Stan's TV Dump: September 2016

Fall's here, I'm back at school, and the TV beat goes on and on and on. Let's get on down to it.

Flowers: Season 1

Another Seeso binge, this just wasn't for me at all. I get what they're going for here - super-dramatic British despair played for laughs - but it never really clicked for me. Thankfully it was just six episodes.

Hard Knocks: Season 11

Every few years I watch Hard Knocks, and more often than not I'm reminded that there's no compelling reason to watch it. That Jets season with Rex Ryan notwithstanding, it turns out football coaches tend to be just cookie cutter as hell. Plus, fuck the Rams.

One Mississippi: Season 1

Yes, yes, yes. Loved this. I'd only vaguely been familiar with Tig Notaro before watching this "comedy" on Amazon Prime, but she:

• is gay
• is from Mississippi
• lost her mother unexpectedly
• had breast cancer
• had a double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery
• developed severe gastrointestinal problems after her cancer and surgery

And she jumps straight into all of this and more in this six-episode series. Truly a tear-jerker of a show and yet, somehow, undeniably funny and hopeful and uplifting. What got me most of all was the version of Mississippi depicted here - not the backwoods hellhole my elitist East Coast ass assumes it is, but a friendly, progressive, tolerant place to live on the Gulf Coast, with warm weather and good food. (Was this an exaggeration? Probably. But still!) So yeah, One Mississippi was great.

An Idiot Abroad: Season 1

Here's one I've been meaning to get around to for a while. Karl Pilkington is a friend and collaborator of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and he's just fantastically dull. As a spinoff of sorts to a podcast segment in which Karl dismisses lots of world travel as pointless and not worth it, Ricky and Steve decided to send him to see the seven wonders of the modern world. See him cope with traffic in India! Watch him ride a camel in Egypt in total discomfort! Observe as he chokes down authentic Chinese food with fear in his eyes! It's total cringe comedy - so, Ricky Gervais has a field day with it as you may expect - but I can't pretend I didn't laugh at poor Carl a time or two. Look, he brings it on himself! He spent a week in Mexico and complained multiple times that he hadn't yet seen or eaten a Mexican jumping bean - go ahead and Google what a Mexican jumping bean is. There are two more seasons of An Idiot Abroad, and although I'm in no rush, I'm sure I'll get around to them eventually.

Vice Principals: Season 1

Lotta mixed feelings here. For something that was initially billed as "Danny McBride vs. Walton Goggins," this... wasn't. McBride was serviceable enough as a very McBride type of sad schlub - picture Kenny Powers without any fame or fortune - and Goggins was fantastic, but the narrative thread here wasn't my favorite. Two vice principals conspire to overthrow the new principal - a successful and headstrong black woman - in what at times feels like "angry white men: the show." I thought the nine episodes were really hit-or-miss, with one of the objectively dumbest scenes of the season (a druggy dual-hallucination outside a high school football game) sending me into absolute hysterics while a few entire episodes left me unenthused. From the get-go HBO said Vice Principals would last two and only two seasons, so perhaps this is just a story that's only been half told at this point. Time will tell!

Fleabag: Season 1

A six-episode quickie from Amazon Prime. British. Funny enough, but really nothing memorable. Sorry!

Big Brother: Season 18

This is my trashy summer comfort food. Big Brother always has a tough time sustaining itself for entire seasons. In a game comprised almost entirely of competitions, alliances, and backstabbing, you can almost always count on a few great moments a year where a villain is born or an underdog becomes a fan favorite. But you can also almost always count on a ton of dead time, when alliances really do stick together and maintain power, and entire month-long stretches can feel predictable. There's also the undeniable catch-22 of shitty people making for good television; you root for the assholes to get knocked out of the game, but once they're gone, you've lost your investment in who wins and who doesn't. Or, worse, a group of assholes runs the table, and you're left to root for the lesser of three assholes by game's end. And then, asshole or not, some people just plain don't "deserve" to win the game, you know? That's how I felt about the winner this year. She wasn't the least deserving winner, not by a long shot, but... damn was she boring this year.

Mr. Robot: Season 2

It wasn't all that long ago that I watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot, and in short hindsight, man, this show really jumped to new levels in Season 2. It was way more surreal, far more "blown open," and nothing felt impossible. For that, I commend it! For the way Season 2 unfolded, particularly in later episodes (compared to Season 1 which faltered and stagnated if anything), I praise it! But that ending... eh. That felt like a classic "just wait until next season" case of blue balls. Not like Walking Dead bad, but, you know, it just left me wanting more! Two seasons in, Mr. Robot is a pretty-good-not-great show in my book. Like, it may sneak into my top five list of dramas this year, but that's in a year without Fargo or The Leftovers. Look, we'll get to that in a few months.

