workaholics Season 6

Speaking of disappointment and Workaholics, Workaholics really needs to end soon. Or at least take a nice long break. I'm committed to this show after so many years of watching, but what felt new and exciting in its first couple seasons is stale and boring here in its sixth. No new ground was broken, no new character traits were explored- unlike Sunny, a show that's pushing deeper and getting more experimental to keep things fresh (although its not always successful), Workaholics is content to deliver the same old shit. In nearly every episode I thought "ok seems like we're about done" and then there turned out to be another five minutes left. And I mean, Jillian was barely a part of this season due to her commitment to Idiotsitter. I shouldn't be expecting much from a dumb slapstick stoner comedy, but I would love for Comedy Central to give it an end date already to fulfill both my desire for completion, as well as my desire to not have to watch much of this show anymore.

 

 

The Venture Bros. Season 6

Here's a show that's made it almost impossible to wear out its welcome, considering it just wrapped up a mere eight episode sixth season in its thirteenth year of existence. It's ridiculous how slowly The Venture Bros rolls out new episodes- the last season to air was three years ago! At the very least, there's a number of hour-long specials that have bridged the gap between seasons, and I believe at least one more is coming, because if there's one way to describe this sixth season of The Venture Bros, it's "unfinished." It's one of the more serialized seasons of the show, in which each episode naturally builds off of the last in a way the show hasn't quite stuck to before, and as always it's hilarious, but it builds up to a finale that doesn't wrap up even a single storyline. The Venture Bros worked well in its new setting, as Rusty and the gang move into his recently-deceased little brother's penthouse suite and lab, but the highlight of this season is the disgraced Monarch adopting a new alter-ego- the "Blue Morpho", a blatant Green Hornet rip-off, who needs to kill his way back to being Rusty Venture's arch-enemy. But as I said, there's no real pay-off here, so it's tough to give this season any sort of final judgment until the next special comes around- maybe early 2018?

Portlandia Season 6

I've caught a few episodes of Portlandia now and then and enjoyed it- the simultaneous vicious skewering and loving tribute to all things hipster in the Pacific Northwest made for a fun if inconsequential sketch comedy watch. It was also nice to see Fred Armisen be funny after years of shitting up Saturday Night Live. But watching a full season of Portlandia turned out to be a grind, as I enjoyed the early episodes but saw my interest decline heavily towards the end of the season. I guess I won't be back!

Black Mirror Series 1

Everything I've heard about Black Mirror made me really want to check it out- a bit of a British version of The Twilight Zone with rave reviews and hour-long episodes that can take their time to fully explore their bizarre concepts- and I did indeed love it. The season consists of three episodes, starting with a political drama, then a pair of speculative future episodes in which society lives underground, or technology is developed that allows us to retain and broadcast video of every memory in our lives. All three are episodes that will stick with you long after you've watched them, and Stan assures me that the best episode comes in season two, so I will definitely finish catching up with this series in April.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

A week or two ago, I finished off Super Mario 3D World and generally enjoyed it as both a platforming game and an improvement to the Super Mario franchise over all the recent New Super Mario Bros. titles. Apparently, my overall approval was not shared by the Back-Blogged community at large, as Trevor had some strong takes about how bland, easy, and boring the game was. There's no accounting for taste, but Trev - if innovation is what you're looking for, then give this one a spin!

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a full-game extension of the four or five Captain Toad levels in Super Mario 3D World and it's absolutely great. The game is divided into three "episodes," each about twenty levels long; each level includes three gems for Captain Toad to find and a star that represents the end of the level. While you can "beat" any level simply by reaching the star, it's imperative to collect enough gems, too. Every three to five levels, you'll need to have a certain number of gems in order to advance. It's an easy threshold to pass if you've acquired even two out of the three gems in each level, but it still forces you to play the game as more than just a dash from the beginning to the end of each level. (Which you should be, anyway.)

What makes the game work so well are the fully three-dimensional worlds. Levels are traversed by navigating Captain Toad along all three axes of movement - not just your four-directional D-pad trajectories, but upward and downward as well. The rub is that Captain Toad can't jump. He also can't run. He's slower than most of his enemies. All he can do in order to defeat enemies is pull turnips out of the ground from fixed locations and throw them. The whole experience is more of a puzzle game than a true platformer. Time is rarely even an issue; there are no time limits, save for one or two levels where lava slowly rises from below. Playing through Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker has nothing to do with typical platforming skills like perfecting difficult jumps or maneuvering behind or around enemies precisely - it's a game of flipping switches, climbing ladders, and scouring very limited areas for gems. It's always immediately apparent where you need to go - you can often see entire levels at on the screen at once; it's just not always clear how to get there.

