Enchanted

I've been on a bit of a Disney kick lately, which led me to visit this 2007 "affectionate parody" for the first time. I did not love it. There were plenty of elements worth praising: a handful of memorable songs, a pair of surprisingly earnest performances from Amy Adams and James Marsden, a boatload of references to classic Disney movies. Still, the sum total final product here felt more lazy and self-congratulatory than clever or off the beaten path. The tone wandered back and forth between embracing and mocking so many Disney fairy tale tropes. I get that Disney would be hard-pressed to outright make fun of their own legacy with a straight up lampooning of so many older classics, but perhaps that just means a movie like this would have been best left to another studio altogether. Instead, it was never really clear when the movie wanted me to be in on the joke and when it just wanted me to enjoy everything at face value. The whole thing also felt completely uninspired. The idea of New York City being the polar opposite of a fairy tale setting felt straight out of 1993 and the movie gave up on exploring that contrast before the first act had ended, anyway. Toss in some overly kiddy shit like a CGI chipmunk, a campy-as-hell Susan Sarandon as the villain, an undercooked plot with underserved characters, and a generally bland lead performance from Patrick Dempsey, and Enchanted struck me as a fairly flawed movie in a variety of ways. By stripping away, say, half of its elements and expanding on the rest, it could have been a pretty decent movie. In this form, it just wasn't.

Now, if you want to see a Disney movie that manages to embrace the legacy of the animated fairy tale formula while simultaneously subverting a few tropes and delivering a very satisfying story with endearing characters in a hundred minutes or so, check out Frozen. That sales pitch probably seems to come out of left field, but honestly, I could not stop comparing Enchanted unfavorably to that movie in my head while watching it.

Lastly, I was surprised when doing a little background research on the production of Enchanted that Disney wanted to go with a "younger and little-known" actress for the lead role and thusly opted for Amy Adams, a 39-year-old five-time Academy Award nominee and bona fide A-list actress. Then I realized that the Amy Adams who appeared in Enchanted was a 31-year-old independent actress whose biggest role to that point in time had been either the naive nurse in Catch Me If You Can or Jim's two-episode girlfriend in the first season of The Office. Life just flies by, doesn't it?

Jaws

 

Everyone knows this movie. I have seen it a few times, but not in about fifteen years I would suspect. What I find refreshing (can a 40-year old movie be refreshing?) about this movie is how realistic it seems (a few things notwithstanding). It could have easily been another silly monster movie, but because of acting performances and Spielberg as a director, the end result maintains far more credibility than any monster movies we see today. Nothing about Jaws is over-the-top and I love it for that. I can’t really think of too many other “monster movies” that are done with such care. On a side note, I freaking love Quint’s speech about the USS Indianapolis. It looks super great on blu-ray as well.  Anyway, this is a great movie that I suggest checking out if you haven’t seen it in a while. It’s safe for you to go back in the water…

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

 

I had seen this movie once before and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. However, I wrote it off as just being in the right mood for a silly movie about a drug that changed chimpanzees into super intelligent beings. Still, for about two years, I’ve wanted to go back and revisit it to see if it stands up. It does. In fact, I would put this as one of my top ten favorite movies of the last ten years. Yes, the acting leaves a little to be desired and the premise itself is somewhat ridiculous, but damn it if this isn’t one of the most engaging movies I’ve ever seen. At the heart of story is Caesar, a chimpanzee born to a mother with remarkable intelligence due to Alzheimer’s drug testing. After a series of tragic events, James Franco, the scientist behind the drug, is forced to take care of Caesar. Well as you might expect, as Caesar grows increasingly intelligent, he becomes less and less a fan of being locked in James Franco’s attic.

In order to love this movie, you have to really let go of some of the absurdities. I found it a lot easier to do that because of the fact that this is an origins movie. We already know where this all leads and I couldn’t think of a better explanation than this one. Yeah, it’s a bit of a revision to what we might have gathered from the original movies, but it’s compelling as shit.

What I found most amazing about this movie is Caesar himself. He’s a CGI monkey and he’s easily the best actor in this thing thanks to Andy Serkis. I really enjoyed John Lithgow as James Franco’s Alzheimery dad, but Caesar is clearly the best thing about this movie.

Still, I overrate this movie. I don’t know why I love it so much, but I really do.

Orphan Black: Season 1

That was pretty good! Orphan Black is a Canadian production that premiered a year ago to very moderate hype on BBC America, a channel most basic cable subscribers don't even have. I only vaguely recall hearing about it back then, even though lots of critics were pretty into it. At the end of the year, it appeared on a number of "best of 2013" lists, and within the last week or two I've been bombarded by Internet banner ads for the upcoming second season. (Just me? Anyone else?) At any rate, from my own perspective it feels like Orphan Black is suddenly emerging into the zeitgeist the way so many decent TV shows do when their second seasons premiere. I had to jump in, and after just one episode, I was hooked. But then we moved and changed cable packages and lost BBC America, and rather than pay ten bucks a month for it and some other channels, we decided to just drop eighteen bucks on this Blu-ray. Oh boy, I'm already rambling, and I haven't even begun to sing Orphan Black's praises.

This is a solid B-level high concept sci-fi show like so many others on basic cable - good enough to suck you in at first, but likely too flimsy for multiple years' worth of interest and appeal - elevated substantially by its main characters and the actress who portrays them. No, not the actresses, plural, who portray them, but the actress, singular, who plays all of them: Tatiana Maslany.

You see, if you hadn't heard, Orphan Black is a show about clones. That's selling it a bit short - lots of shows have been "about clones" before - but to say anything else would kind of spoil the show a little bit, and even though it doesn't have the deepest or most clever plot in the world, Orphan Black is fast-paced, entertaining, and appropriately full of twists. Without Tatiana Maslany, it'd make for fine DVR fodder: good enough to watch, but easy enough to ignore. With Tatiana Maslany, however, it's one of my favorite new shows on television.

