Crackdown

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

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

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

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

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

Fantastic Mr. Fox

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

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

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

Under the Dome

So that took forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 Rock: Season 7

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

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

Perfect Dark

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

The Tree of Life

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

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

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

American History X

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

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

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

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

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

JFK

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

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

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

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 7

Time for a little Friday evening workplace post.

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

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

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

Community: Season 4

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

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

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

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

Infamous 2

When I wrote about the first Infamous game nearly a year ago (has it really been that long?) I commented about how it was a good start to an open-world superhero franchise, but just took a bit too long to get going for me to truly enjoy it. With Infamous 2 consider that criticism a thing of the past- the whole game is just awesome. You start off with all of your powers from the first game, and things only get better from there. I'm glad the game allows an import of your character from the first game, because playing with an already-set level of good or bad karma made the two games fit together well- I was a hero in Empire City, so it makes sense that as I journeyed to the New Orleans stand-in New Marais, my people loved me everywhere I went. I figured I would continue on with this, becoming the ultimate good guy, until a choice in the middle of the game surprisingly skewed my karma level. You see, the game gives you a couple romantic interests who themselves are superheroes, a 'good' one with the power to shoot ice, and a 'bad' one with the power to shoot fire. Now the hero, Cole, has his own free will and can be good or bad, but when a time comes for Cole to switch his powers with one of his new friends, it was treated way more seriously than I thought it would be. I wanted fire rather than ice, but doing so made the ice-girl hate me and dropped my karma far into the 'evil' end of the spectrum. What's so evil about this? Oh well. It was actually kinda convenient because the only reason I planned on staying 'good' throughout the game was because the best powers are only at the extreme ends of the spectrum- starting good and turning evil would result in a wishy-washy neutral karma that would get me nowhere. But no, my choice was made, and I was now evil. Things don't remain quite so black and white, but I kept up my evil presence, launching cars full of people into the ocean and causing mayhem throughout the city, so in the end I got the 'evil' ending to the game, which was pretty damn good. Stan assured me the 'good' ending was better, so I Youtubed that and it probably is. So yeah, no matter what Infamous 2 lived up to the hype and is well worth a play.

Dexter: The First Season

There's been a big void in my life ever since I watched the final episode of The Sopranos. I finally decided to fill it with Dexter. Everyone loves this show and I usually enjoy what the majority enjoys (except in music). Anyway, Dexter isn't always the best written or the best acted, but it is pretty entertaining. Dexter's sister Deb really stands out to me as by far the worst character. She's annoying, whoever plays her can't act and all she does is complain. Most of the time I just want Dexter to kill her. Anyway, if you like your crime shows you'll like this show. It's a good way to get through the rest of the summer before a lot of shows come back on the air.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Trev checked in seven months ago with a post on this classic Spaghetti Western, and for the most part I can just co-sign with the various things he mentioned. (Here's his post.) This movie isn't even three hours long, yet it took me four sittings across nearly a week to get through. But was that because it was a shitty, dated movie that bored me to sleep? Or was I just really tired? Perhaps some combination of the two? You know what, fine, I'm gonna do this:

The Good

Director Sergio Leone is one impressive cinematographer. Though noticeably dated in that blurry and faded way that film gets after a while, this is a beautiful movie. Most shots take place in the exterior of the Old West (well, Spain) and are framed perfectly to maximize a balance of wide open wonder and tense suspense. Also of note is the film's iconic score. (You've heard it, even if you don't know you have. Check Trev's post for a sample.) And while the film is and always has been known as a Clint Eastwood movie, the true star of the movie is absolutely and unquestionably Eli Wallach, who plays Tuco ("The Ugly"), a devious but affable bandit who gets more screen time than Eastwood and possibly more dialogue than the rest of the characters put together. Tuco was involved in every single one of the movie's most memorable scenes, and while Eastwood's Blondie ("The Good") is ostensibly the film's protagonist, I have to consider Tuco its heart, soul, and all-around hero.

The Bad

The film's biggest shortcoming is its plot. Trev accurately described the movie's central conflict as "a mad dash for buried treasure," and at three hours in length there's a whole lot of time to kill. I'll admit, that time is killed pretty excellently with a bunch of memorable scenes and double-crossings and minor obstacles, but ultimately we spend close to two and a half hours - without much dialogue, as Leone and his crew were Italian and his three main actors were all English-speaking Americans - just to get the three title characters to come together for their buried treasure. It's a fun ride, but one void of any character development or witty banter. The whole thing feels a lot like a Quentin Tarantino movie (Tarantino once called this the "best-directed" movie he'd ever seen, so its influence on his work is pretty clear) without any trademark Tarantino conversations and segues. Most glaringly of all, the film's antagonist - "The Bad" - is one of the most weakly-developed bad guys in any film I've ever seen. Early on, he kills a man in that man's home for murky reasons. He is then not seen until midway through the movie, masquerading as a soldier in the Union army. He wears a black hat and scowls something fierce, but man, he is one hollow character.

