Cross Fire

It all ends here.

Friday Night Lights

In the past year or so I've finished off the tv series Friday Night Lights, which I believe was based off of a movie Friday Night Lights, which itself was based off H. G. Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights. FNL the book covers many of the same concepts that I saw in the show, but what's really noteworthy here is the difference in tone. The television series takes place in fictional Dillon Texas, which on the surface represents a fair comparison to the book's very real Odessa Texas- a town out in the middle of nowhere in western Texas where high school football reigns supreme. While it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking the tv series glorifies escaping your small town roots and getting out to see the world beyond high school football, it really should be viewed on a case by case scenario- we're ok with the fact that Tim Riggins is still living in Odessa at the end of the series, and I think everyone who grew attached to the show wishes Coach Taylor had done the same. What's more, the show really does glorify high school football as being more than a game- it's a place where Coach can help mold young men's minds using lessons that would never work in a classroom. It's in these regards that the book and the series differ. While Bissinger claims to have fallen in love with Odessa by the end of the book, the preceding 350 pages are a harsh critique of an awful, backwards town full of racism and misplaced values, where the heroes are the ones who try to get out. The lessons learned on the gridiron at best amount to vague ideas of 'brotherhood' that few can even agree on. Take, for instance, the star linebacker Ivory Christian who struggled throughout the season with whether it's even worth it to remain on the team, ultimately deciding that anything that gets him closer to a college scholarship is worth it. Or Boobie Miles, the superstar running back who had college recruiters knocking down his door until he tore his ACL in his senior year, resulting in a painful departure from the team and a lengthy feud with the entire town of Odessa. The population of Odessa appears to be completely misguided in so many different ways- the racism is constant and casual; they rise and fall economically with the oil industry but never seem to learn any lessons from it; they place a much greater emphasis on high school athletics than education. Seriously, this book is not about a community putting aside differences to root for a football team; it's about the football team exacerbating existing problems, and was quite a shock after enjoying the feel-good tv series. It's a thought-provoking piece of journalism, and an afterword written ten years after publishing serves as a nice justification for writing the book in the first place- Bissinger returns to Odessa and finds that the controversy the book created has led to a more diminished fan-dom of the football team; it's a nice closing to see that a town that had basically gone football crazy was slowly but surely turning itself around.

Les Misérables

At long last, here it is. I've loved Les Misérables (the musical) for a very long time, and had often considered reading Victor Hugo's source material but always wound up balking due to its extreme length of 1460 pages and 365 chapters. That's a year-long book if you're reading a chapter a day! I ended up finally getting the book last Christmas and began reading it in either March or April. I continued the effort intermittently - a few days "grinding" my way through a couple hundred pages or so, then a few weeks off - before finishing it off once and for all earlier tonight. I enjoyed it, but not any more than I expected to. It would have needed to be an incredibly poorly written book or me to dislike it since I already loved the story and the characters so much. And it wasn't! It was 19th century literature, and you all know how much I've struggled with that stuff in the past. But this was actually one of the better-written "older" books I've read. Maybe some of that is due to the translation from French to English. Maybe Hugo's just a good writer. I'll never know, but it's not really that relevant anyway. The big question, I suppose, is whether or not the novel lived up to its own musical. Obviously, there was a lot more going on in the 1460-page book than could fit in the four-hour musical. But plenty of that extra stuff was historical context and filler. I mentioned in my Moby-Dick post that Melville would go off on philosophical tangents throughout the narrative in a way that was very provocative and well-written, but also in a way distracted heavily from the story at hand of Ahab and the whale. Hugo definitely has a similar flair for philosophy and "larger picture" reflection, but his tangents on concepts like love, rebellion, revolution, and society were all much more in tune with the stories of Jean Valjean, Javert, Cosette, and Marius. I didn't necessarily find it interesting when Hugo would spend fifty straight pages recounting a certain battle of the Napoleonic Wars that didn't involve any characters from the rest of Les Misérables, but at least I understood that he was just doing his part to provide a tonal and historical background for revolution in France. (This was written in 1862, after all, well before curious readers could go read about world history on Wikipedia.) Nonetheless, there was plenty of relevant character background and development in the book that was absent in the musical version of the story I've become so familiar with. So I guess ultimately I treated the novel like an extended edition of the musical. If you're unfamiliar with Les Misérables in general, I don't think this novel is the right place to start. The musical is amazing, and now, at long last, there's an official release date (December 2012) attached to a film version of the musical. Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, and Geoffrey Rush? If I wasn't sold already, I'd be sold five times over with that cast on board.

Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball

With my girlfriend out of the house tonight, I figured it was a perfect time to do a little bit of logging. (And making grilled cheese sandwiches.) Here's another really short and mostly pointless game from the Sonic Mega Collection. In case it wasn't totally obvious already, it's a Sonic pinball game. ("Spin"-ball - get it?) There's not a lot to say here. The game consists of four gigantic pinball tables that you must traverse by, well, playing pinball. Each table has a boss fight that only gets unlocked after you collect three chaos emeralds scattered around the table, and all of the boss fights more or less consist of bouncing your Sonic-ball off Robotnik's head. I have to say, at least this pinball spin-off makes sense; way too many video game franchises have received pinball spin-off games - Mario, Pac-Man, Metroid, Kirby, Pokémon - and at least Sonic has always been a fast-moving ball-shaped character. So the concept doesn't even feel like much of a stretch in this case. The game couldn't have taken me much more than an hour to beat, and there are plenty of YouTube videos of tool-assisted ten-minute runs; I didn't exactly relieve myself of an enormous burden by beating this game. Still, a logging is a logging, and the backlog is now another step closer to completion.

Blindness

Sweeney enjoyed this book, I found this book on a "best books of the 20th century" list, I bought this book for six dollars. Sweeney has already explained the gist of the book, everyone goes blind suddenly, the blindness spreads like a pandemic, Will our seven unnamed heroes survive? If you're wondering why I'm using such piss-poor grammar, It's because this is the way Saramago writes, using sentence fragments, Lots of commas, few conjunctions, no quotation marks, Sometimes capitalization of the first word in a fragment. This was easily my biggest problem with the book, A decent book otherwise, Not an easy book to read, Who is talking? No one knows who is talking. No characters are named, no quotation marks are used, the dialogue flows freely and chaotically, I suppose there's an element of style to that, But still that is annoying. Sadly I cannot say I loved this book, the concept was nice, the characters well-made, But why the piss-poor grammar? Originally written in Portuguese, the book could have been much easier to read and digest had the translator done the reader a favor by beating the shit out of the narrative with some serious Strunk & White. But no, the aimless syntax remains, I can't say I enjoyed it, I'm glad Sweeney did at least. This will be my last attempt at Saramago, maybe I'll see the Blindness movie, hard to imagine that version of the story giving me headaches and confusion.

My Name Is Earl: Season 3

Well, that was terribly uninteresting. After two seasons of Earl, I was ready for the show to deviate from its formulaic tendencies. And when Season 2 ended with Earl getting incarcerated, I was hopeful that a shake up would make Season 3 into something more than a series of "Earl rights a wrong he did unto another in his past" episodes. But you know that adage about being careful what you wish for? It applies here. This season occurred during the writers' strike, and there are two pretty distinct "halves" that it was split into. The first half consisted of Earl doing hard time. The post-strike half saw him get hit by a car and go into a coma. The prison half was a deviation from the norm that sort of worked and sort of didn't. The second half was a real chore to get through, even on DVD with an Internet-connected laptop in front of me capable of providing me all kinds of distractions. I don't want to imply that Earl turned into a bad show during Season 3. I just think this is the season when it became clear that the potential the show once had (but had never quite lived up to for more than an episode or two at a time) would never end up fulfilled. You know how it is. Something is so-so, but you've convinced yourself it can be more than so-so, and then when you finally realize it's only so-so, you almost overcorrect yourself, pretending that it's less than so-so. (I've been here before, notably with J.D. Drew and the Greek pizza place up the street.) But ultimately, Earl is so-so. It isn't terrible. It just isn't great, either. Thus, I'll head into the final season with no expectations whatsoever.