She's just incredible. She plays three or four main characters and a handful of others who appear for an episode or two, and she gives each one a unique spin without turning any of them into an over-the-top flat mess of stereotypes. Each clone has a unique accent and vocabulary, a distinct look, several of her own ticks and quirks, and, in general, a complete and fleshed out personality. There are often multiple clones in the same scene, where Maslany has only herself to play off of. There are a few instances where one clone, for various reasons, tries to impersonate another, where Maslany has to essentially play two characters at once. It's an incredible feat and it brings the show up from B-level cable thriller to legitimately good stuff.

I was going to end this post by linking to a video of Maslany's various roles, but I couldn't find one without significant spoilers. Just know that these performances include a British con woman, a straight-laced cop, an unhinged Ukrainian murderer, a chic geek West Coast scientist, an uptight soccer mom, and a paranoid German girl on the run. It's a one-woman ensemble, and a good one at that. Check it out!

Gah, fine, here's a picture.

BASEketball

I kind of figured that the combination of the guys who made South Park and one of the Zucker brothers, creators of classic parody movies like Airplane! and Top Secret! would produce hilarious results in BASEketball- after all, when separate these guys have made many of the funniest pieces of media I've ever seen. But Baseketball just never quite worked as well as I thought it would; it was occasionally funny but nothing special. I suppose it's worth noting that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were nothing but actors in the movie, and while I'm sure they had additional contributions, they didn't write or direct anything. BASEketball is funny enough in concept- two nonathletic losers can only do one thing well sports-wise, and that's shoot basketballs, so they eventually form a sport out of combining that skill with the scoring system of baseball, and it quickly becomes a national phenomenon. From there it doesn't stray too far from your typical sports movie plot plus some absurd gags as the guys need to win the championship to save their team, and one player sells out, and the two fight over a woman. I really expected it to be a little more subversive than it was. Also the movie is just painfully 90's- they casted a bunch of hot 90's women like Jenny McCarthy, Victoria Silvstedt and Yasmine Bleeth and the soundtrack featured a lot of Reel Big Fish. Yikes! Everyone involved here has done better; don't bother with BASEketball.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

The original Final Fantasy Tactics is a game that took a while for me to really get into, but just as it was finishing up I realized what a great game it truly was. With its simple controls and lack of full motion cut-scenes (a departure from other Final Fantasy games at the time) it seemed like the transition from the PlayStation to the Game Boy Advance for the game's sequel would be an easy one, but unfortunately that just wasn't the case. And this wasn't really the GBA's fault. Square just messed with the winning formula too much, trying to make Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance a very different game, when it really shouldn't have. Here's a quick rundown of the noteworthy changes, all of which felt like downgrades of some level:

 

Plot- The original Final Fantasy Tactics may have the greatest plot of any Final Fantasy game, full of intricately connected and warring factions and all sorts of interesting things happening behind the scenes. Tactics Advance replaced this huge story with a small one where a few friends get lost in a dream-world and argue over whether to return to the real world. It just feels like such a low-effort follow up and none of the characters made any sort of impression on me.

 

Classes/Job Trees- I may be remembering this wrong, but I believe the original Final Fantasy Tactics gave you characters as a blank slate, allowing you the choice of 2 jobs, and the further you leveled up in either job, the more jobs you could take on. Tactics Advance replaced this with five races or classes or whatever, each with a seemingly randomly selected number of jobs you could take, and new jobs seemed to unlock with no pattern. Gone was the simple and elegant job tree which applied to everyone, replaced with 5 nonsense job webs. And while I'm mentioning the job tree here, I should note that abilities are much more of a pain in the ass to master in Tactics Advance. Basically the point of switching jobs in these games is because of the abilities you can unlock to apply to your character in the future even after you've switched jobs- you can eventually make a character who hits hard like a soldier, heals like a white mage, travel about with ease like a thief, and get various counter-attack or passive abilities. In the original Tactics, this is as simple as fighting battles while assigned to a job to earn job points, which can be spent on abilities. Now in Tactics Advance you're forced to equip items in addition to gain these abilities. In the first game you would constantly change jobs to keep upgrading your character, but now you stick with a job because there's little reason to test out alternatives.

 

Laws/Judges- In another move that seems like "change for the sake of change", Tactics Advance introduced a rotating system of laws into the game to keep the player from relying on one style of game-play too much. The problem is, it felt like none of it was thought through. First off it's frustrating just needing to check the laws before each battle when it really should have been delivered as a prompt automatically before the battle. Second, the laws were typically poorly-worded. For instance, sometimes a law might simply be "forbidden: holy." Naturally I assumed this meant I couldn't use the spell called Holy, a mainstay of the Final Fantasy series. Nope! For some reason this applies to all white magic, which is referred to as white magic everywhere else in the game, so I'd attempt to heal my party and then my healer would get kicked out of the battle. Why not say "white magic is forbidden"? Why not maybe color in commands that were against the law in red as if to say "only use this as a last resort!" or something? This all led to me to game the system and wander around the map before entering into battle- the laws change each time your party moves in the over-world, so I'd just move back and forth until the laws lined up right with my style of play. When players have to cheat the system like this, it's usually bad game design! Finally I tried to game it even further- say I was constantly dying on a tough boss who did major damage with a sword attack. It would seem to make sense to try to get the laws to line up correctly so he wouldn't be allowed to legally use his sword, right? Wrong! Laws don't apply to bosses! Who cares if it doesn't make sense? We've got a game to rush out! Ugh. Also enforcing these laws on the battle screens are judges who are mostly pointless but take up a spot on the battle screen, which means they might randomly keep you from getting close to an enemy. What was the point of this? How does it improve gameplay? It's like tripping in Brawl- sure, it affect everyone equally, but really only exists to frustrate, not challenge.

