Stan's Movie Dump: Late December 2015

Late in the year (like, late late) I decided that it wasn't unfeasible for me to hit 100 movies in 2015. This is why I plowed through somewhere near 30 of them in December. Was it worth it? Did I get there? Let's find out together!

Tangerine

My 83rd movie of the year was this LA drama shot entirely on an iPhone. (I was pleasantly surprised by the quality!) It's about two transgender sex workers and it takes place on Christmas Eve. Needless to say, it was something very different from the white-straight-male-dominated films I usually tend to see (like everyone else). I've already seen this one on several year-end best lists, and while I can't go that far, I did find this to be entertaining, harrowing, interesting, funny, and heart-wrenching. Worth a look!

Welcome to Me

Kristen Wiig suffers from a severe form of social anxiety, or maybe schizophrenia, or maybe bipolar disorder. I dunno, it's the type of character she always plays. Anyway, the plot here is that her character wins the lottery and spends her newfound fortune producing a talk show in which she's the host and also the focus of every episode. This was nothing special, but I didn't dislike it or find it boring or anything.

The Loneliest Planet

There's a very, very specific taste you need in order to enjoy this movie. It's very largely just an hour and forty minutes of three people walking through the Caucasus Mountains. There are lengthy tracking shots and gorgeous long shots and the whole movie is pretty quiet without very much dialogue. Lots of the chatter that does take place is non-English and non-subtitled. The entire movie's conflict basically comes down to a certain incident in the middle of the film. I really liked this one, but I can completely understand why so many people hated it. As a good litmus test - did you like Gerry? (Watch Gerry if you haven't.) This is longer than Gerry and not quite as good, in my opinion. But then, I loved Gerry. Whatever.

Holy Motors

Here's an interesting one. Holy Motors can best be described as "challenging." It's the type of movie I'd love to love, but it's not one I really understood at all. Describing it in any detail feels like a fool's errand, so I won't bother trying. In a nutshell, a man seems to understand that he is an actor performing different roles as he goes about his day, but there's no camera or audience in sight. And that really only scratches the surface of some of the surreal stuff going on here. Has anyone else seen this? Can anyone help me out?

Beasts of No Nation

We're at movie number 87, for those keeping track. This was a Netflix original film from Cary Fukugawa, the guy responsible for both seasons of True Detective (so, yeah, there was a really wide range in potential quality heading into this one). It's a story - not a documentary - about child soldiers in Africa. I dunno. Didn't do a ton for me.

Spring

Hell yes. I went into this one essentially blind and was rewarded with what was nearly one of my favorite movies of the year. (The ending - the final thirty seconds, really - was total butt.) Spring starts out looking like some generic mumblecore flick about an irresponsible shithead. Then it suddenly gets scary. I mean, this had some of the most startling and jump-indcing moments I've seen all year. But just when it seems like Spring is a mumblecore movie that turned into a monster movie, that monster movie turns into Before Sunrise. It's one of the strangest genre mash-ups I've ever seen, and it works surprisingly well. I loved this! I just still hate the way it ended.

Queen of Earth

Here's the second movie in a row from Alex Ross Perry that didn't live up to the hype for me. (The last one was Listen Up Philip, which also starred Elisabeth Moss.) Oh well! Moss was great here and I'm sure this was an objectively high-quality movie; it just wasn't one I ever felt myself getting into. The premise? Elisabeth Moss gets dumped and goes to spend some time in her friend's lake house. They bicker constantly, and Moss slowly loses her mind. Not in a surreal-hey-cool-dream-sequences way, but just in a holy-shit-she's-unhinged-and-possibly-very-dangerous way. I even tried to rewatch this one, but bailed halfway through when I realized, come on, if I'm going to get to 100 movies on the year I can't be wasting time on rewatches.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I