I liked Captain Toad not only because it was a different type of Mario game than I'm used to seeing, but moreover because it was just a lot of fun to play. It took me around seven or eight hours to finish - about as long as Super Mario 3D World took - but it was a tighter and more polished experience (and also one that cost about $10 less, if memory serves). Wii U owners with a knack for puzzle games would be wise to strongly consider this one.

The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah

Sween, Marissa, Trev, and the Internet at large all agreed - Song of Susannah wasn't very good. It's the sixth book of seven in The Dark Tower series and yet rather than a penultimate table-setter it reads like an afterthought wedged in between the fifth and seventh installments. It's "short," too, for a King book - just over 500 pages in length, only about half as long as the previous or following stories. And the ka-tet spends the bulk of the novel split up into three different groups each working toward its own goal.

But what I really want to spend this post focusing on is Roland and Eddie's arc, in which Stephen King himself becomes an important character. It's the most perfectly Stephen King development I've encountered in any Stephen King book I've read yet. Fans hated it for the most part, and I understand why, but honestly? I absolutely loved it. By writing himself into his own magnum opus, Stephen King destroyed any pretense that his story took place in an isolated world with consistent rules and conventions. Almost every issue I've had with the Dark Tower so far - and there have been plenty - has at its core been based on mistrust. Specifically, I've never been able to trust that King knows what he's doing, and throughout the series I've been unable to lose myself in this world and relate to its characters because, really, so much of it has just seemed made up on the fly with little regard for setting or following precedents.

(Here's my favorite example. Way back in the first book, a major character died and went to Roland's world, and then died in Roland's world and seemed lost forever. But then in the third book he was "brought back" into Roland's world from his own, implying that death just sends characters back and forth between realities - a convention that doesn't stick around at all. When the stakes are unclear regarding our shared ultimate fate - death - and when the means by which Roland and his friends can travel between worlds are never made clear or consistent, the whole illusion of a created "reality" suffers.)

Anyway, here's what happens in Song of Susannah, in a nutshell.

• Somewhere in "our" world, Eddie and Roland find a novel by "Stephen King" - Salem's Lot.
• They realize that the story inside describes the previous adventures of their friend Father Callahan, and discern that Stephen King made them happen by writing them.
• Eddie and Roland decide that they need to convince Stephen King to "write" a story in which they make it to the Dark Tower.
• They look for Stephen King in Maine in the 1970s, and once they find him, they convince him to write such a saga.
• Stephen King warns them that he doesn't really know how the story will unfold or where it may get sidetracked.
• Roland and Eddie return to Roland's world and their push for the Dark Tower; Stephen King spends the next twenty years writing The Dark Tower and dies in 1999 after getting hit by a car.

There's so much to unpack here, and so much to love.

First, this is pure and unadulterated metafiction. Author King had long warned readers that he really didn't know where the story would go - only that he knew he wanted to start it back in the '70s with The Gunslinger. But now he's forcing that very fact right into the story itself, making it canonical. King is literally making his own reservations about writing The Dark Tower part of The Dark Tower itself. King realizes his story has had its share of issues and he realizes it's been inconsistent. So what does he do? He retcons it into that story that it's been nothing more than, you know, a story. Any inconsistencies in the world of The Dark Tower are there because the world of The Dark Tower was fabricated by a flawed author - young Stephen King himself.

This is awesome. It's almost a shameless cop-out, but somehow it's brilliant. I can see why those who were heavily invested in The Dark Tower hated this development; if George R.R. Martin showed up in The Winds of Winter as some sort of god-force, I'd roll my eyes until they fell out of my head. But here? I've always been skeptical of this world and this story, and to see an author come right out and say, in the penultimate book of a thirty-year-old series, "fuck it, I'm going to acknowledge that I wrote this story by writing myself writing the story into the story" - I absolutely loved that. All my previous complaints about characters dying and moving between realities don't really matter once those same characters are revealed to be, in-universe, mere characters in a story written by a young horror author.

Furthermore, consider the implications going the other way. By letting Roland and Eddie into "his" (our) actual reality, King is suggesting that something literally from "out of this world" compelled him to begin writing The Dark Tower in the 1970s. And then you can go one step further (and ten layers deeper) and ask if King's inclusion of his own plane of existence in a fictional story somehow implies that our very reality is fictional in nature - or at least no more real than the one that includes Mid-World.

And then author King goes one step too far and reveals his "own" reality to be a fictional one by claiming that character King was killed by a car in 1999. Wait, what? Then who the hell wrote the last three books, finished and published in the early 2000s? Probably best not to go down this particular rabbit hole.

As usual, I'll close this one out with some stray observations - mostly nitpicks.

