Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 3

I can't pretend I have much to say about this or any season of Curb Your Enthusiasm- just three seasons in and already my posts are getting stale. It's a funny show that is of course similar to Seinfeld, mostly with Larry criticizing social norms and committing his own faux pas and getting everyone around him very angry with him. It's a very consistent show, with no episode really all that much better or worse than any other. There's more light serialization here as Larry tries to open a restaurant with a few friends over the course of the season, and of course that's loaded with hijinks. The final scene in the restaurant was probably the funniest thing in the show thus far. This is by no means must-watch, but compared with what else is out there in the sitcom wasteland it's definitely well above average. And there you have it, my hot take on season three of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Four Past Midnight

Four Past Midnight should be the last of King I read for a while, so I decided to switch things up a little bit and ditch the long novels for a short-story collection. Only thing is, Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas, not short stories, and they average nearly 200 pages each anyway so again I got a huge long book to read. None of the stories really have anything to do with eachother so I'll cover them all separately.

The Langoliers- Wow! This started off just awesome. It took something that's not particularly creepy or scary- red-eye flights, and made it creepy as all hell. I don't want to spoil exactly what goes down here, but I'll just state right off the bat that the intro to Langoliers was the best part of the whole collection. It didn't finish up with quite the intensity, but it was overall a very solid novella and my favorite of the bunch.

Secret Window, Secret Garden- I was slightly familiar with this one- it was turned into a movie, Secret Window a few years back with Johnny Depp. I didn't see it but I remember the ads and the setup- Johnny Depp is a talented writer (eyeroll) working on a new book in his secluded Maine home, who suddenly has to deal with a psychotic Southerner who's hellbent on proving that Johnny stole his story and passed it off as his own. I was aware of the big twist, and you might already be able to guess what it is, but there were a few interesting tricks up King's sleeve to make this not a waste of time.

The Library Policeman- Apparently this story came from that dumb fear that some children have about the library- what if I lose the book? Who's going to come after me? How will I deal with that? It seems nonsensical to me now, but I remember being VERY stressed out as a little kid over a book that I was convinced was long lost and overdue, only to find out I had returned it and simply forgotten. I wasn't sure how King was going to be able to make a decent story out of that kinda funny concept, but to his credit he does make the story more than just "scary people come after you when books are overdue!" There's one scene late in the novella when you find out the identity of the Library Policeman, and it's, well... very hard to read. What mostly plods along as a kinda cheesy, goofy story along the lines of Christine quickly turns into something very depressing and gruesome. Not fun!

The Sun Dog- We end with a book that sounds a little too much like it belongs in the Goosebumps series- The Sun Dog. A prequel to the novel Needful Things, which was released a few months later, we visit King's favorite non-Derry locale, Castle Rock, where a young boy has received a Polaroid camera as a gift. The thing is, none of the pictures come out properly and instead seem to constantly depict the movement of a weird dog somewhere. The story was alright, but that hasn't soured me on Needful Things. But that won't come soon; I've posted enough King books on the Blog for now, time to get back into some of the other authors I've been neglecting.

Dexter The Seventh Season

I admit it. By the time I got to this season, I just wanted to get to the series finale. I get a bit obsessive when it comes to shows and I can watch them at a pretty good clip. Just ask Danielle as I ignored her for a long time. Hannah McKay was introduced in this season and man is she a shitty character. The relationship between Dexter and Debra is explored and that thing takes a turn for the shitty as well. It wasn't a bad season and I loved the finale, but it really set up season 8 to suck. This season didn't really take advantage of the season 6 finale like I thought it would. At this point, I pretty much hate every character in the show. There are a lot of things that piss me off, but I do not feel like I should be spoiling anything for anyone except maybe Webber. Anyway, after finishing season 8, I can safely say that Dexter lived up to my admittedly tempered expectations, but that the series finale is about as unsatisfying as Lost's.

Dexter The Sixth Season

So here it is. The sixth season. A season that is universally panned. You know what. I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, but with the benefit of being able to fly through it in a few days I didn't have to deal with Colin Hanks for that much of my life. This was clearly a bad season, but not much worse than season 5. Colin Hanks was horrible, but I was able to get through his BS and continue on with the series. This seemed like a missed opportunity because the biblical themes should have meshed well with Dexter. Anyway, I don't think this season ruined the series like many others believe, but I also never saw Dexter as a really good show. Enjoyable, but that's about it.

Trance

Always like keeping up to date with Danny Boyle's films. Aside from The Beach, all of his movies have been extremely strong and I just love his energetic style behind the camera. I think Trance peeked it's head into theaters sometime in the spring and went relatively unnoticed. Wikipedia says it only pulled in $22 million from theaters - that's a meh. Needless-to-say, the low hype and limited release was probably good reason why I didn't find my way to see this movie until it came out to DVD. 

... and I can understand why 20th Century Fox was hesitant to drop all their money in publicizing this guy.

I'm not saying it's bad - in fact, far from it - but it is a difficult movie to follow. If you're completely clueless as what this movie is suppose to be all about, here's the lowdown: James McAvoy works as an high-scale art auctioneer. There's an emergency (heist threat) while auctioning off an expense piece of art. McAvoy goes to place the art in a drop shoot for safe keeping when he's intercepted by a thief. During the altercation, the thief hits him on the head and McAvoy goes unconscious. He awakes with a bit of amnesia and learns a lot of startling events. For one, he was in on the heist, and more importantly... the painting that the thieves thought they successfully stole is actually missing (stole an empty case). With the help of a hypnotist/therapist, the group of thieves attempt to help McAvoy go into the deep recesses of his mind to figure out what happened the missing piece of artwork. And there are plenty of surprising developments suppressed in his foggy mind. 

Sorry if that brief introduction to the plot was confusing, but that's what this film is. Confusing. It's one of those stories that just frustrates you more and more the deeper you get into it; however, it does redeem itself. By the climax, there's enough info clearly revealed to help the majority of the audience connect all the dots. It's a relief, but, unfortunately, the payoff isn't anything incredible. 

