The Witness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trev's Movie Dump: October 2016

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

Swiss Army Man

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

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

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

The Others

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

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

Who knows?

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

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

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

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

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

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

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

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blech.

Archer: Season 6

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

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

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

Community: Season 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stan's Movie Dump: Late October 2016

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

No Men Beyond This Point

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

Deadpool

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

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

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

Room 237

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

13th

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

Raising Arizona

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

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

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

Cruel Intentions

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

Love

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

10 Cloverfield Lane

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

The Nice Guys

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

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

The Leftovers: Season 2

Little late at submitting this as I was nearly done watching season 2 when I was writing the post for season 1. Let's be completely honest. The only real reason I've been watching this show is out of respect for dear fellow Back-Blogger, Sween. He seems to have a true appreciation and love for this show. After catching up on both seasons currently available I can definitively say... I don't share the same love for The Leftovers.

It's very much "ok" for me. 

Season 2 continues Kevin Garvey's journey in picking up the pieces to his life after the Rapture-like event that the whole show revolves around. This season primarily focuses on the Garvey's moving to the small Texas town called Miracle -- known for having zero disappearances during the Sudden Departure -- as a new start for both him and his family. 

And, of course, just about everything goes completely wrong for them.

Let's start with the things I did like about this season. I really liked the build-ups. Seeing how Tom and Laurie move on after the Guilty Remnants and Holy Wayne, respectively. Or following Meg's climb to power within the Guilty Remnants, wondering what her masterplan might be as she marches down her dark, demented path. And watching Kevin struggle with his inner-demons all under the suspicious watch of his menacing neighbor. Aside from these set-ups that the majority of the season revolves around, I was also thoroughly intrigued by the episode where Kevin ventures into the afterlife to battle his inner-demon, Patti. Easily the best episode of the season. But I commend all these set-ups and build-ups in making the season both intriguing and fun.

Then things go horribly wrong by the end. 

Most of these set-ups fizzle out to weird, unsatisfying conclusions near the end of the season. Tom and Laurie just sort of fart around half the season when they were initially on this cool path to start a new cult or Tom possibly joining the Guilty Remnants. Then I thought Meg's story would culminate in some ballsy, violent attack making the Guilty Remnants into more of a radical-terrorist organization. Instead, they bluff their big attack yet somehow still manage to cause such a massive riot in Miracle. Then, we have Kevin. Despite having Kevin struggle so hard to return back to the land of the living, he almost instantly gets shot and killed again, plunging him back to the underworld. Despite Kevin having to struggle with all his might to leave the afterlife the first time around, he escapes the second time by... singing Karaoke? No. I don't buy it. I don't buy any of it. 

Is this the curse of Damon Lindelof all over again? To be able to kick stories off in strong, compelling ways, but then never being able to conclude them? This is the same thing that happened for me with Lost. Loved the first three seasons of it, then it just sort of fell apart after that. And the finale? Ugh... Don't get me started. 

Point is, I found this show generally fun, interesting, and engaging through the majority of the season, but the ending seemed so sloppily put together, I struggled to maintain my interest. I hope season 3 (the final season) is able to pull this show together -- especially now that they confirmed a few supernatural elements/plot lines -- better than Lindelof was able to do with Lost. 

The Dresden Files: Turn Coat (Book #11)

I'm closing in on being all caught up with the series, thus far. Book #11 out of #15. Let's get to it.

As Sweeney is currently slogging through the escapades of Chicago's favorite wizard-detective, I spare on the nitty-gritty details of the plot. 

In essence, this is a story where Dresden's rival -- a man he's butted heads with continuously since book #1 -- arrives at his doorstep, near dead, and supposedly framed for a heinous crime he didn't commit. Needless to say, both allies and foes are after this dude and Dresden is unfortunately positioned as the only person who can clear his name and save him.

This book was a lot of fun to read -- much like the others that came before it. I'm not exactly sure how it would rank amongst the ten other books in the series I've read so far, but it's definitely sitting near the top of the list. Just not the the top. I'm taking another break from the series before diving into book #12 Changes -- the book many fans seem to rank as their all-time favorite novel of the series (standing along side Grave Peril and Dead Beat). Perhaps I'll get to this guy before 2016 closes, perhaps not. One thing is for sure, I want to be in a fresh state of mind to really enjoy the next chapter in Dresden's story before embarking. 