• It's implied that antagonistic "forces" are out to stop character King from writing and finishing his Dark Tower novels, and that the car accident that did really severely injure author King in 1999 was, in Dark Tower kayfabe, an assassination attempt on character King. But again, character King dies - so what's going to happen in The Dark Tower VII that allows our ka-tet to prevail?
• The ka-tet will obviously prevail because the stakes here are the very nature and structure of the universe. By leaning on "big battle between good and evil" like so many epic fantasy authors before him, Stephen King has all but telegraphed the final outcome of his last chapter.  After all, how can evil prevail here when King has outright connected the end of Roland's world with the end of our own? The fact that our own world is still here is kind of a "spoiler" in that sense, no? Anyway, with no suspense hanging on whether or not our heroes can stop the Crimson King from destroying the Dark Tower, my enjoyment of the upcoming thousand-page conclusion will hinge largely on character beats. I expect at least one of these characters to die - but will his or her send-off be sad and memorable?
• The Crimson King - the antagonist of this decades-in-the-making story - is referred to in our world as "Satan." Another beautiful "hey, fuck it" from Stephen King. He's had ample opportunity for defining, characterizing, and motivating this villain, and instead in the second-to-last book we just lear that the Crimson King is Satan. This is some Lost-Season-6-third-to-last-episode-Jacob-water-wheel-time-good-and-evil level panicking, folks.
• Prior to seeking out Stephen King, Roland and Eddie were in New York in order to process some paperwork and check in on the deeds for a certain lot in the city. Not compelling!
• The book's named after her, but Susannah doesn't really carry what I would call the A-story in this one; she's pregnant with (and possessed by) a demon baby and once again she's struggling with split personalities. The father might be Eddie, Roland, the Crimson King, or some odd combination of the three. Susannah's alter-ego this time around is Mia, and honestly I couldn't tell the difference between Mia and Detta. Mostly, Susannah's perspective just seems laden with ebonics and n-words. It's tough to take seriously in 2016, but at least when that stuff came from the early '80s I could dismiss it as "from another time." But Song of Susannah was published in 2004, so here it's a lot tougher to excuse.
• Speaking of racial insensitivity, here's a verbatim throwaway line from when Susannah meets two Asian tourists in New York who'd like her to take their picture. "You take pickcha, preese? Take pickcha me and my fliend?" Come on! Accents can be tough to handle on the page, and they're even harder to treat respectfully, but Stephen King just made an Asian guy say "preese" and "fliend." That Japanese speakers struggle with differentiating the English L and R is a known (and often mocked) phenomenon. But either their L's sound like R's or their R's sound like L's - they don't substitute the two sounds for each other! Bad, Stephen King. This is learry razy wliting! (See?)
• Jake, Oy, and Father Callahan also endured their own little arc, but it felt like the least essential one to me. They mostly just looked for Susannah in New York and ended up locking an important bauble in a locker in the basement in the World Trade Center in 1999. (Again, this book was published in 2004. Connect your own dots.)
• It's obvious and clear at this point that I won't be regarding The Dark Tower with nearly as much acclaim as Sweeney and Marissa when all is said and done, but I'm still glad I've worked my way through most of it. It's Stephen King's "biggest" accomplishment, and Stephen King is the most famous and imitated author in the English-speaking world by a country mile. At this point, I'm not too worried about whether or not he sticks the landing; this has been a sprawling, messy, and ugly performance from the get-go - interesting and unique as it's been. No, at this point what I'm worried about is just tackling the 1050-page conclusion. Stephen King rambles really well and ends things really poorly. It's just what he does! I'm guessing I'll hold off on this one at least until the summer... but man, I don't want it hanging over my head for much longer.

Stan's Movie Dump: Early March 2016

And away we go!

Carol

Oops - I actually saw this in February, just before the Oscars, and I plum forgot about it during my last movie dump write-up! (Speaks volumes, right?) Man, critics fucking adored Carol. I can see why, because Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are just perfect here, but at the same time, some people really went bananas over Carol. Like, to extents I can't understand. (For my money, if you see just one beautifully shot 2015 movie about the love between two women, make it The Duke of Burgundy.) This was pretty good, but let's not shit ourselves.

Kung Fu Panda

I think everyone who made a purchase - any purchase at all - on Amazon last holiday season was given a free download code for Kung Fu Panda. Clever! I'd never go out of my way to see this on a streaming platform, but give me my very own free digital copy, and it'd be a waste for me not to at least check it out. Right? So yeah, that's why I spent an hour and change watching Kung Fu Panda. It was pretty much what I expected it to be - silly, not terrible, and overwhelmingly meant for children.