And that's my overall stance on the movie. It's fun and entertaining as you try to unravel this mystery, but - as with any good mystery - the ending has to be something worthwhile. This ending has some fun surprises, but really just didn't do it for me. 

Still a Boyle fan. Still pumped for his next film - a sequel to Trainspotting. As for anyone else somewhat interested in this work of his, I would give it a go if you have the time. Great cast and great performances all around. Just know that you're probably not alone if three quarters of the way through you find yourself completely lost. Just push on and it will hopefully all come together. 

In Bruges

This was an impulse buy. I used it to push an Amazon.com order up above the $25 minimum for free shipping, so in a certain light I got it nearly for free. Still, I'm not sure it was worth it. This was a fine movie and everything, but I can't shake the notion that it was a fairly boring movie. Like, there are plenty of movies that are far shittier than this one that I can readily acknowledge I'd rather have watched last night. This was dry and dark and British, and that's all well and good, but it just didn't grab me at all.

Two Irish hitmen have fled to the town of Bruges (in Belgium) after a hit gone wrong. And while plenty else happens along the way, the movie's climax involves their boss finding them and preparing to finish them off. There were some memorable moments and witty lines, but ultimately this just wasn't a thrilling, exciting, or entertaining movie. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't fun.

Election (1999)

I first heard about this one close to a year ago when the AV Club called it one of the thirty best movies of the 1990s. A lofty claim, for sure, and one the movie didn't quite live up to. There's really not a whole lot to this one. Reese Witherspoon plays an overly ambitious and manipulative high school overachiever. Matthew Broderick is a sad sack teacher opposed to her uncontested bid for student president. And Chris Klein is a lovable but utterly naive idiot who gets talked into running against Witherspoon's character. The movie has been called a "razor sharp" political satire, and I just can't give it that much praise. Clever, yes. Brilliant, no. Maybe 1999 had different standards? At any rate, this movie's worth watching if you find it on basic cable or something, but I really can't pretend it was a hidden gem of any sort.

House, M.D.: Season 1

Finally back into the swing of things after over a month of no posts. There's a lot to go over. Let's get to it.

Been a while since I've written on any TV shows. Now, House, M.D. is something I've half seen. I think I watched most of the first four season years ago while in college, but after re-watching the first season it's clear that I haven't retained much. I'm not saying the show is forgettable. I think I just treated it more as background noise whenever it came on TV, and - to be fair - never gave it attention it deserved. 

In short, the show's great. Not the best thing I've ever seen, but certainly suspenseful and entertaining enough to help pass the time and keep me happy. The character of House is also compelling as all hell. Something that I just don't get tired of. (Let's see if I still feel that way at the end of season 8.) However, the reason why House is such a great character to follow is because it's just an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes only placed in the medical world. Not saying this a bad or cheap move - far from it. It just makes sense as to why the  title character is so riveting to watch. 

Sadly, that's all I really think I can contribute regarding my thoughts on this guy. Why? Well, for one, I pretty sure most people here have already seen this show and understand where I'm coming from without elaborating too much. Another reason is just that self-contained, one-hour dramas like this don't really inspire too much in the vein of captivating stories that grow with every episode (something you see with Breaking Bad or Lost). With 22 - 24 episodes a season, maybe a quarter of them build upon some riveting story arc (e.g. House in jeopardy of losing his job when he butts heads with the new head of the hospital), but the rest are bottle episodes. Stories that are fun to take in, but rarely build on anything if at all. I think this is why I treated the show so much like background noise back when I first watched it. I could pop in on any season and on any episode, see the familiar faces battle their diagnostic problem in the same formula and be entertained, but never wow-ed. Sure, I know there are some major events that occur throughout the series (House getting a new team, House going into rehab, House going to prison), but, in general, the show always seems to find it's way back to its comfortable routine... and for that, there's little else to say other than, "It's fun to watch." 

Looper

Time travel is tough. It's one of mankind's most frequent fantasies, and yet we can't even come up with a general consensus over how it could even feasibly work. Do all possible timelines exist simultaneously? Can you change the past or the future? If you were to die in a previous time, would you just kind of pop out of existence in your present? The trope has been explored half to death, but it's still such an appealing and challenging concept.

Part of what made Looper so appealing - in addition to a great cast and a cool story - was the simplicity with which it handled the concept of time travel, a central element of its plot. Compared to Inception, another recent beloved sci-fi movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and plenty of mind-bending concepts, Looper is relatively straightforward. Sure, there's some narration, especially early on, explaining the gist of how this future world works with its time travel and telekinesis. But you don't spend the entire film getting hit over the head with new rules, exceptions to old rules, and unique situations for which all previously established rules do not apply.

(Side note. I loved Inception when I saw it in theaters, but within a few days of seeing it I had already begun to sour on it. By the time my future wife bought it on Blu-ray several months later I had no interest in even seeing it a second time; when I did watch it a second time, its numerous holes and flaws were glaring and obvious. Still, there are few movies I've ever walked away from feeling more impressed by than Inception. So, was it a great movie, a terrible movie, or some compromise of the two possibilities? I still don't know. Okay, enough about Inception. Side note over.)

I expect I'll end up souring on Looper a little bit, too, with time. Although it was far more straightforward than Inception and should hold up much better to repeated viewings, I'm already figuring out some contradictions and strange plot devices that I didn't really care about at first. Hey, no matter; Looper had something Inception didn't, which was a compelling narrative that superseded its gimmicky sci-fi set-up. And along with the narrative came some great subversion of my expectations. A good movie shouldn't telegraph its twists from half an hour of screen time away, but at the same time a good movie earns its own outcomes, if that makes sense. A deus ex machina climactic resolution is a cop-out, but a predictable vanilla conclusion is no treat either.