 

Item Purchasing- Next to those previous three this is only a minor nitpick but a frustrating one all the same. In any Final Fantasy, or really any RPG where you switch equipment you'll have a screen that tells you the stats of what you're currently wearing and you can compare it to what else you can purchase- say, an expensive new piece of armor seems worth it if it doubles your defense stat. But Final Fantasy Tactics Advance doesn't have that, forcing you to remember your own stats and compare them to what they would be with new items. This wouldn't be so bad if it was just affecting one stat, but stronger armor often comes with a tradeoff of affecting other stats like luck or evasiveness, so it's hard to keep track of it all for spur of the moment purchases. Again it's just a level of polish that's missing from the game that could have been fixed easily.

 

Despite all this I wouldn't say Tactics Advance was a bad game, just one that couldn't come anywhere close to it's fantastic predecessor. Still though this game's sequel Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift sounds like it's better, and I see no reason why it can't be- 3 of the 4 mistakes I highlighted above can be very easily fixed. I don't have Tactics A2 yet, but I'll get it eventually.

Moonrise Kingdom

Upon re-watching Rushmore recently I found that I liked it more a second time, and the Wes Anderson train continues for me with Moonrise Kingdom, which I actually found even better than Rushmore. Basically everything that you could find off-putting about the precocious teen-played-by-an-adult Max in Rushmore just works perfectly on much younger characters portrayed by actual young actors in Moonrise Kingdom. This is probably the most adorable movie I've ever seen. A young boy at a New England island summer camp meets a girl who lives nearby at the end of one summer in the 1960's; they exchange letters throughout the year, and by next summer when he's back at camp they agree to run away together, throwing the rest of the camp and citizens of the island into chaos as they try to stop them. It's a cute tale of young love and rebellion that I'd happily watch again. More Wes Anderson will likely come as soon as HBO airs it.

Inglourious Basterds

I don’t know why this took so long for me to see.  It took me listening to Eli Roth on Chris Jericho’s podcast to finally motivate me. Eli Roth is an interesting dude, but not a great actor. This cast was eclectic to say the least. Anyway, Quentin Tarantino is a very gifted man. No matter how much I want to be indifferent to his movies, he pulls me in. I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps it’s because every movie he does is so uniquely his own. The guy is weird. His movies are weird. His movies are also incredibly engaging. If I have one bone to pick with this movie, it’s probably Eli Roth. His Boston accent sucks. I could hardly bear the Bear Jew. HA!

Jack Reacher

This movie is bizarre. It’s based on a children’s novel from what I can tell, which might explain why it seems so heavy-handed and emotionless. I struggled to take what I was watching seriously when ridiculous things happened over and over again while none of the characters seemed to question any of them. Tom Cruise stars as Jack Reacher, a guy who is incorruptible. He’s a Patriot with his own set of codes. He jumps to conclusions that are always correct. Has anyone else seen this? Can they help me explain it better? It just has such a strange feeling to it. It just feels like a parody of an action movie at times. Jack Reacher is essentially John Cena.

God of War II

Three and a half years ago, Trev made a long and detailed post about how Fable II was just too glitchy and corrupt for him to ever beat; I, with youth and ambition, condemned the post and the concept in general of posting about a game you'd never beat on a blog whose purpose was to document the experience of beating every game you owned. I feared the blog would quickly deteriorate into a place where people game to bitch about broken games or unreadable prose in books. "I tried to read Ulysses, but James Joyce just made it so damn inaccessible. I gave up after thirty pages, and this is my post. Fuck that book; let's move on." Imagine that? I acted swiftly, criticizing Trev and getting all righteous over the blog's integrity.

Today, I eat crow.

Today, I am posting God of War II even though glitches and freezes rendered me incapable of actually beating it myself. After all of my indignation three and a half years ago, there are no excuses here capable of reconciling my actions today with my stance in 2010. So let me just explain what happened in brief detail and compare myself then to myself now.

Here's what happened.

I recently set up my PS2 for the first time in almost a year; I moved out of one apartment and into another last July, and then out of that apartment and into a house just a few weeks ago. The PS2 never left whatever box it was packed in between the two moves, so I was very excited to finally fire it up again here in my new home. I selected God of War II as my next game to play, a game I bought used at GameStop back in college and one of the oldest on my backlog. I was pumped. I hadn't played the God of War series in two years, and I jumped in with excitement. Things went swimmingly until a few hours into the game when suddenly the game froze while I tried to save it. Hmm. That sucks. Could be a memory card issue, a disc issue, a system issue, a one time thing. I replayed the twenty minutes or so since my last save and, alas, frozen once again. Frustrated and annoyed, I took to the Internet and did a Google search for my issue. Lo and behold, others had the same issue at the same point in the game. Some had even experienced freezes and hangs in the portion of the game preceding the save point. I figured I would just bypass that save point this time around, and I did just that, replaying those same twenty minutes yet again and then going another twenty minutes further. At this point the game dropped the background music. Not good. Then I died and it hung forever while reloading the checkpoint. I powered down, despondent. One last time, I restarted from my previous save, played for forty minutes or so, bypassing the troubling save point. Once again the audio dropped, but I took great precautions not to die. But I was stuck. I had hit a dead end. There was nowhere to go. I opened up YouTube and watched a "let's play" for some pointers, and it was clear right away to me that a bridge was supposed to extend for me at this point, but that bridge hadn't extended for me. Downcast, I backtracked back to the bypassed save point. Maybe, just maybe, the game would save this time, and when I loaded it back up next time, I'd be able to cross the bridge. Nope! Frozen while saving, once again.

