Wilfred: Season 2

I just re-read my post from six months ago about Wilfred, and I'm left without much more to add. I've seen the show's third season now, though, and I can vouch that this second one remains the show's greatest to date. Which isn't to say that the third one is bad, but just that - you know what? We'll get to Season 3 in due time, I'm sure.

The thing about Season 2 that sets it apart from Seasons 1 and 3 is a strong sense of thematic continuity. For the show's whole run so far, Ryan has been charming and endearing but helplessly put upon by his sister, his boss, his neighbor and love interest, and that neighbor's dog. But it's here in Season 2 where Ryan gets a chance to lead a happy life and take part in a healthy relationship with a girlfriend. Of course, Ryan's not ready for something like this. He still loves his neighbor, he has daddy issues on daddy issues on daddy issues, and most importantly he still spends most of his free time getting high with his neighbor's dog, probably hallucinating. Tack on his sort of recent series-opening suicide attempt and it's clear that this is a fleeting happiness indeed.

That's some heavy stuff, and it's dark enough to feel downright depressing. Fortunately, this is a show about a crass talking dog, so there's plenty of comic relief undercutting several of the starkest moments and scenes. And I mean, there are plenty of those. The show manages to strike up a healthy balance of mystery, psychology, surrealism, and dick-and-fart jokes. It's really unlike anything else on TV. The upcoming fourth season has been confirmed as the show's last one, so now's the perfect time to try jumping in and seeing if you like what's being offered here. I do, and I look forward to Season 4! Especially since most summer TV just plain sucks.

Heroes of Ruin

Keith grabbed a bunch of copies of this game, Heroes of Ruin for Stan's bachelor party/road-trip this past August, with the assumption that with all of that driving and all of those 3DSes we would want to try some sort of co-op campaign while on the road. The pickings were slim for co-op games, so he grabbed this game which I had never heard of but at least was published by Back-Blog mainstay Square-Enix so we had some idea what we were getting into. It's a randomly-generated dungeon crawler where you can play as one of four classes- vindicator, gunslinger, alchitect, and savage, in order to save some kingdom from some impending doom. Given how easy it was to skip over cutscenes and how cheesy they were, there was little hope that I'd pay any attention to the plot, so I won't comment on that. How was the gameplay? Well, it was mixed. Developer n-Space attempted to put some depth into the combat, so as not to completely devolve into button-mashing, but there was typically little reason to stray from the same old basic attacks over and over again. You run around randomly-generated dungeons attacking whatever comes your way, and while this was mostly fun, by the end of the game it was starting to get pretty repetitive. The few boss fights and puzzles that deviated from the core gameplay ended up being the strongest parts of the game. Also of note is that the co-op and online play was probably the best I've seen on a Nintendo console- Nintendo is notoriously terrible with "friend codes" and all sorts of obstacles getting in the way of a fun online experience, so being able to play co-op with my friends this easily on a handheld Nintendo system was a nice change. Still though, after about 6 hours of gameplay I had apparently completed 94% of the game- it's just so easy to button-mash your way through the whole thing that I can't recommend you go out and purchase. But I do recommend that Keith plays through it, since he's got that shit in his backlog!

The League: Season 4

TV shows age. After enough years have gone by in any show's lifetime it's always interesting to look back at the evolution of the series, and to try to pinpoint the moment when a show hit its stride or jumped the shark. Some shows can be distinctly divided into certain eras, often based on key casting changes. Anyway, as I write this post, The League recently wrapped up its fifth season, and it was a season I just didn't love for some reason. The show felt like it had grown stale to me, which is weird, because for five seasons now The League has been about the same group of people who value their fantasy football league over their collective friendship and the general tone of the show hasn't changed. If anything, the most notable shift happened after the pilot, when The League suddenly became noticeably sharper and quick-paced with its humor. And yet for some reason, I just stopped loving the show this year. I can't put a finger directly on anything specific, but all of a sudden this same old show felt pretty silly, not always funny, and largely unnecessary.

I bring all of this up just to point out that when I went back and watched the fourth season on DVD after finishing the fifth in real time, I liked it as much as I ever had. In other words, I hadn't simply grown tired of the show between 2012 and 2013, or else I'd have been even more tired of it upon returning to previously seen episodes. Right? There must be something about that fifth season that fell flat for me, beyond that really weird Raffi and Dirty Randy episode. I'm sure I'll explore that further in a year or so, but as far as Season 4 goes? Not bad! Reaffirmed to be... not bad!