I liked the first two Hunger Games books just did not care whatsoever about the third one. Turns out the movie was no better, especially when said movie is just the first half of said book. I'll be back for the conclusion soon enough, I'm sure, but this was a real dud.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Movie 91, y'all! And a solid one at that. This one got some acclaim a year ago and it took me until now to check it out. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play vampires in a long-distance and severely long-term relationship; he's several centuries old and she's several centuries older. What I really enjoyed here was their two characters and their relationship. This ain't your father's vampire movie, full of blood and gore and sex and such; rather, it's an exploration of what it'd be like to live for such a long damn time - especially with the same person. I mean, imagine how "over it" you'd be. Imagine how well you'd know your partner. That's more or less the gist of this movie, and I really dug it. And yes, there's an actual conflict in there too, of course.

My Mistress

I liked Venus in Fur way back in January, and I absolutely loved The Duke of Burgundy a few months ago. But apparently lightning doesn't strike thrice, as the third dominatrix-y movie I saw this year was just a big old turd. Boring and unoriginal! Forget about this one.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I love what Abrams did here. The man knows how to tease and foreshadow like no other, and that's really the best thing you can say about this movie - not really that it was awesome as a stand-alone film, but that everyone who saw it is even more pumped for Episode VIII now. And it's only a year and a half away! Hooray!

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Damn. I wanted to love this and I'm pretty sure I would have if it wasn't a Swedish film with English subtitles. This was full of dark, bleak humor. Every shot was a long one taken by a stationary camera and all the colors were intentionally drab and squalid. So this movie's quality rests almost entirely on the timing and delivery of its dialogue. I liked it, but I'm sure there were a few things lost in the translation from spoken words to written subtitles. Oh well!

Two Days, One Night

Marion Cotillard was great here - is she ever not? - but the movie itself was pretty forgettable. A mother of two is about to be laid off from her job and needs to spend her weekend lobbying her coworkers for their support. That's an interesting enough premise to hang a movie on, with some heart to boot, but I guess I'm surprised it won as many film festival honors as it did.

Goodbye to Language

Boy, this was not my cup of tea. It's an experimental video essay in the French language. I think it was meant to be seen in 3D, but I'm not sure what difference that would have made. It's a hodgepodge of footage and audio just kind of mashed together incoherently. The audio will cut out, get distorted, or get boosted to twice the volume seemingly at random and the footage is alternately oversaturated, black and white, tint-adjusted, grainy, blurry, or in crisp and stunning HD - again, seemingly at random. If movies are like books, then this was some really bad abstract poetry. So, why did I watch it? Sixty-minute run time! Four more to go!

Sisters

Saw this one in theaters with my - wait for it - sisters. Thanks to some fairly low expectations - seriously, those trailers - I was pleasantly surprised. There's nothing amazing here or anything, but it's Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and if you're not on board with that then, well, this isn't for you.

Kumiko the Treasure Hunter

While discussing Fargo recently, Sweeney brought up that some girl from Japan had misunderstood that the movie wasn't an actual documentary, and had flown all the way to Minnesota looking for the bag of money that Steve Buscemi buries in the snow by the side of the road. I was like, "Sween, hey now, come on. That's just a movie." Turns out the movie was inspired by the very urban legend Sweeney was talking about. And it was a pretty good movie! Imagine that.

The Bling Ring

This is Sofia Coppola's take on the true story of a group of Los Angeles teenagers who went around burgling rich and famous celebrities' homes back in 2008 or so. I liked this one more than I expected to, and I think a lot of that comes from Emma Watson playing "insufferable brat" extremely well. Like, don't get me wrong - all these kids were shit heads - but you're almost rooting for them to get away with it all until Emma Watson starts playing the victim. Good job, great stuff.

Whiplash

Oh fuck yeah, this makes a hundred! Figured I'd end on a high note. Whiplash isn't much more than JK Simmons berating Miles Teller with homophobic and slur-laden "tough love" in an attempt to push him to become the greatest drummer in the world. Is the attempt misguided? Probably - but Simmons justifies it soundly enough in a late monologue. Way to earn that Oscar, buddy!

