Crackdown

So in a wonderful face-saving PR stunt, Microsoft is offering one free game every fifteen days to gold Xbox Live subscribers. And these aren't just gimmicky DLC games, but older full-fledged releases, it seems. This much is awesome. What isn't awesome, from a backlog perspective, is just how quickly these free releases will build up in my backlog. But, hey, a free game is a free game, and if part of my rationale for the concept of backlog-clearing is an idea that buying new games is a waste of money, then there's no good reason to avoid a free game. Right?

Crackdown was great. It's an older game from 2007 that I'd never even heard about before downloading it, but I'm thoroughly impressed. It took about twelve hours to beat, but two or three of those hours were wasted just dicking around in the wide open sandbox environment. The story is extraordinarily simple, and almost nonexistent. Violent gangs have taken over the city, and you, a special agent with superhuman capabilities, are tasked with cleaning them out and off the streets one by one. There are three gangs, each controlling a distinct and separate part of the city. Each gang has seven leaders, including one kingpin. These leaders are heavily guarded in fortified sections of the city - parking garages, sports arenas, caves, towers, mansions, shipyards, and so on. You don't need to eliminate the leaders in any specific order, but its wise to go after the six non-kingpin leaders before taking on the kingpin himself, as each leader's defeat weakens the kingpin's fortified defenses in a different way. Fewer guards, guards have fewer weapons, guards may turn on each other, guards stop using vehicles - that sort of stuff. I really came to appreciate the very different ways you could take on the various leaders, and I applaud the game design for giving you several distinct options without making you specifically choose one from a dropdown menu, or something similarly unengaging. If you feel like climbing up a large building for a minute by scaling the walls, go ahead. If you'd rather sneak in and take on a few guards at once, quietly, good for you. If you want to head right in chucking grenades and shooting from the hip... don't do that, I guess.

In many ways the game reminded me of Infamous and Grand Theft Auto. It lacked the characterization and storytelling of the former and the mission variety of the latter, but it had the WRPG elements of the former (level up your skills by using them) and the driving-around-and-shooting-guns aspect of the latter. I was able to get four of my five core skills (agility, weapons, explosives, and strength, but not driving) to a four-star rating by spending a few extra hours attacking hapless gang members. (They max out at five stars, I think.) This "grinding," though helpful, was probably unnecessary, as the final boss's stronghold - while awesome to play through - was fairly easy for me. I mean, I did die plenty of times throughout the game, but almost always because I got overambitious in firefights or fell from enormous heights.

The game wasn't perfect, by any stretch. One notably irritating aspect came whenever I'd fall down, often from an explosion or melee attack. You're stuck on your back for about two seconds, no matter how frantically you push buttons, during which time you're still susceptible to attacks. This meant that falling down almost always puts you in much deeper trouble than it should in a game where your character is ostensibly a superhuman. And sometimes the climbing elements of the game felt underdesigned. I can't even remember how many times I leaped from one building to another, only to miss it completely and not grab onto any of the various ledge-like protrusions from that building's facade. And driving? I never drove. Driving was just awful, thanks to some shoddy controls. Overall though, these were very acceptable flaws given how much pure fun I had with the rest of the gameplay. Great call by Microsoft, releasing this for free; now I'm fairly likely to look into Crackdown 2.

Oh, and Keith and Sween - I'm totally down to play this with one of you guys co-op style. I imagine my presence early on in your games would give you access to some great weapons, and frankly, I could use some more achievements for doing driving-related stuff. Consider it!

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Six months ago, I began a stretch where I watched what was basically the entire Wes Anderson filmography. The lone exception - aside from The Life Aquatic, which I'd already seen - was Fantastic Mr. Fox. There were a variety of reasons I didn't include it during my Wes Anderson kick. For one thing, I'd kind of already seen it before, in the way that falling asleep ten minutes into a movie counts as kind of seeing it. But mostly I just figured an animated movie was an outlier of sorts, and one that couldn't quite exude much of a tone or personal feel to it. I mean, quick, name the director of any popular animated movie ever made. Maybe that's an easy task for some of you, but I'm totally drawing blanks here.

How wrong I was, though. This was such a Wes Anderson movie, from its zippy energy to its eclectic soundtrack. And it was a pretty entertaining movie, too. It isn't easy to fit a ton of recurring motifs and throw-away joke callbacks into a ninety-minute film based on a children's book. George Clooney absolutely nails the title role. I don't care if it's just his voice; it was a wonderful Clooney performance. And for the second Wes Anderson film in a row, I've got to give tons of credit to Jason Schwartzman for his work as well.

