Wii Fit U

I'm caving on this one. I haven't touched it for about ten months now, and I always intended to post it only once I hit a certain goal with my weight. But, screw it. If I hit that goal anytime soon, it'll be no thanks at all to Wii Fit U, so I may as well call this one finished, to whatever extent you can beat Wii Fit U in the first place.

First, a quick summary of the game. Or, experience, or whatever this is called. Wii Fit U is essentially just a bigger and better version of Wii Fit. All the same games are there, as far as I can tell, and so are many more. Most of them incorporate the balance board, a Wii peripheral that shipped with the first game back in 2007. This one also makes use of a pedometer which you're supposed to carry around with you all day to track your daily fitness; I haven't touched mine in months. Wii Fit probably wasn't worth its $100 price tag back in 2007, but you could get this game for free if you bought the $20 pedometer last winter, which is a much better deal. (Again, as long as you have the balance board.)

Now that that's out of the way, allow me to regale you all with the history of my own weight. It's not much of a story, so bail now unless mundane information about me excites you. We'll do this in bullet form to keep it as concise as possible.

• I was always a really skinny kid. I was also a picky eater. I don't have any concrete numbers, but there were plenty of kids throughout elementary and middle school who weighed more than I did even though I was always among the tallest of people in my grade. So for most of my life, any dissatisfaction I've had with my weight has been a desire to bulk up and weigh more, if anything.
• This came to a head when I went for my physical early on in my high school freshman year. I weighed 153 pounds and stood at 6'1" tall. This alarmed my doctor, who noted that in eighth grade I'd been 6'0" and 154 pounds. To gain an inch but lose a pound was something they didn't like to see, I was told, even though plugging the numbers into a BMI calculator right now I can tell you that this "concerning" weight loss left me with a BMI of 20.2 - right in the middle of the "normal" range on the BMI scale. I get it - I was a growing boy and all - but if I'm feel like punting responsibility for my eating habits over the ensuing twelve years, I can always look back and blame that doctor for telling me my thin stature was a cause for concern.
• I spent high school packing on the pounds - who doesn't fill out, once puberty ends? - and though I've got no hard numbers, I know I was somewhere around 180 or 190 in my junior or senior year.
• College came, and while I probably gained more of a "freshman five" than a freshman fifteen, that summer I had an internship working a desk job for forty hours a week. I went to a nearby Wendy's almost every day for lunch, often getting three or four items on the dollar menu. I think I gained fifteen pounds that summer alone. This was the first time I was ever remotely concerned that perhaps I wasn't "thin" at all anymore, and maybe even kind of sort of fat. I was probably around 215 or so.
• At the very end of sophomore year, I was 225 and legitimately annoyed about it. For the first time in my life, I began actively trying to lose weight. That summer I worked at the same desk job, but avoided Wendy's this time around and some days skipped lunch entirely. I also took up running - a few miles a week at most - and wound up somewhere around 210 by August. Content with myself, I stopped giving a shit all over again and was probably back to 215 by the time junior year started...
• ...and then, somehow, a good 230 or so once it ended. The following summer, another five pounds or so were lost. And then in my senior year it all went to shit, badly, and I graduated somewhere around the 245 mark. There are plenty of possible culprits here. Beer, a slowing metabolism, a sedentary lifestyle, poor sleeping habits, worse eating habits, and just a miserable diet that consisted of campus sub shop sandwiches and all kinds of preservative-laden frozen food at Target. And also tons of ice cream and tons of straight up Coca-Cola. I was legitimately a fat guy at this point. (Still am.) The BMI calculator says, quite clearly, that by this time I was technically obese.
• Upon entering the workforce, I abruptly quit drinking soda, except for diet soda. I didn't begin to run or exercise, and I'm sure I ate no healthier overall. I didn't lose much weight, but for three or for years I at least maintained it. (I also became addicted to diet soda, but that's another health issue entirely.) My all time high, and I forget when it even occurred, was 256 pounds. For the last five years though, I've mostly hovered around 250. So after gaining some 45 pounds in four years at college, I gained 5 in the four years that followed - and again, my only big change was cutting calorie sodas from my diet. So, if there's one word of advice you should take from me on weight loss, it's to try that, if you haven't yet!
• When I got engaged in the summer of 2012 weighing 250 pounds or so, I knew I could spend a year losing weight and perhaps drop back down to 225 or maybe even lower for my wedding. It was nice to have a goal. Unfortunately, I never really got started with the weight loss, and when the summer of 2013 came, I was still sitting at 250. With two months to go, I went into an all out calorie-counting starvation-based diet. "Starvation" is a stretch, for sure, but I was trying my hardest to stay under 2,000 calories a day. (For a 250-pound sedentary man to lose weight, he needs to be under 3,000.) The flash diet worked, and I wound up at 238 on my wedding day.
• It's been just over a year now, and I'm happy to say I haven't gained all that weight back. These days I fluctuate between 240 and 245, apparently unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to break through into the 230s. With no real milestones coming up, I've lacked the motivation to set specific goals for specific timeframes. But several numbers do hold interesting values:
• At 237 pounds, my 6'2.5" body would hit that 30.0 BMI threshold and I'd no longer be obese. Overweight, bordering on obese, but... not obese. That's something!
• At 230 or so, I would be as light as I have ever been in my adult (21+) life. Even in the mid-230s I'd be as light as I've been since college. This, too, would be something!
• At 220.4 pounds, I'd be 100 kilograms. That's a hell of a milestone, at least in the metric system.
• After dropping below 200 pounds, well, I'd finally be under 200 pounds. I don't realistically think I can get here without some drastic lifestyle changes. This, for me, is more of an "ultimate goal," and something to perpetually strive for without ever really expecting to hit.
• Then again, just three pounds below that, at 197, is the threshold between "normal" and "overweight." If my goal here is literally to not be overweight, then numerically it must be 197 pounds. Again, we'll see. Motivation can be tough. The only two times I've actively gone on weight loss sprees, it's mostly been because of calorie cuts, and it's also only lasted two months and been good for just fifteen pounds. If I do this three or four more times over the next few years, then, sure, I guess I can get there.
• Still, it starts with 240. I've got to get back under 240 before I can get any lower, obviously. Time will tell!