Jane the Virgin: Season 1

When I heard the concept of this one a few years back, I laughed. (So did everyone!) A CW show about a religious virgin who accidentally gets artificially inseminated - that's a laugher! Turns out, this loving parody of telenovelas is one of the best surprises in recent years. It's good! And addicting. And legitimately fun to watch. There are tons of female-leaning shows Marissa will turn on while I'm in the room - Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, Hart of Dixie (R.I.P.) - but Jane the Virgin is the only one that made me say, alright, yeah, I need to start from the beginning here. And now I have, and so far, so good.

Bloodline: Season 1

I ignored this one last year, but Marissa finally convinced me that we should give it a go. In a word, it's good. In a more descriptive word, it's tense. Slow. Not bad - deliberate, really - just not an action-packed type of tense like Breaking Bad was. (But then, what's as good as Breaking Bad?) This one's about four siblings in the Florida Keys. The most memorable tagline of the series, delivered by Kyle Chandler more than once (and who doesn't love Kyle Chandler?) is "we're not bad people... but we did a bad thing." Without spoiling anything, Season 1 seems to be mostly about the bad thing these not-bad people did. Season 2, I'm guessing, is about the repercussions of that bad thing. I'm sure I'll know soon!

Transparent: Season 3
Definitely a great show, but three seasons in you don't need to hear that from me. It's often moving and even more often jarring - not so much for being the most LGBT-friendly show on television, but more so in how cringe-inducing this family can be. Selfish monsters, all five of them! I actually thought this was a slight step down from the first two seasons, but that still leaves it comfortably sitting in the upper echelon of television shows in 2016.

Happy October!

Stan's Movie Dump: August/September 2016

Let's catch up with what I've caught up with.

Bee Movie

This was mentioned, for some reason, at Sween's cabin in late August. I want to say Keith brought it up. What's crazy to me is that this 2007 movie was released as close to the end of Seinfeld (1998) as it was to when I watched it. Wow. At any rate, this was a weird one. Weird is good! Especially when it means "not boring." But let's review, broadly and loosely, what happens in this 90-minute movie. It starts out with a young adult bee leaving the hive for the first time to discover a whole big world out there - fair enough. Then he befriends a human woman who is astonished to learn that bees can talk - hard left turn, but let's see where this goes. Then the bee learns that humans are using bees as slave labor to mass produce honey and steal it for themselves, so the bee sues people in court. The bee wins. All the other bees get all fat and happy off from all the honey that's been returned to them, and as a result, they stop pollinating flowers. Then all the flowers in the world die. Or maybe just the country? That would make more sense I guess. The movie ends with the bee and his human girlfriend landing a commercial airliner by defying all laws of physics and putting it down "the way a bee flies." I mean, what? What even was all of this? Interspersed throughout are a bunch of Seinfeld witticisms and bee-based puns. So yeah, it's a 90-minute kids' courtroom drama featuring a dude getting cucked by a bee.

Jupiter Ascending

"So bad it's good" is a real phenomenon, and everyone knows it. This almost gets there. Such a swollen, crowded movie, just teeming with imaginative aliens and technology, but all for no apparent reason. Rumor has it this thing started out as a 600 page script and I kind of believe it; that would have been a ten-hour movie! I don't know what the Wachowskis were thinking with this one. Channing Tatum plays a werewolf alien in rocket-powered rollerblades! It's all just batshit insanity for the sake of batshit insanity. There are a hundred things going on, as if the Wachowskis wanted to make their own Star Wars trilogy, condensed way the hell down into one two-hour film. On a scene-by-scene basis it's actually an entertaining watch. Sean Bean is here, trying his hardest. Eddie Redmayne clearly understands exactly what he's signed up for, and just chews on every horrible line his villain character needs to say, in this hammy strained whisper of some sort. Mila Kunis gives a pretty forgettable performance, but then, she also has to play the main character here, a stand-in for the audience, a regular ordinary earthling who's suddenly off on a sprawling aimless mess of an adventure. She spends the whole movie just asking other characters what's going on. I can't remember another movie that laid down so much exposition and yielded such an incomprehensible story. So yeah, Jupiter Ascending is a hilariously ill-conceived mess, but at least it's not a bore. No sir, not at all.

The Danish Girl

This, on the other hand - this was a bore. Eddie Redmayne is here too, of course, as the titular Danish Girl - or is Alicia Vikander the Danish Girl? Because this movie felt more about her cisgender character, and her dealing with her husband's transition, than it did about Redmayne's transgender character herself. It seems like the "transgender community" at large has deemed this film problematic and harmful, and while I can't fully agree with a number of those complaints - it takes place in the 1920s, of course these people aren't going to use the right pronouns or adjectives! - I also understand that I don't get to dismiss such concerns and complaints from my tower of cisgender privilege. This was a movie made, after all, by cisgender people, starring cisgender people, and mostly for cisgender people. Okay, this whole paragraph feels wildly disconnected now, so to recap, it's a slow and sluggish movie that might be harmful and problematic for cisgender views of transgender issues, and the whole thing just feels like an Oscar grab for everyone involved. Skip it! (But I didn't think it wasn't terrible.)