Wow! Never again!

Stan's Movie Dump: November/Early December 2015

With both my semester and the year in television wrapping up, I've been pouring on the movies as of late. I'll be brief with each of these. I can't afford not to be.

Circle (2015)

A super low-budget indie flick places fifty people in a room and has them kill each other one by one through a voting process. It's like the ultimate reality show, with alliances and betrayals and a diverse array of people. Only one person can make it out alive - so who's it going to be? Anyway, it's an interesting concept, but the movie struggles to say anything clever or interesting. Bad acting and flat writing ensure that this is no future cult classic.

Scream 2

This felt a lot like the first movie with a few bigger moments but much less of the novelty.

Scream 3

And this one just kind of felt long and boring and bad.

Inside Out

Another gem from Pixar. Personifying emotions works really well, but I can't help feeling like they left a whole lot on the table here. There were so many more aspects of the mental and emotional aspects of growing up that they could have explored! Then again, this is Pixar; they weren't going to go too deep for children to follow what was going on, and they were never going to make a movie much longer than an hour-forty-five.

Why Don't You Play in Hell?

Just awesome. This one's a Japanese import, so be warned that there are subtitles. Be warned also that the first hour-twenty or so feels needlessly long and convoluted. But know that the final half hour is one of the greatest action-comedy set pieces I've ever seen. People have likened it to Kill Bill: Volume 1 and they aren't wrong to do so. Oh yeah, the premise? A group of amateur filmmakers crosses paths with two warring yakuza factions, and at the center of it all is a charming girl from a toothpaste commercial.

Dark Places

This one's based off Gillian Flynn's second novel. The book was no Gone Girl, but it had its own set of strengths. Unfortunately the same can't be said of this movie, a generic-feeling murder mystery that miscasts some pretty big names. Skip it.

Tusk

It's great to see Kevin Smith trying new things again. This movie, in which a man is transformed into a walrus, was surreal without losing sight of how stupid the premise was. This made for a movie that was both creepy and fun, if little else. Well done.

Midnight in Paris

A man on vacation in Paris goes back in time to the age of the ex-pats and meets the likes of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's thrilled to be in the city's "golden age" but his hosts don't seem to agree that this is Paris's golden age at all. To them, that's the 1800s. So the man journeys further backward - only to learn that to the people in 1800s Paris, the golden age was the Renaissance. The man then comes to the realization that nostalgia is a powerful thing, and that no matter when you live, you're likely to think of the past more fondly than your own present. It's a good moral, but the whole movie kind of feels like little more than an excuse to get there. A fun excuse, with lots of big actors playing historical figures, but an excuse all the same.

Listen Up Philip

I didn't like this one as much as I hoped to. It stars Jason Schwartzman as an insufferable self-centered writer (surprise!) and uses third-person narration to explore his downfall. I liked it just fine, but for something that showed up on a number of year-end best lists a year ago, it fell short.

God Help the Girl

I went into this one blind and it turned out to be, basically, an indie pop musical. I really liked it! Your mileage may vary.

Palo Alto

Here's another one that just didn't live up to its reputation. James Franco wrote it - or at least wrote the story it's based on - and also stars as a high school girls soccer coach. Will he end up giving into the weird sexual tension he shares with his own player, Emma Roberts? Find out!

Only God Forgives

This one got terrible reviews, but it's made by the same guy who made Drive and it also stars Ryan Gosling, so how could it be that bad? Well, I'm not sure, but it was, indeed, that bad. Just awful. Slow and confusing without any redeeming depth whereas Drive was exciting, clean, and clear. A disappointment, but not a surprise.