Sleeping with Other People

Without question the best romantic comedy I've seen in ages. Sure, that last statement comes with two hefty asterisks known as "low bar" and "sample size," but I seriously loved this for, oh, a dozen reasons. The leads have an undeniable chemistry. I genuinely wanted them to end up together. It's full of legitimately funny scenes. It made me tolerate, and even root for, Jason Sudeikis. It stars Alison Brie, who is pitch-perfect in everything. It's not a spoof, but an earnest and played-straight rom-com. It's not an alternative "shitty people" rom-com either, like a You're the Worst or anything else where immaturity and irresponsibility among thirty-year-olds can be dismissed as charming character quirks. It doesn't suffer from Apatowisms like "sex mishaps" or "obnoxious man child" or an over-long running time. It's legitimately funny yet tonally very realistic. There were a number of supporting actors whose work I often tend to enjoy. It's written and directed by a woman - which doesn't make it a better movie necessarily, but the appalling lack of female directors has become a focal point for industry critics lately, and here's a perfect movie to watch if you want to start watching more movies directed by women. The movie was somehow largely about sex and sexual attraction without having any nudity or gratuitously raunchy sex scenes. Okay, not quite a dozen reasons, but I could go on and on. This was a great movie. Watch this movie!

Entourage

This was every bit as awful as I expected it to be. Entourage was a fun little lifestyle porn - perhaps even a sometimes-clever parody of Hollywood - way back when it began, but it quickly became one of the least essential shows on television. Here are four bumblefucks from Queens who just keep falling ass backwards into success, fame, and happiness. All of them are womanizers and serial philanderers and were it not for their steadfast loyalty to one another none of them would have a single redeeming quality. The show's best character is an enormous asshole who's funny but only in completely offensive ways. (Seriously, Jeremy Piven was great, but did Ari Gold ever crack a joke in eight seasons of Entourage that wasn't bigoted, personal in nature, or just plain vulgar?) At any rate, I've already covered on this blog just how undeserved the across-the-board happy endings for every character in Entourage were. What's craziest about this movie is how blatantly and carelessly it disregards every single one of those happy endings - except for Turtle's, I guess, which was already the least-deserved fantasy ending of them all. I mean, putting all cynicism aside for a moment, let me ask - why does this movie exist? In theory, like any TV series movie finale, it's for fans to catch up with the gang again and go on one last adventure together. But this Entourage movie seems more concerned with shoehorning as many celebrities and athletes into its hour-forty than it does with giving its actual characters anything to do. The entirety of Vince's arc is as follows: Vince is starring in and directing a movie; the movie is over budget; Vince needs more money; everyone else figures out how to get Vince that money while Vince throws parties and casually dates Emily Ratajkowski; Vince's movie turns out to be a huge success. That's it! No growth for Vince, no challenges or obstacles to speak of. He isn't even shown working hard on his movie or caring deeply about it. He's just kind of ambivalently making it and, hey, look at that, it's a massive success both commercially and critically. Okay, but what about Eric? If there was ever a characte rin Entourage that kinda-sorta functioned as a moral compass, it was E. Here's E's arc in the Entourage movie: E is fucking supermodels on the reg; Sloan is pregnant with E's baby; the baby is due soon, and Sloan is willing to give E yet another chance at making a relationship work; E stops fucking supermodels on the reg, but not before a brief herpes/pregnancy scare; E and Sloan have their baby and presumably make things work. Again, I'm not skipping anything - this is everything that E endures in this movie. The closest thing to dramatic tension that he experiences comes when two of his bed-buddies pretend that they gave him herpes - perhaps just to fuck with him? Who can really know? My favorite arc might be Turtle's, though: Turtle wants to date Ronda Rousey; Ronda Rousey agrees to go on a date with Turtle if he can last thirty seconds in the ring with her; Turtle lasts thirty seconds and earns the date, allowing Ronda to break his arm in the process. The end! What the fuck!? Keep in mind, by the way, that the real Ronda Rousey said, right around when this movie was released last year, that she'd never fight a man in the ring because "I don't think it's a great idea to have a man hitting a woman on television." Did she not realize we could eventually watch the Entourage movie on television? But then, this entire movie takes place in a weird alternate reality best covered by this piece from Vulture. (Holy hell, look at how much I've rambled about Entourage - it's just like old times!) Anyway, until I saw Entourage, Fifty Shades of Grey was the worst 2015 movie I'd seen. It might still be - I dunno. Both films are lifestyle porn pieces based on shitty source material and loaded with bad acting. Entourage seems more aware and unashamed of what it is, but I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. This was a genuinely and objectively bad movie, but it was also exactly the epilogue Entourage and its fans deserved.