I found my interest waning just a tiny bit in the movie's third act, but all in all this was another great movie from Wes Anderson. And now there are no more for me to see. Until the next one, I guess. Here's looking forward to The Grand Budapest Hotel. God, what a Wes Anderson title for a movie to have.

Under the Dome

So that took forever.

I began reading Under the Dome back in May, and with one lone exception it has been the only thing I've been reading all summer long. Now, the book is over a thousand pages long, so in some ways the three-month slog through it is defensible and justifiable. On the other hand, last year between May and July I read twelve books totaling around six thousand pages. Granted, those books were not this book and that summer was not this summer and maybe this isn't a fair comparison to make at all, but it's tough not to look at those two summers drastically different outcomes and not pin it largely on a complete lack of interest in Under the Dome. Yet, already I feel I'm being unfair toward Stephen King once again on this blog, and I haven't even levied any specific criticisms at the book yet.

I don't want to be the anti-Stephen King guy. My literary tastes aren't all that refined, and I feel like the worst kind of book snob with these underwhelmed reactions to works of his that were beloved - or at least be-liked? - by others here on the blog. But here I am, through yet another Stephen King story, just not as impressed as I want to be.

The funny thing is, this wasn't even a bad book. It had its flaws, sure, but so do most thousand-page sagas. And it's not like this one was preceded by a lofty reputation; its ending is widely reviled and the new CBS show based on it has been terrible. Still, I get the sense that this was a real page-turner for most people, and that readers by and large were excited to find out what happened next to the little town of Chester's Mill. This just wasn't the case for me. For three months I've been pushing through this one, and only briefly did I consider it a page turner.

For the sake of being positive, let me highlight the three instances where reading the book was a genuine pleasure and not a chore. Light spoilers, going forward. First, I plowed through the first hundred-plus pages in one sitting. These pages laid the foundation for the book ahead, and introduced the central premise of the book - a giant dome appears out of thin air one day and traps a small town - before even introducing any principal characters. Planes crash, limbs are severed, and there are car accidents aplenty. All of this was gruesome and even fairly repetitive, but it made for such easy reading. One thing Stephen King does about as well as any author I've read is making horrible things happen almost spontaneously. Chaos, from nowhere. Reading about the dome's appearance and the initial reactions to it wasn't thought-provoking by any stretch, but it was good, simple, page-turning fun.

Second, there was a chunk of maybe fifty to a hundred pages in the middle somewhere that described a supermarket riot and a few events going on around town in parallel. This felt pitch perfect to me. A crowd gathers, some overzealous policemen let too much power go to their heads, a mob breaks out, and before long some people are critically wounded and the town's spirit has been broken and martial law becomes the new standard. Meanwhile while no one is watching, the book's antagonist puts his chess pieces in place, so to speak - a murder here, a framing there - to facilitate a coup d'état of sorts. And way off in the background, three teenagers explore the woods looking for the source of the dome's power, and wind up making some pretty substantial discoveries. Here, more than anywhere else in the book, it really felt like Stephen King knew what he was doing. Everything felt connected throughout this section of the book. Once again, I think it comes down to King's mastery of chaotic upheaval. You knew things at the supermarket wouldn't turn out well long before the civil unrest began. Of course, this is probably because King abruptly said things would go bad in that deadpan foreshadowing way he has, but it was an entertaining and interesting segment of the book nonetheless.

And lastly, I was glued to the pages when - and I'm only now noticing this pattern of being attracted to King's flare for chaos - the book ends with a climactic firefight and ensuing meth lab explosion that incinerates most of the town and fills the local sky with poisonous gas. The book has plodded along now for over nine hundred pages and three months, only occasionally being a "page turner," and suddenly everyone dies! There are twenty-eight survivors in a town of two thousand. Heavy! And just as our final group of survivors is choking down oxygen and barely clinging to life, the town newspaper editor communicated telepathically with a teenage alien girl and the dome goes away because hey it's Stephen King and it's time to end the story and why not do it in the worst way possible?

Honestly, the "aliens did it!" ending didn't even bother me very much. This was a book about normal people put in an abnormal situation and "how did it happen?" was never nearly as interesting a question as "how did they respond?" King once said in an interview something like, "My books have endings for the same reason we all wear pants; it's just the way people do things," pretty much tacitly admitting that he's terrible at coming up with satisfying conclusions to his story. And yeah, this was a real stinker of an ending. But I'm not even as disappointed by the supernatural out-of-left-field explanation about the dome's origins as I am by the abrupt killing off of 99% of the town's population. I mean, I was shocked when it happened, and I kind of loved how shocked I was, but it came after hundreds and hundreds of pages of what I found to be pure tedium. I suppose my biggest and simplest complaint about the book was that there wasn't nearly enough action, or perhaps more specifically that the action was lumped into a few huge moments separated by all sorts of superfluous chapters where nothing substantial happened. There were a dozen chapters in this book told from the point of view of dogs. Dogs!