Banjo-Tooie

The original Banjo-Kazooie was a classic of the platforming genre, and seemingly one of its last gasps considering how dead the non-Mario platformers have been in the last two console generations. For Banjo-Kazooie's sequel, Banjo-Tooie, Rare seemed to strive to make everything bigger, and while that's an admirable goal, in execution it didn't quite work out as well as I had hoped. Sure there's still eight levels, each with ten "jiggies" (jigsaw puzzle pieces) and a few new techniques taught to you by Jamjar, brother of Banjo-Kazooie's Bottles. The techniques all build on moves you learned in the previous game- there's no Metroid-style loss of abilities, so by the end of the game you've got tons of moves at your disposal, with most new ones involving shooting different types of eggs, or splitting Banjo and Kazooie up for solo missions. But the scope of the levels is just huge now- in some cases I had explored a level for 2 hours before I felt I had a good handle on how to get around or found a single jiggy, and my desperate need to find everything in every level meant that even with some checking a walkthrough, levels would end up taking like 4 hours total before they were cleared out. That's just too long! And unlike the first game, Banjo-Tooie is heavy on backtracking, with tons of collectibles requiring techniques from later in the game to get. This removes that OCD feeling I loved from Banjo-Kazooie, where I could start a level and after spending enough time, be 100% done with it before moving on. So, yeah, while Banjo-Tooie is still a solid game that anyone who liked the first will enjoy, I still think I liked Banjo-Kazooie much more.

Dillon's Rolling Western

Here's a downloadable 3DS game I got free of charge for registering a few Nintendo products. Even for no cost, I still regret the acquisition; this one may not have cost me any money, but it just wasn't worth my time. And the frustrating part is, it really could have been.

The game is basically just a tower defense game with a unique twist: moderate adventure vibes! As Dillon the armadillo, you can explore the surrounding area you're trying to defend, getting power-ups and money and things you can sell for money. And then of course you can spend that money on your tower power-ups. But a Zelda tower defense game this is not. It's more of a jumbled mess of concepts, played out with a bad control scheme. Look, I know the DS has a touch screen, but any game that abuses that feature and makes you just tap and swipe repeatedly? I'd rather be button-mashing. Worst of all, this level-based game makes you replay levels if you don't complete them in a certain time. The added bullshit here is that the time limits aren't known until after you've completed the levels. And they're absurdly hard to make. I never once beat a level on my first try, which is total crap because the levels take a good half hour each.

All in all this just wasn't a good game. And it should have been! Dillon's an endearing enough protagonist and the "exploration adventure tower defense" genre has plenty of promise. But some bad gameplay design and poor control schemes sunk this one.

Family Guy: Volume 11

No need for a long post here. You've all seen Family Guy a few dozen times, and regardless of when you stopped watching it, you haven't missed out on anything groundbreaking in the interim. So here are a few basic things I liked about this season.

My favorite episode - and probably most people's favorite from this season - was called "Back to the Pilot," and featured Brian and Stewie going back in time to the Family Guy pilot. While it could have been a really awful self-congratulatory experience, it was instead loaded with what felt like contempt; large chunks of it were essentially just Brian and Stewie offering commentary on the very rugged and sometimes messy appearance of the show back in 1999, pointing out things like Peter's eyes somehow slipping in front of his nose for a few frames, or how a TV that people were ostensibly watching wasn't even plugged into a wall. Well worth the twenty minutes if you feel like finding it on Hulu or Netflix or wherever.

The rest were a mixed bag, but not terrible. I can't pretend I've been keeping track of Family Guy through the years enough to break it down into these brief little eras of good and bad quality, but I'm comfortable saying that in general the show's last few DVD volumes haven't been nearly as groan-inducing or anger-instigating as the show was during its creative nadir a few years ago.

Yeah, you heard me. Family Guy is better than it was when it was terrible. Take that one at face value.

