The Royal Tenenbaums

Two months ago I spent far too many paragraphs here on an internal debate over whether or not I liked The Darjeeling Limited. My conclusion, or lack thereof, was that I liked it, disliked it, didn't like it, and didn't dislike it. At any rate, here's another Wes Anderson movie that's left me unable to give any real definitive reactions. The characters, their quirks, and the bizarrely specific bits of history given on each of them were entertaining and endearing, but the movie itself didn't seem quite as good as I've been expecting it to be for close to ten years now. Once again, I'm not sure why.

Instead of being negative and overwrought though, let me focus on one aspect of the movie I really emphatically and unequivocally loved: the introduction. In the first six minutes of the film, Anderson provides us a rich and vibrant picture of an eccentric family with three child prodigies. It felt like a Salinger short story from the get-go and it set the table for a potentially outstanding and unforgettable movie about the melancholy decline of a dysfunctional family of oddball elitists. Check it out for yourself and see if you agree:

The thing is, the hundred minutes that followed just weren't quite on that same level. There were some great performances, great scenes, and great jokes, but not since Pixar's Up have I seen a movie start out so promising only to fade immediately into something not nearly as good. Still good - don't get me wrong - but a minor letdown compared to the way it began.

I'm far from done with Wes Anderson, though. I've still got his first movie, his breakout hit, and his recent magnum opus in my backlog. Stay tuned.

Batman: Dark Victory

The last of what is in my comic collection for the time being - just ordered some more from Amazon. Another Loeb and Sale Batman story that follows up their terrific piece of work, The Long Halloween. Picking up where Halloween leaves off, this story follows what remains of the Gotham's crime families and Batman's concern to cure Harvey Dent's insanity that is his Two-Face identity. 

Things basically get kicked off when there's a massive break-in at Arkham Asylum freeing not just Two-Face, but every other major villain. After this happens, a series of murders occur  during every major holiday. It follows the same plot device as The Long Halloween only instead of mobsters being murdered, it's cops. You're led to believe that it might be Two-Face carrying out these murders, but the story keeps throwing twists and turns your way you're never quite sure what to expect. Also, as can be guessed from the cover, this story arc introduces a young Dick Grayson as Robin. He really doesn't appear till the second half of the book, never-the-less, it ends as a Robin story.

I really enjoy Jeph Loeb's writing in these past two Batman stories I've read. On top of that, I've already ordered another Loeb Batman comic, Hush, that I should receive by next week sometime. He's written a ton of material (plus he's head of Marvel's television development) so there's a lot of work he contributes towards. Not that I intend to get to everything he's touched, he's just got a lot of experience in this field. Plus he wrote Teen Wolf and Commando... So, that's awesome. One side note: Loeb grew up Weston and actually went to high school with my dad and his siblings. Small world. 

Anywho, excited to devour even more of his work in the coming days. For others out there interested in getting into some Batman comics, these two stories (The Long Halloween and Dark Victory) are highly recommended. 

In the spirit of Batman, I bring you this College Humor parody... Badman.

Harvey Dent... Can he be trusted?

The League: Season 3

Well. So much for doubting my last post would be my last post of Marathon Monday. Little did I know as I was posting about the third season of Eastbound & Down that five miles away the largest act of terrorism on American soil since 9/11 had just taken place. Kind of puts things in perspective. But after an afternoon, evening, and night fraught with tension, confusion, and sadness, the blog goes on. I'm still bothered, upset, angry, shocked - the whole gambit, really - but feeling sorry for the victims and their families is a passive activity (a passivity?); while I can't just put yesterday's tragedy out of my mind, it doesn't do me or anyone else any good to just dwell on it. And that's where simple shit like watching TV comes in. Not as some magical cure-all that offers an escape, but simply as a basic every day activity. Normalcy. And I don't mean that in some "slow-healing recovery process" type of way as much as I just mean, hey, watching DVDs late at night is just something I do, and I'm glad yesterday's events didn't scathe me or my loved ones enough to interrupt that for more than a day. Not because this is what matters, of course; quite the opposite. I'm glad because this doesn't matter, at all, and the fact that I can do it means I was lucky enough, blessed enough, not to be directly affected. If my sister, who was working at the finish line yesterday, was in a hospital tonight recovering from leg amputations, I certainly wouldn't be updating a blog about an FX comedy, is all I'm trying to say here.