The Road

People raved about this one, right? The book too. And I read the book but didn't love it. Maybe you need to be a father to "get" it. Maybe I need some kids. Anyway, the movie was pretty good. Viggo Mortensen, y'all. Very Walking Dead and lots of Last of Us vibes, but without any actual zombies. What caused the apocalypse in this story anyway? Doesn't matter.

Wiener-Dog

Here's an odd one, a true black comedy with far more cringes than laughs. It's essentially four separate stories - told serially, not in parallel - whose only common link is the same titular dachshund. It's a movie full of death and reacting to death and anticipating death and it's only like 80 minutes long if you feel like checking it out on Amazon Prime. 

The Host

I'd been looking forward to this one for a while - widely considered one of the best horror films (and foreign films) of the 2000s, and directed by Bong Joon-ho, whose Snowpiercer was one of my favorite movies of the last, oh, five years or so. It's a monster movie set in South Korea where some kind of amphibious slithering giant lizard-fish with tentacles wreaks havoc on a city. The part I wasn't epxecting - and didn't really care for, to be honest - was this quirky undertone about how dysfunctional the family at the center of the movie was. Wanted to love this, but merely liked it. Eh - so it goes!

Hush

This is a horror movie about a deaf woman and a home invasion. I liked it! Netflix. As you may imagine, the deaf angle puts a new twist on what makes this particular victim vulnerable - but also what makes her resourceful and capable of fending off her assailant. There are plenty of "ugh, you dumb fucking idiot" gaps in logic made by both parties, but for a tense ninety-minute horror flick? Yeah, this was decent!

Youth

Oof, you know how long it took to find a SFW poster for this one? At any rate, this is a slow-paced movie in which old friends Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel take a spa vacation in the Swiss Alps to shoot the shit and talk about retirement, their prostates, their families, and life in general. I didn't love this one and I can't recommend it, but it felt like a decent movie I'm just not old enough to appreciate. One review I read said "this won't be appreciated for another forty years," and I kind of get where the reviewer was coming from. (That said, if Youth is being viewed by anyone at all in 20 years, let alone 40, I'll be considerably surprised.) Anyway, Michael Caine was great, as he always is. There were some surreal images and sequences I really enjoyed, too. But for something that appeared sporadically on lots of Best of 2015 lists, eh. Your mileage may vary.

The Witch
Dang, another poster with a naked woman's backside. Or is this her frontside? Tough to tell with silhouettes. The Witch is a horror movie that takes place in early puritanical New England. It's authentic as hell in its characters' language and accents - or at least it feels that way, I dunno, I wasn't around in 1630 - and in its depiction of the shitty, shitty lifestyle that was "early puritanical New England." Nothing but chores and prayers and trying not to freeze or starve - and God forbid you smile! Seriously, for a horror movie, I didn't find this one all that scary. Unsettling, sure, very. And a good movie to boot. But blood rituals and witchcraft seem less harrowing than spending a lifetime chopping wood and hunting rabbits and praying for death. Oh, and it had a great ending.

That's all for now. Look for more horror movies in October, I'm sure.

TV (The Book)

Y'all know I like my TV, so this was an easy purchase for me. TV (The Book) is essentially a lengthy annotated listicle in which long time critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz rank the top 100 television shows of all time. They were clear about their methodology and humble about their intentions - not so much to make the definitive list, but trying to make a definitive list because there just wasn't one out there the way there are established canons for all time great literature and films and such. "This is our list; we look forward to yours," they say. And that's nice. They also acknowledge the absurdity of "ranking television" from the get go, and how it's impossible to compare a laugh track three-camera 1980s sitcom to a 2000s political thriller or a 1960s western hour-long. I completely agree! I make little year-end lists all the time and I struggle with how to compare comedies to dramas and comfort viewing to slow burns.

The two of them each graded each show on a scale of one to ten across six categories: innovation, influence, consistency, performances, storytelling, and peak. Right away, anyone could argue that some of these factors are more important than others, or less quantifiable, but hey - again - this is their list. And they look forward to yours!

The top five shows all tied with scores of 112 out of 120 (hmm, convenient, no?) allowing Alan and Matt to begin their book with a back-and-forth on how to break that five-way tie. Here's how they shook that out:

1. The Simpsons

2. The Sopranos

3. The Wire

4. Cheers

5. Breaking Bad

Yep - Cheers. Again, this is their list. But they really do look forward to yours!

I liked this read just fine. It definitely contained some inconsistent logic - The Simpsons somehow escapes judgment for everything since Season 15 while other shows are withheld because later seasons diluted or diminished earlier ones - but that's fine. Less fine were the few typos and grammatical errors I found - just takes me out of the argument, you know?

Still, the more I think about this book, the more impressed I am that these two were able to come up with a top hundred. Even as I sit here, I'm not sure I've got a top five. A top four, sure - The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men - but who's got that fifth spot? It's got to be either my favorite comedy or my fifth-favorite drama, but I'm coming up empty. Arrested Development? The Simpsons? Parks and Recreation? Friday Night Lights? Deadwood? Something else entirely?