Capsized

Here's another game from the indie PC bundle I grabbed a few months ago. While that bundle has mostly produced games that were great (Hotline Miami, Thomas Was Alone) or at least creative in some way (Little Inferno, Dear Esther), this was the first true dud in the bundle, causing me to abandon it on its last level for like a month and a half. And today it's done. Capsized is a 2-D shooter where you bounce around as a little spaceman on an alien planet, completing basic tasks like finding and destroying markers, finding and retrieving ship parts and returning them to the base, all very generic. The worst part was the controls which just never felt intuitive, and i was still slightly struggling with them up through the final boss. On the plus side, at least the art was pretty nice- that sort of oil painting style you see in the graphic up there was applied to the whole game, so it was a little different from the usual. Still though, no reason to recommend this one.

A Clash of Kings

The biggest reason I wanted to read the A Song of Ice and Fireseries of books was for the second book- A Clash of Kings, which corresponded to the second season of the Game of Thrones show. The season was pretty damn good, but it glosses over a few plot points and introduced some new characters in a way that left me confused, much moreso than the first or third season, so I needed to read this book for clarification as to what was going on- specifically what Arya was up to most of the time, who the heck Davos was again, and what happens with Theon during his return to Winterfell. Reading through the book made complete sense out of all of this and more- hell, if you're a little lost on any specific character the book even ends with like 30 pages of details about every single character in the series thus far and where there alliegiences lie. If anyone felt a little confused about Game of Thrones' second season, read through the books already. They are awesome and make me want to rewatch the whole series again.

Grand Theft Auto V

Well, I broke the promise to myself of finishing off the rest of the games I own in the GTA franchise before embarking on the latest installment. And, you know what? I'm glad I did. 

What a remarkable achievement in the gaming industry. 

Seriously, GTA:V stands leaps and bounds above the last game - and, the GTA:IV is a great game (from what I've played). It still incorporates many of the well known and well loved elements of all of its predecessors (the driving, the action, the wacky, vulgar characters all in a satirical version of popular US cities), but this game has substance like I've never experienced before in a video game. It's story... it's so deep and compelling. And missions aren't stale. You don't always just arrive at the mission start and follow instructions until the level is completed. No. Now you plan heists, assemble crews, and can carry out the mission in multiple ways. Are you into the more Mission Impossible type of stealth maneuver or a Fast and Furious let's just blow shit up till we get what we need method? Every action has it's consequences in both financial gain and the overall development of the characters and their story. But, the story...

As it's well known by now, GTA:V has switched things up big time by now have three main characters that you play between. While I thought this might be too confusing or overwhelming at first, it was actually quite simple to understand and the gameplay switches seamlessly between all three characters. These characters all have their own backgrounds. Most importantly is the relationship between Michael and Trevor (the two white dudes of the trifecta). The game opens during a bank heist in a small, sleepy town somewhere in the Midwest. (By the way, an excellent opening that disguises the introduction to the controls - as all video games must do - in a really compelling and gripping robbery.) The heist goes bad and it leads to the dissolve of Michael and Trevor's relationship. The game then skips forward nearly a decade later where Michael now lives in Los Santos (a rip-off of Los Angeles... literally) under witness protection. When Michael's uncontrollable tempers causes him to accidentally fuck over some wealthy crime boss, he's forced back into what he does best... pulling heists. This eventually leads him to his protege, Franklin, a guy from the hood who's just trying to find a better life for himself (or more profitable life), and an awkward reunion with Trevor who's been living out in the woods north of the city. As the three of them start to form a close-knit team, they are constantly being haunted by the events that transpired from the opening scene, and, well... the answers to what really happened on that fateful night of that bank robbery are gripping. 

This post could last forever as there's so much I want to praise this game for. It's beautiful. It's massive. And it's completely immersive. Yeah... it's also long. I think I beat it (at 75% total completion) in maybe 60 hours or something, but - more importantly - I don't want to stop playing! I keep popping back on hoping there's some other mission (which there are) that will keep me involved. Not to mention, the game culminates to the BIG HEIST where you are basically going to to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in gold bars from the national treasury. So, by the time the credits finish, you return to the game with millions of dollars to each character's name and can go around buying up whatever the hell you want. Good times. 