Soapbox rant over. I guess it's kind of silly to talk about the third season of The League now. It's just as well; the second season received what must be my shortest post to date, so maybe this just isn't a show that needs much analysis or reflection on this blog. Here are some abbreviated thoughts on it, whatever they're worth. It's a funny show. It benefits from a quick-thinking cast capable of great ad-libbed lines. There is great guest star casting. Some episodes are funnier than others. The show is at its weakest when it tries to introduce new or uncommon phrases or concepts to the audience. Overall it is a pretty solid show, but ti comes with the same ceiling associated with every other cable comedy series that always goes for laughs and never anything more. At this point the show has very little if anything to do with fantasy football.

Good night everyone! Stay safe.

Eastbound & Down: Season 3

Happy Marathon Monday, y'all. With work off today, and all kinds of house-cleaning and toilet-fixing accomplished yesterday, I've got little else to do but log. This is my second post of the day already, and I doubt it'll be my last.

Eastbound & Down came out of nowhere in 2010 to wow and impress me. My roommates and I watched it every week over its abbreviated six-week run, and it truly felt like one of the best shows on TV for a time there. The second season was anything but. I understand why the show decided to reinvent itself what with being the second act in a three act redemption story for Kenny Powers, but it was just far too different from the first season for me to really enjoy it. The third season? Act three. The conclusion. Better than the dark, strange, Mexican second season, but still not quite as good as the first one. Kenny has settled in nicely on the Myrtle Beach Mermen, a fictional minor league affiliate of the Texas Rangers. He lives it up with his teammate and best friend Shane, struggles to raise his infant son, and feuds with a promising young Russian prospect. All in all, it was a solid season. It ran a bit long at eight episodes, and we spent some time that felt very unnecessary with Kenny's parents in the middle there, but the season played out much better on DVD in a marathon session than it did one week at a time on TV. But isn't that so often the case?

In a surprise move - trust me, given the way this season ends, it's a total surprise - HBO renewed Eastbound & Down for a fourth season a year ago. I have no idea when it will air - probably this fall at the earliest, and possibly next spring - but prior to re-watching this third season on DVD, I had no interest. Now? I have interest. A good deal of interest.

Beyond Good and Evil

I should have known things weren't going to go well between Beyond Good and Evil and me from the start, when it turned out to not be a first-person shooter like I had blindly assumed it was. I knew it was about some conspiracy in the future or something and I would be running around with a camera taking pictures (it's right there on the cover!) but I guess I assumed the first-person camera view meant I'd be attacking in first person as well. Nope. Beyond Good and Evil is a third-person action game, and despite the critical acclaim, it just never quite worked for me. It reminded me of Kameo in that it tried to do a lot of things, but did none of them really all that well aside from maybe building a cool environment and having some great voice acting. The game's divided up into 4 big levels and a central city, and I guess I can point out a few more things the game did well- traveling around on a hoverboat was pretty fun, and the bright colors and interesting music choices (lyrics in Spanish and Bulgarian!) made the overworld a pretty fun, unique experience in gaming. But the levels. Oh boy, those levels. Think of everything people didn't like about the central temples in the DS Zelda games, and it's there. Mostly just constant forced stealth, I guess. It's boring, frustrating as all hell, and really has only been pulled off well in the Metal Gear series, and even then only because those games are so insane. I can see why Beyond Good and Evil would work for some people, but it just didn't work at all for me. I usually post games I love on the blog, and it can be boring to read and write post after post about how great every game is, but the silver lining of playing one I don't like like Beyond Good and Evil (also, there's no traversing beyond 'good and evil', morality is pretty clear-cut here) is I get to give out the rare "Skip It!" Sweeney seal of disapproval.

