V/H/S

It's that time of the year again. As we near All Hallow's Eve, we should take time to enjoy  some of the creepier and more disturbing items in our backlog inventory. What I have here will kick things off. 

Although I technically don't own V/H/S, this is a horror movie that's available On Demand before it hits theaters this weekend. Originally premiering at Sundance, a couple of friends who attended this year explained that I needed to see this when I got the chance. So I did... and was extremely disappointed.

What we have here is a throwback to the older horror anthology series - basically a series of scary vignettes designed to give you a hauntingly good time. Does anyone remember watching the Creepshow movies? If not, they are a blast. Nothing actually scary, but it's great to see what two horror legends (George A. Romero and Stephen King) can do when  given the opportunity to cultivate some fantastic, campfire-like, scary stories.

King playing a hick-farmer who discovers a meteorite that's crashed on his farm - acting at its finest!

But I'm not going to focus on this precious item from my childhood. Let's get back to the steaming pile of garbage that I just finished watching. 

Like I said, V/H/S is a series of short horror films all based on the concept of watching amateur footage before something goes horribly wrong (think Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity). The film starts out with a couple of jackasses who film themselves running up to a girl in a parking garage who they jump and pull her top down to expose her breasts on camera. They later explain that they sell this footage like this to porn-snuff sites for a little bit of cash - clearly, we'll be rooting for these gents throughout the film. Anyways, we later cut to these hoodlums on route to break into some house as they're getting paid to find a specific video tape for some unknown purchaser. These guys get to the house to find it completely empty until enter the one bedroom with some dead man sitting in a recliner facing a wall of stacked TVs all playing static. From here, the team breaks up to look for the specific tape they're on the hunt for. While they do so, we get the opportunity to check out five tapes they've randomly pulled to watch. I'll break them down quickly below:

Tape 1: Amateur Night

A couple of young guys look to pick up some chicks a make an amateur porn in their motel room using glasses with a spy-cam mount in the brim. Turns out one of the girls (creepy and stand-offish to begin with) is a some sort of demon. She changes into a monster and murder two of the three guys. The last guys (clearly the one with the glasses on) runs out of the room and tries to get help from some people in the parking lot before being pluck up by this demon-girl who has now sprouted wings and flies off into the night with him.

Tape 2: Second Honeymoon

A young married couple travel out to the west to enjoy a little vacation time, filming the whole thing. In the middle of the night an intruder breaks in and films the B&E with the couple's own camera. Although walking around with a switchblade knife, the intruder does nothing but steal some money and dunk the husband's toothbrush in the toilet. Cut to next night. The intruder has once again enter the couple's hotel room. This time the intruder stabs the husband's neck killing him. As the intruder runs into the bathroom it's revealed to be a woman, and... oh, shocker, the wife appears behind her and the two suddenly start to make out. Cut to the wife in the car with assailant asking her to delete the tape. 

Tape 3: Tuesday the 17th

Four kids go to the woods for a camping trip. Turns out there's a killer that can only be seen through their camera - otherwise he's invisible. Ends up killing three kids before you learn that the fourth girl just brought everyone up there to bring out the killer to exact her revenge for when her friends were killed last year. She sets up all these Rambo-like booby traps in the woods, but apparently the monster can teleport or something and eventually gets her too. Question: Why the hell would you ever want to go back to pick a fight with an invisible monster who brutally slayed your friends???

Tape 4: The Sick Thing That Happen to Emily When She Was Younger

Easily the most confusing story of the bunch. Shot from the point of view of a boyfriend video-chatting with his girlfriend - you're told this is a long-distance relationship. The girl claims she is seeing the ghosts of young children in her apartment while complaining about a large lump under the skin in her arm. One night the boyfriend convinces her to confront the ghosts. When she sees them she goes unconscious or something. Then, shocker, the boyfriend steps out from the doorway and begins talking with the ghosts (you can't understand them). He then cuts open the girl's stomach to expose a fetus-like thing and explains that he doesn't know why this keeps happening. Then smacks the girl around so the next day he can frame it that she was hit by a car and that the ghosts are just delusions in her mind. Cut to the boyfriend video-chatting with a completely different girl (claiming to be his girlfriend as well) who's complaining about some bump on her arm. What's the deal with the ghosts? What was that thing that he pulled out of her stomach? How the fuck did the girl not know this guy was next door this whole time? I tried researching about this clip to see if there was something I was missing, but, unfortunately, I still have no clue what this was about.

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Alright, let's touch base with the main story arc before getting to the last tape. As of now all but one of the criminals have disappeared. One guy, the leader, is left - seeming not too distraught that, one-by-one, each of his cohorts have inexplicably vanished. You notice that the dead man is also no longer laying in his chair. As the remaining guy goes around the house looking for everyone, he finds one of his friend's decapitated body sitting in the stairwell. That's when he notices the dead man is up and walking around, covered in blood. The thug then trips down the stairwell where the dead-man jumps down and kills him. 