New Super Luigi U

The Year of Luigi, guys!

This one was quick and simple. It's essentially the same game as New Super Mario Bros. U except for two major differences. One, obviously, is that you play as Luigi, who jumps higher than Mario and falls slower, but who also lacks traction and therefore slips around a lot. It's an interesting trade off, made more interesting by this game's second big dynamic; every level has a time limit of just 99 seconds. These aren't exactly the same levels that appeared New Super Mario Bros. U, but each one feels like a 99-second cut down version of the same levels from that game. The world maps from both games are identical, and so is whatever barebones plot exists - even the final boss battle plays out exactly the same as it did last time around. (This much was fine; it's a great final boss battle!)

This really isn't essential, even for a Super Mario platformer, but it was fun and different and slightly more difficult with its short time limits and floatier controls. It also costs just $20 at full price, so keep that in mind if you're looking to build up a little Wii U library on the cheap.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Happy Thanksgiving! Stick to the movie.

Lady Vengeance

Here's the third and final part of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, and I'm disappointed to say it was easily my least favorite of the three. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy were more raw and realistic in their various choreographed acts of violence; this movie, by contrast, at times felt like a bad Kill Bill knock-off. And I never really identified with the main character's plight this time around. She's been framed for a murder she didn't commit, but she was an accessory to that crime, so the revenge she seeks - against the true murderer - never really seems fully justifiable from a personal level. On the other hand, it's completely justifiable in a vacuum. The guy she seeks to kill is a total monster. Bluntly stated, he kidnaps children and films himself killing them while they cry and scream for their mothers. I can stomach most things in movies, but that was pretty tough to watch - and so were the parents' reactions to the videos they eventually saw.

Like I said, the guy is a monster and deserves everything our heroine has in store for him. But what of this titular Lady Vengeance herself? She's a complex character, for sure. Guilty of some serious shit, but trying to atone for it. Kind-hearted to some and ice cold to others. Remorseful, but hell-bent on torture and death. It just didn't all come together and work for me. Maybe I missed some subtle character-building moments, like a certain tone or inflection lost in the subtitles, but it was never clear to me whether or not I was supposed to be rooting for this woman. Tack on a mother-daughter relationship that seemed more like length-padding than story-building, and I'm a bit stuck when trying to see a thematic bigger picture.

Oh, and there were some weirdly tacky-looking transitions and other strange editing choices early on. Park's always been great at framing his shots and telling his stories more visually than with dialogue, but this movie got a little too hallucination-heavy and surreal at times for my liking. Apparently, the movie originally had a feature-length slow fade into black-and-white, where everything starts out bright and colorful and then loses saturation for the next two hours. That would have been pretty cool, I think! And it would have lent itself very well to the progression of the tone and tenor; we start out with a seemingly reformed woman being released form prison, and we end up with the brutal murder of a kid-killer, after all. I suppose I could have replicated the effect by turning the color down a notch every few minutes, but it just didn't matter that much to me I guess.

Anyway, long story short, this was a fine movie, but it didn't quite live up to what I'd come to expect from Park.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is just plain excellent. The bittersweet tone this post will soon take has nothing to do with the quality of the game itself. But playing and "beating" this game all weekend long has left me reflecting on my history with this franchise and, by extension, with video games in general. Basically I just need to lament growing up for a few paragraphs here.

I didn't own a Nintendo 64 until well into the 2000s, but Super Smash Bros. was immediately my favorite game for the console. It probably still is. Back in fifth grade, I was just so impressed by the idea of all these Nintendo characters duking things out in a fighting game. When I got a GameCube for Christmas in 2002 - freshman year of high school - the first game I bought was the year-old Super Smash Bros. Melee. And man, I beat the ever-loving shit out of that game. Classic and All-Star mode, each cleared with every single character. I collected every trophy that didn't require some special condition like "have a save file from such and such a game on your memory card."