Cronos

Guillermo del Toro is recognized as one of the main powerhouses here in Hollywood. More than just being praised as a true visionary genius... he's got more money than God and - at this very second - is producing a baffling number of movies (Spielberg baffling). Aside from Pan's Labyrinth, I'm not a huge fan of his movies (movies = meh; character design = un-fucking-believable); however, people have kept telling me, "Oh, but have you seen Cronos, his break-out film? That shit's off the chain!" Well, maybe they don't quite sell it like that, but I have had several recommendations to check this guy out... and seeing as how I seem to be the B-horror nerd here, it's my duty to enlighten the rest of you simpletons of my findings.

As I've said - or as others have said to me - this was del Toro's first film. And like most major directors of today, his debut was in the horror genre. Actually, horror might be a bit of an overstep here. This film is not scary, even in the slightest. In fact, there really is no attempt to even try and be scary. On the contrary... it's heartwarming. Here's the plot: In Mexico (or was it Spain?)... In some country where people lack Burger King and speak Spanish, an old antique dealer discovers one of his statues is secretly hiding this fancy-looking gold device - Cronos. With his granddaughter by his side, the old man begins tinkering with the device until some sharp prongs pop out of it and pierce into his hand. The guy's fine... no harm; but next morning he wakes to find he's healthier, younger in fact. Turns out this device is home to some weird-ass bug that somehow sucks in your blood, filters it, and injects it back into you making you super healthy... actually it makes you immortal. The old man finds this out when Ron Perlman (some thug sent out by his dying, rich uncle to find this legendary device) runs the man's car off a cliff and kills him. The old man then awakes in a funeral parlor to find he's all zombified and gross, but never-the-less alive. The film finishes up where the man, with the help of his granddaughter, returns to the dying uncle who wants this Cronos device where they - and Ron Perlman - duke it out, and the film pretty much wraps up from there. (Even though I doubt anyone will see this - who knows? maybe you have already - I'll keep myself from spoiling the ending.)

Now, while the film revolves around this undead protagonist who needs to drink fresh blood to live (oh, yeah... probably should have mentioned that earlier) this is really a sweet film about the relationship between this man and his granddaughter (who also never once freaked out when she saw her granddad show up at her front the day after they buried him all decomposing and shit... I guess that's true love?). Anyways, it's because of this relationship that I back away from calling this a horror. It's actually endearing to see the grandfather look out for the kid in the beginning, then seeing how the girl cares for her grandfather near the end when he needs help after returning to the world of the living.

But let's cut to the chase... did I like this movie? Just like most of del Toro's other flicks, it's a "meh". Aside from Ron Perlman (this man is the shit, and if you haven't seen Drive in theaters yet... see it) the movie didn't do a whole lot for me. It was well made for the indie that it is and has a fairly interesting premise, but I wasn't really that captivated by it... just like all of del Toro's other movies (sans Pan's Labyrinth). However, next year he's coming out with Pacific Rim (some movie about aliens and fighter jets, I think?) and it's got Charlie Day in it. Enough said. I'll be there.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Well, here's my first taste of just straight up not liking a Saramago book. Like the previous three (Blindness, Seeing, The Stone Raft) it has a simple and interesting hook- a proofreader working on a non-fiction books called The History of the Siege of Lisbon deliberately adds a single word, thus changing the entire meaning of the book. As a parallel to this story, Saramago offers up his own interpretation of what happened during the siege of Lisbon, chastising the proofreader's inability to get it right, resulting in three different levels of meta-story that I'd normally eat up and beg for more. But I don't know, something about the tone here just didn't sit quite right with me. The run-ons and lack of punctuation that usually work fine seemed especially grating, and the interesting concept didn't end up going in any particularly interesting directions. I'd normally blame this on History being one of Jose Saramago's first books- perhaps he simply hadn't perfected his writing style- but this came out a few years after The Stone Raft, which, while odd, I found at least decent. Well, there's 8 more Saramago books on my Kindle, so unlike before I'm going to temper my expectations from the rest of them, aside from maybe the one Stan commented on- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