At this point the final video tape kicks in a starts playing - don't ask me why or how? - it just does.

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Tape 5: 10/31/98

A couple of young guys in LA set out to go to a haunted house for a Halloween party. When they arrive at the house, they find it entirely empty. Searching everywhere, they make their way up to the attic where they see a couple of guys torturing some girl in a satanic manner. Once party group is spotted, the assailants go crazy and tell the kids to leave just as the house begins to shake and go all nuts. The assailants somehow get sucked up to the ceiling. With the coast clear the guys rescue the girl and try and make a break to escape the house. As they run out, plates are floating, windows are disappearing, hands are coming out of the walls... it's nuts! They end up escaping out of the basement and making it back to their car as they frantically drive away. Suddenly, their car breaks down and the girl miraculously disappears from the backseat and reappears in front of the car screaming like a banshee. Turns out the car has stalled on railroad tracks as a bright light grows from the distance. You can probably guess how this story ends... Question: How the fuck did they recover the video casette from a car smash by a speeding train?

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There... that's it for the movie. To sum up my thoughts on the film: Great idea; poor execution.  To bring back the anthology horror films is brilliant. Then to have a main storyline weave each vignette together, great! But this film fails to do that. There's no conclusion that explains what type those guys were looking for. Who was in the house. Why all those fucked up video tapes were there to begin with. It's all nonsense. I was truly hoping that the last tape (however random it was that it gets played after everyone has died) would explain the whole situation, but it doesn't. Sorry. That's really urks me. 

On top of that, the acting is terrible. Normally, that's perfectly acceptable for a horror film - maybe even encouraged. But in these amateur-shot films you're not suppose to be watching actors; you're suppose to be watching real people. So when you see someone clearly reading off a script, poorly pantomiming and reading their lines, it becomes painful to watch. 

So there you have it. Stories that make absolutely no sense. Terrible acting. And little to no scary moments - a handful of gore scenes to gross you out, but the effects fall flat. If there's anything to recommend with this film, it might be to watch the final tape. It was half-way decent. Other than that, I would give it a pass.

Sorry for the lengthy post. Frustration tends to make me ramble.

Death Proof

And here's the second half of Grindhouse. I dunno. For a movie that ran nearly two hours, I'm not so sure this was all that exciting. It was Tarantino to the core, with plenty of drawn out conversations between characters, a randomly inserted black-and-white scene, abrupt character deaths, and a willingness to play fast and loose with story pacing conventions, and while the final product wasn't bad or anything, it was also much less entertaining overall than the campier and crazier Planet Terror. The gist of the plot here is that Kurt Russell is a retired stunt driver with a death-proof car - that is to say, a car designed to keep its driver safe even in the event of a horrific crash - who has a penchant for murdering young women. In short, it's a slasher film where the serial killer's weapon of choice is a muscle car. Knowing this much about the plot heading in, I expected the movie to involve several well-choreographed death scenes as Kurt Russell stalks and runs down a bunch of women one-by-one. That's not how it unfolded at all, though. Instead, we meet a group of four women, learn who they are thanks to that Tarantino-style exposition where the characters use a lot of profanity in debates over small-scale things, and then see them all get run down by Kurt Russell about an hour into the film. A "fourteen months later" inter-title appears and we're suddenly meeting four entirely new girls and experiencing the same drawn-out exposition to who they all are, and then Kurt Russell appears again and tries to run our new set of ladies off the road. Except this crew of women includes a stunt driver and a stuntwoman, and they're badasses in general, so they fight back. The whole ordeal climaxes in a lengthy and pretty excellent car chase before ending, well, rather abruptly, and with a plot thread or two still dangling. I watched this right on the tails of Planet Terror, the way the Grindhouse experience was intended, and it just didn't keep up the adrenaline and absurdity of its predecessor on the twin bill. Early on, especially, it just feels like Tarantino is trying for that "lost '70s film" aesthetic, letting the background music skip and using a few too many intentionally clunky jump cuts. It still worked pretty well as a standalone piece, but it took on a whole different tone and feel - a very small-scale one, really - than Planet Terror, which was about a zombie apocalypse and had a girl with a machine gun leg. But anyway, that's that; I've now seen Grindhouse, and I've also seen every Quentin Tarantino feature film. Yay.