And most importantly, I played it frequently and often, with everyone I knew. My friends, first and foremost, but also my sisters and occasionally their friends. Cousins. Neighbors. Completely "random" people that I wouldn't call friends or even acquaintances, but who would be in our house for one reason or another back in those days. And what's crazy is that I can remember distinct "eras" of playing Melee, even though Brawl would come out just six years later. Early on, I was flat-out awful at the game, but so was every friend I had, so I could win matches fairly easily by spamming Kirby's down-special brick move. Kirby was my first main, I guess. Then came the Young Link era; his down-aerial, a "sword pogo" if you will, was quicker and more potent than Kirby's brick was, and in addition to that Young Link had projectiles and quicker movement. After logging something like twenty hours with Kirby, I put in fifty-plus with Young Link. All of this happened within my first year of owning the game, I'm sure.

Somewhere along the way - and it's not even clear to me when or why - I began dabbling with Jigglypuff. I distinctly remember playing so, so many one-on-one matches with an old neighbor and friend, who with Marth was, at the time, easily the best player I'd encountered. He made me better, and I made him better. By '05 or '06, my Jigglypuff was in absolute top form, and boy, was I an insufferable asshole at Melee. The unconventional movements of the character, along with overpowered moves like rest and rollout, made him (her?) a nightmare for my foes. Multiple times back then and later on in college, I made people rage quit over zero-to-death combos and perfectly executed "wall of pain" aerial kicks. Those were the days! Except, keep in mind, this was 2006 or so; I had only just gotten my driver's license and certainly had little reason to ever leave my hometown. I may have been as good at Melee as anyone I knew, but in those pre-Internet days, it was nothing but greatness in a vacuum. (It's worth mentioning that my second-most played character behind Jigglypuff by this time wasn't even Young Link, but Bowser. Bowser, often considered the very worst fighter in all of Melee.)

All of this changed when a few friends and I decided to spend a summer Saturday in '06 or '07 at some independent video game store a forty-minute drive away, competing in our first (and last) regional video game tournament. We showed up, certain we could hang with anyone. And then all four of us just got obliterated. It wasn't even close. My Jigglypuff, who had been wrecking hometown fools for years, got absolutely smoked by two of the three people I met in group play. I did manage to beat one person in my group - a Dr. Mario who went by the moniker "Dr. Tubbs" - only to later find out that he had been deemed the very worst player in the entire tournament. It was humbling and sobering for the four of us, to head into a seventy-man tournament and all find ourselves placing somewhere in the sixties. But it was also pretty damn inspiring! After all, we were the biggest Smash nuts we knew, and here was this much bigger and far deeper scene of immensely talented players. I learned that day that I could play Smash forever and still never be as good as some of those guys. Rather than dishearten me, it gave me all kinds of incentive to get even better. I thought I'd been atop my game all along, but I had so much farther to climb!

Except, I never really did. Life got in the way. College started, and even though there were tons of new people to play Smash with - plenty of them great - I just never found that video game to be nearly as important as I once did. I still obsessed over the impending release of Brawl, eating up every new piece of information that came my way for a good year or so. And when it came out in the spring of 2008, I was right there with several of my hometown friends on release night, giddy as hell. We played the living hell out of Brawl that year, and while today many people will frown on Brawl and say that it was terrible, trust me, we ate that shit right up back then. I can't confirm that I beat classic and all-star mode with every single character again, but I do know that I organized my own little tournament that summer and hosted twelve friends or so at my place. Brawl interest never quite hit Melee levels after a year or so, but it was alive and well back in the summer of 2008, where we'd often find ourselves playing Smash until dawn on the weekends.

And then it just sort of faded away. A lot of that has to do with Brawl not being quite as good as Melee, I'm sure, but strangely I can't really recall any specific Smash-based memories for most of the Brawl era. We played it - I know this - but never religiously. I wonder how much of this has to do with me starting up this blog in 2009. Probably quite a bit, really - who could play so much Brawl when there were so many other games to beat? (And books to read and movies to watch, too.)

2014 has been a big year for Smash. A lot of us got into the fan-made Brawl modification Project M, which sought to take Brawl's characters and make them play more like they did - or would have - in Melee. Then of course Smash 3DS came out in October, and now here's Smash Wii U. And it's great! And yet I know I'll never come close to beating all-star and classic mode with every single character, nor will I devote a particularly large amount of time to becoming great at the game and ruling online play. I know this because I am not the 14-year-old kid who bought Melee. That guy could spend all afternoon playing it after school. All afternoon! And I'm also not the 20-year-old college student who could play Brawl between classes and all summer long with nothing else but an internship to worry about. I'm now the 26-year-old fully-employed married homeowner taking part time classes. I probably played something like fifteen hours of Smash for Wii U this weekend - meaning I wasn't playing it for forty of the fifty-five hours between 5:00pm on Friday and midnight on Sunday. And still I feel like I played it too much. I raked some leaves, watched a lecture for class, did some homework, went grocery shopping, went out to dinner, watched a lot of football, and still I can't shake the feeling that I "wasted" the weekend playing Smash. I guess that's just what it means to grow up. (It sucks, but it beats the alternative!) Anyway, I just don't think I'll play a boatload of this Smash game. There's too much else going on in my life, and frankly, I'm strangely okay with that. Up ahead is a four-day weekend and strangely I really hope not to spend more than ten hours of it playing Smash. I wish I could!