I'm curious as what the next game can do to top this one? One guess: space shuttle. There's already some much that you can play with here. Yeah, there are cars and motorcycles, but there's also helicopters, crop-dusters, private jets; there's even one scene where Trevor flies a small prop-plane into the back of huge jumbo jet, highjacks it, then flies up, up, up to the stratosphere as he's being pursued by fighter jets, then bails and parachutes back down to Earth. Holy crap was that a great scene! But, yeah... the only thing I think Rockstar could do next to top this game is incorporate space shuttles or something into the line-up of vehicles you can fuck around with. 

There's so much else I want to say, but I'm just going to leave it at this: play this game. If you don't have the time, wait till the holiday season or any point where there are no other commitments on your calendar. Have fun.  

Contrast

Well, this game is like no other I have ever played.

As part of the PS4 bundle I purchased from Amazon, I got one year of Playstation Plus, their answer to XBOX Live. However, with the Playstation Plus Service, you usually get 2-4 free games per month per system (PS4, PS3, Vita). This was one of the free PS4 games.

Set in the 1920s, the story follows a young girl named Didi as she tries to help her father get his shit back together so he can move back home. Her Dad decides that he is going to put on a circus to try to make enough money to gain back Didi's mom's trust. However, to get the start-up money, he gets the mob to invest. Knowing that her dad is a screw-up, Didi follows him around and makes sure everything that goes wrong gets fixed (i.e. the stage lights are out or the pirate ship ride is not working). And these won't get fixed unless you solve the numerous puzzles involving shadows. Though it might sound a bit ridiculous, it's actually a well-written, dark story that kept me interested for the entirety of this 4-hour game. The voice acting is great and the setting really adds to the enjoyment. They never really explain why (perhaps this is Didi's dream) but all of the adults in the game are just shadows, which plays in nicely to all the puzzles in this game.

Oh yeah, did I mention that you don't play as Didi, but as her imaginary friend, Dawn? At least, I think she's imaginary. Dawn (see above) seems to be what Didi imagines she will look like as an adult. Anyway, Dawn is able to go in and out of shadows. That one dynamic is at the center of every puzzle in this game. But they are very clever. You often have to move lights to certain places and get rides and other machines moving so that Dawn can reach the roof of a building or the top of a lighthouse. As a shadow, Dawn can climb on the top of the shadows created by the machines you just turned on or the box you just moved. Anyway, as good as the story and setting are, these puzzles are what made this game worthwhile. They get somewhat repetitive at times, but nothing too bad.

Anyway, despite some random graphical and physics glitches, this was a pretty cool game. I believe you can get it on PC and PS3 as well and it probably isn't much more than $10. If you can get over the strange premise, there's a lot to like about this game. I'll probably never play it again, but it was a great experience while it lasted.

How I Met Your Mother: Season 8

The end is in sight! The ninth and current season of How I Met Your Mother will be the show's last. And although it hasn't always been my favorite show, it's been a decent one for a long time. Like, a shockingly long time. Nine years? I guess I should table any discussion about the show's longevity and legacy until I'm back here posting about Season 9 a year from now. So, in the mean time, how was Season 8? Pretty good. It started slow, with three of the five main characters treading water in uninteresting relationships that we already knew wouldn't last. But it ended with a lot of forward character-based momentum, clearly setting up its own end game with some purpose in mind. And perhaps most importantly, in case you haven't heard or don't really care, the season ends with us - wait for it - meeting the mother! I mean, Ted still hasn't met her, and we only see her face for like five seconds, but hey, here we finally are; after eight years, the show has finally delivered on its own title's premise. Granted, meeting the mother was never really the point of this series, and what matter more are the emotional beats and clever episode structures. Part of the reason I disliked the early part of the season was its overall blandness. Thirty-somethings in dead-end relationships? That's been done to death before, on this show and elsewhere, and it's rarely even funny in an interesting way. For what it's worth, the best episode of the season, and the one that really corrected the show's course, came right at the halfway point, as a particularly unbelievable story arc that had existed for a few episodes in a row ended with a surprise twist, and a heart-warming one at that. When it happened, I met it not with eye-rolling and groaning, but with a big old shit-eating grin. It was nice to see that even after all these years, How I Met Your Mother could still muster up enough creativity to pull a fast one on me. What little I've heard so far about the ninth season suggests that it hasn't been stellar so far, but as long as this show sticks the landing after nine years and what must be more than 200 episodes, I'm all in.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Here it is. My proudest day on the back blog. The longest game I have ever played at 45 hours. Danielle was not happy about it, but I did it over a 2-year span. 18 hours in 2011, 27 hours in 2013. I'm actually glad I played it like that. Because it seemed like non-stop action for most of the 27 hours. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of the beginning of Zelda games when I'm not dressed in my green tunic wielding my sword and shield. From what I remember, the beginning of this game was kind of boring. You spend it on Sky Loft, your hometown which happens to also be a island floating in the sky. The whole dynamic of flying feels a little bit like the boat in Windwaker, although there is not nearly as much to explore in this world. If you're like me, that's awesome. I like a little more linearity to my Zeldas because the main reason I play is for the dungeons and the puzzles. I don't care that much about everything else. However, if you are all about exploring, this game won't be as fun for you.