Coraline

Found this one on HBO and figured, why not? Webber named his kid after this movie (or was it the book?) so it must be worth checking out. And it was! This is a well-made unsettling kids' movie. Its biggest accomplishment was probably its creepy and dreamlike atmosphere. The whole thing felt like a cross between Psychonauts and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Would you believe that Tim Burton had nothing to do with this movie whatsoever? I couldn't! But yeah, this was interesting and watchable and better than I expected it to be. Although, fair warning to Webber - even in this movie everyone seems to call Coraline "Caroline." So get ready for that. (You probably already knew that.)

The Theory of Everything (2014)

Finally got around to watching this one, and now I've seen every Best Picture nominee from the last two years. (Hard task, I know.) This was more or less what I expected it to be - a standard and largely vanilla biopic about Stephen Hawking and his long-time wife. Eddie Redmayne was a convincing enough Hawking, but his acting Oscar for this role seems like a classic case of "let's just give it to the guy who pretended to have a disability." No one needs to see this, but doing so isn't a chore or an unpleasant or boring experience, so do what you will.

Starlet

Sometimes a unique premise executed the right way is all you need for an interesting movie. In this indie film from the guy who made Tangerine (Sean S. Baker), a young woman without much stability in her life - okay, minor spoiler, she's a porn star - befriends a guarded old lady. What struck me was how realistic their relationship felt, from its origins all the way through the end of the movie (no, not a death). And here's a heartwarming fun fact - Besedka Johnson, who played the old lady, was 87 years old when this movie came out and had never acted in anything before. She was "discovered" at a YMCA and immediately put in this movie and she was just fantastic. I would have assumed she was a 60-year acting veteran, but no - this was her very first professional performance of any kind. Sadly, it was also her last, as she died a year later. Bittersweet! Maybe one day they'll make a movie based on her story. Eddie Redmayne can play her and win another Oscar.

Zootopia

My sister works three or four shifts a week, which means she has a lot of weekdays off and (often) very little to do. So during my spring break (woo!) we made plans to go the movies. Her pick was Zootopia, the latest animated feature film from Disney (not Pixar) and it ended up being pretty good! Some of the criticism aimed at this movie has focused on the subtle-as-a-brick metaphors for racism and discrimination. Foxes are crooks, rabbits are "dumb bunny farmers," and predators are pre-disposed - because of their biology - to be violent and angry and dangerous. Familiar, no? But in defense of Zootopia, I mean, it's a kids' movie. For children. Do you want racial prejudice metaphors to be subtle here, or is it more fitting for a child to be able to understand the moral of this story? Anyway, I liked Zootopia because it was funnier and more clever than it had to be. Where lots of kids' movies are content to just revisit the bug-eyed slapstick comedy of Looney Tunes, Zootopia was more concerned with visual gags and callbacks. The story was also tight and well-paced with only a few obvious signs of a three-act structure being forced onto arcs and relationships that didn't really need one. I dunno - I liked this.

Mommy

A foreign language film, all the way from Canada. (French Canada!) Critics absolutely loved this, and I can see why. It's the story of a troubled teenager and his barely-holding-it-together single mother. Mom doesn't want to give up on her Steve, because doing so would mean sending him back to some sort of juvenile foster-prison hybrid. But Steve is an on-and-off nightmare - a kid prone to violent outbursts and destructive tendencies. I thought the central conceit and the performances here were great, but I wish this had held more of my interest as it started to drag through its second hour. Most interestingly, the whole movie is shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio, a perfect square that makes every frame look like a record cover or an Instagram photo. It's strikingly narrow, which is probably meant to show how trapped Steve's mother is, or how tightly confined and restrictive it can be to deal with a shitty but lovable problem child. This was an interesting movie and I applaud its experimental cinematography gimmick, but I'd be lying if I said I loved the movie.

Macbeth

This showed up on a few "best of 2015" lists and Michael Fassbender in particular earned praise for his depiction of Macbeth, but overall it didn't do a ton for me. Maybe I shouldn't have expected much. This is a Shakespearean classic, after all, and there are only so many new spins a director can put on it. Here, it was played straight and dramatic and with all the gravitas it could muster. It was beautiful, and I'm not sure there's a better possible straight-laced movie adaptation of the source material, but it was still the same slow-moving story I read in high school.

Straight Outta Compton

I stand with Trev. Not usually a biopic fan but this was great. Rags to riches, rise and fall, history lesson, #diversity, excellent soundtrack (obviously) - there were just a lot of positive boxes to check here. One thing Marissa pointed out was that Dr. Dre seemed to get a pretty rosy edit whenever the film depicted any inner friction going on in N.W.A. Ice Cube also came out of it looking good. The same can't be said of a few other famous personalities - notably a certain dead one and a certain incarcerated one - but I suppose that makes sense!