Assassin's Creed

The Assassin's Creed universe is expanding pretty quickly lately- this year will mark the third in a row with a full console game coming out for the holiday season. I really enjoyed Assassin's Creed 2 when I played it nearly 2 years ago, but if I have any hopes of catching up by the time Assassin's Creed 3 rolls around, I had to get the original Assassin's Creed out of the way quickly. For those who don't know, the background behind the series isn't to simply play as an assassin in a few different time periods, although that is the real meat of the game. The actual protagonist isn't simply Altair during the Crusades in Assassin's Creed or Ezio in 2, but Desmond Miles- a modern day supposed last living descendant of an order of assassins stretching back throughout history, who is being hunted down by the Knights Templar and forced to relive 'genetic memories' in a machine called the Animus to aid in their nefarious schemes. This provides an interesting framework for the game- for instance, the player doesn't have a health bar, but a 'syncing' bar- the better he follows along with Desmond's genetic memory of Altair, the better he syncs, but messing up (getting hurt, killing innocents) can deplete the bar to a point where Desmond literally needs to 'reset' the Animus. I found it an interesting way of tackling certain video game tropes- Desmond doesn't die, he 'resets.' Don't want Altair to reach a certain part of the city? That section of memory is 'locked.' Of course it all revolves around an interesting but completely bananas storyline about the end of the world in 2012, but it's told in such a fresh way that it manages to overshadow the innovative core gameplay. So many third-person adventure games tack on unnecessary stealth missions that break up the flow of the game, but Assassin's Creed manages to make the stealth angle feel so natural that normal combat begins to feel out of place- the high points of the game involve running undetected across rooftops and swooping in for a one-shot kill, while the low points involve long-winded counter-heavy battles that really only come about after the player has made a mistake and finish with little payoff. The game certainly had a bit more structure here than 2, it reminded me of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes's ability to make some sense out of a giant environment compared with Metroid Primes's freewheeling exploration- there may be a little less sense of wonder, but it provides you with an easy way of keeping track of progress, which becomes more important with more backlogging. The scenic viewpoints I liked in 2 were handled better here too- although there was less variation of towers to climb, they actually played an important and fun factor in the gameplay rather than being a slightly more interesting collectible for OCD completionists. That said, there are just so many huge improvements made between here and Assassin's Creed 2 for me to call it the better game- some fun platforming sub-levels, a fantastic economic system, and frankly 2 ran a lot faster and smoother. So while Assassin's Creed has a few things going for it, it wasn't until its sequel that things really kicked into high gear and became must-play.

My Name Is Earl: Season 2

I'm halfway through this series now, and frankly, I'm not in love with it. That's okay, of course. Not every show out there is a gem, and someone who wastes as much money and time on DVD sets as I do is well aware of this before every purchase. Earl is decent. It's funny enough to be the kind of show I sued to watch now and again (but not regularly) and the characters are likable and unique enough to keep you coming back for more. (Because our affinity for certain characters, more than anything, is what keeps us coming back for more TV. Right?) But if the characters in Earl are the show's biggest strength, then the show's inability to find a tonal center for itself is its greatest weakness. The show started out with a formulaic premise - Earl has made a list of all the bad things he's ever done, and one by one, he's making amends and crossing items off the list. Easy enough. The show has stayed consistent in its overall "purpose" in Season 2, but the writers have now begun to dabble in longer story arcs. Because of this, Earl's list often takes a backseat to, say, Joy's court date or Randy's affections for a motel cleaning lady. I'm fine with this. By paying less attention to the list and Earl's karmic quest for redemption, the show is capable of being much funnier and expanding its scope much more. That said, this new and expanded approach in Season 2 only made the list-centric episodes all the more boring and one-note by contrast. I should point out that I sued to occasionally watch Earl in college, but only in this second season. The remaining two seasons on DVD, then, are still complete mysteries to me. The only thing I know is that the show got canceled after the fourth season, and that the fourth season's finale was in no way an adequate series finale. I've also heard there's a huge deviation from the "Earl's list" format coming up in Season 3 that left some people satisfied and some people wondering what the hell was going on. And based on the way this season ended, I've got my guesses - as well as my own suspicions regarding whether or not I'll enjoy it. Time will tell!