So that's my takeaway, I guess, and it's ver much become my default takeaway to Stephen King fiction: great ideas and great set pieces buried under too much banality. I need a break from this guy if I'm ever going to enjoy reading him. That means it'll probably be a while before I pick up The Dark Tower III, but hey - I'd rather be good and ready for what's allegedly the best book in that series than try to force my way into it, and then, reluctantly, through it. We'll see!

30 Rock: Season 7

So here's the final shortened season of 30 Rock, a show about which I've written plenty over the years. Suffice it to say, the final season hit all the right notes and the show went out on top, which is more than too many other shows can say, particularly after seven years. Which reminds me - seven years? I know I jumped into 30 Rock two years in, but still, where did those seven years go? With most other long-tenured shows, you can recall them in chunks and eras. Casting changes, tonal shifts, memorably good or bad story arcs. None of this is the case with 30 Rock, which from start to finish has been a gag-a-minute show with consistent characterization and very little aspiration to be anything beyond funny. I don't mean that negatively, either. Some of the funniest shows on TV - Always Sunny, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The League, and Archer, to name a few - strive for humor without even a hint of heart. But those shows are all on cable networks. Maybe it's not even a fair comparison, as the people in those shows are, for the most part, rotten to the core, while those in this show are simply cartoonish. All I'm saying is that 30 Rock never tugged on heartstrings the way many of its basic network peers (The Office, Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, Scrubs - hell, even Community) did or still do. This was a workplace comedy without any workplace romances, a smart sitcom that was as comfortable going for obscure reference gags as it was schilling out lowbrow slapstick.

It was never my favorite show on television, and realistically I only ever gave it a chance because I watched so much other Thursday night TV and felt like bridging the gap between 9:30 and 10:00 in my pre-DVR days. I will not "miss" 30 Rock in any sense of the word this upcoming year. I never thought the show was worthy of the sheer extent of praise and love it received, particularly from the Emmys, but hey, that's TV people loving TV shows about TV people for you. Still, here I sit after seven seasons, and I can't really think of a negative thing to say about 30 Rock. That's not true. The first season was terrible. But growing pains aside, that's six quality seasons from a show that never wore out its welcome. The list of shows that can boast the same accomplishment is very small indeed. The Sopranos? Breaking Bad, if you consider its two-part fifth season to be two separate seasons? I dunno, anyone out there have any others for the list?

Perfect Dark

Perfect Dark is a game that will forever be linked to the classic GoldenEye, and for good reason- both were FPSes made by Rare that were basically the only game in town if you were trying to play on a console. They even had a few of the same levels in multi-player. I had never played any of its main campaign before, so when the sequel (prequel?) Perfect Dark Zero was given to me by Trev in his big stack of games I knew I'd have to download a port and play the original first. Overall, it was pretty decent. It's hard to ask for much from a first person shooter that's like 15 years old; unlike platformers, puzzle games, or RPGs, they usually show their age horribly. The good news is that like the previously-logged Doom, Perfect Dark felt less like a test of shooting accuracy and more like a first-person adventure with some shooting thrown in to keep things interesting. Compare it to the FPS games of today like Halo and Call of Duty that basically boil down to nothin' but headshots, and it's hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for these types of games. Why did shooter/puzzle/adventure hybrids not take off? We had the Metroid Prime and Portal series, but surely even more can be done there. Anyway, I'm rambling. Perfect Dark is nowhere near as good as any game in either of those series. You run around and shoot things, you act stealthy, you ride a hoverbike briefly. Think GoldenEye plus aliens and you've got the right idea. Hopefully Perfect Dark Zero makes more of an impression on me.

The Tree of Life

I know a guy who considers this one of his favorite movies of all time, and some kind of beautiful religious experience. Popular opinion has cast it off as two hours of pointless whispering in front of pretty shots. My thoughts lie somewhere in the middle. Had I not been unwisely caffeinated last night, there's no way I ever would have made it through the two-plus-hour movie without falling asleep. It really is just a bunch of whispering most of the time. There is also no discernible plot whatsoever. I can easily see how so many people could despise a movie like this. Some days, I could even be one of them.