I guess what I'm trying to say - and here come some major spoilers, which I feel safe writing here since at least four other blog members have seen this movie - is that I love how Bruce Willis became the bad guy. It's not even that it happened gradually and you came to realize it suddenly; rather, he was a bad dude the entire time, and we were just rooting for him early on before coming to spend time on the farm with Emily Blunt and the kid. Early on, we root for Bruce Willis and think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is being a total asshole, dismissing all this advice and all these warnings form his future self so callously, and then worst of all just ready to shoot and kill his future self for some easy money and a carefree life. But by the end of the movie, it's like, wait a second - why do we give a shit if Bruce Willis dies? He made his bed long ago, and now it's time for him to sleep in it. Plus he's killing kids. It's misguided at best and horrifying in any case. For a movie to take the wisdom out of an "old man" character and replace it with a cold quest for vengeance was subtle, especially given Bruce Willis's charisma, and I'm sure I'm not alone when I say once I got to the end of the movie I realized I was no longer rooting for him, but couldn't remember when I had consciously stopped doing so.

At any rate, I thought this was a very solid movie. It wasn't perfect or anything, but few movies with this kind of ambition are.

Kick-Ass

I didn't know much about this one heading in, aside from that it was a movie about some regular kids who decide to dress up like superheroes and end up in way over their heads. I didn't even know Nic Cage was in it, let alone that he stole the show. (Though, that latter part is no surprise.) I figured this was just one more recent movie in an ongoing string of superhero comic book adaptations.

And it is, really. But it was also surprisingly entertaining and brutally violent. I guess I'm so used to the "PG-13" status quo on superhero movies that seeing blood spatters and limbs flying felt delightfully fresh for me. That so much of the carnage came at the hands of an eleven-year-old girl was a bonus toward the element of surprise I experienced while watching this movie. Ultimately I guess this is nothing special, but it was a hell of a lot of fun to watch, which is more than I can say about so many other cookie cutter comic book action movies these days. I'm interested enough in the sequel to check it out eventually.

Sons of Anarchy: Season Five

Sure, this was all old DVR material from last year, but the DVD for Sons of Anarchy's fifth season has been released so I'm cool with logging this. At the end of season four, Sons of Anarchy completely whiffed on their finale, choosing to remain stagnant rather than make either of the big changes that were heavily foreshadowed all season long. I was worried that season five would continue with the stagnation and fall into a stretch of bad writing. I was wrong, but that didn't make season five any easier to watch. Season five was actually very hard to watch. It's just brutal. Think, torture-porn comes to tv. Here's a brief list of awful things that happened in season five, and I'm probably missing many others:

-A man witnesses some goons burning his daughter alive
-A man sees his tied up wife casually shot in the head
-A different man has a spurned lover force him to have sex with his new lover in front of her at gunpoint, only for her to commit suicide immediately after
-A man watches his best friend get beaten to death

I mean, holy shit! Oh yeah, the show seemed suddenly progressive by introducing a trans character, only to have her played for laughs and make the rest of the crew uncomfortable. Whatever happened to the fun-loving group of criminals who were just trying to make their community a better place? On Breaking Bad watching a situation go from bad to worse is part of the appeal; on Sons of Anarchy it just makes me feel like the show is pushing too hard to shock its audience. Oh yeah since I'm all caught up now I can add a few more brutal moments from season six, which I'll remind you has only broadcasted two episodes:

-A man drowns another man in a pool of urine
-Women are raped and kept in cages
-A man cheats on his wrongly-imprisoned and fiercely loyal wife with a woman he just met
-Numerous prison rapes
-A woman is suffocated with a pillow minutes after watching her husband get killed, and she has really done nothing wrong, except be the mother of....
-A child who commits a school shooting.

Yeah, I think they're doing away with "plot" and ready to focus solely on shocking. Why am I watching this again?

The Sopranos: Season Three

Season 3 of The Sopranos is probably the worst one I've seen, but that's not really all that bad. I talked to Stan about it, and he told me apparently there was this pretty cool plan for the season where Tony teamed up with his mother against Uncle Junior for a season-long arc, but when her actress died suddenly in the middle of filming, they had to ditch that plotline completely, and never seemed to recover its momentum. This is fine, Sopranos isn't a show that needs heavy serialization to work, but it seemed to make season three feel a bit weaker than the first two. Honestly I finished this about two weeks ago and I've already forgotten significant chunks of the season finale, whereas season two's finale still feels completely clear to me. Oh well! I'll probably remember this season for a few things: the kids' arcs- Meadow growing to hate her father, while Anthony Junior seems to grow more and more like him; Tony and his complete psycho of a new girlfriend; and Christopher and Paulie wandering around lost in the winter woods of New Jersey. Oh yeah Meadow had a boyfriend Jackie Jr, who is an idiot and has a pretty boring father figure in Ralph who never got all that interesting to me. Still though, the season was consistently entertaining, so hopefully it rebounds to "excellent" again come season four.

Final Fantasy XIII

And here's even more in the 'substantial gaming' department, a game that took up a large chunk of my summer- Final Fantasy XIII. Critical reception to the game was decidedly lower than what's usually given the Final Fantasy games, and it quickly generated a reputation as being very boring. "It takes 24 hours to get through the tutorial!" was a popular claim. "Way too heavy on cutscenes!" was another. I realize I'm a bit of a logging optimist, and it takes a real stinker of a game/book/show for me to get very critical, so much like this past January's Metroid: Other M post, I feel like I need to break this post into a few different sections to talk about what worked and what didn't. Here we go!