Yeesh. Let's go with Arrested for now and say I'll revisit this later.

How about you - top five, anyone? I look forward to yours!

The Last of Us

I've been interested in this one for a long time - at least since it came out in 2013 - and with a PS4 in hand I knew it was high time to try it out, remastered and all. This one came dripping in hype, with Keith calling it one of his top five games of all time and Stevie sharing similar praise. Could it possibly live up to the hype?

[Deep breath, through teeth.]

Not quite.

Here's where I quickly backtrack and lump praise on the game. I had a lot of fun playing it, for the most part. I was very invested in the story, for the most part. I thought the two main characters were very well developed - full stop. The gunplay was pretty good, although I had all kinds of issues with stealth takedowns - sometimes you had to press square, sometimes it was triangle, sometimes they were quiet, sometimes they weren't - but this was, all in all, a pretty good game. Let me repeat that. A pretty good game! I'd readily call it my favorite survival horror game of all time. For real!

But folks - survival horror just ain't my bag. Sween was all jazzed up when I started playing Resident Evil 4, but I just couldn't get into it. And when the world went apeshit over Left 4 Dead, I bought in, but I spent most of those games being annoyed and frustrated. I can recognize that what annoys me about the genre is the same thing that appeals to most people - limited ammunition, sluggish controls - hell these games are probably more realistic than most regular shooters, but when I'm reloading a shotgun at a fixed three-second clip while a pack of zombies bears down on me for the eleventh time in a row because I've got two shells and one pipe bomb and a broken baseball bat, eh, I just get a little sick of reloading from the same checkpoint over and over and over again.

So again, The Last of Us has instantly become my favorite survival horror game. It's also one of my favorite pieces of zombie fiction to date, which is impressive not because zombie fiction has a high bar (pfft) but because there's just so much of it out there. This was very good, and there were moments when it was great. I disliked the ending for reasons I'm willing to discuss with anyone who's beaten the game, but I at least appreciate and understand why the writers chose to end the story in such a manner.

Plus, Boston! The first quarter of this game was set in Boston and then a little more of it unfolded in Lincoln, a nearby suburb (but not that nearby). The attention to detail was pretty good, particularly in the State Street subway station, and I can only assume that the other locations in the game were rendered with caring accuracy as well.

Most of the "issues" I had with this game - and really, I didn't have many, I just wasn't as blown away as the rest of my friends seemed to be - are probably just "issues" I have with the genre. Overall, it was another impressive game from Naughty Dog and I'd be interested in playing the rumored sequel. Plus, my PS4 copy of the game came with the Left Behind DLC. Maybe that's worth looking into. Probably! But not yet. Not yet.

Steven Universe: Season One

Back to watching another kid's cartoon. And much like my experience with Avatar: The Last Airbender, I am shocked and amazed at how much I've come to love this show. 

Actually my introduction with this show goes way back to B-Town's bachelor party. I remember spotting a bunch of art work that Kev Cole had picked up at the N.H. comic-con and he explained it was from a little show called Steven Universe. I had no idea what he was talking about at the time and quickly dismissed this show thinking it was just another forgettable children's cartoon. Flash forward a year later and I can't stop watching this. 

But what's it about? 

Well that's -- shockingly -- kind of a long answer. One that's shaped over the course of the 50-somewhat episodes (don't worry, they're only like 10 minutes each) that cover the first season. Frankly, I'm still piecing elements of the backstory together and the lore that has helped shape our characters... and I'm mid-season 2! All that aside, I actually think it's probably best if to come to this show knowing very little. Even after the first few episodes you might be thinking, "That was cute, but, seriously, what's going on with this kid having a gem for a belly button and hanging out with three superheroes?" Like I said, it will all come together. 

Now, if I have to pitch the show, it's basically all that I would elaborate on it... That it's a story about bright-eyed and cheerfully optimistic boy with a gem for a bellybutton who lives with three superheroes (at least that's one way to describe them without giving too much away) and helps them defend the Earth from evil or other mysterious threats. 

While trying to refrain from talking anymore about the story, what I love about this show is continuity. Seriously, it's got continuity porn up there with Arrested Development. All along the season, they drop hints and clues for things coming that I wasn't even aware of. Only to look back and go "Oh, shit! These reveals were right in front of my face the whole time!" Needless to say, I get off on continuity. I love it when I see that storytellers know exactly how their made-up world is going to unfold and slowly reveal their masterplan to you. Piece by piece. That's one element that this show excels at. 

The other element that I find truly endearing is its general style and tone. The show has a fantastic soundtrack. It's music feels like it's heavily influenced by video games, which makes a lot of sense. As you watch the show you'll see easter eggs all around. Whether it's a GameCube stashed away in the corner or Steven playing with a Cloud Strife action figure, it's obvious that the creative talents behind the scenes like the same shit I like. So naturally, I feel an immediate rapport with its creators. 