But last night, for whatever reason, this movie just worked for me. I'm not ready to call it the greatest thing I've ever seen, or even the best movie of 2011 (Drive, no question), but consider me aligned with the "yeah, this is a good movie" camp. The question is, why? I think I'm just impressed with how well the movie manages to be about all the things it tries to be about. It's about life, family, space, and time. It's about spirituality. It's about childhood and the loss of innocence. Regret, too, maybe. And possibly heaven? I'm not even sure. But there are dinosaurs in it. And lots and lots of beautiful footage. And this movie is able to be about all of these things and include all of these things because it has no plot. No plot whatsoever, and very little dialogue.

But it worked. For me, at least. Last night, at least. If you've got the patience - not the temporal patience, as it's only two hours long - but the kind of patience that lets you just sit there and take in a movie where very little happens but everything is beautiful, give this a try. It's visual poetry, and not all poetry is for everyone.

American History X

The title changes hands constantly, but here, once again, is the oldest movie in my backlog. It's an older one, from 1998, that I've been meaning to see for at least a decade. Somewhere over the years, I'd seen its two most infamous scenes - the curb stomp and the prison rape - but there was plenty more discomfort in store for me when I finally popped the movie into my PS3 a few nights ago.

Contemporary racism is a tough film subject to tackle. Look at all the melodrama that made Crash the worst "Best Picture" winner in ages.  Look at Gran Torino, which started out with an amazingly honest portrayal of an old bitter racist and wound up with such a wasted, banal ending - and one that didn't even jibe with the established characterization. Look at Bamboozled. Look at White Chicks. (Just kidding. Don't ever look at White Chicks.) Just by making a movie about racism in America this side of the Civil Rights Movement, you invite all kids of scrutiny from different angles. Have you made too many stereotypes? Are your characters unrealistic straw men? Have you somehow "missed the point" or otherwise been tone deaf about the whole thing? Did your movie piss off black people? Did it piss off white people? And so on and so forth.

At any rate, American History X is remarkably straightforward. A devout neo-Nazi attacks some black guys in the process of stealing his truck; he kills one; he's sentenced to three years in jail; he enters hardened, but pisses off his fellow neo-Nazi inmates; they rape him; he befriends a black guy; he emerges from jail a changed man, ready to move on and away from his hatred and his anger; his story has a profound effect on his little brother, who also decides to cut ties with neo-Naziism. There are no frills here, and the movie lays everything out with a bare minimum of supporting characters and secondary plots. There's no subtext. It's blatant and wide open, showing all of its cards from the get go. And I liked that. The movie wasn't perfect by any stretch, and in particular it could have used ten more minutes developing the "in prison change of heart" aspect of the story; merely getting butt raped and befriending one black guy shouldn't be enough to change a hardened neo-Nazi's entire worldview.

Still, it's never preachy. The film doesn't take a holier-than-thou approach and try to explain some sort of solution to racism. It also presents the main character as relatively complex. We see flashbacks that give us insight as to why he turned to neo-Naziism in the first place. In high school, he was just a normal kid. But his dad was a little racist, and then his dad got killed by some black guys, and, well, that was that. The movie just churns along, straightforward and without any misdirects, but then, it's kind of endearing for doing so. Every new scene arrives exactly when it needs to in order to keep things moving. It's a flawed movie, but one that lived up to and even exceeded my ten-years-in-the-making expectations.

Finally, see this movie if for no other reason than Edward Norton's performance.

JFK

I'm not a big conspiracy theorist for the most part. The official September 11th story doesn't add up quite perfectly for me, but I'm content enough not to assume much else. And the anti-moon landing crowd? No thank you, not for me. But damn, does this movie lay out a compelling argument for being suspicious about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Granted, it's a heavily fictionalized look back at a semi-recent historical event, so it can't all be taken at face value. Still, watching the movie convinced me to do a little basic Internet research and frankly the case seems about as wide open today as it was fifty years ago from an evidence-and-explanation standpoint.

Funny thing is, I went to Dealey Plaza less than a year ago while visiting a friend in Dallas. I did the whole Sixth Floor Museum, listened to the audio tour, saw the footage, the whole deal. And while it was all very interesting stuff, I never really considered any of the "alternative" opinions. I accepted the museum's story - that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and shot three bullets - without any real doubt. And here I am, eight months later, having been presented a very different account of what happened, filled with all kinds of questions and skepticism. I suppose I have a very weak mind that is easily influenced by history museums and political thrillers.