The dungeons in this game are some of the strongest I have played in any Zelda game. The Ancient Cistern is my favorite dungeon of all time. The puzzles are by-in-large great in this game. They are never so hard that I wanted to give up, but they were often challenging enough to force me to think for a few minutes. I found the bosses in the dungeons to be pretty easy. Ghirahim, a sorry excuse for Ganondorf, was a boss of a few dungeons and I found him to be incredibly annoying because beating him was all about accurate sword swings. I'm more of a brute force kind of guy and that didn't cut it. The final boss was very fun, but it was over too quickly (that's a lie, it took me 6 tries - but on the 6th try it only took 3 minutes to beat him).

Anyway, this game in general is all about showcasing what wii motion plus can do. Rather than just swinging your wiimote haphazardly, you are supposed to time and place your strikes to do damage on your opponents. I found that most of the time that it took away from the experience rather than improve it, but there were a few times when I thought it was pretty cool. Still, I hope the next Zelda does away with the motion controls to some degree.

I am pretty upset that the Wii is so underpowered. I know this game would have looked gorgeous in HD, but as it stands now, it looks like shit. I had a hard time looking at it. I would have rather it looked like Ocarina of Time 3D than the way it looked. For some reason, Wii games just don't have the bright colors or textures that I come to expect to the point where Gamecube games seem to outshine them in the graphics department. Whatever.

Overall, this was a great, great game. It had everything you come to expect from Zelda games with the addition of motion controls. Though this probably represents the game that best utilizes motion controls on the Wii, it also demonstrates that motion controls don't necessarily add to the experience. Still, I love this series. This is a fitting addition. I imagine most will like it more than Twilight Princess but less than Ocarina of Time and Windwaker. Now it's time for A Link to the Past.

Friday Night Lights Season 2

For me, this season just didn't capture the same magic as season 1. Too much Jason Street. I find him pretty annoying to be honest. Not to mention Lyla, who is somehow worse this season despite her cheating on a cripple in the first. There were some big changes at the end of season 1 that were thrown out the window. I was okay with it, but this season didn't do much to add to the stories that were told in season 1. I wasn't a big fan of the way that race/racism was dealt with in this season. It got a little too serious and lost some of the fun from season 1. Still, Tim Riggins became my favorite character this season, so there's that. I know it sounds like I hated this season, but I didn't. I really enjoyed it. I just don't understand why it went in the direction it did. Still, I have faith in season 3 to get back to the magic of season 1. Good season. Not great.

Friday Night Lights Season 1

Wow. Steve has been singing the praises of this show for quite some time and for some reason I just never fully believed him. I mean, I saw the movie and it kinda sucked. What do I care about high school football? Apparently, I care a lot. This show really was all it was hyped up to be. Danielle loves it for all the freaking romance BS and I love how Coach Taylor just pretty much tells everyone to fuck off. But in all seriousness, it's hard to put into words what makes this show so compelling. The characters are great and the story lines never really fell into the trap of most shows centered around high school (Season 2 is another story). Anyway, Danielle deemed this her favorite show of all time and it's one of mine.

Modern Family: Season 4

Once more, I've got nothing much new to say about a show I've posted multiple times here. I'll admit that I didn't dislike this season at all, which makes it better than either of the previous two.  Could this be because I didn't watch it in real time? That's absolutely possible. I've got a long documented (right here on the blog!) history of slowly coming to dislike TV shows only to give up on watching them in real time, and then catching up with them in marathon viewings on DVD and slowly coming back around on them. What can I say? Some shows just feel mundane when seen in half-hour morsels week after week, but perfectly fine in back-to-back-to-back viewings. This is one of them.