The Ugly

The following points shouldn't really be taken to reflect the film's "ugliness" as much as just some interesting ways in which it is quirky and dated and odd. I've gotta start with the sound. Because the three main actors spoke English and the rest of the supporting actors and extras spoke Italian or Spanish, Leone had everyone just speak their native language during shooting. Leone also shouted directions at his actors during shooting, and for these reasons in tandem decided to just have everyone dub their lines back in in post-processing. This made the film feel noticeably shoddy and low-budget, even though it was neither of those things. In addition to the voice dubbing, there were some flat out odd choices made by Leone, in my mind. For instance, at the film's climax, when Tuco stumbles upon the graveyard where the gold is buried, as he's running toward it, a dog appears and just starts chasing him. It's a dog we haven't seen before, and never see again. As it turns out, it's a dog Leone released unbeknownst to Wallach, the actor playing Tuco, as he wanted Tuco to look genuinely alarmed and surprised or something. First of all, forget about the levels of distrust that must foster between actor and director - there's a dog just running around blatantly in one of the movie's most pivotal scenes. What an odd choice. While I'm on the subject of actor-director distrust though, apparently Wallach nearly died three separate times while filming the movie. I'll keep the list brief and void of context, but once he was nearly decapitated by a speeding train, another time he wound up riding on a spooked horse for a mile with his hands tied behind his back, and a third time he drank acid out of a bottle he expected to be filled with water. Damn!

All in all, it was a decent movie, and about as good as anything I've seen from the other side of 1975 or so.

Gangster Squad

I've been meaning to post this film for a while. First off, let em apologize. I'm not too reliable when it comes to posting on the movies I see. I'm watching roughly a half a dozen a week, and it just slips my mind to always write up on them - that or I'm just plain lazy. (OK, I'm lazy.) This one, however, deserves someone coming to its defense.

There's was a lot of hype prior to Gangster Squad's release. I mean, you got an stellar cast tackling the Mickey Cohen crime story set in the iconic 1940's Los Angeles. The story of crooked cops and dangerous gangsters and the few that are willing to risk it all to do some good - a story the public always seems to love. It's the complete set up for another L.A. Confidential or The Untouchables. And with the original release date slated for December (the winter blockbuster season) it suddenly got pushed to January... the film industry's dumping ground for all their failed projects. None-the-less, I was disappointed when the rescheduled release date was announced, even more depressed when RottenTomatoes reviewed the film at 32%, and completely downhearted when the film pulled in a measly $46 million in total for its domestic run in theaters. (Short of its $60 million production budget.) Despite all this, I picked it up a few weeks ago and found myself pleasantly surprised despite all the negativity surrounding it.

First off, everyone is trying to sell this a "true crime" story. Maybe some sort of mystery-drama piece. It's not any of that. What it is, is your basic shoot-em-up action movie. Personally, I love these flicks. Lot of gun fights and a lot of bare-knuckle brawls... that's what you get in this picture, on top of some pretty great performances. I loved Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen. No, it's no going to win him another Academy nomination or anything, but it's gritty, unrefined, and fun. Plus there's some pretty great one liners: "Here comes Santi Claus!" right as Cohen, armed with a tommy gun, enters into the final gun fight centered around a display Christmas tree.

Despite her love of Emily Stone and Ryan Gosling, I think Kelsi fell in line with the masses' with this film - and there's nothing wrong/surprising with that. It's not particularly smart or enchanting movie. There are no specific scenes I'll cherish or a soundtrack that I'll continuously hum in my head (unlike Ennio Morricone's work in The Untouchables). Dialogue can by a bit dry. Plot is fairly predictable. But if you walk into it with your expectations prepared for your basic run-of-the-mill shoot-em-up movie, then I think you leave pleasantly surprised. 

Oh, and it has one hell of a trailer...

Final Fantasy X

After several years it has finally come to a close. I probably picked up this release title for the PS2 (I think that's around 2000 or 2001 for those keeping track) shortly after I purchased my console on that infamous Cedar Point trip the summer before my sophomore year of college. Through all those years I never beat this guy. Came close a few times. But then I would lose my memory card to a friend in college - losing my saved game as well (same goes for FFXII). I would then start it up again and again only to lose interest and just forget the whole thing ever existed in the first place. Well, last Christmas I start on last new game... over seven months later, it's done.