Ristar

Hey now! That was actually kind of fun. Ristar is a quick little fourteen-level platformer made by the same team that made the early Sonic games - hence its inclusion in the Sonic Mega Collection - but thankfully it plays nothing like those. Ristar is a star-dude with stretchy arms; these stretchy arms inform just about every aspect of gameplay, allowing you to move, to attack, and to collect items. Check out some YouTube clips for a better idea. It was a nice conclusion to a compilation disc which had grown stale quickly, and more than that it was just a nice 16-bit game form the '90s. Bright colors, great music, just an all around fun and kind of challenging experience. You could do a lot worse on the Sega Genesis.

The Wire: Season Two

I was prepared for The Wire's second season to be even more underwhelming than its first, and for the most part it was. No one seemed to like this season, and really from the first episode I just couldn't latch on to any storyline of dockworkers and drug smuggling and enjoy it for a while. Again, the series had realism, but people turn to tv for escapism, and there was nothing all that interesting here, aside from a few brief scenes catching up with the drug dealers of season one. Talking with Stan, he seemed to remember those being the best scenes of the season by far, which had me thinking that I probably didn't need to pay any more attention to most of season two. Just get through it and reap the benefits when season three comes! Fortunately the benefits came a little early as the last three episodes of this season flipped a switch and the show finally became compelling television! Suddenly I was invested in the fates of the Sobotka family and whether the police would be able to put The Greek behind bars for his crimes. I'll put the series on hold for a little while as there's just so much out there to watch, but I'm excited to see what happens when The Wire really gets good.

Sonic 3D Blast

I'll give Sonic 3D Blast this much - it did something new with a franchise that was growing old and stale really fast for me. This wasn't a side-scrolling fast-paced platformer, but a fast-paced isometric platformer instead. And boy, did it handle like shit. On the one hand, I give credit to Sega for taking a risk here, drastically altering the gameplay in its most famous series. After all, Super Mario 64 had come out a few months prior, changing platformers forever. This wasn't really a full-fledged 3D game, of course; just one where Sonic can move in four cardinal directions on the ground instead of just two. But levels were repetitive fetch quests, design felt horribly uninspired, and this was just overall a pretty bad game. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be Sega's answer to Super Mario 64 or not, but it feels several years older, clunkier, and more dated. But hey - no more Sonic in the backlog. Finally. One more game remains on this compilation disc, and my hope is to be done with it soon enough.

Sonic & Knuckles

Gameplay here was exactly identical to that in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, right down to the design of the level titles. When I looked into this, I found that Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were originally intended to be one game, but that scheduling delays and space constraints led to an eventual split. Hey, fine. Whatever. It's not like the third game was substantially different from the first two anyway. In Sonic & Knuckles I got to play as - yep, you guessed it - Knuckles. You'd be surprised how non-different that was. Hey, at least these games are relatively quick and easy. I expect to finish Sonic 3D Blast before the weekend ends. Will that game be different? We'll see.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

It's been three and a half years (wow!) since I played through the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games. When I took a break before returning to the series, I figured I'd eventually want to do so. But here I was, three and a half years later, still not really feeling the urge to play more Sonic the Hedgehog. I suppose there's a very limited appeal to the era of 16-bit platforming. Anyway, I learned my lesson with those two Mega Man compilations: better to just grit your teeth and knock off a ton of games in a row than let a compilation grow entrenched in one's backlog. And while there were something like fifteen or more Mega Man games for me to play through, I've got only Sonic & Knuckles and Sonic 3D Blast remaining on this Sonic Mega Collection compilation. Well, and Ristar, but that's something completely different. I think. Regardless, I'm left without much else to say about Sonic the Hedgehog 3, as it was a game I played purely out of backlog duty and not whatsoever out of desire. Maybe I can bang out another game or two this long weekend. Time will tell.