It's Such a Beautiful Day

This is an absurd animated movie about a guy who loses his mind and sinks into a depression of sorts. That description doesn't really do it justice - there's more to all this than that. Have you ever seen Don Hertzfeldt's work before? You probably have. If not, here's some required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuOvqeABHvQ

Phoenix
This one's already landed on a bunch of year-end best lists. It's a German film set in the aftermath of World War II and it focuses on a woman who survived the Holocaust and underwent facial reconstructive surgery. The central conflict is whether or not the woman's husband was the one who betrayed her to the Nazis. It's a slow-mover and everything about it is understated and subtle. If that's your bag, then goddamn, this is amazing. What a movie, and what an ending. But if you're like me, you might appreciate something a little quicker, brighter, fierier, louder, more explosive, what have you. I respect this movie a lot, and I absolutely understand all the love; I just can't fully co-sign myself.

The Brothers Solomon

Dumb as all hell. Will Arnett, Will Forte, Kristen Wiig - and Bob Odenkirk as the director? I had to look into this one, universal negative reviews be damned. It wasn't horrible! I mean, objectively, yeah, it was, but there were still plenty of jokes and gags that I appreciated. If nothing else, this movie was worth seeing just for the opening credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnxUBkZRBe4

I'll be back! With Star Wars! And like a dozen other movies I'm sure.

Dragon Ball (Complete Series)

I'm not happy about this either...

It's been a long journey, but I've finally finished it. The series of Dragon Ball. No, not Dragon Ball Z, just Dragon Ball. The first one. The series where Goku (our plucky, young, super-strong hero) is still just an innocent kid and not the bulked up, super-Sayain character with lightning blonde hair most people probably think about when they hear of this franchise. In fact, there's no Sayain at all in this series all together – how disappointing – but I'll get to all of that in a moment. 

Initially I was going to write this really long backstory about how I willed myself to watch all 153 episodes of this mildly entertaining children's cartoon, but then I thought... fuck it. It's the Back-Blog. Sween's watched Human Centipede. Keith and Webber have watched Knucklehead. I see that no defense is necessary in my decision. Dragon Ball seems to be an extremely popular series, and – simply put – I wanted to know why. Unfortunately, with the first series down, I'm still no closer to finding any answers to this question. 

So, what's with this story? The story follows a little boy sporting a monkey's tail named Goku. When we first meet him, we find him just chilling in the middle of the woods waiting for his grandfather to return from some sort of excursion. He's discovered by this young girl, Bulma, who's on a quest to collect all seven Dragon Balls, of which Goku is protecting one – protecting it for his grandfather, although unaware of the power that it holds. 

"What exactly are the Dragon Balls?" I hear no one asking. Great question! There's some mythical dragon that sends seven Dragon Balls scattered throughout the world. Whenever all seven are gathered together, the dragon will appear granting a wish to one person. After the wish is granted, the balls take off, scattering to the far reaches of the world and will remain as inactive stones for one year before becoming Dragon Balls again. There was also an episode that explained the reason for the wish-granting dragon's existence, but I totally forget what happened – I burned through these episodes pretty fast. 

Anywho, refusing to give away his grandfather's Dragon Ball, Goku agrees to join Bulma on her quest, bringing the Dragon Ball along with him. So begins our journey and slowly we build our main cast throughout the entire first season and are gradually introduced to additional characters throughout the later seasons. But, for the most part, the central cast is established within the first 20 or so episodes. 

Ok, so what did I think of this show? I give it two out of five thumbs up. 

There's some mild action fun, but it's found few and far between the senseless, overdramatic dribble that stretches on for episodes at a time. In fact, that might be my largest compliant with this series, that it purposely seems like it's trying to run out the clock as if it's getting paid by the minute of being on air (well, they probably are). Each time a character stumbles into a big fight, prepare yourself as that fight will likely stretch out over multiple episodes. And the more important the fight, the more episodes it will bleed over to. I think the record was something like 6 or 7 episodes to conclude Goku's fight with his main rival, Piccolo Jr. 