The Gameplay- By far the biggest change here is gameplay. This isn't all that surprising as Final Fantasy games are famous for introducing wild new game mechanics with each installment. Developer Square Enix may not always hit the right notes, but you can't call them lazy. Unlike most game series, fan outcry would probably be the most negative here if nothing had changed. So what did they do for Final Fantasy XIII? We've got the Paradigm system. Basically each one of your six characters comes pre-set with three job classes that simplify a lot of the jobs in the Final Fantasy series down to a few basics: commandos do the most damage; medics are used to heal and the party; synergists cast buff spells; saboteurs cast negative status effects on enemies; sentinels draw enemy attacks away from allies; and finally the ravager deals weak attacks but are used to fill up an enemy's "stagger" bar- once an enemy is staggered, for a short time all attacks on the enemy become ridiculously potent. This results in a gameplay that's a little close to Final Fantasy XII's hands-off gambit approach but really completely different from all other games in the series. With most boss fights, your strategy will focus mostly on timing and setting up the best combination of "paradigms", or set of roles each character will have in a fight. For instance, you'll often want to include in your paradigm sets a sort of "starter" paradigm with a saboteur, a synergist and a medic- the first two cast all necessary spells while the latter keeps everyone alive. Another good one to include is a set of 3 ravagers so when the time is right you can hack away at the stagger bar to get an enemy staggered quickly. It's less like the old style of figuring out that a certain enemy is weak to fire attacks, and more about knowing what kind of attacks an enemy is capable of doing and when, and how they're affected by staggering. But enough about the specifics- does it work? In my opinion, yes. It's certainly an extension of Final Fantasy XII's mechanics so as long as you're not expecting old-school turn-based battles and can go in with an open mind, then the game can be pretty fun. But there's a problem. The scenarios I've been describing start happening when the game "opens up", which doesn't really happen until like 24 hours in. That's a full day of gameplay! That's longer than like 99% of games! What happens in those 24 hours is a much more specific and guided gameplay where you often play with only 2 characters and have very specific roles, forcing you to play in a very un-creative way. This more than anything is the reason I think so many people were turned off completely by Final Fantasy XIII, so let's expand on it more in...

The Pace- Just awful. RPGs start notoriously slow, but Final Fantasy XIII is frankly ridiculous. Where other games mask linearity by giving small choices and illusory freedome, Final Fantasy XIII is blatant about how linear it is. For those first 24 hours, as Trev had described to me, you will literally move forward, fight, and have a cutscene. "Leveling up" (which is actually pretty fun and reminiscent of the sphere grid, when it finally shows up) doesn't become a concept until many hours in. Cutscenes tend to dominate over gameplay, which doesn't help deflect the criticism that the game can often "play itself". Hell, even when the game does open up, you're met with basically a brick wall of difficulty the forces you to grind for a long time before you can move on to the game's suddenly very fun third act. The pacing is by far my biggest gripe about the game and hopefully is something that was fixed in the two sequels. Hey speaking of sequels, how about that story?

The Story- I found the story of Final Fantasy XIII to be above average for the series. There's a few dumb parts and some cheesy dialog, as is par for the course, but there were some concepts thrown in that I liked. You'll have to get over the cringe-inducing character names (Hope, Snow, Lightning, Vanille? Ugh.), some confusingly similar new nonsense terms (L'Cie, Ci'eth, Fal'cie), and Snow's constant referring to himself in the third person as "the hero" is a much less charming twist on Balthier's similar tendencies in Final Fantasy XII, but there's still an interesting story here at its heart. What truly separates the story in XIII from previous installments is just how much each character screws eachother over, accidentally or on purpose, and how it fuels a lot of in-group hatred throughout the game. Grudges last for a long time leading each character to a different "low point" that is actually integrated very well into the gameplay. The old gods, who created a floating civilization of Cocoon above the uncivilized wilds of Gran Pulse, have summoned our six heroes into a seemingly impossible task- to destroy their own world, or face a fate worse than death for themselves. Everyone in the group is quick to lay the blame on eachother for how it all went wrong, and their struggles for forgiveness made each character feel three-dimensional in a way I haven't seen since Final Fantasy VI. I mean, I'm at least looking forward to XIII-2 more than I've looked forward to any other Final Fantasy sequel, if only because there does seem to be a lot of potential for a better overall game. We'll see, but not for a while! And hey, just like that, I've got the main numbered non-MMO series of Final Fantasy beaten, and all of them have been posted here on the Blog. Some of my opinions have chaged over time, so let's jump into an overall Rank-ems!

12. FF3- The only new thing it brought to the table was the job system, but the DS version made an already hard game just excrutiating.

11. FF- Replayable only for nostalgic purposes. It's not awful, just completely bare-bones.

10. FF2- Introduced a failed leveling mechanic, but unlike the first two games on my list Final Fantasy II was at least quick and painless.

9. FF5- A significant step up from the previous 3, it really did the class system much better than III. Consider it the worst of the decent games.

8. FF8- This one just never quite stuck with me and gets appropriately labeled the oddball of the series. I didn't like Squall and the junction system was a little too bizarre, but overall it was still pretty fun.

7. FF13- Despite the ridiculous linearity, I did enjoy messing around with the paradigms.

6. FF10- Very fun gameplay, but a story that got too goofy at times.

5. FF12- The first game to switch from manually commanding each character to something a little like light programming of strategies. I loved it, but I understand why purists did not.

4. FF4- This begins a new tier of fantastic games- I'd suggest any of these four for anyone to play. Final Fantasy IV was such a huge step up from what came before it and I've been hankering for a replay since I played it first in the series three years ago.

3. FF9- It has one real downside in it's slow battle startup animations, and looking back I was definitely still playing RPGs all wrong on this, my third Final Fantasy. But it makes for a great homage to the older games while avoiding all of their missteps.

2. FF7- Commonly cited as the best game ever, this one will have to settle for the 2-spot for me, which is no big deal really! I think everyone here who has played a Final Fantasy game has played Final Fantasy VII.

1. FF6- The tiny screen of my Game Boy Micro felt like an innappropriate window into this deep, expansive game. Featuring the best villain, complete story arcs for like ten different playable characters, and fun gameplay; Sorry Webber, there's just nothing not to love.