Events beyond my control had prevented me from clearing this particular section of God of War II. The disc didn't even look very scratched, relative to other games I've owned and played through without issue. Granted, one scratch in the right place could of course doom the game, but still. Maybe this was a system issue. After all, I hadn't played the PS2 in two years and it had spent the last eight months inside a plastic bin. Who knows what internal damage the system may have suffered? So here, I was at a crossroads. I could go out and purchase another copy of God of War II on PS2, but that would involve a used game purchase at GameStop or over the Internet, and I could still be faced with a faulty PS2. I could buy the game via PS3 download, but then I'd need to start over, and it would also set a precedent for my thirteen remaining PS2 games - if they hang or glitch out at all, buy them on PS3. I'm broke, dammit. Remember how I just bought a house? Or, as another option entirely, I could just shrug and say, "fuck this game, I'm moving on." And in a move that echoes Trev's Fable II post from years ago, that's what I'm doing. The irony is, of course, not lost on me, and today I am a hypocrite and an asshole. So be it.

Look, this blog is close to five years old. When I began it, I had something like seventy games to beat and all kinds of free time to do so. Now, I have something like seventy games to beat and far less time to do so. I've beaten like two hundred games between then and now, and I've had a ton of fun and a few frustrations doing so, but it's becoming more and more clear to me how silly my little quest is. I hold down a full time job, I own a house, I plan to start taking some night classes in the coming year, and it's very likely, God willing, that I'll be a father before another five years go by. My "video game free time" is converging on zero pretty quickly here. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean I'm not nearly as ambitious about this whole project as I once was. I still enjoy the thrill of a good logging spree and I appreciate reading and commenting on other posts as well as when mine are read and commented on, but I'm beginning to have my doubts over whether or not I'll ever really finish every game (and book) I own. So I'm not going to beat myself up trying to find a work-around on this one.

For a few final notes here, I was having a blast with this game before it shat itself. I was playing it on "easy" difficulty as I so often do, which meant it posed virtually no challenge whatsoever beyond figuring out the puzzles and reacting to the quicktime events. I have no reason to doubt that I would have sailed straight through it today in a matter of hours. I also watched - at least in the background - the remaining parts of the game on a YouTube "let's play" series, just to ensure that I had experienced, kind of, the rest of such a good game. I've done everything I can here, short of making another purchase, to see everything God of War II has to offer. It looks amazing. I really wish I could have played it myself. If Sony ever releases the downloadable version on PS3 for free, I will absolutely go back and partake in the rest of this one.

And man, I hope my PS2 is fine, given those thirteen remaining titles.

Bored to Death: Season 3

With higher stakes in several episodes and much broader Hangover-like comedy from Zach Galifianakis, Bored to Death's final season felt a lot more like a "noir spy comedy" than either of the first two. I think that's a good thing. This ended up being the show's final season, and while it isn't clear to me whether or not everyone involved knew that it would be when they made it, it feels like this season benefited from letting loose a little more, from going bigger at times, from being sillier at times. We kick things off with Jonathan being framed for an actual murder and end things with a gunfight on a baseball diamond. Sillier, goofier, and less realistic all around, but at the same more open to different types of comedy and humor. One episode spent half its time with Zach Galifianakis struggling to take care of a baby, which is literally exactly what he does in The Hangover. On most shows, that would feel like a winking reference; on this one, it just feels like someone watched The Hangover and said, "hey, let's do this on our show!"

HBO has said recently that they'll revive and conclude the Bored to Death series in the form of a TV movie. I'm looking forward to it, but I can't even say it feels necessary.

The Muppets

I had both The Muppet Movie (1979) and The Great Muppet Caper (1981) on VHS as a kid and watched them several time over, I'm sure. It was only when I went back as a teenager and gave them each a re-watch that I realized all the subtle and more adult-oriented humor in those films. Nothing was risqué or violent or explicit or kid-unfriendly, but there were a few implicit winks through the fourth wall, a few intentionally awful puns that came from Fozzie, and a few other examples of a movie nodding its head to the parents likely watching the PG-rated stuff with their kids.

The Muppets was a great little movie with game performances from Jason Segel, Amy Adams, and Chris Cooper, but it just didn't give off the same vibes of darker humor. The winks and references are all still there, but it felt otherwise a tad too sweet and saccharine to be a true successor to The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper. That's my only real complaint, I guess, and it's more of an observation than a real complaint. That, and that they couldn't find more to do with Amy Adams since her B-story arc throughout the movie kind of relegated her to being a flat character who eventually turns into a wet blanket for Segel and the extent to which he gets into helping out the Muppets. She was fantastic every time she was on screen - they just couldn't work her into the story in more ways by virtue of how they decided to break her arc with Segel.

Anyway, it was a solid movie with memorable songs and clever jokes, which is really the best that you could hope for from a Muppets revival attempt.

Melancholia

Melancholia ends when a rogue planet collides with the earth, wiping everything out entirely. This isn't a spoiler; it's a very established fact, one the movie itself gives away within the first five minutes. You have to know, going into Melancholia, that it ends with the total annihilation of the earth. Needless to say, it's a very dark and bleak movie. I knew this much going in. What I did not expect was that the film wasn't really about the end of the world at all. Instead, it was about depression.

That's right. Director Lars von Trier made a movie about the end of the world not to explore what it would be like for society to face the apocalypse, but instead to compare two sisters and their personalities before and after they realize they are doomed. That's certainly a high-concept movie, and not something for everyone, but for me the whole thing worked pretty well. The film takes place over two parts. In the first part, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) arrives at her wedding reception with her new husband and for an hour or so we just get to see her sink further into unhappiness and depression. Her sister, Claire, is the one hosting the reception, and she's none too happy about Justine's general sadness throughout the event. Justine spends most of the evening either trying to be alone or otherwise not reacting to the world around her. It's an amazing performance by Kirsten Dunst. She isn't being aggressively sad or mopey or intentionally distant. She's just devoid of emotion and empty, barely registering when her mother openly mocks the idea of marriage during a toast or when her boss chastises her recent work performance right there at her wedding reception. It's ostensibly the happiest day of her life, and Justine is just deeply, deeply depressed. Her husband, who has presumably been seeing this build up for some time now, gives up and just leaves along with all the other guests when the wedding ends. Really, only Claire seems to want to try to snap Justine out of her funk. Nothing works, but at least the big sister cares enough to try. So, to recap, halfway through the movie we've already got a severely depressed person surrounded by nasty family members and abandoned by a new husband at a party no one is enjoying. Fun, right? And remember - no one even knows about the end of the world yet!