Redbelt

There were many great films that came out in 2008. Most notably would have to be Slumdog Millionaire, Iron Man, Walle, and The Dark Knight. Actually, I searched for a few online lists that labeled the so-called "best" movies of 2008, and while there are plenty of impressive titles... Redbelt is not one of them. And that's a damn shame. 

Still going on my David Mamet kick, his most recent full-length feature film, Redbelt, is fucking amazing. Seriously, I absolutely loved this movie. There are faint memories floating around in my brain of this movie slinking its way into theaters, but, sadly, I never went to go see it. And, apparently, neither did the rest of the country considering the film only pulled in $2.3 million in the box office (according to RottenTomatoes.com). All that aside, it still remains an incredible movie and deserves to be on these internet lists compiling the top movies of 2008. 

The plot is a bit convoluted, but it can be boiled down to one simple concept: A jujitsu master and owner of a modest dojo in LA is forced into a televised fighting tournament in order to win a bunch of money that will help solve some serious problems plaguing his life. Now, don't get the impression that this whole movie follows this one tournament. That's really just the end of the final act. Most of the movie is spent developing our hero, Mike Terry  (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor - a badass actor), as he faces one shit show after the next. Everything that could go wrong for this guy, does. As the audience, you really begin to feel for him as this character embodies everything that's good in a person, yet it keeps getting him in trouble. Then when things turn their worst, his busts out his martial art skills and just lays people to the floor. ARGH! IT'S SO GOOD! I want to describe more, but I'll refrain. 

Take my recommendation, folks. With - once again - an amazing cast delivering great performances and story that gives you a punch to the solar plexus, watch this movie. Plus it's got Tim Allen in it, and, well... it's always nice to see the Tool Man with some work. 

A World of Keflings

Another day, another Xbox Live Arcade freebie beaten with little fanfare. This one was just weird. Its sole purpose seemed to be an excuse to get Xbox Live avatars into a game; I played for five hours as a giant version of myself. Or was I regular-sized, and the world around me small? It doesn't matter. Apparently this was a sequel to a previously extant Keflings game, and what that means I can't say whatsoever.

Perhaps I should describe the actual gameplay here. It's sort of like Warcraft II without any of the fighting. You help these little Keflings build their cities by putting them to work harvesting resources and building new shit and... God, does anyone even care?

This one's still free with an Xbox Live subscription for a few more days. There are worse gifts out there to receive, I'm sure.

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes

Here's early October 's free Xbox Live Arcade game for Xbox Live Gold members. It's a grid-based turn-based strategy game with minimal RPG elements like leveling up, spells, and unit upgrading. It wasn't all that far off from something like Puzzle Quest, actually. It even took me thirty hours to beat. Fortunately, those thirty hours were largely spent on double-logging duties, with a laptop propped open playing either South Park or Parks and Recreation to keep me from utter boredom. I mean, I liked this game and all, but it was just so damn repetitious. I believe the original version came out on the Nintendo DS, and frankly, that's a perfect platform for this type of game; a portable "pick up and play" model just seems to work so much better for these sorts of games than a full console release. Having said all of this, I thought the game was a pleasant enough experience to merit finishing every side quest. So, while it took a while, I didn't mind elongating the experience by several hours for the sake of 100% completion.

Glengarry Glen Ross

About to go on a kick of David Mamet films. To start things off, Glengarry Glen Ross.

First things first, it's a terrible title - to me anyways. I always heard of this movie and though it was the name of the title character or something - I also thought this was essentially a gangster story based on the poster and the actors involved (I mean, Pacino, Arkin, Baldwin...). Couldn't be farther from that. 

The movie (er, stage play) centers around a small real estate company that has come under tough times. The heads of the parent company send in Alec Baldwin's character to announce (motivate) to the four salesmen that come the end of the week the two top salesmen will win some prizes while the bottom two get canned. After that, the story is set in motion with these four guys scrambling around to make their sales and keep their jobs in what looks to be a hopeless market. All the while, their manager (played by Kevin Spacey) has a stack of reliable leads (likely candidates that these guys could actually make a sale with) and has them under lock and key within his office. With the pressure to make sales, keep their jobs, and knowing the answers to all their problems are stowed away in their boss' office, you watch these salesmen plot and plan a way to stay on top in this dog-eats-dog world.