Mistress America

Critics seem to adore Greta Gerwig, especially in her collaborations with Noah Baumbach, but Frances Ha disappointed me when I saw it last year. I'm glad I gave the Gerwig-Baumbach partnership another shot, though, because Mistress America ended up being one of the funniest movies I've seen all year. Gerwig stars as a spirited and adventurous almost-thirty New York woman full of big ideas and grand plans. She takes her soon-to-be-stepsister, a college freshman, under her wing and the two become fast friends. The movie mostly takes place from the point of view of the eighteen-year-old. This is a nice touch - in her eyes, at least initially, the woman in her late twenties making plans and living life in New York is a perfect role model. Of course, it's immediately apparent  to the audience - or maybe it's just that I'm much closer to thirty than eighteen - that Greta Gerwig's character doesn't have her shit together whatsoever. You know - to hilarious extents. This was farcical and screwbally and full of razor sharp wit and I just dug it a whole lot, alright?

My movie pace will slow down. I promise! The dumps will become fewer and farther between. Twenty-plus movies a month is just completely unsustainable. You hear me? Completely!

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor vs. Undertale

I thought I would shake things up a bit and review these two games at once. (And, yes, I'm back to playing games after being sorely hurt by Rise of the Tomb Raider's shitty bugs and even shittier customer service. I mean, the balls those guys have to tell ME to restart my game after over 20 hours of invested time just because they were too lazy to finish it in the first place!!! I mean, HOW DOES A MAJOR DEVELOPER LIKE SQUARE ENIX FUCK UP THIS BADLY... Ok, Ok... Trevor, calm down. This isn't you. You're better than this... I'm not going to cry... I'm not gonna... OH, JUST START THE POST ALREADY!)

Middle earth: Shadow of Mordor and Undertale. Two very different games, two very different experiences. One coming from a major game developer costing millions to make. The other, some dude hanging in his basement who may or may not have a major fan-love to the Earthbound series (or Mother for all those purists out there!). 

First, let me recount my journey with Shadow of Mordor. Not a terrible one, but definitely not a great one. After playing the game, I have to imagine that the pitch meeting for its development went something like this:

LEAD DEVELOPER: So I was thinking a bit about those Tolkien books the kids seem to like, right? Then I thought, "How do we make a game about that?" Wait, Jerry what are you playing there?

JERRY THE INTERN: Oh, this? This is Assassin's Creed.

LEAD DEVELOPER: Assassin's Creed, eh? Is it popular?

JERRY THE INTERN: Well, yeah... I mean, it's a huge franchise with a giant following. It even has a film coming out this year with the "Young-Magneto" guy staring in it. 

LEAD DEVELOPER: You don't say... Alright, tell you what, let's take that game, only we'll put it in the world of those damn Tolkien books the kids love so much.

JERRY THE INTERN: You mean Middle-earth?

LEAD DEVELOPER: Middle what?

JERRY THE INTERN: Middle-earth is where Lord of the Rings takes place.

LEAD DEVELOPER: I'm not talking about the movies, I'm talking about the books!

JERRY THE INTERN: Actually the movies were based off the book--

LEAD DEVELOPER: See you kids nowadays are always glued to your damn smart phones and never read anymore. We're making this game true to the source material and we'll give it that Assassin's Creed flair. Hell, with any luck we'll get a movie deal too. 

JERRY THE INTERN: Sigh...

LEAD DEVELOPER: Jerry, what the hell are you still doing here?! Get the team some coffee already. We're going to crank this gem out before any original ideas throw us off track.

JERRY THE INTERN: **I wish I was dead**

LEAD DEVELOPER: Dead... Hmmm... Maybe our protagonist could be a ghost for no reason at all. Jerry... what do you think about that?!

JERRY THE INTERN: (Missing -- an empty chair swivels)

Aaaaand scene.

OK, so maybe that's not how the game got green lit, but it harkens to my point that there's not much original in this game, especially for the first installment on what's eyeing to be a new franchise. 

The fighting mechanics are nearly spot on to the like of Assassin's Creed (maybe throw in a dash of Arkham Asylum). So, there's flashes of entertainment, but nothing truly refreshing. Then we have the worlds that are fairly uninspiring to say the least. You travel through Mordor and through Gondor. While that might sound badass, it's really bland. It's essentially the same monotonous map only one's lit with daylight and the other shrouded in darkness. Aside from satisfying some sense of an environment while walking from point A to point B, it does nothing to transport you to a different state of mind, nor does it encourage you to explore in hopes of discovering new items or places you never new existed. 