Weeds: Season 8

Whenever a show runs for enough seasons - six? seven? - and has passed its prime in the process, the importance of the entire final season almost pales in comparison to the importance of the final episode alone. Most long-running shows have seen their share of peaks and valleys, but ultimately, it's those final thirty or sixty minutes that need to leave an audience with a sense of closure and finality. I don't remember every detail of the final season of Entourage, for example, but I recall on a nearly itemized basis just how stupid its finale was. And since the whole final season - well, the whole show, even, was pretty stupid, that says a lot. In another vein, Six Feet Under was a decent show, but one of the only scenes that has stayed with me until now, just a few months after seeing the whole thing, is the series-ending montage. Finales can elevate or bury entire final seasons. The ending to Big Love felt incredibly lame, and the show suffers in hindsight because of it; 30 Rock went out as strong as it ever was, and as such, the show feels all the more solid in hindsight.

All of this is to say that, even though the first eleven episodes of Season 8 of Weeds were kind of a meandering mess - much like so many other seasons of the show - none of that mattered once the finale began; a great finale would have elevated the season, and even the entire series, just by virtue of providing the right finish to an often-shaky story. And likewise, a collection of gibberish would have only served to accentuate just how lost and unfocused the once-sharp satire had become over the years. With the legacy of the season and series partially hanging in the balance, Weeds ended its final season with an episode that turned out to be pretty indicative of both the best and worst the show had to offer. It was jarring and sloppily-paced and tried to be too clever and included a few too many pointless elements, but it was also sweet and endearing and funny and family-focused. Here's the very simple and pleasant closing scene, which I assure you, spoils absolutely nothing about the show:

The family, with Nancy literally at its center, just smoking a joint. Perfect in its simplicity and earnestness. And Rilo Kiley! What an unexpected treat from the ten-years-old portion of my iTunes library!

So, that's curtains for Weeds, which at 102 episodes currently holds the record for "longest-running scripted premium cable series." We've got nothing left to do here but talk about its legacy, and it's a legacy of inconsistency. You can pretty easily cut Weeds up into four distinct eras, each with a different tone. In its original form, Weeds was a show about the banality and absurdity of upper-class suburbia. Then for Seasons 4 and 5 it became a Mexican soap opera of sorts, trading in its social commentary chops for drug cartel melodrama. (This was my least-favorite era of Weeds.) Season 6 was basically one long road trip, with the Botwins on the run and slumming it heavily. (This was my favorite season of Weeds.) And then in its final two seasons it became sort of a half-empty echo of its original form, taking place in the Northeast instead of Southern California while never quite re-finding its roots. Ultimately it was far from the best show on TV, even at its best, and it never produced any memorable characters or moments like so many other so-so shows that rise to the occasion in a few key areas. But it was enjoyable enough throughout, and I'm glad I watched it in its entirety - even if I wasn't always glad while doing so at times.

Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013

Most of you should just skip this post while I wax nostalgic on a game I first played close to twenty years ago.

Props again to Microsoft for another quality free game. Apparently there've been four or five iterations of Duels of the Planeswalkers with this being the second-most recent one. This makes sense; the 2014 game must be way too new for Xbox to be giving away for free at this point, while the versions going as far back as 2009 have to be sort of dated and shitty.

Magic: The Gathering has been around since 1993. Every year a few new sets of cards have been released and according to some basic Google searches there are anywhere between 13,000 and 20,000 unique cards in existence at this point. That's insane. Large numbers are meaningless out of context, so to put that into perspective, if you had to make a deck of sixty cards without repeating any, you could make 10e168 decks. Meanwhile, the number of atoms in the universe - atoms, in the universe - is estimated to be something like 10e80. This means that if each atom in the universe contained its own entire universe, the grand total of the atoms in all those universes would still be less than the number of sixty-card decks you could make out of twenty years of Magic: The Gathering expansions. And the kicker is that there's no maximum or minimum size a deck must have, and you can repeat multiple iterations of the same card. Possibilities are very literally endless.

Having said all that, no video game could possibly contain every single Magic card ever made. Instead, a few hundred are present in this game, and still they were plenty. I first started playing Magic in 1996 or so, back when there were only a few thousand total cards. I must have several hundred myself, sitting in a box somewhere within another box in my mother's basement, or attic, or, man, who even knows? I remember playing the game - or mostly, really, just building decks and trading cards with neighbors and friends - on and off for a good chunk of my later elementary school days. And then, just like that, Pokémon cards swept through and became all the rage. And shortly thereafter I was in middle school and, aside from when I got back into it for a few weeks with one or two friends in college, my Magic days were over. So when I found a few weeks ago that Xbox was giving away a Magic game for free, I was all over it. And the beauty of it all is that even though the game was composed of cards I'd never heard of and deck themes I'd never have come up with on my own, the overall gameplay worked exactly the same as I remembered from so long ago.

I don't need to play any more Magic for a long time, and I won't be seeking out the newest or latest versions of Planeswalkers or even digging out my old cards any time soon. But damn, I had some real fun these last two Saturdays dicking around with an old pastime made new again.

Dexter The Fifth Season

I was pleasantly surprised by this season. The serial killer this season was pretty compelling. This was more of the original and imaginative story arcs that they've had in any season. It probably helped that I wasn't expecting much. Dexter himself has become somewhat less compelling with each passing season and the addition of Julia Stiles didn't do much for me. At this point, I am just trying to get to the end of this series so I can have one more show off my list. Eight seasons seems entirely too many for this show.

Dexter The Fourth Season

Spoiler Alert: Dexter has a kid. I'd also like to point out that the baby on the cover of this season is not the baby in the television show. So presumably, Dexter has kidnapped someone else's baby for this shot. Anyway, Season 4 seems to be the consensus favorite for most people thanks to John Lithgow as the "Trinity Killer." I won't say too much but it lived up to the hype. Rita became my favorite character in this season. You really needed her in this season to counteract the fucked-up nature of the rest of it. She was a devoted wife and mother holding together a family with a serial killer father. If only Trinity's wife was as strong as Rita. Anyway, this is probably my favorite season, but by the end of it, I could sense that the quality of the show is probably on a steep decline going forward.