The last item I praise this show for is its progressive view on... I guess I should say society. Despite being a cartoon designed for little kids to watch, it undeniably exhibits progressive values by showcasing strong female characters, appreciation for hetero- and homo-sexual relationships alike, it even explores the idea that one's identity isn't defined by gender but lays somewhere deeper in the core of the individual. It manages to speak to these (as some may see it, controversial) ideas without ever getting preachy or didactic. They keep it entertaining, fun, and emotionally powerful. 

In a word. This show is lovable. And, now, I can totally understand why Kev Cole felt the urge to pick up some artwork during comic con.

The Hike

Quick one! The Hike is Drew Magary's fourth book and second novel. I've been reading Magary regularly on Deadspin for a good five years or so, where his ALL CAPS-heavy "dad in the suburbs" shtick is so distinctive that at first I worried he'd struggle to make the transition from "writer" to "author." But you know what? This works. I read Magary's The Postmortal five years ago (wow!) and I thought it was pretty good right up until the end, when it collapsed into a mess of dystopian tropes with no real conclusion. This is a much lower-concept story; a man (a suburban father of three from Maryland who grew up in Minnesota - hmm...) goes out for a solitary walk in the woods one day and very quickly ends up on a video game-esque adventure that blends The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy with talking crabs, time travel, smoke monsters, magic beans - wait, did I call this low concept?

For real though, it is. This is a story in which a man endures a lot of shit - weird shit, scary shit, mundane shit - in order to reunite with his family. And while there isn't a lot of depth to mine from "middle-aged guy misses his wife and kids," this was still an effective and even kind of moving story. Very relatable, and at 278 pages it's short enough to finish in a couple of days or even one long sitting. (Shortest thing I've read all year, in fact. #LongReads2016)

The Fountainhead

With election season in full swing and third party candidate Gary Johnson earning a fair share of attention as a viable protest vote candidate, I figured it was high time for me to reconsider the Libertarian Party - a region of the political spectrum I was scared away from years ago by none other than Ayn Rand herself, via her novella Anthem and its central moral of self-worship. Libertarians love Rand, in general, so this was as good a time as any for me to break into The Fountainhead and see if she couldn't win me over with some compelling arguments for valuing oneself above everyone else.

Nope!

To be fair, The Fountainhead was far more philosophical than political in nature, and while the two theaters certainly have their fair share of overlap, there really wasn't much in this sprawling story about the state itself oppressing a free-thinking hero. Instead the central theme here is individualism vs. collectivism. (Can you guess which philosophy Rand championed?)

The two main characters here, at least initially, are architects Howard Roark, who embodies individualism, independence, and Peter Keating, his foil in every way. Roark has been described by Rand herself as the ideal or perfect man. He holds firmly to his own beliefs and opinions no matter how unpopular they may be with the "establishment" and as such he ends up butting heads with a lot of people and getting fired from a lot of jobs for insubordination. Keating on the other hand is what today we'd call a yes man. He's a total kiss-ass. Affable and agreeable to everything, and a very capable flatterer, and as such, he gets "ahead" in life despite his mediocrity as an architect. To use today's parlance, he's "playing the game," whereas Roark is uncompromising and thus struggles despite having more natural talent.

We're about a quarter to a third of the way into this book here, and the parallels and contrasts between the characters has been established. Is there really enough to sustain another 500 pages of story? Buckle up. You won't BELIEVE where this is heading!

Put Keating aside for now. Roark has burned too many bridges to continue on as an architect in New York, so he takes a job on a quarry in Connecticut. There he meets a beautiful, jaded, cynical woman named Dominique. They flirt a little, and she plays hard to get. So what does Roark - Rand's "ideal man," who lives for himself first and doesn't concern himself with the greater good of society or any of that hodgepodge - what does Roark do?

Roark rapes Dominique.

Rape!

Everything a man should be, in Rand's eyes.

A rapist!

Look, at this point, I'll admit - I'm fully not on board anymore. I went into this 700-page classic with caution and skepticism, but in those first 200 pages or so I could at least see what Rand was going for with Roark, and how sometimes it's important to let transcendent talents break the mold and ignore the rules for the sake of humanity. (This sort of feels like a strawman argument - talented people are very often successful! - but then again, Rand grew up in early 20th century Russia. I'm sure the prevailing mindset was a lot different then and there. Fine.) But, yeah, no. Apparently when you live for yourself and refuse to cater to what others think of you, the natural conclusion is that you become a rapist.

"Like a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of a slave." Rand's words. Ideal man.

It gets worse, but probably not unexpectedly so.  Dominique, after being raped and humiliated, realizes that a good raping was exactly what she needed, and falls madly in love with Roark. Had he remained thoughtful and polite, she reasons, she'd never have given him the time of day. But a man who just storms in and takes what he wants? Swoon.