If Nintendo continues putting out a new Smash game every six or seven years, there's a good chance I'll be a father by the time the next one comes out. And once that happens - being a father, I mean - I know that it'll pretty much be curtains for my free time. This blog itself comes with an unspoken time limit of sorts - yeah, the goal to just beat everything is open-ended, but when I take a step back and realize how infrequently I play video games these days, I grow very skeptical about whether or not I can actually finish off the seventy games still in my backlog.

This was very long and rambling and I apologize to you, dear reader, if you've made it this far. My long-winded point was merely that playing this Smash Bros. game has filled me with nostalgia for simpler times when I had all the time in the world to play Smash Bros. games.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

I've added a shit-ton of games to my backlog recently; in addition to picking up an Xbox One, I decided to sign up PlayStation Plus. There's a few free PS3 games released every month as well as PS4 and PS Vita should I ever purchase one of them, as well as very good sale prices which resulted in my grabbing a few Fatal Frame and Grand Theft Auto games. I had played some of Vice City back when it first came out but never got around to finishing it, so I figured now was a good time to get that taken care of- I was just in Florida for a few days, so... appropriate! The dreary New York-inspired Liberty City from GTA III is traded away for the Miami stand-in Vice City; an environment that's brighter, more colorful, and has a heavier focus on water-based missions as well as Cuban and Haitian gang wars rather than the Italian mafia and Triads. It also featured the inclusion of bikes- faster and more maneuverable, but more dangerous to drive than cars; also your character actually talks this time around and has a personality. Tommy Vercetti, fresh out of prison for killing eleven men in what was likely a setup by his own boss, is sent by the Liberty City mafia down to Miam- I mean Vice City, basically to get him out of town, but also to help out in a series of drug deals. The first one goes horribly wrong, so now it's up to Tommy to work his way through some missions to figure out who ambushed him and to get his boss's money back and then some. For a while it's pretty similar to the previous Grand Theft Auto III, until mid-way through the game where Tommy has basically removed any rivals from the city and realizes this is a golden opportunity to take the city over completely, mostly by running side missions for gangs and investing in struggling criminal businesses. This takes up the second half of the game and it's completely open-ended- you can really do it in whatever order you want, and can skip over some missions entirely. I liked the change; it's noticeable that Tommy eventually stops taking orders and starts completing missions simply to help himself or his allies get ahead in Vice City, and it really does feel like Tommy is starting to own the city the further along you get, rather than GTA III's more passive Claude (yeah, that's his name). Still though, while the game blew me away twelve years ago with how huge it was and how great it looked, the graphics aged pretty horribly and it wasn't long before I felt like I knew the whole city inside and out. At least the second issue should be fixed in the next GTA game I'll play- see you in San Andreas!

Lolita

Oh boy. I just finished Lolita - a book that many people consider the finest one ever written in the English language - and I've got a lot to say about it. I'm still processing plenty of thoughts here and I'm not even sure where to begin. May as well break this post down into general sections in order to create some semblance of structure.

Background

Vladimir Nabokov was born to a wealthy family in Russia in 1899. His family fled for Western Europe after the Bolsheviks took control of the country in 1917. He married a Jewish woman in 1925 and, naturally, fled for America in 1940. The man was multi-lingual from an early age and by his fifties he'd lived all over both Europe and America. He had written all kinds of stories in Russian throughout his life but upon moving to America began writing in English instead. In 1955, his third English-language novel, Lolita, was published.

Plot Summary

Lolita is framed as a prison confession from a man named Humbert. The narrator is a pedophile, or more accurately a hebephile; he is sexually attracted to preteen girls. He refers to them as nymphets. In the beginning of the novel, he explains how his first love, a thirteen-year-old girl (when he was a thirteen-year-old boy) influenced his perversions; how he tried but failed, repeatedly, to maintain normal relationships with women his own age during adulthood; and how eventually he came to meet a nymphet more captivating and striking than he had ever encountered before: Dolores Haze, who he immediately dubbed his "Lolita." Humbert marries Lolita's widowed mother in order to maximize his time with Lolita. He is careful not to act on his infatuations by molesting the girl, but is barely able to conceal his excitement when she brushes up against him or flirts innocently like any twelve-year-old girl. Humbert's new bride quickly finds out about his sexual attraction to her daughter and reacts with appropriate disgust, but immediately afterward she dies in a car accident, giving Humbert sole custody of his new stepdaughter. Overjoyed, he takes her to a hotel room, drugs her, and plans to molest her, but finds himself unable to act on his desire while she sleeps. Instead, to his delight, when Lolita wakes up, it is she who ends up seducing him. They have sex, and although Lolita almost immediately regrets it and threatens to report Humbert for raping her, Humbert manages to talk her out of it by reminding her that if she's taken away from him she'll become a ward of the state. What follows is a year-long road trip where Humbert tours America with Lolita in tow, acting on his urges nightly, but beyond just lust, falling deeply in love with his blossoming teenage stepdaughter. Lolita, for her part, runs increasingly hot and cold with the man, and when they finally settle down in a New England town, there's a thick tension. Lolita, fourteen or so, wants to do normal teenage things like go out on dates; Humbert, selfish, wants her all to himself, and becomes even more controlling and domineering; Lolita, in return, slowly comes to learn how to tease and manipulate Humbert into allowing her to do things. Knowing that Lolita's time as a nymphet is running out, Humbert begins to take her on another road trip, but quickly realizes that they're being followed by another man. Humbert assumes it's a cop, but grows increasingly paranoid when he starts to see Lolita interacting with the man. As it turns out, the man is in fact another nymphet-lover, and Lolita runs off with him, breaking Humbert's heart. Years pass, and one day Humbert receives a letter from Dolores; she's seventeen now, and married to another man entirely, and pregnant, and she needs some money. Humbert visits her and finds himself no longer attracted to her at all. He gives her ten times the amount of money she asked for, and demands to know who took her away from him all those years ago. Once she tells him, he leaves her for the last time and sets out to kill her abductor. He does just that, gets arrested, and currently awaits trial for rape and murder in prison, where he has written this very confession, pleading for his audience to understand his plight and not to judge him too severely. In a foreword to the whole manuscript, a fictional psychiatrist notes that Dolores ended up dying during childbirth, and that Humbert died in prison shortly afterward of a heart attack.