Planet Terror

Here's the first part of that double feature Grindhouse that came out five years ago. It's something I've always had interest in seeing, and now here we are. And I think I'm impressed. It's tough to know for sure. On the one hand, Planet Terror is an absurdly cheesy and over-the-top zombie movie with excessive blood and gore and laughably bad special effect, riddled with about five dozen glaring plot holes and sporting an aged and blurry look comparable to damaged B-movies from the 1970s. On the other hand, that's exactly what the movie strived to be: an homage to '70s action-horror exploitation films with a few aspects made possible only by recent technological advances in film (such as the female protagonist's machine gun leg). The movie was a whole lot of fun to watch, but I just couldn't shake the fact that - although this was intentional - the movie looked and felt for the most part like some ironically enjoyable gem you'd find on VHS at American Video back in the day. I'm not old enough to remember the age of double features and grindhouse slasher films, but I've also seen enough of them in my time to know that Planet Terror absolutely nails the genre tonally and visually. I guess at the end of the day I have to give Robert Rodriguez and company credit for revisiting a long-abandoned film genre, even if said genre was abandoned for good reason. Fuck it - I had fun watching this, and already my appreciation for the movie has grown since beginning this write-up. I'm sold. I give this one a like, a plus-one, a retweet, or whatever your favorite unit of respect on the Internet is. Next up? Grindhouse, part two: Tarantino's Death Proof.

30 Rock: Season 6

Boy. What can I even say about 30 Rock that I didn't say in three previous posts? That question isn't rhetorical. Once again, this is a funny and entertaining but by no means incredible network sitcom. It's edgy in comparison to, say, CBS show, but it's rather tame compared to most comedies on cable TV. Its most impressive attribute may be how gracefully it has aged. There really aren't many comedies that are as good in their sixth seasons as they are in their first few, but this is one of those shows. Of course, I really didn't like the first season much, so maybe the bar's always been easy to beat here. At any rate, the show will bow for good a few months form now after an abbreviated seventh season and a grand total of 138 episodes. It doesn't feel as though it's ending too soon, but it doesn't feel too late, either. Maybe I'll have more to say about the series about half a year from now when all is said and done. Until then.

The Raid: Redemption

Sony got the rights to distribute this Indonesian martial-arts film back in March. I tried to catch a screening of it based on the trailer alone...

Enticing, no?

...but, unfortunately, I had to bail on seeing the film on the big screen and just wait until its DVD release. Well, I finally got to see it this past week (at least back when I started writing this eons ago) and it was well worth the wait. 

It's been a while since I can remember a decent action/martial-arts movie being released. (Note: I did get a chance to see Expendables 2 not too long ago and it's a steaming pile of poop. I know everyone's seeing it for its ensemble cast - that's why I went - but its poor acting and poor action sequences by actors who are getting too feeble to throw a decent punch just ruins it. The only actors who still hold their own are Jason Statham and Liam Helmsworth... and they kill him off in the first act. Whops? Already ruined the movie for you. Good.) We see a lot of action and super heroes films, but rarely are we treated to some solid martial-arts. No CGI. Just trained actors who really know how to throw a punch... or more importantly, take one. 

The plot is fairly simple. An elite police squad arrives at this apartment building that's home to some of the toughest criminals in the city. Their goal: to sneak in at dawn and take down the crime syndicate in one fell swoop. Everything starts smoothly. They break into the compound unnoticed, ascending each floor, getting closer to taking out the crime lord stationed at the top. On the sixth floor, a child notices them and alerts the building of the police invasion. After that, hordes of thugs descend upon them, blocking off the fifth floor, sealing them into the building. Soon hearing from the police commander that this mission is not sanctioned by the city and that no back-up will be provided, the squad learns that they must fight their way up through each level to not only bring down the crime syndicate, but to keep themselves alive. 

The fighting in this flick is outstanding. (Once again, just refer to the trailer if you need a taste.) Not too long after the cops get trapped in the middle of the building, they are forced to abandon their weapons - or maybe they just run out of bullets? Regardless, from that point on, guns are removed from the equation leaving everyone to fist-to-fist combat. And this isn't some clean fight. It's blood and gore galore. The final battle is this 2 vs 1 that is just great to watch - if you're already into this kind of thing. Anywho... if you need a martial-arts fix, get it here.

PS - Sorry this entry took so long to post, but finally made it out to Chicago.

PPS - I'm coming home next week (9/26 - 9/29) for anyone that's available to hang out.

PPPS - I'm also engaged... couldn't wait till Halloween. Latronyx. 