I think at quote from Wikipedia sums up the tone and plot of movie very nicely calling it, Death of a Fucking Salesman. What stands out the most of Mamet's writing is his dialogue - or, more obviously, his massive use of profanity. I fucking love it. In all seriousness, the character development is great and their conversations with one another are up there with something Tarantino would write - if we use him as standard for great dialogue writers even if Mamet made his presence known long before Tarantino. 

The movie does feel slow from time to time, but it's been adapted from Mamet's stage play. For that reason, you don't see the characters jumping around from location to location. Things are fairly isolated. The story is pretty much contained to two locations: the real estate office and a Chinese restaurant across the street. Director James Foley adds some energy to his camera work. There's a lot of panning, smash cuts, extreme close-ups. It all helps what would otherwise be a stifled presentation feel more alive. The soundtrack is also this sad, dissonant saxophone, bluesy sound. The film opens and closes to that music as a subway rolls by. Once again, it gives me the immediate impression that I'm watching some film noir detective story. Not a film about four salesman scared about losing their jobs. 

To tie things back into the start of my post, I'll explain the title. Glengarry Glen Ross stands for the two real estate properties these salesmen are trying to push. It's not even that clear from the story or dialogue to have the audience make this connection. It's just that the names pass over you without a second's notice. But, I'm nitpicking here. It's a great story; incredible performances from a star-studded cast in this film adaptation; and it deserved all the awards and praise it's won over the years. Check it out if you're ever curious. 

Parks and Recreation: Season 5

I just read my posts on all four previous seasons of Parks and Recreation to check for observations I'd already made so as to avoid repeating them here. Everything I've hit on before applies to this season too, and in no way have I changed my overall opinion of the show since its earlier days. But I noticed that I still haven't really gone into any depth talking about what I believe is one of the show's strongest features: its characters.

Any show needs interesting characters to thrive, but "breakout characters" are what can elevate otherwise fairly generic sitcoms to greatness, or at least significant pop culture relevance. For example, what's Happy Days without Fonzie? What's The Big Bang Theory without Sheldon? What's How I Met Your Mother without Barney? Whenever you watch any one of those shows, you're watching because of the existence of those characters. The rest of the respective casts may be just fine, and the writing might be funny enough even when said breakout characters aren't on screen, but those shows and many others are significantly elevated due to that one special incarnation where the acting and the writing combine nicely into someone memorable. What sets Parks and Recreation out and above so many other comedies is its sheer number of potential breakout characters. What I mean by that term is characters that could suffice as the sole breakout character on most other shows, but don't have to carry such a load here at all.

Objectively speaking, Ron Swanson is the breakout character on Parks and Recreation, the star of more T-shirts, posters, and Internet memes than anyone else on the show. But even on a hypothetical Parks and Recreation where there is no Ron Swanson - gah! - there would still be, say, an Andy Dwyer. Or a Tom Haverford. Or, especially in later seasons, an April Ludgate. Here's a quick exercise. Think of a fairly bland comedy you've seen recently. Now, add any one of the aforementioned Parks characters to the mix. Does that character not instantly become the best part of that show? I'm not suggesting that any one of the characters on Parks could instantly elevate another show to greatness, but it's a hell of an improvement, no?

Anyway, Parks has an embarrassment of riches on that front. It's not the first show in that category, by a long shot; Arrested Development instantly springs to my mind as another example of a show with so many absurdly memorable characters. (Buster! Lucille! Gob! George Michael!) When a show has such an all-star loaded roster, so to speak, it can avoid revisiting the same sources too often and running the proverbial well dry. No one character is stealing every scene, and as such, no one character must shoulder the load for the rest of the show.

Of course, Parks is great for so many other reasons, too, and some of the biggest laughs in the show come from one-off characters or even unnamed people shouting at town hall meetings. In fact I've heard it argued by others that it's the depth of Parks, and not the breakout stars, that form the backbone of the show. Hey, maybe both are true. Maybe the show is just plain great from its top-billed stars to its tertiary characters to its guest appearances to its throwaway gags.

Well, this has run long. But at least I came up with something new to say about one of my favorite shows. Until next time!