This whole tactic wore me down fast. You see, there's a very simple formula they use to make these fights so long. First, they would have character A gear up to do some major move against character B. Now, while character A is charging their attack we cut to other supporting characters on the sideline who add expository dialogue before character A finally performs the attack. Looooong pause as the dust settles. Finally character B climbs to their feet proving that they've survived the assault. Both characters A and B have some sort of tea-time conversation (despite them being in the middle of a life or death fight) commenting on both their attacks and blocks, which concludes with character B now commencing to charge up for their attach. Rinse and repeat until there's a victor. 

It wears you down after a while. It got to the point where I was honestly considering just watching all of the recaps that start each new episode. Sure my experience would be nothing more than the narrator saying, "Last time on Dragon Ball..." but at least it would have saved me hours of watching characters screaming at the top of their lungs while charging their super attacks. 

Now, I suppose I could get into each saga's story arc, but it basically switches from one story arc focusing on getting the Dragon Balls, to the next (when the balls are inactive for a year) where Goku is likely either training to be better or participating in this worldwide fighter championship. So, not spending any extra time discussing that crap.

The more I write this, the more I remember how tedious the show really felt. To be fair, I always played it on the background while doing other shit. I never gave it my full attention, but, then again, its doesn't ask for it. It's a dopy cartoon that was churned out at lightning speed for years on end. 

But with fans loving the next series, Dragon Ball Z, it made me think that the original should be better. Rather, it's scaring me from progressing any further. 

Shame.

And then there's this... 

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Here's one from a few years back that I was able to finish off this morning. It's an action-adventure game with lots of platforming and hand-to-hand combat and even a few puzzles. You play as Monkey, a musclebound dude recently captured by a slaver ship in some post-apocalyptic future. The ship crashes and Monkey is able to escape alongside a fellow capture - a girl named Trip. Together, they must make their way back to Trip's hometown.

But there's a catch! To ensure that Monkey won't hurt her - and moreover, that he'll help her - Trip has locked a slave headband onto Monkey's head. If Monkey strays too far away from her or lets her die, the headband will kill him.

At first this game mechanic had me wary. My least favorite part of Ico was taking care of Yorda - and who among us enjoyed carrying Princess Ruto's entitled ass around inside Jabu-Jabu? As it turned out, aside from lending the game its title, the slave crown didn't really do much. Trip and Monkey worked like a beautiful team and, sure enough, developed an admiration and respect for each other along the way. In my entire play through I think the slave crown only killed me once, and it was when I dropped Trip off of a ledge by mistake. Wouldn't virtually every other game out there give you a game over for allowing a vital NPC to die in such a way? The game's tone didn't play into any master-and-slave dynamics either - there were plenty of other tropes to hit.

When it came to gameplay, Enslaved was just fine. It was smooth and easy to control without ever lagging or glitching, and in that respect it more or less met my baseline expectations of what a video game should be. Solid all around, even if it brought nothing new to the table. An easy low-risk B-plus with ordinary gameplay, generic post-apocalyptic environments, and three memorable characters. That's right, three! In addition to Monkey and Trip, there was this guy named Pigsy who joined up about two thirds into the game and provided some very welcome comic relief.

Fire Emblem

Here's another GBA game bought for five bucks or so on my Wii U. It's Fire Emblem - not the original game in the franchise, but the first to be released in the U.S.

Y'all know by now that I'm a big fan of tactical RPGs, but honestly? This one didn't do a whole ton for me. Or at least nothing new. Its gameplay was virtually identical to Fire Emblem Awakening, which I played only a year ago, and which also had a vastly better story. Now, there's nothing wrong with a franchise keeping the same core gameplay elements from game to game, but there were three other Fire Emblem games that came out between this one and that one. That's a whole lot of same-old same-old, no?

Oh, and a shout out to the Wii U's save state feature, which easily saved me hours and hours of retrying battles. This game was no cakewalk!

