Captain America: The First Avenger

I was skeptical of this movie when I saw it in theaters. Based on the previews, it looked a little cheesy to me. I loved Iron Man because it brought Iron Man to life in a (somewhat) believable way. This, on the other hand, looked somewhat ridiculous. And yes, it was somewhat ridiculous. But, like Guardians of the Galaxy, this movie had a ton of heart. Steve Rogers is a protagonist that’s easy to love. He’s a puny guy who can never back down from a fight. Any and all injustice must be answered, even if it’s in a losing effort. Speaking of losing, this guy never gets any ladies. Of course, after some super serum, he’s a super soldier with everything he needs to thwart injustice and land the ladies. But, because we got to see him before all that, he remains relatable. It doesn’t hurt that he’s fighting Nazis! The second half of the movie isn’t quite as enjoyable because it reverts back to commonplace super hero movie fight scenes. It ends somewhat tragically, allowing it all to feel a little more meaningful than you might expect. All in all, I like this movie a lot. Captain America: Winter Soldier (the sequel) is objectively better in almost every way, but I have a soft spot for this one because of the pre-serum Steve Rogers.  

The League: Season 5

Sooner or later, a group-of-friends comedy based on fantasy football is going to run out of new ways to make jokes about fantasy football. That The League has made it through five seasons and is now beginning a sixth is actually kind of shocking and impressive. Like most comedies, this show is best when binge-watched; there's really not enough content on a weekly basis to make it memorable or transcendent in any way, and "hanging out" with the characters for several hours at a time in two or three separate sittings is more rewarding than checking in with them on a weekly basis for half an hour. The hits and misses all blend together that way.

The most notable thing about the fifth season of The League was, bar none, a weird format-breaking episode that followed Rafi and Dirty Randy's ill-advised quest for vigilantism to Los Angeles. Rafi is a supporting character only seen in every other episode or so, and Dirty Randy, played by Seth Rogen, is a friend of his that pops in maybe once a season. To see The League devote an entire episode to the two of them being ridiculous, without any references at all to fantasy football, was surprising. That episode may have been the moment the show jumped the shark. It also may have been the series' best episode to date. Maybe both - why pretend both options are mutually exclusive?

Dragon Quest VI

I've noted that as I play through the Dragon Quest series, each game has been better than the last. This was easy to note with the first few installments as developers at the time were just starting to figure out what works and what doesn't in role-playing video games- going from a party of one in Dragon Warrior, to a party of three in Dragon Warrior II, to eventually a party where you could recruit enemies in Dragon Quest V; or the evolution of a character's inventory and menus becoming easier to manage; or the movement from a strictly linear storyline to something more open-ended with side-quests and optional levels.By the time Dragon Quest IV rolled around, the basic formula seemed to be perfected, and as such there doesn't feel like many big differences between 4, 5 and 6. The gimmick in Dragon Quest VI is some well-worn territory- parallel worlds, with two separate world maps featuring two versions of most towns- is one a dream world? Or do they both exist simultaneously with no awareness of each other? The reliance on that cliched plot point and a messy story that mostly ended like 30% of the way through the game are the only reason why I didn't like Dragon Quest VI as much as the previous installment. The gameplay all checks out and is fun aside from a little too much grinding for the final boss, but that's just RPGs in general I guess. Still though, that's six Dragon Quest games down, and while I don't regret playing through the series, not one game has really blown me away. Japan apparently loves the shit out of the Dragon Quest series, but it's not nearly as popular in the US, and this is affecting my backlog. My next game, Dragon Quest VII was released for the PS1 and the cheapest, crappiest copies available still cost like $40 on Amazon; it was also remade for the 3DS in Japan, but there's been no announcement of it coming stateside. So, my progress through the series may be halted for a long time. Farewell for now, Dragon Quest!

Top Gun

I'll be the third guy here to post this movie and admit that I've never seen it before! Trev gave it an overview and honed in on the homoeroticism angles the movie has left behind as a legacy. Keith just skewered it up and down. Fear not! I've got a fresh take of my own on this film, even if I doubt it's a fresh take at all, given how clearly and vividly it jumped out at me, and given that this movie is already thirty(!) years old.

Ready? Maverick is a total dick. And Iceman is the real hero here. Consider the obvious. Iceman is a top-ranked student revered by his peers and his teachers alike. His biggest offense is just that he's leery and wary of Maverick, the showboating newcomer with no respect for rules or the chain of command. Maverick meanwhile demands all kinds of respect and attention from the people around him despite going out of his way to be immature, dangerous, and generally not a team player. This is a military movie, after all, and who would you rather fly with - Maverick or Iceman? And it's not even like Iceman is boring or shitty or not fun to be around. That's Maverick! Compare the way the two of them act throughout the movie if you don't believe it. When the movie ends and Iceman - the winner of the Top Gun contest and clearly the class's best pilot - finally acknowledges Maverick as a great pilot in his own right, Maverick one ups him like an asshole. "You can be my wingman anytime." Hey, good for him! "Bullshit! You can be mine!" What a petulant little shit bag...