Tone

The biggest thing about Lolita that you can in no way gather from the plot summary alone is that the narrator, Humbert, is quite a charming and charismatic guy. He makes little puns and jokes throughout the book and describes himself as a handsome and educated man, soundly breaking the "creepy pedophile" stereotype. He also repeatedly professes his love for Lolita. He's constantly reminding the reader that he understands how perverse his desires are, but he comes across as such a lovestruck goof that it becomes easy to understand where he's coming from. Not to respect or condone his actions, by any means, but to see them as a sick man giving into his vices - as something more than an incestuous child predator. Furthermore, no sexual acts are ever described in any detail; the dirty deed is done repeatedly, but very much "in between the lines," and therefore out of sight from the reader. Humbert's wit and carefully selected language are essential to enjoying Lolita; without them, after all, you're just reading about a guy who has sex with his pubescent step-daughter.

Various Interpretations

Any reaction to Lolita of course begins and ends with addressing the uncomfortable subject matter. Plenty of would-be readers through the years have dismissed the whole work as lewd and bad pornography, its reputation as one of the best books in the English language aside. Still, it has inspired a wide array of responses since its initial publication. Initially, some considered it an erotic novel; others, a tongue-in-cheek parody of an erotic novel. In Soviet Russia it was described as "an experiment in combining an erotic novel with an instructive novel of manners." Its reputation as a great literary novel would grow with time while its erotic label diminished. Some tried to find a deeper symbolic message in the book. Was is Nabokov's commentary on totalitarian regimes destroying Russia? A metaphor for the exploitative nature of capitalism? A sneaky comparison study in morality, of European decency to American crassness? Or perhaps an open love letter to the wild and untamed America? I could see it being all of these things, which is pretty amazing, but Nabokov himself insisted that he hated literary symbology and never liked being asked why he'd written something, or what its moral was.

My Reactions

One thing I really appreciated was that, even though Lolita was only 300 pages long, my reaction to the book changed wildly over the course of reading it. At first I thought, "hey, this is pretty bold - the author is trying to get me to empathize with a pedophile." This led to some thoughts on moral relativity, which were only supported when the narrator helpfully pointed out that, hey, not all that long ago, people used to bed twelve-year-old girls all the time, so this wasn't even necessarily unnatural. At first I actually admired Humbert's restraint with Lolita and his ability to keep his hands off of her for the first half of the book. Then, abruptly, when the pair had sex, I spent several chapters trying to recuperate and recover; I honestly did not expect Humbert to give in before what I imagined would be the book's climax (no pun intended) and was worried that the whole second half of the book would be one long sex-filled road trip. That wasn't the case, and instead as things began to go south for Humbert and Lolita's "relationship," I began to appreciate the novel as a satire on a failed relationship. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl begins to change, boy falls out of love with girl. Except, here, the change was made blatantly into puberty and the teenage angst that comes with it. Kind of like how when a once-great relationship goes south, it can often be dismissed as, "hey, people change," except that here, the change was very literal and obvious and foreshadowed. In this respect I actually came to see the novel as a great little tragedy of sorts. Humbert likes his girls a certain age, after all, and Lolita is "doomed" to grow up, so of course what they have can't last. Then when Humbert thought he and Lolita were being followed and stalked, I began to wonder about Humbert's mental state. Was he slowly going insane with paranoia? It turns out he wasn't - Lolita had in fact conspired with another pedophile to run away from Humbert - but once this seed was planted, I was finally reminded of something I should have been considering all along - that Humbert could be an unreliable narrator. The story's framing, after all, spells out bluntly that Humbert is in prison writing down his confessions; of course he might favor certain details, and change or omit others entirely.