Hocus Pocus

It usually takes me two or three sittings to breeze through a Vonnegut book. They're all around 250 to 350 pages long and since the author's style is always straightforward and frank, I can usually bang his novels out in a day or two, maybe a week tops. That just wasn't the case with Hocus Pocus, a 320-page book written in a straightforward and frank manner that, for whatever reason, I could only seem to get through 20 or 30 pages of at a time. I've been chipping away at this one for three or four weeks now, and it took an hour and a half on a plane for me to just finish it off once and for all. Needless to say, the story never really pulled me in. This isn't the first Vonnegut book to leave me unimpressed in the story department; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano were also guilty of that crime, and they happen to be my two least favorite Vonnegut novels. But I'm not ready to call this one a disappointment. In fact, it contained some of the best individual lines and paragraphs Vonnegut has ever written. This was his penultimate novel, and by far his most cold and cynical. He's often pessimistic about the 20th century follies and atrocities of mankind, but he usually hides any outright contempt behind a glossy and numb sort of apathy - the "so it goes" mentality, if you will. But this time, Vonnegut is firing off in all directions and his wit is as sharp as it's ever been. He hits on all sorts of specific running themes here - Vietnam, racism, slavery, academic elites, prison riots - and what the book lacks in cohesive story it makes up for in razor sharp wit. The usual party line with Vonnegut might be something like, "Gosh, people sure do some nasty things to each other," but here that's been honed down to something more like, "Oh, fuck everyone." If I hadn't known better I'd have said Joseph Heller wrote this book, and not Kurt Vonnegut. (Actually, Heller called it Vonnegut's best work, so there you go.) At the end of the day I don't know where to place this one in my overall ranking of Vonnegut's novels. Story-wise, it's bottom three, but memorable moments-wise, it's top five, and putting it in the middle seems less like a compromise than a dishonest cop out. I guess that dilemma describes my feelings for this book more than any definitive rating could. We'll leave it at that. But before I go, I've got to share some of my favorite zingers from Hocus Pocus.

The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them. Look at it go!

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

The martyrs at the Alamo had died for the right to own Black slaves. They didn’t want to be a part of Mexico anymore because it was against the law in that country to own slaves of any kind. I don’t think Wilder knew that. Not many people in this country do. I certainly never heard that at the Academy. I wouldn’t have known that slavery was what the Alamo was all about if Professor Stern the unicyclist hadn’t told me so. No wonder there were so few Black tourists at the Alamo!

Doesn't that all just make you feel so shitty? Awesome, right?

Jackie Brown

I was recently looking at a list of upcoming movies, and one of the ones I'm most excited for was Django Unchained, Tarantino's upcoming antebellum slave revolt movie. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed Tarantino's last movie, Inglourious Basterds. And without thinking much of it, I suddenly realized that, including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill, I've never seen a Tarantino movie I didn't strongly enjoy. Well, now I have. Jackie Brown wasn't  abad movie by any means, but for me it just lacked the same substance and impact that all those other movies had. It's a 1997 tribute to blaxploitation films of the '70s based on a story by Elmore Leonard, the guy whose work the TV show Justified is based on. The door was really wide open for anything here. The plot revolves around Pam Grier and Samuel L. Jackson double crossing one another and scheming over a certain amount of money. Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda were in on it to certain extents. As always seems to be the case with Tarantino, there was a great sense of both tone and style here and there was an enormous amount of well-writen dialogue as well. The story just didn't quite blow me away, and I spent the movie's two-and-a-half hour run time being entertained enough but never really excited or thrilled beyond that. Of course, I wasn't around in the seventies, so maybe this is simply a genre tribute that fell on partially deaf ears for me.

That '70s Show: Season 4

Let's try another That '70s Show post made using the Q&A style format I came up with last time.

How familiar was I with the season's various episodes?

Again, very familiar. There were 27 episodes in Season 4 (wow) and while I didn't keep a specific count, I think only three or four seemed entirely new to me. We're now at 103 episodes through four seasons, and I think I'd already seen 80 or 85 of them. This stands in stark contrast to when I was watching every season of Seinfeld a few years back, where I thought I'd seen a few dozen episodes but could only specifically remember ten or so.

Were there any key ways in which this season was different from previous seasons?

The season's big ongoing arc was the aftermath of Eric and Dona's break-up, one of those "game-changing" moves a show tends to pull after three seasons. It worked pretty well. There was a predictable five-episode stretch of break-up angst/depression/grief to kick things off, and the season also ended with a predictable five-episode stretch of Eric desperately trying to win Donna back from her new boyfriend (Luke Wilson, everyone!) but that left seventeen episodes for each character to explore new territory; without Donna by his side, Eric turns out to be kind of a pathetic and desperate guy who resorts to hijinks to pick up girls. And when the formerly confident and mellow Donna dates an older guy, she turns into a fawning and giggly teenage girl, at times nearly flipping the dynamic between her and the show's other female lead, Mila Kunis's Jackie. That character, by the way, undergoes some growth by taking up a job at the mall when her father cuts her off financially. Kelso, who spent most of the first two seasons cheating on Jackie, goes through some emotional maturity of his own when they deal with a few bumps in their relationship. Hyde becomes a bit less of an asshole and Fez enjoyed a brief fling with his own first girlfriend. Depth, all around. Plus, the two least enjoyable main characters from seasons past - Donna's mom Midge and Eric's sister Laurie - left during or after the third season. And Tommy Chong's Leo was back again, stealing every scene he was in.