Madden NFL 25

Dang. This was disappointing. Sports video games - particularly baseball and football - were a big component of my teenage video gaming years, and just as I went on a retro kick with MLB 13: The Show, I was recently overcome by the urge to purchase and play a recent Madden NFL game. This one was released two years ago; it's really Madden NFL 14, but EA got really into the idea of promoting the 25th anniversary of Madden and here we are.

I did the same thing here that I did in MLB 13: The Show; I created my fantasy team from years gone by in an attempt to finally win a championship. This process - creating my fantasy team - was arduous, hellish, and actually impossible.

I'll spare you all the details (unless someone actually asks for them) but several features in Madden 25 - namely a salary cap and a strict set of minimum roster requirements - made what should have been an hour-long process into a treacherous slog of cycling through sluggish menu screens. It took me close to five hours, and thank God I had my laptop to watch Netflix while I did it. Worst of all, I couldn't even build my entire fantasy team. Individual defensive players were just far too expensive, even after I pulled a lot of tricks I'd discovered throughout the five-hour process, and at the end of the day I had to do without the likes of Eric Berry, Brandon Flowers, Antonio Gates, and a few other big names. Oh well.

Anyway, once that process was finished, I was finally able to start my season. Except Madden NFL 25 has no season mode. It has a "connected franchise" mode in which you get to experience all the joys of being an NFL owner - like setting concession prices and threatening to move the team if no new stadium is built! This mode features a whole new slew of sluggish menus to navigate through in order to tweak your depth chart or your playbook or start playing a game.

Look, all I wanted to do was compile some 40 players or so onto one team, and then take that team and win a Super Bowl and have some fun along the way. Madden NFL 25 made the whole experience  a very trying one.

I'll cut to the chase. I did it. I went 10-6 after starting 3-4. There was a bit of a learning curve, but I ended up winning my final five games - several in comeback fashion - in order to win the NFC North and make the playoffs. (Oh yeah - I played as the Bears. Because why not?) By this point I had figured out how to play the game, at least on offense to the point where I was scoring at will, and the playoffs posed no challenge to me whatsoever. Kind of anticlimactic, really. I mean, always fun to beat Peyton Manning's Broncos, don't get me wrong. But none of this made me feel as invested as MLB 13: The Show did.

The game's default setting is to play 7-minute quarters, which is weird, since every Madden game I'd played prior to this one had a 5-minute quarter default. Here are my team's statistics, adjusted for length of game:

I had plenty more to say when I began this post. I was going to build a little narrative for my team and explain why Jay Cutler started a few games for us, and talk about who the MVPs were, and also who the unsung heroes were. I was also going to whine about three or four different aspects of Madden gameplay and complain about how broken this game still is after 25 years, and how pathetic that is.

But I don't have it in me! I just don't care enough. This game has left me feeling kind of numb toward it.

In short, I had less fun with this one than I did with Madden NFL 09 six years ago. And I had less fun with that game than I did with the PS2 titles I had back in '02, '03, and '04. And I don't think it's me! I think Madden has just slowly gotten shittier throughout the years.

Jessica Jones (Season 1)

Another rousing success to the Netflix library. Burned through Jessica Jones perhaps even faster than I did Daredevil. And while I did really enjoy Jessica Jones, how does is rank in comparison to Netflix-Marvel predecessor? While I give Daredevil a win for besting the competition in regards to action scenes, I will say this for Jessica Jones... it's got one hell of a villain. 

The Purple Man, aka Zebediah Kilgrave, aka the scariest version of the 10th Doctor you'll ever see, has to be the most terrifying Marvel villain unveiled so far. Without spoiling anything, Kilgrave has the ability to manipulate people's minds with the command of his voice. From getting people to hand over their hard-earned cash to making someone cut out their own heart, he can make people do whatever he wants. And it's truly terrifying to see the different ways he uses his power. 