Look, I'm not judging Dominique - and by extension Rand - for having a rape fetish. Kinks are kinks. There are people who willingly engage in far nastier forms of sexual activity. There are women who want to be strangled to the point of passing out during sex. There are men who, rather than engaging in intercourse, might request to be kicked right in the nuts repeatedly instead. But the key words here are "willingly" and "want" and "request." Consent. It's not just a buzzword! And since Dominique never fantasized about being raped or even having sex with Roark before she was, hey, raped by Roark, her being madly turned on after the fact kind of reads more like PTSD.

But all of this is beside the point. Whether or not Dominique is okay with being raped, whether or not "consent in hindsight" is a thing, one thing is clear and indisputable. Howard Roark is a rapist!

Just one more time, for emphasis. The undisputed hero of The Fountainhead, a fictional man Rand upholds as ideal and morally superior, is a fucking rapist. And an unapologetic one at that! It'd be one thing to have your hero commit such a heinous act early on in your story, and then to redeem him through trials and sacrifices and such in the ensuing 500 pages. But no! Roark never changes - the "ideal man" needs no growth, after all - and his rapey tendencies are just part of what makes him an exceptional person with flawless ideals.

Seriously, what the fuck?

So yeah, there's really no coming back from that one. Not helping matters, the story only gets less believable and more didactic from here on out. Roark leaves the quarry and gets back into architecture. Enter Ellsworth Toohey, the novel's ultimate antagonist, a purely evil man. He's an architectural critic with no talents of his own, so he just seeks to bring everyone else down with him. He is a master manipulator, preaching humility and shaming egos. And for whatever reason, he's hellbent on destroying Roark. "Why?" you may ask. (I did.) "What does he stand to gain?" Who cares? Roark, the ultimate hero, needs an oppressive villain to contend with in order to reach Christ status. That's why. So Toohey starts getting businessmen who have hired Roark to sue him once Roark's buildings are complete. And Toohey conspires to have all kinds of other architects testify against Roark and suggest that his buildings were poorly made or terribly designed. This isn't that hard to do - after all, the entire architecture industry hates Roark for being such a stubborn as, remember? Anyway, Roark loses, and he's ruined - again! - and Dominique goes back to being a hardened, angry cynic, and because of her masochistic tendencies, she decides to leave Roark and marry - yep! - Keating! Remember him? The talentless yes man who achieved success by refusing to make waves or question orders?

You might think the book should end here. It's a nice downer of an ending, and we've come full circle, and there's really nothing more to add to this allegory, right? Wrong! We've got another 300 pages to go! (I'm getting tired of rehashing this thing. It's such a long book!)

The next portion of the book introduces us to Gail Wynand, a newspaper magnate who has made his fortune by printing only what the public wants to hear. (Again, the theme here is that pandering is how to get ahead in life in a reprehensible manner.) Never mind that conventional wisdom suggests that the media gets readers and viewers by telling audiences things they don't want to hear. Acknowledging that would ruin this sprawling fable Rand is painting without any shades of gray, or nuance, or internal conflict. Wynand is a lapsed idealist, though. He used to be like Roark, but he sold out his morals of sticking to his guns in order to make a buck. What an unbelievable asshole, right?

So Wynard meets Dominique and falls in love with her. So he offers Keating a boatload of money in order to, you know, sell him his wife. Holy cow! And Keating - come on, you know Keating - accepts. And so does Dominique, because she's kind of into being treated like a brothel whore, and also she finds Wynard even more detestable than Keating, and she's still all about punishing herself. All three get exactly what they want! Hooray?

Anyway, Keating's own complete lack of ability finally starts to catch up with him - he's terrible and utterly talentless, remember? - so he goes and asks Roark to design his next project in secret. It's a housing project, for the poor. Roark is like, "hey, listen, fine, I can do that for you. But let me make one thing clear. You can take full credit for this thing, and I won't tell a soul about it, but you cannot make even ONE alteration to my plans, you hear me?" (If you haven't caught on yet, Roark is an uncompromising man!) Why he cares so much about his vision being 100% realized when it's 0% attached to his name, I can't say.

You surely know where this is going - Keating's gonna change the plans, that cowardly snake! - but I promise, you do not know where this is ultimately going. We're in the homestretch now!

Roark goes on summer vacation and when he gets back, sure enough - YUP! - Keating's housing project isn't being built entirely to Roark's specifications. (Actually Keating didn't do it. It was TOOHEY! Yes, Toohey could tell this wasn't Keating's work at all, but Roark's. It's far too good to have come from Keating. Oh, Toohey is Keating's boss at this point. I didn't mention that yet. So Toohey, whose sole goal seems to be to make everyone and everything around him mediocre, sabotages his own employee's stolen plan because it's too good. Wait, if all Toohey wants is mediocrity, then why is Keating on thin ice at work? NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY FUCKING SENSE!) Yikes, sorry - tangent.

So anyway, what does Roark do? Ayn Rand's ideal man, the ultimate hero - what does he do when he realizes his vision has been tweaked?