The second part of the movie takes place in the days after the wedding, where a nearly catatonic Justine is staying with Claire, Claire's husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), and their son. News of the approaching rogue planet comes to light, but John assures everyone that there will be no collision, and that it will be an exciting and beautiful night time fly-by visible from the earth. Long story short (seriously, the movie really started to drag during this second half, as we spent another hour mostly just mining the depths of Justine's despair), turns out there will of course be a catastrophic collision after all. And here's where the tables turn. Claire and John react like most sane people would, and panic, and worry, and fill with despair. John just straight up kills himself once he learns his predictions were inaccurate. But Justine seems to find some kind of beautiful inner peace over all this. For the movie's final twenty minutes or so, it's Justine taking care of Claire. It's Justine, utterly tranquil and calm, trying to make the end of the world as unhorrible an experience as possible for her sister and nephew. Which is kind of bleakly sweet, especially relative to the rest of the movie. Anyway, the collision comes and everything is incinerated. Roll credits.

So, yeah. Melancholia was bleak and depressing and also, frankly, a little boring. It's very easy to compare to a Terrence Mallick movie, and particularly to The Tree of Life. That movie featured a whole lot of stillness and tranquility, but was filled with positive spiritual vibes. It began with the Big Bang itself; here, we're sad as hell and staring down the end of the world, but the same stillness and quietness exists in most shots and most scenes. I read that Melancholia premiered at Cannes just two days after The Tree of Life, and that audiences were stunned, almost as if Lars von Trier had seen The Tree of Life and then gone out and made a direct response to that movie in just two days.

I've run long here, thanks largely to a bunch of plot explanation, but I don't want to wrap this up without really driving home how well von Trier and Dunst were able to sketch out and act out, respectively, such a genuinely believable embodiment of clinical depression. I struggled with some minor bouts of depression myself in both high school and college, and I've known a few people who've been affected far more deeply than I have, and this film just nails the condition. Everything from the antisocial despondence to the inability to motivate oneself to do, well, anything, really, is all on display here. As is the silver lining to the condition - if you can call it that - which is that once you're numb to everything, bad news doesn't really affect you all that much. I want to be clear here - Justine isn't welcoming the end of the world with open arms because she's suicidal; she's just calmed by it in a way that can't possibly make sense unless you're able to empathize with such a sad character. When you feel nothing, and "nothing" is all that everything is about to become, imagine how calming and peaceful that might be. It's sad as hell that anyone could react that way to the end of the world, but there's a certain inhuman calmness there that you may be able to appreciate as well.

It wasn't the most entertaining or enjoyable movie I've seen, but Melancholia is certainly one I'll think about for years and years to come.

Swingers

I knew that Swingers was a bit of a cult classic, a "bro's movie" that put Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on the map. I expected wacky hijinks to ensue in Vegas, perhaps on some sort of bachelor party or something, and for the line "Vegas baby, Vegas!" to be used more than once. I figured that almost 20 years later without the proper context I would find the movie kinda funny but not hilarious. And I expected this trip to Vegas to be a little glamorized too, making the swinging lifestyle that the movie's named after out to be some sort of risky but rewarding venture for the group of friends who seemed ready to try it out. It was only really on this last point that I was wrong; I figured "swingers" meant people in committed relationships who sleep around with others, but no, these "swingers" are just a few single guys out on the town and looking for love. At the heart of the story is Favreau's character attempting to get over a rough break-up, and the more easy-going Vaughn tries to help him out of his funk by getting him laid in Vegas. And for the most part the movie makes Vaughn's uncaring, non-committal character out to be a fool and makes Vegas seem about as seedy and underwhelming as I expect it to be. Still though, this was pretty fun to watch; while "bro movie" and Vince Vaughn might turn some off considering his later Frat Pack movies, Swingers surprised me by showing some heart and never really losing sight of the fact that it's about Favreau recovering from a break-up, rather than an excuse for wild sex jokes. It's not something I'm going out of my way to watch again, but Swingers was pretty good.

Bored to Death: Season 2

When you jump into a show after it's already ended, as I've done these last few weeks with Bored to Death, it just isn't the same experience as viewing it live. Sometimes that helps you appreciate a show more, sometimes it helps set expectations for time commitments, and sometimes it detracts from your ability to get invested in the show since you know it'll all be over in a matter of weeks or so. As I write this post and attempt to reflect on the middle season of Bored to Death, it occurs to me just how differently I'd likely be reacting to each episode if, for one thing, I had to go at a pace of one episode a week, and if, for another, I had no idea whether the show would last another year, or two, or five, or be canceled immediately. No, I entered this viewing experience knowing it was a low-investment mission consisting of just three seasons of eight half hours of largely forgotten television. If I get too distracted by my computer or phone while watching, I seldom feel the need to rewind an episode a few minutes to see what I've missed, because I'm basically just along for the ride. Additionally, if two or even three straight episodes leave me wanting more, it's not as if I've gone half a month without seeing a decent half-hour of Bored to Death; in real time, each individual episode would bear the weight of a week's worth of expectations on my end, for better or worse. Instead, I don't need to grapple internally with whether or not to stop recording the show, or let it pile up on the DVR, or something. Here? I'm just kind of along for the ride. Which, granted, is how most people watch most comedies.