All that aside, the only thing that's somewhat worth praising is their AI enemy system. You see, this game remembers not only how you die, but who kills you. An your enemy (in this case, the Uruks) are all competing to be the top-dog in their own army. So a death for you means the person responsible for your kill will level up, and that could pose a significant challenge... if you happen to fail at understanding the game mechanics and just suck balls at fighting. 

My final dig against this game is that it's fairly easy to level up, and once you get on a roll, no one will stop you. Now, this is a top-seller game. Won tons of awards. So, yes, it's clear people love it. And I believe they love it mostly for its fighting mechanics. However, while the mechanics are fluid and can be initially fun, ultimately they feel immensely over-powered as you level up to the point that there's no fucking challenge. Maybe some people found sheer enjoyment from leveling the shit out of their player and just having a blast wreaking havoc on their enemies. In reality, it's pretty much an exercise in futility because your final boss fight is not much more than a series of quick-time cut scenes that don't really make use of all the grinding and leveling up I had dedicated so much of the game to. All-in-all, what people praise it for, I denounce it for.   

So there you have Shadows of Mordor. An unoriginal concept with a so-so execution that left for some mild enjoyment. I guess you could get into it more if you're a big Tolkien fan-- 

like Zoë and her Uruk-hai Scimitar 

--and read every little detail in the game while playing (much like Zoë was doing). But I'm a fair-weather LOTR fan. Sure, it's fun and all, but I'm not going to geek out learning Celebrimbor's backstory on how he fell to Sauron and made the rings. 

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, watch this.

Point is, this was a "huge" game. Big intellectually property, put out by a big developer, and released by a big publisher. Money was spent and money was made. But there's nothing to savor here. Much like age of magic in Middle-earth, this game will one day be forgotten. 

However, not the same can be said about Undertale.

Undertale is... well, I really shouldn't say what it is. You see, Undertale is one of those games that works best knowing absolutely nothing going into it. The few things I can say about it without ruining anything is that it's not made by a series of big name developers and publishers; it wasn't made with a big budget to support big, flashy graphics; yet it's sure as hell fucking original. Despite it seemingly borrowing on a bunch of familiar gaming tropes, there's really nothing else quite like it. It will leave its mark on you, I swear it. And because of that it will never be forgotten -- unlike another game that I can't quite recall. 

Currently, I'm making my way through a second pass of the game. Make what you will of that because I'm going to shut the fuck up about it now in fear I might let slip some other piece of info and I would hate to ruin what should be a fascinatingly fresh experience. 

So there you have it. Two very different games that gave me two very different experiences. What I'm hoping you've taken away from this is that you need to respect the idea behind your creative ventures. Sure, graphics and glory can still delivery on some level, but when your message is truly extraordinary, it can lend to a transcending adventure. 

Happy gaming. 

Sweeney's Movie Dump: February 2016

Oldboy

Okay so I've been called out for my lack of movie-watching, mostly by Trev. What can I say, I can never seem to put in the effort to go to the theater and spend all that money to catch a flick when there's so many other options to spend my time on. I actually saw just two movies in theaters last year, and that list (Furious 7 and Trainwreck) doesn't exactly represent the cream of the 2015 crop. So here's the start of my serious effort to watch a lot of movies. There's an immediate focus on movies from 2015 as Stan's compiling some ranked lists and I'd like to give more input, but my first overall choice for a monthly movie post was 2003's Oldboy- an absolutely brutal movie out of South Korea that I always knew I would love. And I did. For those who don't know, Oldboy is about a businessman who is kidnapped and imprisoned seemingly at random- he has no idea what is happening to him or why. After fifteen years he finally manages to get out, and immediately his hunger for revenge makes him set out to determine who imprisoned him and why. Honestly, things were probably better for him in the prison. I did know the major plot twist at the end, which softened its likely devastating impact for me, but I didn't know about some of the other instantly iconic scenes and shots from the movie- the live octopus, the hallway fight, the photo album, the amateur dentistry. Okay if anything can convince you to watch Oldboy it's that hallway fight. Go watch it if you haven't.