What's really scary, beyond the incredible control his superpower holds, is the fact that the man behind the power is a complete and total sociopath. Literally, he has no empathy or feelings to anyone else but recognition to his own appetites and desires. At one point in the show Jones accuses Kilgrave of being a murderer – killing innocent people – to which Kilgrave responds he's never physically killed anyone himself, thus freeing him from any guilt for his actions. And, technically, he's right. As far as I could tell, he's never punched anyone or pulled a trigger... from a legal standpoint, Kilgrave is in the clear of murder charges. But, still... it's a superpower that allows him to rape people's minds with a conscience that frees him from remorse, responsibility, or guilt. That's what's truly terrifying about this villain. 

And it makes him way more compelling to watch then, oh, let's say... A giant robot that wants to rip a eastern European town out of the Earth only to smash it back into the world thus destroying modern life? Yeah, it's a fascinating character compared to some of the other stuff Marvel has shoved out there.

Mentioning Ultron does bring me to a major issue I have with these new Netflix-Marvel shows. You see, I was initially under the impression when Daredevil came out that these Netflix shows would be outside of the canon already established in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). They would be their own gritty superhero stories, buried in the back alleys and dark neighborhoods of New York's seedy underbelly. But imagine my surprise when I heard mention of the New York alien attack from Avengers in Jessica Jones (ambiguously referred to as "The Incident"). Then in a following episode, seeing a kid running around Central Park wearing a Captain America costume. Point is: I was wrong about these being separate stories. These are all in the same canon. 

Now, maybe this isn't a big deal to some of you. Maybe you're saying, "Well, of course these are in the same canon. It's Marvel, isn't it?" I would totally be on board with that except for the fact that I find it difficult to believe that in a world where we've established S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers, no one would turn and recognize there's a lunatic running about who can control people's minds. Or even going back to Daredevil, how come Kingpin never bumped into Tony Stark (or anything Stark related) at some sort of New York, high-class soirée? And there were scenes of Kingpin at these very events with billionaires and law-makers running around. 

I've heard rumors that Netflix has very specific limitations to how they refer to the rest of the MCU. For instance, they can't refer to any hero or MCU event by name (hence saying "The Incident" for the alien attack on New York or having to call Hulk as "The Green Guy"). Also, if you show any character, they can't be on screen for longer than a few seconds (like the kid in the Captain America costume who runs by the camera really quick in Jessica Jones). I have no idea on the validity to these statements, but if they are true, then it's a real head scratcher as to why you would put such limitations to anything apart of the behemoth franchise that is Marvel. 

Go figure?

Anywho, show is a certifiable blast! Despite the lamenting I did in this post, I was heavily addicted to the show and binged it in record time. Can't wait for the next Marvel series to hit Netflix so I can lose another of my weekends to it. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Hey, another Call of Duty game! This is my ninth and the blog's seventeenth overall post on the franchise, which has really evolved over the last decade or more from a mundane WWII FPS series into an absurd sequence of playable action movies. And all within the lifecycle of the Xbox 360 - impressive!

I've been away from the series for just over three years, and my last post was on the first Black Ops game. I said there that "Since these games have been just fun as hell for several years now, what it takes to set an FPS apart from the pack is, in my mind, a good story and memorable characters. Black Ops has both, and as such, it just may be my favorite Call of Duty game ever." So imagine my disappointment when Black Ops II was more frustrating and confusing than exciting and fun.

What happened? Did the franchise somehow get substantially worse here, or did I somehow change in a way that left me feeling cold this time around? Sure, I was 24 then and 27 now - married, with a house, and all that - but I really don't want to pin this one entirely on "growing out of" the Call of Duty series. I mean, I've been playing Halo 5 a lot this fall and I have no complaints at all.

Something about the way Black Ops II unfolded just left me without any investment in the story or the characters. There are eleven total missions in the game, taking place in either the late '80s or the year 2025. There are also a few special "strike force" missions that you can play. I tried one and had no idea what was going on, failing miserably. They seemed cool in concept - top-down tactical battles where you had to deploy units and assign them to defend or attack or whatever - but in practice I had no idea what was going on and my forces were immediately overwhelmed.