The Gut Punch

And here's where the brilliance of Lolita really finally hit me in all its power. If Humbert was an unreliable narrator, then how could we know for sure that anything he had said was true? What if he'd forced himself on Lolita, rather than being seduced by her? I mean, it's rape either way, but formerly it was only rape in the statutory sense. What if Lolita's mom hadn't died in a car accident, but had instead been killed by Humbert? What if Lolita's abductor wasn't another pedophile at all, but instead her savior? A cop after all, maybe. A relative. Less importantly, what if Humbert wasn't the charming, handsome man he had described himself to be? And, worst of all, that entire two-year period where Humbert claimed to be captivated by the hot and cold whims of Lolita - what if she was simply a scared shitless rape victim with severe Stockholm Syndrome, which, come to think of it, seems to be very obviously what she was? Holy shit. The greatest trick Nabokov pulled here was getting me to empathize with an incestuous kidnapping murderous pedophile in the first place, with nothing more than a silver tongue and a platform from which to speak. Surely, a first-hand account of these events from Lolita herself could read quite differently. But we'll never get one, because how she's dead! And so is Humbert. The truth of their story goes to the grave with the pair of them, but only one side of it remains for the world to see. And it's so carefully crafted by Humbert that he succeeds in making the reader - most readers, I imagine - see him as a victim of sorts and not the criminal lowlife he really is. Such is the power of the English language in the right hands, and such was the power of Nabokov's writing.

Anyway, I've talked at great length now and I've spoiled plenty. I'll duck out here, but seriously, give Lolita a shot. It's well worth the reward if you can stomach the content, and, again, Nabokov makes that much easier to do than perhaps you would like. What an author and what a book!

Orange is the New Black: Season Two

My post on the first season of Orange Is The New Black was bland praise and a reaction to Keith's hot take on its main character; this post has even less because I more or less agree with everything Keith mentioned in his season two post. Sorry! I have trouble making decent television posts unless it's something I didn't like. Orange Is The New Black is good. It may have been a little better in its first season, but I will happily continue with it when the third season comes our next summer. Excellent season finale. Good times!

For One More Day

I'll be honest; I had no desire to read this book. I have no idea why I own this book. I imagine it was something my mother bought that ended up on my bookshelf at some point during my time away at college. The same applies to the only other Mitch Albom book I've read, The Five People You Meet In Heaven. I mean, Mitch Albom sucks. The guy is only fifty-six years old and he's basically replaced Andy Rooney as American media's lovable curmudgeon. Deadspin has had a field day with Albom's red hot takes through the years. (Link here.) The man is corny and hackish with his prose, and he's also a known fraud. So, why did I read this book at all?

Truthfully, I just wanted to knock a short one out of the way in order to continue pursuing my goal of finishing 25 books in 2014. This one marks the twentieth, and I've got seven more weeks to bang out five more. If they all went as quickly as this one did, I'd be in great shape to have things squared away well before Thanksgiving. This was barely more than 200 pages long, but they were small pages with larger font than I'm used to finding in books meant for adults. And every third or fourth page was half blank thanks to an abundance of chapter breaks. I thought this would take me two or three hours to finish; it barely took me one.

The story's premise is simple, and frankly, appealing to a simple audience. "What if you could spend one more day with a deceased loved one?" Lowest common denominator stuff, right there. Albom targets the masses with his tearjerkers and makes it a point not to really explore his own themes with any depth or introspection. Plenty of better and more daring authors have tackled the concept of reconnecting with the dead, but Mitch Albom seems content to limit himself to a perfunctory glance at a vague afterlife without his protagonist experiencing any emotions beyond, several times over, "this can't be happening - you're dead!" Worst of all, the characters are so flat here that they're almost one-dimensional. The narrator is depressed. His dead mother was a saint. His father is an asshole. His sister exists.

I've blasted the author and criticized the book, but if I can stop being cynical for a second here and give the benefit of the doubt, I really can't say I disliked the book. It was brisk and ridiculously easy to digest, and it gave me just enough of a case of "the feels" at certain points for me to admit that Mitch Albom is pretty effective at what he sets out to do with his soccer mom-ready novellas. I'd never call the man a good author, but this really wasn't a bad book. Neither was The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Both set such a low bar that it would have been difficult for either to come up short. I mean, sincerely, I could have written either book, and the biggest challenge for me during the process would have been staying interested enough to stay on track and avoid falling into the temptation to do something remotely interesting. Is that a back-handed compliment? Of course it is, but it's a compliment all the same. For One More Day didn't try to do much at all, and it very much succeeded!

Anyway, I don't have five more Mitch Albom books - or any, for that matter - so we'll have to see what my path through five more books by year's end hits next.