The Shining

It's October, so why not? I went ahead and read The Shining. Now, I loved the movie. (Based on our recent Rank & File at gametimebro, I wasn't alone - everyone loves the movie.) But I've loved most of the Stanley Kubrick movies I've seen, and I've only loved - or even liked - some of the Stephen King books I've read; both are masters of their domain, but give me Kubrick's films over King's stories any day. So while I was excited to read The Shining, I was also a bit skeptical. I mean, what if Kubrick had made a gem of a film out of some very middling source material?

Well, props to King after all - The Shining was an excellent and unnerving story that I absolutely devoured. It's a bit different from the film it inspired, though not nearly as much as some would have you believe. No, it's all laid out here. Jack, Wendy, and Danny, spending a winter at a magnificent but haunted hotel - Jack gradually losing his mind, Wendy fearing for her safety and her son's, and Danny capable of zoning out into little trances ("shining") that let him see ghosts or other terrifying visions. What you get in the book that you don't get in the film - because you can develop people and places more with 650 pages than you can with two hours - are all these little character flourishes that I think greatly added to the overall story. When I watched the movie, I wasn't really invested in the family's wellbeing; when I read the book, it was about all I cared about, even knowing that things wouldn't end well.

We dive deep and learn that Jack's a terrible alcoholic, but that he's been off the sauce ever since his temper got the better of him and he broke his son's arm. He feels horrible about that, and also about losing his job as a teacher back in New England, and in a lot of ways he considers his winter caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel as his last real chance in life not to be a complete fuck up. Then you've got Wendy, who was ready to divorce Jack after what he did to Danny - and throughout the book it's clear she's never fully forgiven him for it, even though she wants to. But Wendy's got all sorts of apprehensions about wintering at a hotel cut off from civilization that have nothing to do with any fears that Jack will hurt anyone; she keeps thinking about the Donner Party having to eat one another when they ran out of food. And she's harboring some dark, ill-defined resentment toward her own mother. Meanwhile, Danny's "shining" abilities are much more pronounced here. Tony isn't a creepy little finger-based buddy he breaks out now and again, but a full-blown voice in his head that gives him premonitions and telepathic capabilities. Danny also reads his parents minds with some regularity, and knows - despite being just five - that they've contemplated divorce, for instance. And he knows his father feels terrible for breaking his arm. And so Danny is way more concerned with his parents staying together than he is about all the weird shit going on at the Overlook Hotel - at least at first.

So yeah - the book absolutely holds its own here. Plenty of the classic scenes in the movie - "All work and no play," "Here's Johnny," the twins, the maze - Kubrick added all of those, and his movie's all the better for it. But in their place, the book contains some unsettling elements of its own - a wasp attack, some animated topiary hedges, a few more ominous premonitions from Danny, a pesky boiler that doesn't maintain its internal pressure very well, and plenty else.

If I have to compare the two, I'd say Kubrick's much better at bringing the slow-burning tension to a head in a terrifying manner, but King did a much better job at establishing these characters and at making me care about them. Granted, those might just be strengths of "film" and "written word," respectively. But yeah, it's a great book.

Stan's Movie Dump: Mid-October 2016

The horror binge continues. We've got everything from classics to indies and from bloodlust to slapstick. Let's jump on in.

Trouble Every Day

Meh. This French movie about lovestruck cannibals was very highly acclaimed, so I went ahead and sought it out and, yeah, not really. Fucking arthouse... There are definitely some grossly bloody scenes here; the lines between sexual lust and a ravenous appetite are blurred, leading to some truly horrific sex scenes. But I wanted more substance!

Carrie

Wow - Stephen King's very first film adaptation. Imagine that! This was dated, as most movies from 1976 are today, but it wasn't shitty-dated. That's such an important distinction. There were some weird script decisions in this one - what's with the extended tuxedo-buying montage with all the nameless dudes? - but Sissy Spacek is great as the put-upon Carrie. She's a weird little loner at school with an abusive mother at home - and oh yeah, telekinetic powers - and on prom night she just fucking snaps and, well, that scene earns the movie its "horror" tag after an hour and a half of much more conventional high school drama. I wasn't blown away by this, but given my track record with movies from before, I dunno, my birth? This worked. This was good.

The Descent

Make it two straight posters featuring a woman covered in blood! The Descent is a modern classic - ten years old still counts as modern, right? - for good reason; it's not that it does anything phenomenally, but it does everything so well. By obeying all the conventional rules of horror filmmaking - make your victims feel trapped, use very little light, don't show the monsters at all early on - it just kind of manages to be a great exercise in genre. At the very least, it makes me never want to go into a cave, ever, for any reason. And that's what an effective horror movie does. It stays with you. Not that we should all be carrying around more phobias or anything.