Was it worth it? Is this a good game? Should anyone else waste their time on it? 

I have mixed feelings on this guy. On one hand, I remember one of my friends getting this game when it was first released and being amazed by the graphics. Let's face it, computer graphics mastered the texture and look of water years ago, and this game rightly capitalizes on that. Most of the game revolves around the element of water - even the main protagonist's name is spelled close to "tide" and spends half his time swimming in the ocean. For its time, it does look amazing. But then that's something that the Final Fantasy series has always been known for. Although I can't stand FFXIII and eventually handed it off to Sween before moving, I was still blown away by even the most recent game's open scenes. They're fantastic! Sadly, looks alone can't save a game.

What really makes a game is the gameplay and the story.

The gameplay in FFX is your standard turn-based style fighting... and there ain't nothing wrong with that. I've always loved this game technique and I always will. (Once again, another reason why I almost threw FFXIII out the window. What the fuck were they even trying to do in that -- Sorry, I'll leave the bitching to Sween for that game.) It's like a game of chess or something. I don't know, but it just works for me. And the leveling system here with the spheres keeps the game moving at a brisk pace where you always feel a sense of improvement even if it's only in tiny increments. All-in-all, the gameplay is enjoyable. I do have one (somewhat major) hang-up with it near the end, but I'll address that in a bit.

Next the story. Now, I know the Final Fantasy series are always recognized for their bizarre  metaphysical tales that push the boundaries of our imagination, but there's a limit. The only other Final Fantasy game I've finished is the 7th one. It was out there, but I let that slip. Maybe because it was the first game from the series that I finished, maybe it was because of the legacy that it has, or maybe it's because Sephiroth is such a badass. Who knows? But I love it all the same. In FFX, not so much. With the cheesy voice acting and the weird-ass explanation of different worlds, it wasn't long before I completely lost track of what was going on. I'm sure I'll read a complete synopsis of the plot online after I post this, but there are too many "what the fuck?" moments to keep track of what's really going on. 

And the final battle scene... Where and what? You're just sort of thrown into the chaos of the universe as you battle Yu Yevon of the blade of a giant sword. Did any of this have any significance or was it all just suppose to look cool. Maybe if 13-year-old Trevor had played this his mind would have been blown. It just pissed off current day Trevor. Also, the soundtrack when you fight mutant Jecht... That shit's a riot. 

To my final point. Much like Sheridan, I over-leveled. What does this mean? Well, I fucking jacked up my team so high that by the end of the game a sneeze from one of my characters on the bosses would make them crumbled. Basically what happened was that I wanted to make sure I had some strong tanks going into the final battles, but getting those Ultimate Weapons that let you do damage above 9,999HP was so damn tricky except for Auron and Rikku. So I started leveling just those guys up. Along the way I managed to get Yuna and (fucking finally) Tidus' weapons too. By that time I was on this leveling streak. I just couldn't stop. The total time on my save file said it was around 140 hours. I know I left the game on from time-to-time, so it's probably more like 90 hours. Still... a good chunk was just spent building my characters. In the end, Rikku was my all-star. I dumped all my fortune spheres on her to raise her luck incredibly high to the point that every 1 out of 3 hits dealt critical damage topping out at 99,999HP. With this, most bosses were killed with one or two blows.

What I'm getting at is that I ruined the end of the game. Where most people have the chance to use technique and strategy in figuring out how to defeat these incredible foes, I repeatedly hit X until the next cut scene - which didn't take long. That's what really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The fact that you can actually over-level your characters to the point where the game is just no fun anymore. In the end, I'm going to put the blame on the game for this problem instead of me. They should have figure some people just don't have a life and would waste all their free time endlessly fighting pointless battles for experience points making their character more powerful than God. They should have countered all this by opening up new bosses that are even stronger than the original. Put your devotion to the game to the true test. But, no. It ended in the blink of an eye leaving me to wonder: "WHY THE FUCK DID I WASTE SO MUCH TIME ON THIS PIECE OF CRAP GAME! WHAT WAS IT ALL FOR! TELL ME!!!"

I'm not playing any Final Fantasy titles for a while. 

Four Whole Years

Just a quick update here on Back-Blogged's fourth birthday.

Here's a snapshot of my current backlog stats along with where it stood one, two, three, and four years ago.

Progress is progress! But this progress seems almost entirely based on video game counts. Books are up, which is an issue. It's time to do more reading this coming fall. My movie count oscillates from year to year but has apparently stabilized pretty soundly ever since the blog's first year. TV sets are back down to an all time low at just five total. Video games continue to call at a rate of about ten a year, and I should make sure not to slow down as fall arrives and turns into winter.

And that's all for now. How are all of you doing?