Tomb Raider (2013)

It's been a long time since I've played a full-fledged Tomb Raider game, so I'll back up a bit and detail the history of the series and what I've played and haven't. I think most of us have played at least part of one of the first two games in the series whether for PlayStation or PC. Tomb Raider and its sequel came out in 1996 and 1997 and became two of the best-selling games of all time not only for it's protagonist's huge breasts, but because they were great games with interesting environments to explore and huge multi-part puzzles that tower over little Lara Croft. People loved them. I played a good chunk of Tomb Raider II but never finished it (I was 11 and the Back-Blog wouldn't be created for another 12 years). Developer Eidos quickly ran the series into the ground with some less acclaimed entries in the years that followed, up through the horribly-received Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness in 2003. Granted, I've never played any of those games so I can't speak from experience. In 2006 the series was rebooted by Crystal Dynamics with the release of Tomb Raider: Legend, a game I did play, love, and beat the shit out of. I even completed all of the levels on time-trial mode as I was a bored college student. The game ends on a pretty major cliffhanger, which went unresolved in the next game- Tomb Raider: Anniversary- a remake of the original Tomb Raider from 1996 using Legend's engine; a game that featured none of the new characters or plot points from Legend but still ends with some unresolved threads of its own. The reboot wrapped up with 2008's Tomb Raider: Underworld, which improbably tied together both of the previous unrelated games under one conclusion. With that, Tomb Raider ended its second era of games. Shortly after that came Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, a non-Tomb Raider-branded co-op game that Stan and I both played together and posted about recently. Finally the series returned for a second reboot in 2013 just called Tomb Raider again, and now I've gotten around to playing it.

 

There were high expectations for the game as Crystal Dynamics had some time to learn from Naughty Dog's similar Uncharted series, and the game also promised a sort of Metroidvania style of play- one huge world to explore with upgrades along the way allowing for access to previously unreachable areas. I thought this worked fantastically. Lara and a crew of researchers are on the hunt for the island of Yamatai, a sort of lost island/civilization myth that's supposedly somewhere off of the coast of Japan. Their ship runs into a huge storm and they find themselves shipwrecked on a mysterious island, guess which one. Since this is a reboot, this is supposed to be Lara's first real adventure, as she finds the island populated by a few hostile groups and must transition from a curious young woman to a cold-blooded killer to stay alive and save her friends. This was a major point of emphasis when the game was being discussed pre-release, although I thought it was handled rather sloppily. Allow me to back up again, here in just my second paragraph, to a time where I thought this was handled very well- Tomb Raider: Anniversary, that remake of the first game of the series. Throughout the game Lara's only ever killing animals who pose a direct threat to her, and since this was 2007 there were a few quick-time events added in where Lara acrobatically hops around to some well-timed button presses. Late in the game Lara catches up with one of the bad guy's underlings, and at a crucial moment he taunts her and says she doesn't have the guts to kill him. The game then jumps into quick-time mode, except instead of being some difficult combo of buttons every prompt has you pull the trigger again as Lara slowly walks forward and proves the bad guy wrong. Damn! I realize that tons of games have you mow down thousands of people from start to finish, but that was the first time I felt like a game made a non-clumsy statement about it. No jumping around, no fun challenge, just pull the trigger and take a man's life. From then on Lara basically goes completely nuts storming a compound and the game ends an hour or two later. Compare that with the most recent Tomb Raider where like 2 hours in Lara takes her first life, she's shocked, and then she turns into a killing machine who acts completely normal in cutscenes the rest of the game. It's not a major complaint, but having seen it done so well by a previous game in the series, I was kinda disappointed. The game is also a little gore-heavy too in a way that would fit better with survival horror games than Tomb Raider- I see Lara accidentally jumped off a cliff, and I get that she will die, but do I really need a scene showing her getting impaled underwater? Seriously, if you mess up she seems to get impaled a lot, which seems pretty Freud-ian to me.

 

Cut-scene tone-deafness aside, I did really love the game. It's a huge island with tons to explore and lots of collectibles to find; I decided to go for 100% and eventually got around to finding everything. There are tombs to raid, although they're more like extra missions and most will only take five minutes or so, but there's a healthy balance between action and exploration here that should keep anyone happy and is along the lines of what I assume the Uncharted games did (I still need to play 2 and 3 there). It's of course visually impressive, getting a nice upgrade going from last-gen systems to the Xbox One; I noticed one brief bug where an enemy got trapped in a wall, but other than that there were no issues. Overall I'm very happy with the game, so Keith, enjoy. The sequel should be out in about a year, so in the meantime I may go back and play some of the games I skipped over from the first series.

The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole

I'm mixing things up a bit. Stephen King spent more than thirty years writing the seven books that constitute his Dark Tower series, going in chronological order and wrapping things up in 2004. But then in 2012 he released this little 400-page nugget taking place between the fourth and fifth books. I guess technically that makes this the fifth book, and the old fifth book, Wolves of the Calla, the sixth book - and I guess the whole series is now eight books long - but it's so much easier and cleaner just to treat The Wind Through The Keyhole as an addendum to the series rather than a key component. Because really, that's what this is. Sure, it's 386 pages long, but only about 50 of those deal with Roland and his ka-tet between the events of Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla. Another 135 dealt with Roland's past, and the final 200 or so - the majority of the novel - were spent on a Mid-World fairy tale of sorts. More on all this shortly; it's time for bullets!