Any particular highlights or lowlights worth singling out?

Yes. The less is said of the show's 100th episode, "That '70s Musical," the better. I watched that one all alone after midnight last night, and still I was just cringing in embarrassment. It felt so utterly misguided. None of the actors on the show can really sing, and the episode didn't contain new original songs, but '70s hits instead. (And one '60s hit, for some reason.) Blech. In general, the back third of the season (with the exception of that awful episode) was loaded with great episodes and moments. There was a class picture episode that sevred mostly as a framing device for a bunch of "how did the gang all meet?" flashbacks, and those are always interesting. Ah, and the season led off with a Wonderful Life-style episode where Eric got to see what his life would have been like, and will one day be like, had he never dated Donna at all. I bring it up only because it offers a gimmicky 1980s alternative future that worked on a lot of levels, which makes me wonder two things. One, how did Fox screw up a spin-off That '80s Show so badly? And two, why did this show refuse to advance the calendar into the early '80s as it wore on? We're four seasons deep and the timeline has gone a grand total of two years, even though every season has had a Christmas or Thanksgiving episode. Eh, whatever. It works.

Final thoughts on anything else relating to the season or series as a whole?

The fourth season breathed new life into the series in my mind. I wasn't bored sick of it after three seasons or anything, but there did appear to be a creative resurgence going on here. The loss of those aforementioned tertiary characters didn't hurt the show in the least, and a lot of that character growth and development I was talking about helped drive - or maybe were driven by? - a surge of creativity.

I liked Season 4 more than I liked Season 3. I may have liked it more than Seasons 1 and 2 as well, but it's tough to say for sure since the whole series kind of blurs together the way long-running sitcoms tend to do. I recently purchased Seasons 5 and 6, so I'll be back soon enough with more, I'm sure.

Little House on the Prairie

I'd long been dreading this one. My ongoing disappointment with the lingering "children's literature" portion of my backlog has been well documented on the blog, and at 330 pages this book wasn't going to go down quickly. But earlier tonight, I cracked it open just to see what was in store. To my surprise, I gave it an honest read (minimal skimming) from cover to cover in only about two hours. It turns out large text and a number of pictures made up for the high page count. Nice. At any rate, I actually found myself enjoying, or at least not angrily hating, this book. We've all been given an inkling of what pioneer life was like back in the 1800s thanks to the likes of The Oregon Trail, and the twenty-odd easily digestible chapters in Little House on the Prairie fit into a familiar archetype. The semi-autobiographical book begins with the Ingalls family deciding to leave their little house in the Wisconsin woods to head out West. They settle in Kansas in the middle of Indian Territory, but the family patriarch is convinced that the government will push the Indians further west sooner or later. The government never does this, though, and the book ends with the family withdrawing from their titular little house on the prairie on the government's orders and heading back to the Wisconsin area. Maybe it's because of all the politics in the air as Election Day approaches, but I definitely noticed some strong libertarian vibes at play here, even though the tone in which the book was written seems completely apolitical and agenda-less. You've got a family that literally packs up everything it has and heads to the middle of nowhere, building a house and some stables and carving out a new life, aiding neighbors and in turn being aided by them. There's no law enforcement out here whatsoever, and the biggest threat is the potential hostility of the local Indian tribes. They suffer through tons of hardships like malaria and house fires and poison gas (seriously) and the continental temperature extremes from the blistering summer heat to the long frigid winter. But when this family begins to make everything work out without any outside assistance or protection, some bureaucrats in Washington decide that it's time for them to leave it all behind and get the hell off of that Indian land. I mean, doesn't that sound like an Ayn Rand short story? Doesn't the success of the Ingalls family, entirely responsible for their own well-being and livelihood, clash with our current lifestyle where everything is computerized and automated and co-dependent? I shit bricks when the power goes out for an hour or two; there's no chance in hell I'd be able to support a wife and three daughters if forced to live off the land with a gun and a bunch of traps, let alone build them a house to keep the wolves out at night. Yeesh. So anyway, yeah, I guess Little House on the Prairie actually made a small impact on me. I tip my cap to Laura Ingalls Wilder for succeeding where so many before her have failed, but I doubt I'll be checking out any of the other books in this series.