Dope

Dope is an odd one, a movie that feels like a throwback to the 90s in style, but a story that's rooted in the present day. I don't know, I feel like in the 90's there were a lot of comedies starring black people set in the ghettos of LA, peaking with Ice Cube's Friday, but I feel like that sort of sub-genre doesn't exist anymore, or at least isn't nearly as popular. And to add to the 90's feel of Dope, the main characters, despite being right in the middle of the millennial generation, are all huge hip-hop fans who love to talk about how the 90's was the golden age of hip hop. The soundtrack features Nas, Naughty by Nature, and A Tribe Called Quest. And check out that flattop on Shameik Moore! In a way the movie almost feels like a nostalgic love letter to nineties black pop culture. And yet, it never loses sight of the fact that the movie is set in 2015- a time when being geeky can be cool, teenagers communicate in memes, and the virtual currency Bitcoin can be used for whatever illegal purposes you could want. The story here is light-hearted, despite the fact that it seems possible any of the main characters could be murdered at any time- our group of heroes are just trying to graduate high school when they accidentally come into a huge supply of molly, and they all fall for the allure of big money in dealing drugs. There's a nice coming-of-age story here though. Also Workaholics' Blake Anderson has a pretty significant role playing roughly the same character as his tv show, and it's great. Overall it's not a movie anyone needs to go out and see right now, but I enjoyed it enough to rank it my #4 movie of 2015, which speaks to how few movies in 2015 I saw and really liked. Most of the good ones will show up in this post.

Ex Machina

I loved Ex Machina so, so much. I had seen ads for it and knew it was the type of movie I would enjoy, and when I finally watched it, it was exactly what I wanted it to be. In the simplest terms, Ex Machina is about a low-level programmer (Domnhall Gleeson) who wins a trip to the remote Nordic home of his company's founder (Oscar Isaac), and while there he can administer the Turing test to his boss's latest creation- an android (Alicia Vikander). Pretty quickly it's obvious that the Turing test isn't really necessary- the android very clearly has artificial intelligence and a personality of its (her?) own. A power struggle develops between the three characters, as the android pretty clearly wants to get out of her tiny apartment to see the world, the programmer believes he can help with this, and the boss reveals how terribly he's been treating his creation. Watching it all play out was tense and surprising, and the whole thing wrapped up with an ending that was both beautiful and horrifying. I was happy to call it my number one movie of 2015 (again, out of only nine movies I saw).

Bone Tomahawk

Stan gave Bone Tomahawk a strong recommendation as one of the best available streaming options from 2015, so I added it to my list with no other knowledge of what it was about. For a while it's a slow-moving Western, as four men set out from their town to rescue a kidnapped housewife and a deputy from a nearby group of cannibals. Again, "slow" is how I would describe the first 90 minutes or so- even though the pacing felt fine to me, admittedly very little happens as our crew assesses the situation and makes their way into the mountains, wondering what they might find there. And yeah, the movie bends over backwards to insist that it's storyline is more than "natives are scary!" by bringing the guy who played Hanzee from Fargo into the mix, and having him insist that these cannibals in no way represent Native Americans. If you have to add that to your movie, it's probably a bad sign. Still though, I ranked this movie highly anyway, and in my opinion Bone Tomahawk concludes itself with a very strong payoff, as long as you've got a strong stomach. It features literally the grossest scene I have ever seen in any movie- a scene where a guy gets scalped, and that's not even close to the worst thing that happens to him. I liked this, just don't expect to use it as a date night movie.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Hype City! I read the AVclub a lot, and holy shit did they ever love Mad Max Fury Road. And honestly, I thought the movie was great. It's a return to the Mad Max series after a thirty year absence, and replacing Mel Gibson in the title role is Tom Hardy, who honestly is second in command here to Charlise Theron's Imperator Furiosa. It's basically a two hour insane car-chase through the desert, not only touching on the survival themes of the original flicks but adding in a dose of feminism as well. It's very impressive how much of the movie features real, practical effects rather than CGI, and it shows- everything in the movie feels real. Still though, the hype was just too much- it got nominated for basically every award- so I only felt like this was my #2 for 2015.

Focus

Snoozers! I was mildly interested in this Will Smith/Margot Robbie con-man movie, again, mostly to add to my 2015 list, but this was really by-the numbers. Will Smith playing a cool con-man seems like a slam-dunk in casting, yet he didn't seem to bring all that much to the role. Margot Robbie fared a little better as the protégé, learning the ropes of the industry, while simultaneously either conning or being conned by Smith, while hooking up with him, and it's uncertain whether the feelings either show for each other are real. One beef I have with the movie is that at first, it does not try to glamorize the art of the con at all- Smith mentions that there won't be a huge flashy job that lands them enough cash to retire on, and that a high quantity of tried-and-true method jobs are enough to keep them busy and profitable. An interesting take! And yet, the movie spoils it by immediately following it up with two barely plausible high-stakes cons that make up the majority of the movie. I get that this makes a better movie, but it flies in the face of the logic our main character just laid out for us. Bah.

Beasts of No Nation

Ok I saw this a little under a month ago and I have to say I barely remember any of it. Idris Elba was great as always, but this drama about West-African warlords and child soldiers just didn't grab me. I mean, the warlords are brutal and the actions they get the child soldiers to take are heart-breaking, yet I don't think this really surprised me in any way. Oh well!