Dexter The Third Season

Ah Jimmy Smits, you charismatic bastard. For the first time, Dexter thinks he has found a friend who also enjoys killing people. But it goes awry. This season was pretty predictable and not as good as the first two. However, some of the secondary characters really come into their own and I finally start enjoying the cast a little bit. Rita, Deborah, Masuka and Batista are all great. LaGuerta is fucking terrible. Her whole character is a cliche and she annoys me more and more each episode. Come to think about it, this season was pretty damn forgettable compared to the rest of 'em. Moving on.

Dexter The Second Season

Dexter is a strange show to me. It's not quite good enough to really stand out amongst other shows on premium cable television, but it's not as bad as I was expecting. In fact, through five seasons, I find it pretty enjoyable. But it's just kinda there. It's not profound and it doesn't do anything I haven't seen before other than its serial killer of serial killers gimmick. The writing isn't as strong as I was hoping, but the detective aspect of the show makes it pretty watchable. Season 2 is weird in that I feel like it jumped the gun on a few storylines. After seeing season 1, I penciled this storyline in for season 4 or 5 in my head. My favorite character other than Dexter, the only guy who is at all suspicious of Dexter vs. Dexter. This show has a pattern of having one serial killer as the focus of the season, but Dexter was the serial killer of focus this season. Again, this should have been one of the last seasons, not one of the first.

Anyway, this is one of the better seasons of the show.

Halo 4

Did somebody request "more substantial games?" Well, Halo 4 kinda qualifies! This is a big-budget game, the newest installment in Xbox's flagship series, and I can confirm that Halo 4's campaign is easily the best one yet! Unfortunately if you've been reading the Blog for a while, that's just not saying much, as most of us strictly play the Halo series for its multi-player. The campaigns usually seem to be boring, lacking the visceral experience of recent Call of Duty games. I dunno, it's hard to get worked up about Master Chief and his faltering AI, Cortana. I missed out on Chief's burst onto the scene, not really playing any Halo game heavily until ODST, so it's not like I've been growing up with this series like so many others have. I really don't care where the story goes, and for me, Halo games work best when they're constantly switching up the gameplay and involving the players with a lot of vehicle-based missions. Halo 4 did that plenty, and as such I liked it the best.

But who cares about that? Let's talk multi-player. I think Halo 4 is the best of the series there, too. And it's not just because it has the fanciest graphics or anything. The customization is incredible. Leveling up is addicting. The levels themselves feel more fair and balanced than any set has before. And with all the special abilities returning from Reach's experimenting, they did away with the cheapest one, armor lock. What's not to love? Many times on the Blog I'll mention how I'm considering dabbling in bonus levels or multi-player in a game I've just finished. I rarely do. Halo 4 is a game that I've spent a shitload of non-logging time on, and I will continue to whenever I get the itch. The campaigns may be pretty stale, but Halo is still going very strong.

Weeds: Season 7

My history with Weeds is long and complicated. I bought the first few seasons on DVD based on popular acclaim and was not disappointed. Then the show spent Seasons 3 through 5 kind of slowly losing sight of what it was and also what it wanted to be. And then for some reason, Season 6 just sat so right with me, in ways I still can't quite explain. Unfortunately, I lost interest in Season 7 almost instantly, and none of its silly plots or story arcs compelled me to keep watching. When the season ended on a horribly forced and stupid cliffhanger - think Downton Abbey: Season 3 "out of the blue" bad here - I swore it off entirely. But then the eighth season turned out to be the show's last, and once it got cheap enough on Amazon I took the curiosity-based plunge. I also gave Season 7 a re-watch, just to  get myself back up to speed.

I didn't hate it! In fact, I didn't even dislike it. There's something to be said about watching a mediocre show in marathon sessions on DVD compared to one half hour at a time once a week regardless of interest levels. I definitely just gave up on paying attention to the show last year, forgetting why certain characters were in certain predicaments from week to week. Now, plenty of this fault falls on Season 7. It was sloppy, uncoordinated, unfunny, and undramatic. There was simply no compelling reason to keep watching it week in and week out. Marathoning through it in three nights was a much better experience, and I kind of look forward to doing so with Season 8.

Doritos Crash Course 2

Here's another free game I stumbled upon while looking for some other XBLA downloads. It's essentially the exact same game as its predecessor, except that they added all kinds of unnecessary bells and whistles to it. It serves as a great reminder that not every free download is worth getting. Anyway, that's two throwaway games in a row on Back-Blogged. Let's hope something substantial is coming soon!

Poker Night at the Inventory

Poker Night at the Inventory was a throw-in game in the TellTale Games bundle I bought recently; it wasn't something I was going out of my way to play, but TellTale has been building up a reputation for themselves with updates to some old puzzle games as well as new video game franchises from popular works like HomeStar Runner, Penny Arcade, and The Walking Dead. The first Poker Night at the Inventory game (a sequel has since been released) is a pretty basic poker games, but also acts as sort of an all-star game of sorts, bringing back beloved characters from previous games- Max for Sam and Max, Strong-Bad from HomeStar, Tycho from Penny Arcade, and the Heavy from Team Fortress 2, who I'm pretty sure had nothing to do with Telltale Games in the first place. The actualy poker gameplay kinda sucks as it's fairly slow, so the whole reason to play through the game is to hear the funny characters bounce zingers off of eachother around the virtual poker table. And that's really it. It took a few games before I had cleared the table and was the last man standing, but by that point most of the characters were repeating dialog and I decided I had seen all I needed from Poker Night at the Inventory- decent enough as a toss-in game in a bundle, but nothing I'd suggest anyone go out of their way to play.

Generation Kill

I love a good HBO war miniseries, and David Simon and Ed Burns were responsible for creating my favorite show of all time, The Wire, so there was never a doubt in my mind that I'd really enjoy the seven-part miniseries Generation Kill. Like Band of Brothers before it and The Pacific shortly afterward, Generation Kill is based on a nonfiction book, and its characters and events, though slightly dramatized, are meant to be taken as faithful and realistic depictions of the actual people and actual history. The similarities between those two World War II shows and this one, however, end there. In the former pair, the U.S. soldiers are wholesome all-Americans fighting for a morally justifiable cause against a dangerous enemy. They believe in God and country, and although their losses are often staggering, they fight the good fight. They are, it's been said many times, the "Greatest Generation." And the contrast between those kids from the 1940s and the morally suspect characters that fill Generation Kill is where the very title comes from.