Bastion

Bastion is an action RPG you can download for Xbox Live Arcade or several different computer operating systems. The game blends isometric dungeon crawling with plenty of typical action-adventure elements such as leveling up, acquiring new weapons and skills, and exploring secret areas. The game had a stunning art style, both visually and soundtrack-wise. Its most memorable attribute was certainly its narrator, a gruff-voiced omniscient guy who adds plot to the game where there otherwise is none and also provides running play-by-play commentary. "Kid is just going to town on those windbags," he'll say as you swing your hammer around wildly. "They've got some big guns," he'll note after you get hit by an enemy projectile; fire back and kill said enemy, and you'll hear, "...but the kid's guns are bigger." The plot was kind of strange. The world has been more or less destroyed by an event known as the calamity. You head to the bastion, which is where everyone was supposed to go in the event of an emergency, but the only people to make it there are you and the aforementioned narrator. You spend the rest of the game trying to collect shards and cores with which to get the bastion up and running so that you can undo the calamity. Or is there something else going on entirely? The game stays very vague on a conceptual level, despite being relatively straightforward in terms of gameplay, and in that respect it reminded me a great deal of some other recent XBLA games like Braid and Limbo. Honestly, this may have been its biggest shortcoming. Don't get me wrong - I had a lot of fun playing it and it resonated thematically with me. I just think a straightforward medieval setting would have worked better. But maybe that's just a personal preference. Regardless, this was a decent little game that I could see myself revisiting one day for completion's sake. But not yet. Not yet.

Oldboy

Listen. This is the greatest foreign language film I've ever seen. It's up there among the best movies I've ever seen in general. It's a South Korean movie from 2003 based on a Japanese manga from 1997. In Oldboy, a man gets kidnapped after a night of heavy drinking. He's imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years. He doesn't know by whom, and he doesn't know why. Then, one day, he's released into the world. His one instinct now, naturally, is to find out who was responsible for taking fifteen years of his life away, and why. And also, you know, to hunt him down and kill him. But here's where things get interesting. The kidnapper himself is hoping that our protagonist can discover both his identity and his motive. So we've got one man trying to solve a mystery and enact his revenge, and we've got another man eagerly awaiting that man's moment of discovery. Throw in a love story that exists for more than just peripheral reasons, tack on a very disturbing twist ending, and you've got yourself a hell of a movie. At times it was action-packed, at times it was surreal and dreamlike, and at times it was downright gruesome. At all times, it held my interest, and at no time was I disappointed in a single plot development. This was just a straight up awesome movie. See it before Spike Lee ruins it with an unnecessary remake.

WWE '12

I owe the blog an apology. Unlike many of our other contributors - no judgment - I try my best to post about every finished game, book, movie, and TV season in a timely manner. After all, my original intent in starting this blog was to document the lengthy but usually pleasant process of clearing out my backlog. But here's a game I haven't even touched since - let's look on my Xbox.com profile here for accuracy's sake - December 18th of last year. I owe you all, dear readers, an explanation.

The thing is, I think I "beat" this game on - checking again - November 29th. On that day I won the Royal Rumble with my created superstar, earning a trip to WrestleMania in the process. On that same day I won the main event at WrestleMania and was crowned as the WWE Champion, unlocking a couple of achievements. At the time, I figured I'd keep playing for the sake of unlocking more achievements and seeing how my created wrestler's story unfolded through the spring, summer, and following fall. So, at the time, I didn't make a write-up. I should have. I never touched the game again and its existence only crossed my mind again today after hearing that Monday Night Raw commentator Jerry "the King" Lawler had a heart attack live on TV last night and now probably has permanent brain damage.

I bought this game almost a year ago because a couple of my friends did, and we figured we'd have some fun with it on Xbox Live. Collectively, our group had undergone a bit of a wrestling resurgence, attending a few live events in 2011 and doing our best to catch most of the Pay-Per-Views in someone's living room. But interest was certainly already fading by the time this game came out, and when the game turned out to be a glitch-ridden shitfest, no one ended up playing it on Xbox Live after all. In fact, one of the game's many glitches was an inability to connect to the servers following the game's launch. For all I know, they've fixed it now, but for at least a full week after its release, the game was simply unplayable online. In this day and age, really, that's an inexcusable issue for a video game. The glitches didn't stop there. More than once, the game froze up on a menu screen and required a restart. More than once, my wrestler got stuck inside the ropes or the ring. In the former case I was stuck with the ropes running through my body, unable to move and incapable of climbing either in or out of the ring. In the latter case I looked like a legless torso just floating around on the surface of the ring. In both, the match could not be finished, necessitating restarts. Again, this kind of stuff is just inexcusable these days.