I'm not trying to say that Bored to Death is bad TV that I wish I could stop watching. It is, however, sometimes fairly bland. It's earnest, it's pleasant, and it's usually funny and quirky enough to enjoy, but I do wonder if I'd have had this same mildly pleased reaction to the series had I been watching it four years ago and dealing with isolated half-hours, weeks apart, in which nothing happens. But here, knowing the whole show comprises twelve hours in total, I'm just enjoying each episode as much as I can without worrying about whether or not to cut ties with it, or if I'm wasting time waiting for it to improve, or if it can sustain the nice little vibe it's got going on. Anyway, Bored to Death is still good stuff. At least in rapid-fire marathon viewing form.

After Earth

Garbage.

Streets of Rage 3

In January, I knocked twelve Sega Genesis games off of my backlog. In February, I drummed out seven more. In March, no progress was made whatsoever. Linear trends being what they are, I was very afraid I would somehow make negative progress - regress? congress? - here in April. But no! I'm back on the wagon, and earlier today I was able to bang out Streets of Rage 3 with Keith. How did it go? I already can't really remember. Let's see some highlights in bullet form.

• The game was just fucking impossibly hard and within fifteen or twenty minutes we knew we had to resort to some cheat codes.
• Doing so allowed us to play as kangaroos in boxing gear. If you thought the streets were enraged before, you have no idea how enraged they were once boxing kangaroos took to said streets with the appropriate amount of rage.
• There was a story here, and even though we whizzed right through the cut scenes and largely ignored them, we gleaned enough to appreciate the stakes of the final few stages.
• Those stakes? Some sort of robot became an impostor standing in for the city selectman or mayor or maybe even the U.S. President or something. Oh hell no, not on these two kangaroos' watch.
• The game ends with a vague, "The End?" Hindsight tells us the question mark was unnecessary, as Sega passed on a fourth Streets of Rage game. No real loss, folks.

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Streets of Rage 3
Gain Ground
Streets of Rage 2
Golden Axe II
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Drive Angry 3D

Well I bought this movie when I bought a 3D TV because it was only $12 when most were $30. I like Nic Cage and Johnny Depp is a lucky man, but that wasn't enough to salvage this garbage. For starters, this movie plays up something as a huge reveal even though it was spoiled on the back of the case and in all of the TV spots. There's a lot of driving and shooting, but the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe the most interesting part of this movie is just the fact that it really tried to take advantage of 3D (and by that I mean a lot of bullets were shot straight at the camera and CGI'd to the point where I thought they were gonna come out of the TV and kill me! Kill me if I ever have to watch this again.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

I've got a confession to make. I've never beaten an RPG, turn-based or otherwise. In fact the only RPG I've ever played prior to this game is Pokemon Red. However, as someone who has watched South Park religiously since the day my mom first let me watch it, I couldn't resist this game, RPG or not.

This game has its flaws. It gets easy at points, it's short by RPG standards and it's a little glitchy, most notably in cut scenes. The game seemed to struggle with your character. Sometimes he wouldn't be facing the camera and sometimes he would be the wrong size. This is most likely due to the fact that your character is completely customizable. Okay, those are all my complaints.

Anyway, this game is incredible. It's easily one my favorites of all time. You play as the "new kid" as you fight for the stick of truth with the familiar faces of South Park. They do an awesome job of playing off the fact that the kids are really just pretending like most fourth graders would while still keeping it within the South Park reality. They've got an upgrade and leveling system that allows you to customize your weapons and armor and thankfully all the weapons and armor fit within the South Park universe. This game does such a good job of making every little thing in it a reference to some episode or another, from the ManBearPig ears to the Alien Probe sword.

The fighting system is simple, but I found it very satisfying. It was exploitable by using the right "consumable item," but I still felt accomplished with most of my wins. The only complaint I have is that you can only have yourself and one partner fighting. I spent far too much time with just me and Butters. I wish I had some opportunity to fight with Cartman and Kyle at my side at the same time. They could have had some great dialogue going on.

Still, the biggest selling point for this game is probably the story. It's like one big episode. It's really funny and feels so perfectly South Park. I don't want to go into too much detail because everyone deserves to experience it.

This is probably the greatest "licensed" video game ever, thanks in large part to all the work Matt and Trey did on it. I am dying for a sequel, but I doubt we will ever see one. Those guys are just too damn busy.

24: Season 5

Sarin gas and an evil US president. Day 5. Let's get to it.

This is likely my favorite season thus far. (To be fair, watching the show in rapid fire is making it a little difficult to differentiate season from season. Still...) Right away we start things off with a bang. Jack is in hiding after faking his death last season until all four people who know this secret become the target of assassination plot. With his friends in danger, Jack returns to LA to save the day. 

This season had some really shocking and heartbreaking moments. I mean, Palmer gets assassinated almost immediately (and, thus, begins Dennis Haysbert career with Allstate), we see Chloe fend for her life in the field once again (is it weird I'm developing a bit of a crush on her?), and  Edgar -- oh, poor, sweet, sweet Edgar -- just doesn't make it. I mean... that whole scene where the nerve gas is released into CTU is just captivating television, and it ultimately resolves when Samwise gives his life to turn on the air vent system to clear out the poisonous gas. This season also puts a big spotlight on who is quite possibly my favorite character so far in the series: Charles Logan. At first you believe he's just this whiny coward who, despite accidentally falling ass-backwards into the presidential position, really doesn't belong there. Then, BOOM, you learn he's this fucking maniacal madman consumed with his own legacy. Also, we finally give our favorite member of the secret service, Aaron Pierce, some decent screen time and, ultimately, the best line in the show so far:

"There is nothing that you have said or done that is acceptable to me in the least. You're a traitor to your country and a disgrace to your office. And it's my duty to see that you're brought to justice. Is there anything else... Charles?"

Well... I didn't finish the series before it was taken away from Netflix, but a big thanks to the 'rents for owning all the DVDs. Season six should be done shortly. 

Bored to Death: Season 1

If there was a benefit to me assembling chairs and barstools until four in the morning last night - a benefit beyond having functional furniture, I mean - it's that I was finally able to beast my way through the second half of the first season of Bored to Death, a show I've struggled to find time to watch since the big move.