He grabs a bunch of dynamite and BLOWS THE WHOLE HOUSING PROJECT SKY HIGH! Because fuck everyone else - if Roark can't have things his way, no one can have anything at all.

Ayn Rand's hero, y'all. He's a proto-Project Mayhem pioneer!

(Dominique helps Roark blow the project to hell because that's just who she is. Her role is to run distraction. When the deed is done, even though she is unharmed she climbs into her mangled car and slashes and stabs at her body with broken glass - gotta sell this! - and is nearly dead when the cops arrive. Wynard is furious with her - but also kind of in awe that she and Roark would do such a thing. His young idealist side is coming back, folks!)

Roark is arrested, and confesses to his crime. The nation fucking despises him, as they should. Timothy McVeigh and such, you know? Meanwhile, Toohey's "cult of selflessness" has taken over Wynard's newspaper, so even as Wynard publishes articles and pieces in Roark's defense, they're having the opposite effect on the masses. Toohey is undermining him! (This is what happens when socialists take over the media, folks! [Fart noise.])

God, this is interminable. I'll cut to the chase. Roark's on trial, and he represents himself and intentionally chooses the least sympathetic jury he can find (because he's needlessly a martyr, this fucking asshole). And in order to defend his actions, Roark unloads just the preachiest and most horrible "angry white man" speech I've ever heard. Liquid Reddit just pours out of him as he talks about the virtues of living for yourself, and fuck everyone else, and even though none of that has anything to do with the fact that he blew up a goddamn building, Rand is running out of steam here, so of course it's time for a neat little summary of her morals IN CASE THEY'D BEEN TOO SUBTLE FOR YOU ACROSS THE PRECEDING 650 PAGES. And it totally works (for Roark I mean) and the jury finds him not guilty (...what?) and he's free to go. Good God, what a speech! (Remember how one of Rand's defining evil characteristics of Toohey was how he was able to manipulate people with his words? Yeah, I'm not sure Rand does, at this point.)

The novel ends with Wynard commissioning a gigantic skyscraper - a monument to man's greatness - and hiring Roark to design it. The final image is from Dominique's point of view, as she reaches the very top of the tower and finds nothing but her husband - Roark now, try to keep up - staring out at the sky and the sea.

Jesus. Fuck everything about this. Fuck anyone who reads this shit and says "hey yeah you know what she's got some really good points." Fuck Howard Roark, the rapist-turned-domestic terrorist. Fuck Ayn Rand for considering him a hero. Fuck objectivists around the world for buying into this shit. Fuck Ron Paul for naming his kid Rand.

This right here is just a never-ending angry white man fantasy bullshit. The moral here is that rape is just a way to take what you want and live for yourself. The moral here is that blowing up buildings is justifiable when people disagree with you. You know that kid who, hanging out after school, wants to play a certain game a certain way, but everyone else wants to play it another way, so the kid crosses his arms and stomps on home? That is Ayn Rand's ideal man.

Ayn Rand despises compromise. It's literally the very thing her hero stands against. The whole is never greater than the sum of its parts to Rand; the parts are the only things that matter. No, that's not right - each part is the only thing (singular) that matters, from each part's point of view.

Ayn Rand is a shameless frontrunner. Her philosophical concern here is allowing the best and the brightest to be the best and the brightest without the rest of us dragging them down. To the mediocre masses, she says little more than "stay out of the way of the best and the brightest." But isn't that asking all of us not to live for ourselves and our own pursuits and goals and dreams?

And holy shit - she's not a good writer. Or at least The Fountainhead is not a well written book. So slow and clunky. So dense with nothing and so light on depth. Every character, flat as a pancake. Every conflict external in nature. Shifting third-person perspectives, but no introspection. Loaded with inconsistencies. Actions and characteristics are either admirable or detestable based solely on characters' individually held philosophies.

Ayn Rand thinks collectivism is parasitism. She thinks there are maybe a handful of worthwhile people in every community, and that the rest are just leeches. But even those leeches shouldn't have to live in housing projects that are anything less than superior to every other building in the city, apparently?

Ugh. The biggest shame of all of this is that there are ways to explore and express Ayn Rand's philosophies that aren't laughably bad. Ayn Rand apparently wasn't up for the task. Maybe she was by the time Atlas Shrugged came around? Oh God, why am I considering reading Atlas Shrugged one day?

And no, none of this has anything whatsoever to do with Gary Johnson, the modern United States Libertarian Party, or the 2016 general election. Still undecided, I guess. THANKS, Ayn Rand. And THANKS, OBAMA!

The Leftovers: Season One

You see, Sweeney? This is what commitment looks like. I set my mind to something and I accomplish it. On that note, how's Daredevil treating ya?

To be fair, it was easy to binge watch this show. While not the best thing to ever hit TV, it can certainly hold my attention. Not to mention the premise (on its own) is pretty great. What does the world do when roughly 2% of the entire human population inexplicably disappears? Can we rebuild ourselves? Or are we doomed to fail?