It definitely didn't feel good to pay full price to buy something on launch day (something I never do anymore with very few exceptions) and have it be horribly broken in so many ways. Sure, I had my fun creating my character and his dumb gimmicks and such, and then using his eclectic move set to battle my way to WrestleMania and the WWE title. But at its core WWE '12 was deeply flawed in a frustrating way. In hindsight, it's no wonder I never resumed playing after winning the WWE equivalent of the Super Bowl. So at any rate, here I am today, remembering that I had yet to post this game because of yet another ex-wrestler tragedy. It should go without saying overtly, but, yeah - stay as far away from this stinker of a video game as you can.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Here's another science fiction classic I found at a used book store. Its reputation precedes it, and you've probably heard about its most famous scene, in which a computer that has been toiling away for 7.5 million years finally confirms that the answer to "life, the universe, and everything" is, simply, forty-two. Yes - forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The issue is that no one knows what the right question is. The book is filled with this type of erratic wise-assery and manages to carry throughout it a lighthearted sense of dark humor. It is, in other words, exactly as you'd expect a British science fiction novel from 1979 to be. At just over 200 pages, it was just long enough for me to start to get a sense of at least the very main character, but it flew by at too fast a pace and spent too little time on long-term story-building to make any sort of lasting impression beyond a few scattered memorable scenes and anecdotes. I suppose that since the book is the first in a series of five, it can be forgiven for zipping around between zany chapters at the expense of characterization and overall theme-building. Then again, given the style and tone of the novel, I don't see why or how its various follow-ups would change things up. I don't think I'll be going out of my way to read the next book in the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I liked this one just fine, but not enough to wonder what comes next or to find myself craving more of Douglas Adams' witticisms. File this one under "glad to have read it but ready to move on" and we'll see what pops up on Back-Blogged next time.

Community: Season 3

Long-time readers of this blog - by which I mean a few of the people who contribute to it - know that I've got a weakness for TV series ownership completion; if I own one season of a TV show, I've got to own them all. Somehow, this applies to even the shittiest of TV seasons. The good news is that I've at least learned in recent years to wait on making TV season purchases until the DVDs have dropped in price to a reasonable $10 or $15 each. It's not as if I can't wait to re-watch most of these seasons. In fact, I often dread it. And even when it comes to the ones I know I'll enjoy, why not wait? The longer I give myself between viewings, the more I'm likely to have forgotten from said season, and thus, the more I'll probably enjoy the second viewing. Of course, as you've probably already figured out, this lengthy opening paragraph has merely been included in this post just to highlight that when the third season of Community came out, I purchased and watched it immediately, devouring every bonus feature included on the DVD set, including cast and director commentaries on every episode. What can I say? I fucking love this show.

I won't go off on a lengthy pitch or even attempt to describe my strong appreciation for the series. Instead, here's a brief list of a few different tricks it pulled off along the way to another 22 episodes:

• A multiple-timeline episode exploring chaos theory and the butterfly effect
• An episode in which the characters take turns telling very unique and true-to-character horror stories, unintentionally exploring the various roles and relationships they all see one another having within their study group
• A very memorable montage set to Seal's "Kiss From a Rose"
• Another documentary spoof (not a "mock mockumentary" this time around, but more of a Hearts of Darkness spoof - so, different!)
• A Christmas musical episode
• A Ken Burns-style documentary about a college-wide pillow fight, told mostly through still images
• Another "clip show" of entirely original clips
• The shocking - albeit temporary - twist that the characters weren't at a community college at all, but instead in an insane asylum
• An episode about a video game, rendered almost entirely in wonderful 16-bit animation
• A heist episode
• An appropriately touching season finale that could have served as a series finale (production on it was finished before the show was renewed for a fourth season)

Luckily, the show was indeed renewed for that fourth season. But at what cost? The season will consist of 13 episodes, not 22. The show will now air on Friday nights, all but ensuring that its (young) audience will be DVRing it rather than contributing to its ratings. And, worst of all, Dan Harmon, the show's creator and primary creative voice, has been fired outright. What will this show look like without him next season, and how badly will it flounder on Fridays, and is there any hope whatsoever of getting a back nine ordered - or hell, a fifth season? I suppose these questions will be answered next month. For now, I'm just thankful there's a fourth season at all. (You know. In addition to being thankful for three truly wonderful seasons of television.) So, uh, #sixseasonsandamovie, and I'm looking forward to Season 4's premiere with an open mind and high hopes. Good night!

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

This is the second time I've come away from a famous Ang Lee movie feeling underwhelmed. Not completely disappointed or anything, but merely not quite as impressed as the hype surrounding the movie had me hoping I would be. I guess this movie was a minor landmark in film history simply for bringing wuxia - a Chinese fiction genre focusing on mysticism and martial arts - to the West. The fight scenes were impressive and the film was shot in many beautiful locations, but a very generic and slow-moving plot left something to be desired. Actually, if you want to see a wuxia movie, I'd totally and wholeheartedly recommend the 2002 movie Hero, starring Jet Li. Compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that movie was better-plotted and easier to fall right into, and it contained more and even better fight scenes too.