These are volunteer careerist soldiers with state-of-the-art advanced killing machinery. They swear violently and use all kinds of racial slurs toward both their enemies and one another. Some take pleasure in killing. A few don't even care if their targets are armed civilians or not. Granted, most do; if I'm giving off the message that these are heartless bastards, I'm giving it too strongly. Anyway, this perceived moral bankruptcy was at the center of the initial reaction to this series. One scene in the first episode, where the Marines read and openly mock a bunch of letters from elementary school kids, gained notoriety for understandable reasons. For many - if I may stereotype here - older viewers, the vulgarity and disrespect of the marines was shocking, with some particularly stubborn people even deciding that the series must have been some kind of slam piece, as no honorable U.S. patriots could possibly be so profane while defending the country abroad, right? I digress, but the point I wanted to establish here is that, for most people, that's all Generation Kill was. Whether or not you agreed with it or believed it, it was a look at what a bunch of badasses, or, alternatively, heathens, the Marines in the Iraq War were.

But the miniseries managed to be so much more than that if you cared enough to look deeper. There are Wire similarities aplenty here, and while that's no surprise, it's interesting because so many of the elements were allegedly in the book before they were in the show, and thus had nothing to do with David Simon and Ed Burns. In a nutshell, here's the gist. A team of elite reconnaissance Marines spends the duration of the Iraq Invasion heading from one place to another with unclear and often conflicting orders. They are under-equipped and without many essential supplies, and they aren't doing what they've been trained for at all. The rules of engagement are constantly changing; at first they'll be told to treat everyone as a hostile, and then they'll come up against blatant Jihadists and be told not to engage. Their overambitious commander, seeking fame and glory and credit, often sends them headlong into dangerous areas much more suited for initial engagement by tanks and aircraft. When they stop to provide medical assistance to wounded prisoners or accept Republican Guard surrenders, they're told to move on to their next mission. It's all chaotic and frustrating, as one could imagine, and the grunts on the ground often know far more about what's going on and how best to handle it than the higher-ups back at headquarters. But, chain of command is chain of command, and the biggest critics of the decisions being made are silenced with threats of insubordination while some of the most clueless and violent soldiers get medals and special recognition.

Like I said, it's very Wire-esque in its take on the inherent flaws in established institutions. While the Baltimore-based drama spanned five seasons and looked in depth at politics, inner city education, blue collar workers, the drug trade, the media, and the legal system, the scope here is much narrower, limited only to the invading U.S. forces. I would have loved to see more aspects of the war get fleshed out a little more, particularly the Iraqi civilians and armed forces. The Wire just wouldn't have been the same if you never got to know the likes of Omar, Avon, Marlo, Stringer, and Bodie, and likewise, additional perspective could have made this miniseries even better. But a miniseries is a miniseries, and even seeing just one side of things still allowed for plenty of depth and a diverse array of characters. The series also did its best to remain apolitical, never hammering anything home to hard about whether the Marines should or shouldn't have been there, or whether or not certain actions against potential threats were warranted. Much like Bunny Colvin's Hamsterdam project from The Wire's third season, the invasion of Iraq itself is depicted as a plan that was conceived and executed fairly well, but with little regard for the eventual ramifications of such an undertaking. It's almost hard to recall now, but the invasion of Iraq - the invasion itself, from the outset of the war to the moment Saddam's regime was toppled - lasted for just six weeks. yet the war itself lasted for eight years, and even though the U.S. military is gone the violence hasn't ended at all. Remember, there was a commonly held opinion at the time that the U.S. would be greeted by the Iraqi people as liberators - and to a certain extent, Generation Kill shows that happening. But by tearing through the nation city by city en route to Baghdad without really worrying about offering humanitarian aid to the people or accepting surrenders, it seems we burned through a lot of that initial good will rather quickly. At least, that's how things are depicted in the show.

I sound like an asshole at this point, waxing political in very broad terms with regard to a subject on which I have a very limited understanding. Let me just end this post here with a hearty thumbs up and a nod of approval. Check this out sometime.

Insomnia

There's some major Dark Tower spoilers coming up (who'da thunk it?) so Stan and Webber, don't read this yet! Anyone else planning to read those books eventually should probably stop now as well. Part of the allure of the Dark Tower series is all the insane connections King managed to spread across all of his books and the way Dark Tower seems so essential to it all. Some connections are small (the Takuro Spirit shows up in 11/22/63), some are blatant (trekking through the setting of The Stand at the start of Wizard and Glass, and some actually really add to the Dark Tower story (like say, Black House, which unfortunately wasn't all that good). Insomnia falls into the last category. It was good, not great (much better than Black House) yet it felt so neccesary to make sense of the ending to the Dark Tower series. The Crimson King, for instance, a guy who's often spoken of but rarely seen in the series, appears several times throughout. The similarly oft-spoken of Dark Tower itself is expanded upon- in the series it was somewhat confusingly spoken of as being at times a literal tower, and other times a metaphorical one where each "floor" represents a different level of reality- Insomnia elaborates on this. Finally, there's the odd case of Patrick Danville. Towards the end of the series when most main characters have been killed off, Patrick suddenly enters the picture and becomes the reason Roland is able to defeat the Crimson King. Who is Patrick Danville? What did he do to deserve this sudden push to the forefront? At least Father Callahan did some badass stuff to warrant his late arrival into the ka-tet. Seeing Patrick Danville play such a huge role and not Jake or Susannah kinda pissed me off. But in Insomnia Patrick, despite only getting a few lines, gets suitably built up as the important character he will eventually become. Knowing this book came out in '94, a full decade before Patrick entered the Dark Tower series, had me thinking "this is awesome!" when it depicted some major foreshadowing of the Dark Tower conclusion. But what about the story itself? Does Insomnia stand up on its own without the Dark Tower tie-in? In my mind, only sorta. King is known for having pretty bloated books and doesn't mind spending a couple hundred pages without any major action. This is usually fine for me as long as I like the characters I'm reading about, but that wasn't quite the case here. We have Ralph Roberts, a retiree in Derry, Maine who recently lost his wife to a brain tumor, slowly afflicted with a major case of insomnia. He gets less and less sleep with each passing night, and it's starting to drive him loopy to the point of hallucinations. As the hallucinations get more and more intense, he starts to learn that this is no natural case of insomnia but something that has been forced on him, for a purpose he will never understand (saving the Dark Tower). There's a lot of interesting talk about just what sleep is, but there's also plenty of ruminations on growing old, and how hypocritical some right-to-lifers can be that didn't interest me much at all. There are a few awesome moments, mostly when the hallucinations are getting really intense but Ralph still doesn't quite realize what the heck is going on, but more than any other long book of King's I feel this one could have benefited with some major cuts. Oh well. I'm already halfway into another King book, or series of novellas really, but after that I'll take a break from my Stephen King mega-marathon.