It Follows

Lotta hype around this one, and I think it delivered. It wasn't quite as scary as most slasher films are, but that's totally in keeping with the gimmick of its slow-moving monster - an unspecified being who can take any form, and constantly walks toward you in order to kill you. Never running, never driving, never swimming - just walking. Stalking, deliberately. Completely epitomizes the idea of "you can run but you can't hide." You can drive a thousand miles away from this thing, but all that will buy you is time. It's still coming. It's always coming. It follows! As you can imagine, a lot of tension came from seeing people just walking toward the camera in the distance. And I haven't even gotten to the STD metaphors yet! Solid movie.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

I didn't love this. I'm all for over-the-top stupidity in slasher movies, but the plot here was just too dumb, even considering the genre. A bunch of college kids come across two well-meaning hillbillies in West Virginia, assume they're creepy serial killers through a series of misconstrued gestures and snippets of conversation, and ultimately die one by one in a series of ill-conceived attacks on the pair. It just felt too slight for me. I'm fine with absurd death scenes and ridiculous character motivations - it's horror-comedy, after all - but this, eh, less so.

An American Werewolf in London

This very pleasantly surprised me. So many horror movies - hell, so many movies in general - can maintain my interest for about half an hour or so before squandering it away and petering out. It's so often the case where the tension built up in the early going - the unsettling regression from "this is normal" to "shit, guys, this isn't normal" - is far more interesting than seeing the monster, seeing the heroes fight the monster, and so on. Not so, here! If I was bored early on during An American Werewolf in London, I was enthralled during its rising action and climax, in which our poor bastard protagonist goes on a horrifying killing spree. The effects are all kinds of dated and Jim Henson-y, particularly when it comes to animating the undead, but Rick Baker deserves kudos and praise for his then-brilliant werewolf transition sequence.

Dogtooth

This didn't wind up being "horror" in any real sense of the word, but holy shit was it disturbing. Think Room but without the kidnapping and rape and in a bigger home, but where no one ever escapes. A man and his wife have forbidden their three children - late teens to mid-twenties - from ever leaving their isolated estate. This leaves us with three young adults completely naive about the outside world, who've been brought up to believe in some really fucked up things. They're gullible as hell, and that's sad, and they're abused for disobedience, and that's horrifying, and they've got sexual curiosities, and that's - well, you get the idea. I've seen my fair share of messed up movies, so believe me when I say that this was very, very messed up. And still I kind of enjoyed it. Or at least couldn't stop watching. Looking forward to The Lobster!

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

What's cool about this black and white Iranian movie is that it's really pretty looking. The titular girl is a vampire and - this being Iran - she wears a chador, which looks so much like an old school vampire cape as she skateboards around her city at night looking for victims (dudes, it seems, and bad ones at that). Good stuff. But as with so many other subtitled movies, I couldn't fully lose myself in this one. Eh, it's an okay trade off.

Poltergeist

A while back - ten years or so? - I was talking to my dad about horror movies. He told me that this one scared the absolute shit out of him and affected his sleep for weeks afterward. It came out in 1982, which means he'd have been around my age (then) at the time - mid-college. That always stayed with me - that Poltergeist scared the hell out of my dad only six years or so before I was born. I mean, shit, this had to really be something, right? Anyway, I watched this the other night and it was a solid exercise of the horror genre - but even compared to other older horror movies I've seen, sorry Dad, but it's not clear what about this was haunting your dreams. The idea of getting sucked through the TV to another dimension? A demonic portal opening up in your bedroom? Okay, fine - there was plenty here that could scare a barely-grown man, sure. But to me this was more of a "good movie" than a "scary movie." Does that make sense?

The Shallows

I had my issues with this one - mostly factual, like how it gets tides all wrong (and tides are a major component of the story) or how certain beach-goers managed not to see the shark-ravaged carcasses of other beach-goers that had previously washed ashore - but for a quick, dumb shark movie? This was good enough. Remember in Gravity how they give Sandra Bullock the barest semblance of a tragedy that haunts her past, and then they just start flinging her around from space station to space station and her increasing will to survive is supposed to seem like character development? Yeah - take exactly that, set it on rocky outcrops and buoys instead of in outer space, and that's The Shallows.

V/H/S

This was very effectively scary, but also very bad. It's an anthology of five short "films" (all found footage) in which weird and fucked up things start happening to regular people. Some of the shorts were quite effective - the first one in particular had a generic but visually horrifying and memorable monster and the third and fourth ones made for some really good mindfucks - but the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and the sum of those parts isn't even all that much anyway. V/H/S was good for some quick scares but not much else; that said, it's Halloween - what more do you want than a few quick scares?

Holy smokes, a three-post month? It's happening!