Paranormal Activity 4

One last horror movie for the road as we leave Halloween. Unfortunately, this one wasn't scary either...

I'm a huge fan of the first Paranormal Activity. Saw it in theaters when it first came out and - oh boy - was it creepy as fuck. Yeah, I was first rolling my eyes at the thought of another "found footage" movie, but searching for creepy shit going on in a haunted house worked beautifully. The time elapsed footage of the woman just standing over her husband for hours while he sleeps in bed; the random loud bangs in the dark; the woman just waking outside in their yard with no memory of how she got there. It scared the crap out of me and definitely made it difficult to sleep for the next few nights. I've been "fortunate" enough to experience this feeling quite a bit while watching horror movies as a kid, but seeing Paranormal Activity has been the most recent occasion of that ever happening (and, I think, The Ring before that). Although each sequel to this franchise has entertain/spooked me (a bit), this is by far their lowest point.

I found nothing either scary or inventive about Paranormal Activity 4. At least with every other sequels (er, prequels) you would see the creators try to introduce new ways film the spooky crap going on around them. In the third installment, which takes place in the 70's, the characters don't have security cameras or sleek, fancy HD cameras. Instead they have one of the main characters (who's conveniently a wedding videographer) mount the camera on an oscillating fan motor, which creates a lot of suspense and terror as the camera slowly pans back-and-forth, back-and-forth revealing something new and disturbing each time. 

This film is the first in the series to be a direct sequel to the first installment, which means that they're able have security cameras, webcams, and even an Xbox Kinect (cough, cough... blatant product placement) that can be seen in night vision - it lights up the living room with a bunch of green christmas lights. (Actual that was pretty cool. If you haven't seen what Kinect looks like in night vision, check it out here.)

Still from the movie where the night vision combined with the Kinect are used. Helps add another level of spookiness, but is far from sealing the deal. 

In the end, the movie just tries to rehash similar gimmicks used over and over again from the previous films. Sadly, it no longer has the same effect. 

Perhaps the one thing that frustrates me the most in this franchise is that lack of story development. Now, the first movie didn't really explain a lot, and that's totally fine - in fact, the less you understood the more mysterious and captivated you became. If you're not all aware of the storyline of this franchise, it's incredibly simple. This first movie: haunted house; turns out there might be a demon that has been following the wife since she was a little girl (although her memory is fuzzy on the subject); film ends with the woman becoming possessed, killing her husband, and stealing her baby nephew from her sister (while killing that whole family as well). Second movie (a prequel): we learn that sister to the woman who will later be possessed was originally being haunted by the demon and her and her family figure out how to throw the curse over to her sister instead - great sense of family values. Third movie (another prequel): we go back a few decades to when the two sisters are just kids and learn that their grandmother is apart of some witch cult and they are indoctrinated in (really confusing). And finally, in this film, we march forward for the first time. Now the possessed woman and the baby she stole are a few years older and have moved across the street from this teenage girl and her family. Same story as always. The girl is the only one who senses some shit is up and eventually everyone gets knocked off. By the climax, when the girl tries to escape (all the while running with a camera to keep the movie going), she is stopped by a giant horde of creepy-ass women (probably witches based on the evidence in the third movie) and the camera cuts out with one last scream from the girl. 

So... what should the audience take from all this? I HAVE NO CLUE! You would think after four fucking movies they would really start to piece together some strong narrative that would explain the mystery behind this invisible demon that's been tormenting (or serving?) this family for decades. But, no. All I've got is that there's apparently some secret cult of witches and that they have an invisible demon under their control that only young, disturbed children can see for some reason. 

I'm sure there are more and more of these movies to come, which makes complete sense. They're cheap to make and bring in the dough. My only suggestion: start building the story and start building the characters. We're lucky enough to have the same woman from the first movie still around. Sure, she's possessed and evil, but do something with that. She was barely present in this last movie (drops her kid off to stay with the family across the street because she has to go to the hospital or some shit). I guess what gets me angry is that I see a lot of potential for them to take this franchise and make it into something really compelling and epic, and, yet, they're just squeezing the juice out of it rather than breathing new life into it.

Well, I guess they certainly wouldn't be the first horror franchise to do that. Happy (belated) Dias de Los Muertos, folks.