Dear Esther

I've played a few pretentious games in my day, and while 'pretentious' has never been a turn-off for me, let me just get it out of the way right now. Dear Esther is the most pretentious game I've ever played. Like, to the point where it's debatable that it's even a game. There's no conflict, no gameplay, no secrets (that I'm aware of), just a lot of walking and a little bit of exploring. You start on a beach on an abandoned island late one afternoon, and you walk wherever you want. There's a somewhat well-worn path that guides you, and in the distance on the other end of the island you see a lighthouse. That looks interesting! So you walk there. And while you stumble upon a few interesting locales (a shipwreck, a long section of caves, an oxygen-deprived hallucination), there's nothing to interact with. The only signs that you're going the right way are a series of narrated letters that speak vaguely of friends of the main character and possibly a car crash involving them. The order in which the letters are read is random, and not every one will be read on every playthrough. Finally, you reach the lighthouse, and get an ending cinematic. Is the experience 'fun' in any way resembling any video game I've played? No. But did Dear Esther make me think? Well... also no. I've looked around online and a lot of people claim that playing through it had a profound effect on them. And hey, that's cool. But there's not much to be gained here, for me at least, that you couldn't get from watching an hour-long Let's Play on YouTube. At least the scenery is really pretty.

Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami came out to some hype as one of the best indie games to play last year, so when I found it ridiculously cheap in a recent Humble Bundle, I knew I had to take the plunge. With a distinctive 80's/Miami Vice style aesthetic, it sort of has the feel of if GTA: Vice City had come out before that series moved to 3D. Using a top-down perspective, you play as a hitman sent on missions by a mysterious source and basically have to clear out room after room of bad guys, utilizing melee weapons and guns equally. Getting hit even once means death, so it's the type of game that will have you restarting a level every ten seconds like thirty times just to get to that one perfect run. Hotline Miami can get frustrating, but it's very satisfying when you finally clear out a level. The whole thing's over in a few hours and you rarely deviate from the room-clearing gameplay, but the game does start to get weird halfway through with some fourth-wall breaking that can get kinda creepy. A few bonus levels promise answers but really just raise more questions. Perhaps whatever the hell was going on in the game is best left unexplained; maybe there's a jumbled message on violence in games, but the game itself it pretty fun and worth a play. Check it out.

The Wire: Season 3

Starting with the end of its second season, The Wire started to build up some real steam towards becoming a great show. After ten episodes of stewing over a case I didn't really care about, suddenly like the turn of a switch it became compelling television and I got invested in most of its storyline. Could The Wire keep up that momentum going into season three, despite moving away from the docks and back into the drug-heavy streets? The answer is a resounding "yes". Just as expected from reading others' posts here on the Back-Blog, The Wire started to enter the discussion for "greatest show ever" with an awesome third season. I'm not saying it is the best show ever, as I still feel Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and several others have been significantly better, but this was still pretty darn good. We have a power struggle between Avon, Marlo, Omar, and Stringer. We have the recently-released from prison Cutty who is tempted to return to the drug trade. There's Carcetti, the initially idealistic city-councilman trying to swing a campaign for mayor based on the war on drugs. The most compelling storyline of all though revolves around Baltimore cop Bunny Colvin and his unorthodox way of fighting drug crime- by not fighting it at all. Rather than continue to fight a losing battle, he sets up a deal with local drug peddlers- if they do all of their dealing in an abandoned section of town, then the police will look the other way and not take action. This seemed to be the major question of the season- just how much is the war on drugs actually helping? Anyway, it won't be long before I jump into season four which has been hyped up to be the best and also somewhat horrifying. I know it mostly features kids in and our of school, so something tells me it's going to get very depressing. Can't wait!

We Were Soldiers

I finished this movie two nights ago, and it's not that I've been putting off posting about it; I just haven't really figured out what to say about it. It's such an earnest war movie that, in the wrong hands, would come across like all kinds of horribly over-the-top jingoism. It's got Mel Gibson, who more or less became a pariah immediately following this 2002 performance when he went off the anti-Semitic deep end. It's about the Vietnam War - probably the least popular war in American History - and yet it isn't an anti-war movie whatsoever. It's got all the elements of a movie it'd be easy to snark about, but somehow, I've got nothing negative to say at all. This was a damn good war movie that felt far more complete than so many others I've seen. The enemy North Vietnamese were depicted as intelligent and hardened war fighters, rather than ruthlessly violent savages. The movie spent just the right amount of time focusing on scenes back at home where the wives of several soldiers received those oh-so-worst-case telegrams. And rather than make it the story about one man's quest for vengeance or redemption, they allowed for a simpler and more vulnerable scope: the courage and commitment these soldiers had, and the extent to which they dedicated and sacrificed themselves to protect each other. I can only speak fondly of this straight-played Mel Gibson Vietnam War movie, and that's quite an accomplishment.