It turns out that these missions, along with some choices you make in the main campaign, will significantly alter the story and its ending. And hey, why not? It was 2012 and alternate endings were all the rage thanks to BioShock and Infamous and others. But where those games pulled off the idea of karmic storytelling with tact and heart, this is Call of Duty we're talking about. Decisions often boiled down to things like "kill this guy or that guy" and "spare this prisoner or don't." None of it felt like it mattered, and the story suffered accordingly. In the middle of the game there was a mission where I had to prevent a guy from kidnapping a woman from a posh island resort. It was one of the most memorable missions, but when it ended in a successful kidnapping, I thought nothing of it; these things happen in movies and Call of Duty games all the time. Only after the game ended did I remember that woman and wonder what happened to her and why the game had never revisited that particular character or plot point. It turns out that I actually could have saved her, and that doing so would have allowed her to stop a massive cyberattack, drastically changing the ending. But I had no idea I could even save her! And once she was kidnapped, she was never mentioned again - presumably killed, I guess. Who knows?

That's the level of "decision making" that Call of Duty: Black Ops II allowed. Another big turning point came when I was told to shoot a prisoner with a sniper rifle from a long way off. He had a bag over his head. I shot him in the head, because that's what you do in these games - and also in real life. It turns out that if I'd shot the guy in the arms or legs instead - critically wounding him, rather than killing him swiftly - I'd have been rewarded with a more touching post-game cutscene. Wait, what? For being shittier with my aim?

Worst of all, in one mission late in the game - in which, by the way, the enemy has infiltrated a U.S. aircraft carrier by parachuting down onto its deck (don't get me started!) - you briefly take control of the game's primary antagonist, Menendez, and you have to make a decision bout whether or not to shoot the admiral in the head. This isn't good storytelling! Let the antagonist's motives and personality be established for me, the protagonist. Don't let me role play as a bad guy and ask me to make story-altering decisions! Naturally, as a "bad guy" I chose to shoot the admiral in the head. I'm not sure what it accomplished. As the "good guys" I always chose to spare prisoners and captives when in the same situations. Why am I role playing? Why am I controlling the antagonist? If I had killed myself, as Menendez, right then and there, would I have been given a checkpoint reloading screen? Probably! Even though, logically, well, I've just subdued the threat and the game should end two levels early with a minimal loss of civilian lives. Ugh.

Story aside, this was the most frustrating Call of Duty game I've played since Call of Duty III. Three separate times, I was forced to restart the level I was playing - once due to a freeze, once due to a disc read error, and once due to a faulty checkpoint trigger. In that last case, holy shit, the game just kept reloading me into a situation where I was already in the middle of being torn to shreds by drone fire, instead of reloading with me safely behind a wall or something. Bad! Broken!

There were also something like 50 different weapons to choose from - half of them futuristic and science-fictional in nature - which meant I never really had any understanding of what I was using or how I should use it. And the grenades! Oh man, the grenades. Half of my many deaths came when grenades were thrown in my direction and the "grenade indicator" on my HUD didn't show up. Blech. Just so damn frustrating.

Three more Call of Duty games have been released since this one, and I just don't know if it's worth it for me to continue. They're all on the Xbox One and PS4, so at least playing one of them would offer me something new in that respect, but... yeesh. I just really didn't enjoy this experience, guys.

Stan's TV Dump: Mid-Fall 2015

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

Trailer Park Boys: Season 2

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

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 1

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

Trailer Park Boys: Season 3

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

Trailer Park Boys: Season 4

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

Master of None: Season 1

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

The Bastard Executioner: Season 1

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

Trailer Park Boys: Season 5

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

Trailer Park Boys: Season 6

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

The Last Man on Earth: Season 1

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

Man Seeking Woman: Season 1

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

Trailer Park Boys: Season 7

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

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

Tomb Raider (2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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