Nintendo Land

I've had my fair share of fun with this game and friends. There's a lot of content here. My problem with this game is that so much of the content is simplistic and unenjoyable. I didn't have too much fun with any of them. I never really got into trying to beat a high score or complete a certain "attraction." My favorite was Zelda. I hated the Octopus Dance attraction. I dunno. I wanted to like this. This was the new game that was supposed to show what the Wii U could do and it mostly proved the gamepad to be a gimmick. I got a silver trophy on all the 1-player attractions so I'll call this one beaten. What a relief. For fun, I thought I'd give analyze the attractions in the same way Steve did in his post.

Least enjoyable game I am most skilled at: Takamaru's Ninja Castle

Most enjoyable game I am least skilled at: Donkey Kong's Crash Course

Best solo adventure: The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest

Best cooperative adventure: The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest

Most intuitive control scheme: The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest

Clumsiest control scheme: Octopus Dance

Most replay value: Mario Chase

Least replay value: Takamaru's Ninja Castle

Most stressful game: Animal Crossing: Sweet Day

Most relaxing game: Captain Falcon's Twister Race

Overall most essential game: Luigi's Ghost Mansion

Overall least essential game: Metroid Blast

MLB 12: The Show

Well, this game has been weighing on me for a while. I bought it back in 2012 along with the Vita version because of the cross-save functionality. I thought being able to play my season on the go as well as on the PS3 was a novelty I could not pass up. It was pretty cool. But I found this game to be somewhat hard and it didn't really keep my attention. I did spend enough time with it to create all the fantasy teams from 2012 and I did play about 10 games. This morning I woke up, updated the my fantasy roster (while leaving the other teams stuck in 2012) and began a season. I was not going to spend a ton of time on this so I made it a 14-game season with 1 inning games. Man, lots of pressure. Every pitch could end the game. It was actually pretty exciting. Anyway, I played 5 games that season and simulated the rest. My Athletics won the West, Colin's Twins won the Central and Stan's Rays won the East. Kristina's Tigers took the Wildcard. Anyway, Kristina's Tigers tried their best but could not bring me down. Stan's Rays failed to get a W off me in the ALCS. And then I took on the Mets in the WS with Lucas Duda hitting in the three hole (this is the result of all the fantasy teams being in the AL). I took the Mets down easily and won the World Series. I would have figured there would be an awesome animation of the players holding up the trophy. I wanted Edwin Encarnacion to get that, even if it was just in a video game. But alas, the animation was the same as every other game. It was disappointing.

Gameplay is good, but it didn't feel quite as good as MVP baseball. Moreover, this game is super hard. The pitches come in really fast and I couldn't even make contact for the most part. The good thing is that this game has sliders. You can control pitch speed from the option menu before starting the game. You can increase the rate of contact for humans and computers separately. Basically, I was able to make this game much easier. Though it still felt somewhat difficult, it was a lot better. I think this game does a pretty good job at baseball (much better than anything other than MVP). Still, my time with baseball video games is probably over.

Gangs of New York

According to Martin Scorsese, the idea for Gangs of New York came when the director first realized that the first real wave of immigrants to come to New York wasn't full of Italians at the dawn of the twentieth century, but of Irishmen a good fifty years earlier. I'll admit, I didn't really consider this either, given all the Italian culture (and stereotypes) in New York, and given that when you think of Irish immigrants you're more apt to think of Boston. Anyway, yeah, New York was totally crawling with Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, and this is a movie more or less about the conflicts between those immigrants and the "native" New Yorkers whose families had been there for centuries.

It was a movie set during and informed by the American Civil War, yet in no way was it a Civil War movie. I liked that. It seems like the Civil War is at the absolute center of American history in the 1800s - what led up to it, how it played out, and what the aftermath was like - but there was obviously way more going on all over the country than a North-South conflict or an abolitionist movement. This movie explores part of that "way more" and it educated me on a period and a conflict I knew very little about.

Also, you've got Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, John C. Reilly, and (briefly) Liam Neeson here. Just excellent work. Cameron Diaz? She is also an actor and was also in this.

This wasn't my favorite movie, as it did drag a bit in the middle and never fully captivated me, but it had my attention and it did almost everything very well and it held up 12 years later. The ending montage was one of the coolest parts. All movie long I had been thinking, "this just doesn't feel like New York." But of course, New York only really became New York once all that infrastructure popped up in the 20th century. The movie ends with a lingering shot on two graves in a cemetery as, through the years, the modern New York skyline begins to pop into view off in the distance.