Zombieland

Here's one of those movies I always knew I'd get around to seeing, but never felt the compelling need to see with any immediacy. And just like that, three years went by, and when I finally did get around to buying it on Amazon a few weeks ago for chump change and saw the little "(2009)" next to the title, I did a double take. Three whole years? Shit. At any rate, if you'll pardon my severe lateness to the party, I did indeed highly enjoy Zombieland. It was well-made in all the right ways, from the great casting choices to the tone and mood. Coming in at just 82 minutes sans closing credits, it never really hit a lull or grew stale. It was funny without being stupid and it was R-rated without being excessively graphic or leaning too heavily on zombie scares. And somehow at the end of the day, there was an element of warmth to it that... just kind of worked, rather than feeling cheesy. Zombieland was one of those movies that I'd be hard-pressed to rate extremely highly, simply because its ceiling as a zom-com isn't very high. But the thing is, it hits that ceiling; what it sets out to be, it accomplishes becoming, and in that regard I'd have to call it a great movie. Not flawless, not an instant classic, and nothing I'd expect to find on the IMDb Top 250, but an extremely well made and enjoyable movie all the same.

A Dance with Dragons

Too many thoughts, too little willingness on my part to edit them into a concise and free-flowing post. To bullet points we go!

• Man. What now? After spending the past six months fully engrossing myself in this franchise, I'm all caught up to everyone else, waiting impatiently for the sixth book to arrive and hoping the third season of the HBO show doesn't screw everything up. After twenty hours of television and 5,000 pages of serialized storytelling, I'll be doing nothing Game of Thrones related for a long, long time. (Unless any newcomers want to gather 'round for a Season 1 marathon someday soon. Eh? Ah? Anyone?)
• Rest assured. This book was much better than its predecessor, A Feast for Crows. The unpopular and questionable decision made by GRRM (I can call him that now; I've earned that) to split the story into two parallel books following the spectacular third book left A Dance with Dragons free to pick up where A Storm of Swords left off for half of the characters in the series. And since this book ran close to 50% longer than A Feast for Crows, its final third brought several of that book's characters and elements back into focus, too. GRRM has gone on record saying he was never really happy with the decision to split the story into two parallel books at this point, but admits he saw no easy way to deal with how dense and heavy his story had become without either omitting half the characters or cutting all of their stories short. At least in this book I rarely felt as though what I was reading was needlessly tacked on and irrelevant to the larger story; the same could not be said of A Feast for Crows, which was paradoxically both much longer than it had any need to be and also far less substantial.
• Still, even though GRRM split the stories geographically so as to better serve the storytelling aspect of his series, plenty of arcs from both this book and the last one feel unfinished at this point. And I'm counting huge cliffhangers as "finished plots" because I know the story will resume once more in the (hopefully near) future. What I mean is that there were a couple of plots that just kind of stopped one or two chapters short of a natural stopping point. GRRM has acknowledged this, admitting that he had to bump about five or ten various chapters due to the sheer heft and length of this book. The good news is that this means he was already like 200 pages done writing the sixth book from the get-go. The bad news is that for the second time in a row, the book doesn't end on a perfectly satisfactory note.
• The first four books in the series were given to me for my birthday back in May, all in trade paperback form. I finished the fourth one on July 15th, and was prepared to take a small break before buying the fifth one in trade paperback on its release date in late August. Then the trade paperback release date got pushed back to next March, and I had no desire to wait that long to see what happened next, so I dropped three times the price on a hardcover copy and ended up not taking so much of a break after all.
• GRRM, who has earned a notorious reputation for missing deadlines, has estimated that he should (or was it "could?") be done with the sixth book in 2014. I won't hold my breath, but a 2015 release date seems reasonable. Of course, the gap between the last two books was six years, and he had originally planned on that gap being one year. So, hey, we may never even see a sixth book.
• The first book was told from nine different characters' points of view. This one was told from eighteen such points of view, and there were seven additional points of view from A Feast for Crows that didn't wind up getting revisited here. Thus far in the series there have been chapters told from 31 unique points of view, and only one of them has been maintained across all five books. There are at least a hundred principal characters in the series and there must be close to a thousand named characters by now. The fictional world includes two massive continents full of various cultures, languages, and religions, and plenty of both have yet to be explored or examined in any detail. So, yeah. Maybe the story is just starting to sag under its own massive weight a little bit, but holy shit is it ambitious.