But enough about the facts themselves. Let's close up here by talking about the movie. While I was thoroughly interested by the movie by its end, I must admit, I was more than a little bored throughout its three-and-a-half-hour run time. Aside from the climactic courthouse scene and a fifteen-minute segment somewhere in the middle where Donald Sutherland appears out of nowhere, starts dishing out the "who," "how," and "why" of the Kennedy assassination, and disappears just as abruptly, I really can't pretend I was that invested in the movie. All the same, it's worth a watch, even if you just check out the decent parts on YouTube or something.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 7

Time for a little Friday evening workplace post.

Always Sunny is about to enter is ninth season, and as with any long-running sitcom it has put forth its fair share of hits and misses over the years. I wasn't a huge fan of the show's most recent season, but I just re-watched Season 7 and enjoyed it a great deal the second time around. The show is at its best when it just relentlessly punishes these terrible people without letting off the gas, and several episodes this season were able to keep pushing the situational comedy into increasingly bad situations. Nothing demonstrates this better than two separate scenes from the first two episodes. In the premiere, an ill-concocted Frank-and-Charlie plan is going predictably poorly enough; the pair are trying to land Frank a decent woman, but Frank is creeping her out and Charlie is being an idiot. Most shows would stop digging here, mining the awkward situation for all it's worth, but Sunny immediately kicks things into another gear when Charlie, apropos of nothing at all, emits a fountain of projectile blood vomit all over the poor girl. She's screaming, terrified, sobbing, and the show still refuses to hit the brakes, with Frank just rolling right along and suggesting, through her hysteria, that they go to a bar for some drinks. The entire scene is at once surprising, absurd, and hysterical, but it somehow stays within the confines of plausibility given what we know about these characters and their lifestyles and points of view.

In the second episode, Dee gets her hair braided and starts whipping it around with no shame whatsoever. The joke, obviously, is that this is a terrible hairstyle that no self-respecting adult woman should ever wear. But that's an easy joke. Friends made that exact same joke once, and it ended there. That's only the beginning for Sunny; a scene or two later, Dee and Dennis are on one of those amusement park rides that just drops you a long distance. One of Dee's braids gets stuck in the machinery right before the drop, and we know what's coming, and so do both Dee and Dennis as Dee starts to panic and Dennis starts to laugh, but even still, it's hilarious. Time slows, Dee's cries for help drop a couple of octaves, and we see it, frame by frame, as the drop begins and an entire braid is ripped right out of Dee's scalp, small blood spatters flying in every direction. And once again, out of nowhere, vomit. From Dennis, also in super slow-motion. Here are these idiots, one puking, one screaming in pain, and by the end of the episode they'll have both been involved in some kind of drug murder in a montage set to the Go-Go's "Vacation." Just relentless stuff.

Anyway, now that I've over-explained a pair of vomit jokes, I think it's time to start my weekend. Enjoy yours!

Community: Season 4

I buy a lot of TV seasons I've already seen, and end up watching them a second time. (As you all know, DVD purchasing is one of my biggest vices.) In my experience it has often been the case that mediocre seasons of television comedies improve the second time around. For some reason - probably a combination of reduced expectations and binge-ability - I tend to come out of a lot of these re-watches with a more forgiving attitude.

That just wasn't the case with the fourth season of Community. I don't need to re-hash all the behind-the-scenes melodrama, but suffice it to say for those not in the know that there was a huge turnover within the Community crew after the third season, particularly in the creative realm, and the drop in quality and overall tonal softening couldn't have been more obvious. For some reason though, in some sort of anti-cynical attempt at naivety, I spent most of Season 4 reiterating - mostly to myself - that I didn't really think the show had gotten that bad. There were a few duds and missteps, but overall, the new showrunners were just struggling to balance the twin tasks of maintaining the show's legacy while also making it their own.

But I spent the last two nights watching these thirteen episodes again and, well, no. These just aren't good. Specifically, they get better toward the end of the season in general, but even then there's no consistency. What's stranger is that critics and fans never seemed able to agree on which episodes were decent and which were awful; although the season as a whole was widely despised, I can't say the same thing about any one particular episode.

There's reason for optimism, though. Not only was a fifth season greenlit against all - no, seriously, all - odds, but creator Dan Harmon has been rehired to run the show. Most of his best writers have found work elsewhere, Chevy Chase is finally gone for good, and now even Donald Glover is edging his way out and will appear in only five of the upcoming thirteen episodes, but there's still some cause for hope here. At this point I don't want to see a sixth season. Truthfully, I never even wanted to see a fifth. But it'd be nice to see Dan Harmon and company salvage enough pieces here to go out with a bang. I'd like to be able one day to think back on Community and say, "I'm glad the fourth season was just a brief dip in quality in what was otherwise an excellent show." We'll see.