1Q84

After just loving the first three Murakami books I've read, I was excited to finally jump into a fourth this summer- the lengthy 1Q84. It's a novel told in three parts totalling around 1000 pages, detailing the seemingly separate stories of a man and a woman living in Tokyo in the eighties- he, Tengo, an aspiring novelist taking who becomes a reluctant ghost-writer, trying to turn a sloppy teenager's fantasy story into a best-seller; she, Aomame, an assassin working for an elderly woman, seeking to rid the world of particularly abusive men. The chapters here alternate between focusing on Tengo and Aomame, and as you may have guessed we learn the two of them, without knowing eachother, are deeply linked as their stories eventually begin to intersect without the two meeting. Of course it wouldn't be a Murakami novel unless things started to get trippy and surreal, and that's all over 1Q84. Over the course of the book it becomes more apparent to our main characters that they have crossed into some sort of parallel universe where the Earth has two moons, among other smaller changes. You see, apparently the Japanese pronounciation for the letter "Q" is a lot like the pronounciation for "9", so the book's title is a pun for the year the book takes place, only slightly off in this parallel universe. Pretty clever!

 

So how was it? Unfortunately, this was easily my least favorite book of his. The alternating chapters which initially drew me in eventually became kind of annoying- information was often repeated several times as each character finds out more about what's going on, and the forced perspective switches really messed with the pace of the book. In part three a third character is introduced with his own chapters, and while he eventually grew more interesting, his chapters really slowed the pace of the book to a crawl for a while. Content-wise this is mostly an interesting story, but the surreal elements Murakami specializes in didn't work too well here. In previous novels Murakami has featured dream worlds and hallucinations, and given them meaning and the gravity they deserve. Here it just feels like he was throwing a bunch of malarkey out there and I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. I won't let this sour me on Murakami though- the AV Club just gave an excellent review to his latest novel, so I'll pick that up soon.

 

One more thing though- I've been posting that gag bingo chart joking about how Murakami keeps featuring the same images and settings in his novels but 1Q84 was the biggest offender by far. Let's see if it scores a Bingo, shall we?

Mysterious Woman- No. There's a teen girl I'd describe as mysterious, and Aomame might be mysterious to others but she's the main character so I don't think she counts. The rest of the women in the book aren't really mysterious.

 

Ear Fetish- No, and I haven't seen this in any books yet.

 

Dried-Up Well- No, this one was pretty clearly about a previous book of his.

 

Something Vanishing- Ding ding ding! Yes. Several people and things vanish over the course of 1Q84.

 

Feeling of Being Followed- Yes, several times, and the feeling is usually correct.

 

Unexpected Phone Call- Yes, and Murakami even makes a big deal about how Tengo can seemingly sense who is calling him by how the phone rings.

 

Cats- Yes, although only in a fictional story in the book.

 

Old Jazz Record- Yes, repeatedly.

 

Urban Ennui- Not really. Tengo lives the more boring life but he seems happy with it. 1Q84 takes place, like many Murakami books, in Tokyo.

 

Supernatural Powers- Yes, several characters seem to exhibit supernatural powers

 

Running- No running!

 

Secret Passageway- Yes, literally how the book begins.

 

Train Station- Yes, repeatedly- Tengo in particular takes several train trips, even though there's little focus on the stations.

 

Historical Flashback- Close. There's a lengthy passage from Anton Chekhov's travel diary from 1893, but it's not a flashback.

 

Precocious Teenager- Yes, the teenager whose story Tengo re-writes.

 

Cooking- Yes, although you could say a lot of authors focus too much on this (GRRM?)

 

Speaking to Cats- No, although it's really close!

 

Parallel Worlds- YUP.

 

Weird Sex- YUP. REPEATEDLY.

 

Chip Kidd Cover- Yes. I didn't know what this was, but he's a guy who designs a lot of cool looking book covers, including many of Murakami's.

 

Tokyo At Night- Yes, Tokyo is the main setting.

 

Unusual Name- Yes, 'Aomame' is literally what the Bingo card lists as its example unusual name. I think it translates to "Sweet Pea".

 

Faceless Villain- No.

 

Vanishing Cats- No, unless you want to get figurative.

Almost! Just needed some urban ennui!

The Dark Knight Rises

I'm glad I saw this one again. To quickly recap my thoughts on Nolan's Batman trilogy, I was never as impressed by Batman Begins as so many others seemed to be, but I absolutely loved The Dark Knight. I think this was largely due to the first movie being an origin story of sorts, featuring a villain, whereas the second movie was more of a character study on Heath Ledger's Joker, which happened to feature a superhero. Don't get me wrong - Christian Bale has been great as Bruce Wayne (and less so as Batman, but whatever) - it's just that in a hundred-million-dollar PG-13 comic book movie, the good guy is never going to be as interesting as the bad guy. Tom Hardy's Bane was never going to be as captivating as Ledger's Joker, but the character was interesting enough in his own right. The plot was compelling and new supporting characters like Catwoman and Robin (combined use of these two names in the movie: once) rounded out an already strong array of personalities and gave the final film in the trilogy quite a deep ensemble. Tack on the idea that Nolan was willing to explore deeper themes and that he repeatedly tries to explore human nature in his movies - as much as you can explore it in a PG-13 summer blockbuster, I guess - and you've got yourself a really good movie. Flawed, yes, but still very good.