This strikes me as one of HBO's lesser known efforts, so here's the quick rundown. The show ran for three seasons from 2009-2011 and starred Jason Schwartzman, Zach Galifianakis, and Ted Danson. The basic premise is that a writer, Jonathsan (Schwartzman), has just endured a break-up and, seeking something new and different to distract himself from the heartbreak, posts an ad on Craigslist purporting to be a private detective for hire. His reasoning is that he's read plenty of noir detective novels before, and can thus do a decent job. His friend (Galifianakis), a struggling cartoonist in a sexless relationship, serves as his driver and often unwilling accomplice. Lastly, his boss from his magazine job (Danson) is a twice-divorced well-to-do guy in his mid-sixties who is just game for anything, from drinking to smoking pot to joining in on the private detective shenanigans as soon as he learns about his employee's night time activities.

That's really pretty much it, and the simplicity and wide openness of this set up allow . Most episodes so far have revolved around Jonathan accepting a case of some kind and attempting to solve it like the amateur he is. Sometimes he succeeds and sometimes he fails; sometimes he's genuinely good at what he's doing and other times he's woefully incompetent. There's no real formulaic feel to any of it, and each episode feels very organic and situational. I mean, it's all right there in the show's title - these three guys are just plain bored, each of them looking for a distraction or an escape from the rest of their lives.

The strength of the show, I guess, is just how genuine it feels. This isn't a gut-busting comedy that goes for guffaws, and it isn't mean spirited in the least. It's just sort of pleasant to be around. The first few episodes didn't really suck me right in, but it's show that slowly grows on you, and one where I can look back at the first season and consider the whole as greater than the sum of its parts - a rarity for such an episodic and non-serial show. There's great dialogue, of course, as any "show about nothing" needs to have pretty much by default. All three lead performances are great, with Schwartzman and Galifianakis essentially sharing the role of the straight man to all of Ted Danson's scene-stealing charismatic willingness. Danson's character is somehow unlike anything I can recall seeing on TV before. He's neither egotistical nor pitiful, and he's not a snarky wiseass or a crazy old man. He's just game for anything, in an excited but relatively calm way. In a lot of ways he seems like a much more grounded version of Sealab 2021's Captain Murphy, one of my all time favorite comedic characters from any medium.

I digress, but yeah. So far, so good, and I look forward to the second and third seasons of this one.

The Artist

The Artist is a black-and-white silent film, presented in 4:3 aspect ratio, shot at 22 frames per second and then sped up to 24. It's a nice little homage to a very bygone era - Hollywood, 1927-1933 - and everything about it seems to wink at the audience. At an hour and forty minutes, it doesn't really outstay its welcome at all, and the central gimmick works just fine. The story is a self-referrential piece of meta-pandering if ever there was one. One of the biggest actor-directors of the silent film era refuses to adapt to the onset of the "talkies," even as the industry around him abandons silent film at the end of the 1920s, here in this silent film from 2011. Ultimately what The Artist does is pay homage to the era and the genre specifically by going as over-the-top as it can in pointing out all the quirks and gimmicks of the genre and the era. The entire production felt like an affectionate parody of sorts, and this absolutely felt like a case where a movie tried to have its cake and eat it, too. And frankly, it worked. There was nothing to really dislike about the movie. As long as you're on board with the idea of a modern day silent film, I can't imagine anyone disliking this thing. It's got mass appeal and gimmicky charm to it.

But "Best Picture?" Wow, is that a stretch. Actually, since The Artist was one of the least attention-demanding movies I've ever seen, I spent most of it muling over two key questions in my mind. One, are award-winning films predisposed to cynical reactions and "overrated" accusations? And, two, was 2011 the worst year in film in recent memory?

I'll tackle the first question first. In short, yes. As an exercise, while watching, I tried pretending that The Artist was a little-known film from the last decade that a few of my favorite critics had heralded as an underground success. When I did this, I was able to appreciate the idea of someone attempting to make a silent movie in 2011 just a little bit more, and I bought into the film's conceit a little more willingly. But as long as I was watching and thinking, "this was the best movie of 2011?" I just couldn't come close to agreeing. It's kind of fruitless to wonder if I'd have liked this one much more had I seen it before it was given the most prestigious award in film, but I know that I would have greeted it much more openly and without a callous "alright, this better blow me away" attitude.

Now, having said all that, I can't even come up with a 2011 movie that deserved "Best Picture" more, and frankly that's on the year as a whole for just failing to deliver. I asked above, "was 2011 the worst year in film in recent memory?" My answer is yes, and I'd invite anyone suggesting otherwise to show their work. I'll wrap this up by listing every movie I still recognize from 2011 just so you can all see where I'm coming from here. Starting in January, we had...

South Park: The Stick of Truth

Listen, we all love South Park, but at first glance this game looks like another cheap adaptation to a series that likely doesn't lend itself well to the video game industry. Sure, these knock-off games make money, but I can't recall many that measure up beyond their movie or television show counterparts. (Aside from the Enter the Matrix game. That shit was bananas!) These games typically seem glitchy, rushed, and otherwise stale. I don't remember anyone clamoring for those Harry Potter or Transformers franchise games, yet it feels at least three were made for every movie. Point is I wouldn't have never touched this game normally, but I heard from a lot of people that they actually liked it. So, I gave it a shot.