I feel like its only appropriate that Lost's own Damon Lindelof helped create the TV adaptation of the book. Much through Lost you hear over and over the "Die alone, live together" mantra. It seems like that applies to the central problem of this show. People are doing their best to survive. And to survive, they strive to come together. Only this time, the different factions of people that come together all have different visions on how to survive. Seeing how these ideals interplay with one another, how characters respond to them, that's what makes this show truly engaging. 

Curious how the book compares to this show. Does the first season mirror it exactly? Seems like the season finale could have been a proper ending to the whole show what with Kevin getting his "family" back and all. But clearly there's still more to tell. 

Already powering through onto season 2. Shouldn't be long until I'm all caught up and read for the final season.

Speaking of which... Sweeney, any chance you're going to be all caught up on Netflix's Marvel shows in time for Luke Cage?  

Welcome to the Monkey House

For the first time in at least six years, my backlog is entirely Vonnegut-free. This was a collection of stories he had published in the '50s and '60s in order to finance his true passion of writing novels. There were 25 in total and they varied enormously both in quality and genre. In fact, the entire collection feels like a decent sampling of Vonnegut's career. There were endearing old coots and boorish plain salesmen; there were stories set in outer space, in dystopian futures, and in quiet little towns with nothing going on; there were love stories and sci-fi stories and subtle stories and ridiculous stories. I don't know what else to say!

This wasn't Vonnegut's best work, but upon completing it I can't help but reflect over the last six years of the Back-Blogged. I fell in love with this man's writing with Slaughterhouse-Five, then after a lengthy hiatus I barreled through the rest of his fourteen novels in a matter of two years or so, ignoring a few but enjoying most. This marks the fourth straight summer in which I've tackled a collection of his short stories, and although more collections do exist, I think they hit the point of diminishing returns a little while back. I could always try out some of his essays and editorials. Time will tell.

I guess my main point here is one of personal evolution and change. Six years ago, I was 22 and Kurt Vonnegut was my favorite author, living or dead. And that makes plenty of sense. There's just something so appealing about his work when you compare it to most mandatory reading from high school and college. And yet 18 Vonnegut books later, at 28, I can't help but feel like I've moved "past" that era of my life a little bit. Does that make sense? Is it smug, and vain? I've just read so much else these last six years - stuff that digs a little deeper into the human experience, stuff that evokes a dreamlike state, stuff that comes from the perspective of someone other than a put-upon straight white man - and while I'm glad to have read all that Kurt Vonnegut over the last six years, I don't think I can safely call him my favorite author anymore. (Who is? Couldn't tell you! So absent another option, sure, why not.)

Anyway, this concludes my time with Kurt Vonnegut, at least for the foreseeable future, and as such it sort of concludes a literary era in my own life. So it goes! (Sorry. Had to.)

Bravely Second: End Layer

Two years ago, of this game's predecessor, I wrote:

Bravely Default had everything you could want in an old-fashioned JRPG and it seemed to do everything right, right up to a certain point. New spins that the game put on the genre allowed for features like "summon friends," where you could call on people you had tagged with to help you out in battle. (Thanks, Webber and B-Town!) You could raise or lower - even turn off entirely - the random encounter rate, depending on if you wanted to grind for experience or just complete a fetch quest quickly. A weapon-producing mini-game even made it a benefit to close your 3DS in sleep mode without pressing pause or going to the home screen. The story was generic as hell - four heroes need to reawaken four elemental crystals in order to save the world - but the characters were fleshed out and fully realized and the world was varied and interesting enough to overshadow the mundanities of the plot.

All of that applies here as well. And this game has also added some interesting features that made grinding into a low-risk high-reward gamble. ("How many consecutive battles can you win in one turn? Here are exponentially increasing experience multipliers.") I rarely buy new games at launch, especially for full price, but I was all over this one a week after it dropped. I'd just wrapped up a rough semester at school, and on my first day of "summer vacation" (working 9-5 again - "adulting," I think the kids call it) I settled down on the couch with this game, a pizza, and a six-pack of beer. I plowed through eight or nine hours, tacking on another six before the weekend was up. And in these fifteen hours, I knew I'd only barely scratched the surface of Bravely Second, a fifty-hour game with tons of side quests, and I didn't even care. I loved it. I was in my happy place. Marissa even asked me, somewhere around hour seven, "Is this really all you wanted to do all day? It just seems kind of like a waste of the first day of summer!" She wasn't wrong! But, you know, such is the life of a JRPG fan - even one as casual and lapsed as I am.

Anyway, this game was great. Somewhere around the thirtieth or fortieth hour, I lost patience (I always eventually do - who am I, Stevie?) and decided to just barrel through the rest of the way. I was substantially over-leveled and overpowered thanks to the grind-friendly tweaks this game made, and I can't look back and reflect on this one and think, "wow, that was an instant classic and an all time great game," but any and all fans of JRPGs - particularly the older Final Fantasy games and their ilk - should be encouraged to check this series out. They're long games, no question, but they just feel so effortless and pleasant to play.