Which is why, again, I'm glad I gave this film another viewing. Memories aren't perfect, and mine tends to be a little cynical at times, and when I popped this DVD in last night, all I could look forward to doing was shaking my head at all the plot holes and implausibilities and gaffes and continuity issues and structural concerns and poor pacing decisions. There were plenty of those, to be sure, and people way more concerned with slandering this movie than I ever was have filled the Internet with lists of plot holes and dumb contrivances and such. I won't waste my time or yours, dear reader, by ranting here. Instead I will only offer a slight tweak that may have made the movie, in my humble opinion, just so much better. Ready?

Just get rid of the whole transition between Acts 2 and 3 where Batman is stuck in the pit in Middle-East-istan. Seriously. The inclusion of that pit-climbing "montage" adds nothing to the story and the pit prison itself is the source of almost half of the issues people had with the pacing and the structure. You've already shown Bruce Wayne struggling as ex-Batman. Just have him go back into hiding after getting his ass kicked by Bane that first time, instead of spending five months stranded in an ethnic hellhole across the world. It would have added way more to his arc if he was hiding in Wayne Manor watching Gotham burn around him. Catwoman goes back to him and gives him a stern talking to. Or Robin. Or both. Maybe Alfred - he was gone for the entire movie, after all! It's just way more sensible, Nolan!

Also, that Talia twist at the end? Pointless. In fact that whole character was pointless. Commit to Bane, Nolan!

My two cents. The Dark Knight Rises was good - very good - but until I gave it a second viewing, all I could remember were its flaws.

Sons of Anarchy: Season 5

I'm fairly certain most blog readers either don't care about this show or have seen through the fifth season, so the following post is just laden with spoilers. You've been warned!

The groan-inducing ending to what had otherwise been a fantastic fourth season was a real tipping point for Sons of Anarchy. By leaving Clay Morrow alive and revealing that the club's cartel partners were actually undercover CIA agents, the show had grabbed a pot that had been building to a boil all season long and just kind of took it off the stove as it had started to simmer. Season 4's big loss was Season 5's small gain, however, as one of the most compelling plots this time around was Jax's ability or lack thereof to lead his club while Clay stewed on the sidelines.

Elsewhere? This was just a messy slew of "big moments" with no thematic linkage. Opie was brutally murdered when a few members of the club went to prison for a few episodes. Gemma got stoned and ran her SUV off the road, severely injuring her two grandkids. Tara spent the season neither shitting nor getting off the pot, unable to commit to getting the hell out of Dodge with or without Jax, and then ultimately she got arrested in the season finale. So did Clay. Boyd from Justified showed up to play a transexual for one episode. Jimmy Smits joined the cast as Nero, and spent the year nailing Gemma and supporting SAMCRO with a prostitution ring side business. Three new members of the club turned out to be home invaders and they meet a pretty quick demise about midway through the year. Otto murders a nurse in prison and then bits his own tongue off to avoid testifying about any of it. Donal Logue arrives late in the season to avenge that nurse, who was his sister. Joel McHale shows up at some point to sleep with Gemma and then rob her blind and then get the living shit kicked out of him. The season kicks off with Tig watching his daughter get burned alive and ends with him shooting the man responsible for it - Michael, from Lost - in the head.

That may have been the biggest disappointment of the season. Sons has never gone all in on casting big names or even established character actors for their yearly "big bads," but Harold Perrineau just felt like a horrible casting call in all kinds of ways. No disrespect to the actor himself; I think he did just fine with the material he was given. But given every black actor out there - take the entire cast of The Wire for starters - this show had to opt for the guy notorious for screaming, "Waaalt!" for a few years on network television.

Having said all of that... this was an enjoyable and fairly entertaining season of television. Sprawling plot messes aside, it was able to cram a whole lot of action and tension and character scheming into thirteen episodes. And unlike the colossal ball drop that ended Season 4, Season 5 wrapped itself up with a neat little bow. Instead of trailing off with a big fat ellipsis or two, this season ended with appropriate periods, commas, and question marks. No exclamation points, really, but that's okay; Season 5 never promised them the way Season 4 did, and thus its conclusion was far more gratifying.

I'll get to Season 6 soon enough, I'm sure. That one... that one just kind of sucked. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.