At first glance, this game falls right into my predictions. Being that it's a turn-based RPG, as soon as you begin the tutorials, you get the feeling that the game hasn't been tested well. Feels a little glitchy, battlescreen interface is a bit lacking/confusing, and (what will become even clearer later on) the game is extremely easy. However, you forget all of these problems almost immediately because the game is just so damn clever and funny. First off, with the amount of cut-away scenes, the game feels like three TV episodes stapled together -- already the game should be worthwhile to any South Park fan. Aside from the cut-away scenes, there are so many clever points where you can clearly see Trey Parker and Matt Stone's humor riffing on video games. When you choose what race your main character will be, your options are Knight, Thief, Mage, or Jew (with Cartman likely harassing you if you pick jew -- I don't know, I picked thief). Then there's the main villains: Nazi Zombies! Unlike Call of Duty's zombies, when you become infected in South Park you just start screaming out old recordings of Hitler (and as always with South Park, it's way too silly to be taken seriously -- there's even Nazi Zombie aborted fetuses!). Then there's boss fights in the craziest places: shrunken down you fight a gnome on your parents' bed while they're having sex forcing you to dodge any flying testicles that come your way (spoiler: the game will force you to fail); you venture into Canada where everything all of a sudden becomes 8-bit graphics looking like the first Final Fantasy; and you'll have to venture up Mr. Slave's ass (like Lemmiwinks) to disarm a snuke. There's so much more awesome randomness, I could ramble on it all day.

Along with the game's downsides, this one really bothered me. As you battle your way through the game, you collect a SHIT TON of items. Seriously, you never stop picking up crap. And I mean CRAP. Yes, there are items for health and there's equipment to help level up your character in fights, but then there's just random bullshit everywhere that does nothing. Chicken bones, lost socks, tampons, bottle caps... the list goes on and on. And since there doesn't seem to be a limit on the amount of random crap (different from health items) you can carry, you just start hoarding them all. I kept thinking that at some point in the game this stuff would come to use, but... nope. Nothing. Maybe you could sell it off, but I never tried because the game was so easy I was never in need for any money while still being able to buy up any weapon I wanted in the stores. So, who fucking knows why this game had me picking up hundreds and hundreds of random, useless items. 

All that aside, what this game is... is entertaining. 

It's basically the TV show just made interactive. Yeah, the game side of things isn't too challenging or rewarding, but that's not why you keep playing through. You keep playing because you want to see how much crazier the story is going to get... and this is a story that just gets better and better as you work your way towards the end. 

Hoosiers

A couple weeks ago as March Madness was starting up I figured it was about time to watch what's got to be the biggest college basketball movie of all time, Hoosiers, the story of the most legendary coach in Indiana Hoosiers lore who led the team to a national title despite all of... hey wait a minute. This is about high school basketball? What? I don't care about high school basketball! This movie has nothing to do with 'the' Indiana Hoosiers and everything to do with, well, people from Indiana, a region where people call themselves Hoosiers, some of whom play basketball. Still this a mid-80's sports movie so you probably know exactly how this one's going to go. Like I mentioned in the Sideways post I watched these movies a while ago and while I can remember most of Sideways I don't remember much of Hoosiers at all. Gene Hackman was pretty good, and the stereotypical insular and unforgiving townspeople seemed a little too over-the-top. They were all assholes! Anyway, no reason to strongly recommend Hoosiers.

Sideways

Sideways made a pretty big splash back in 2004 when it came out, quickly becoming the "wine movie" as I can't think of any other movies about wine. It's a comedy that's usually not "ha-ha" funny- if you've seen Paul Giamatti in anything you probably know that kind of weird sort of pitiful style of character he often plays. Here he's a recent divorcee who along with his best friend, a small-time actor played by Thomas Haden Church, sets out on a week-long tour of the California wine country for an old man version of a bachelor party.You watch Paul struggle with his recently ended marriage and Thomas struggle with the fact that he's about to enter into marriage, and they meet some women in wine country who make the week a little more complicated. I know my description makes it sound kinda boring but this was actually pretty good! I saw it several weeks ago yet I still remember a lot of what happened here. Of course if you don't like Paul Giamatti then you'll probably want to avoid.

Homeland: Season 2

The first season of Homeland was smart, sharp, and objectively good television. One small tweak to the season finale would have made it an extremely memorable miniseries with a dark ending and a nearly flawless run. But, this being a series on Showtime - the same network that pushed both Dexter and Weeds through eight seasons long after either show had anything relevant left to say or do - Homeland had to continue. Of course, nothing gold can stay, and sure enough, Homeland has fallen pretty steadily in two increasingly sloppy and silly seasons since then. I'm here right now to talk about the second of those seasons, which I've just re-watched on Blu-ray.

In short, it was bigger, bolder, and sometimes better. But its start-to-finish plotting relied on about half a dozen completely implausible coincidences, and the character relationships by season's end - one relationship, in particular - felt completely absurd given all previous characterization groundwork laid by previous episodes. Carrie Mathison has always been a little schizophrenic and reckless, but she was the one lone individual who had properly pegged Nicholas Brody's motivations in Season 1; Brody has always been a bit indecisive and mysteriously motivated, but he's been able to retain his cover and conceal his true intentions from everyone around him including his entire family, except for Carrie; why, why, why would either one of them ever come to seek the friendship of the other? Let alone engage in a romantic and trusting companionship? It makes no sense for either individual, and seems to exist solely for the audience. And how did Saul just stumble upon that thumb drive with Brody's confession tape from Season 1 in some desk drawer somewhere on the streets of the Middle East? And Abu Nazir just kind of took Brody's word that he would do something at one point - and then Brody did it. And how about the fate of the Vice President? There were just a few too many leaps of faith taken this season to constitute that same "quality television" label. Homeland was still good, still entertaining, and still tense as hell, but nowhere near as smart as it was a season ago. And it gets so much worse in Season 3, but we'll get there eventually here on this blog, I'm sure.

Lastly, I want to stand up a little bit for the character of Dana Brody, who took way too much undue flak from fans for being irritating and insufferable. Guess what. Teenagers can be irritating and insufferable! And perhaps some slack is due when a teenager has all the daddy issues Dana's dealt with these past few years. I actually thought she was a decent person, all in all, this season, especially considering the drastic difference between her reaction to that night time joyriding incident and the reaction of the rich little shit head who shared the experience with her.