• So first of all, yeah, this really wasn't a Dark Tower book. If I'm being cynical - and when it comes to Stephen King, I always am - then I'm accusing King of coming up with a so-so fantasy novella, then deciding to set it in Mid-World and frame it with Dark Tower characters in order to appeal to a wider audience. And it worked! Within weeks of the book's release, all three blog members who'd read the series had also read the book and made their posts. Quickest "Hall of Fame" entrant we've ever had.
• The structure of the book was that of a story within a story within a story. Nested stories are a fine format to use, but I've never personally been a fan, for whatever reason. A small tale or character history told amid a sprawling epic is fine, but when the bulk of the story you're telling is essentially about someone telling a story, why bother with the framing device? Wait, I'll stop and let "me back in 2010 reviewing The Turn of the Screw" take over: "...And just like that, the group of people I had come to appreciate had vanished away as nothing more than some kind of meaningless prologue. I've already said that I've already said this, and in fact I said it rather recently when reviewing another turn-of-the-century novella (Heart of Darkness), but what the fuck is up with this story-within-a-story bullshit? There are many instances in literature and storytelling where the double-layered story works well as a plot device, but you can't just bookend a story irrelevantly with a second narrator who tells the tale. That's just bad writing!" Wow! Now I've already said that I've already said that I've already said it!
• Having copied and pasted all of that, I was actually okay with the way Stephen King went about his business here. I still think a pure Roland backstory would have been more germane to The Dark Tower all in all, but the combination of this book's three nested parts did help with the world-building and characterization I've long accused the series of lacking.
• Stephen King would prefer that you call this book - brace yourselves - The Dark Tower IV.5. Just tossing decimals after Roman numerals like it's not a heinous abuse of two distinct numbering systems. Please, if we must assign a number between four and five to this, can we go with The Dark Tower IVS instead? I mean, come on, Stephen. The Romans had ways of saying "and a half." Use Google.
• Let's start in the middle and work our way outward. The Mid-World fairy tale, the "Wind Through the Keyhole" story at the center of The Wind Through the Keyhole - did I like it? Meh. It was fine, and in its brevity alone it was more tolerable than all kinds of King's work I've read. But I can't say I'll remember it for its plot, its characters, or anything else about it. At best, it serves to build Mid-World's history and lore, which is nice, but has nothing to do with our characters or their quest to reach the Dark Tower.
• The middle layer was easily my favorite. Young Roland, fresh off the dual tragedies that he endured in Wizard and Glass, is sent on a quest by his father to a town plagued by a shapeshifting murderer. It's the type of stuff King excels at - small town settings, creepy vibes, gory deaths. But most of all I loved that Roland narrated this portion in the first person. Finally, at long last, we're getting the series protagonist's thoughts straight from his own mouth. One minor grievance I had with the Wizard and Glass flashback was that Roland was ostensibly the narrator, yet the events were told in the third person and from multiple points of view. Like, how does Roland know what Rhea of the Coos was doing in her little witch hut before he even arrived in that town? Because that's where his own flashback opens up. A nitpick, sure, but my larger point is that King's doing it right this time around. Hooray!
• The outermost shell of the story just involves the ka-tet taking shelter from a vicious storm that sounds exactly like the climactic super-freeze from The Day After Tomorrow. King calls the storm a "starkblast," which is a reference to the Starks and their house words - "Winter is coming" - from A Song of Ice and Fire. Neat! As a framing device around a framing device, this story layer was somewhat barren of content, but it was still nice just to see the characters interacting and working together to save one another's bacon. I imagine that for King and his long time readers there was a nice nostalgic aspect at play here, but even without that added emotional pang, I enjoyed the whole ordeal just fine.
• Sween wondered in his post if reading the series in new chronological order - like I am - would leave readers frustrated by back-to-back flashback books, wishing the plot would churn forward toward the Dark Tower again. I can only speak for myself, but, honestly? Not at all! Roland's Dark Tower quest has always been ill-defined and non-exciting to me; it's the deeper character moments that I've enjoyed so far, and since these last two books were full of them, I'm enjoying the series now more than I was at any point during the first three books. But that's just me!
• Trev asked in his post if the Covenant Man in the fairy tale was supposed to be the same "Man in Black" from Roland's world. Sween didn't think so, but I do - mostly because he leaves a note for Young Tim signed "RF/MB," which I took to stand for "Randall Flagg/Marten Broadcloak," which are both aliases for the Man in Black, unless I've missed something. I dunno. I'm not sure what it would even entail if the Covenant Man was the Man in Black. That guy has always been an enigma to me, and I have no idea how many people he is at this point, or what extent his powers have, or what his intentions are, or whether or not he wants Roland to make it to the Dark Tower, or even whether or not he's still alive. I blame the unprecedented shittiness of The Gunslinger for all of this. Fuck that book.
• Marissa said in her post that she liked the throckens in this book. I thought those were just billy-bumblers! Are they not?
• Look at me, guys, discussing the series with you all, two and a half years after you've all finished it. Isn't the blog great?

And that's a wrap. Long post! I'll be back soon enough, I'm sure, but that's enough Stephen King for me in 2014. The adventure continues a few months from now!

The Sopranos: Season Five

Five seasons in, and I'm still torn on how I feel about The Sopranos. There is a lot to praise here, especially James Gandolfini's excellent performance as mob boss Tony Soprano- maybe the greatest character in television history; there are so many layers to the guy that you keep going back and forth between loving and hating him. The supporting characters and their actors are great, the writing is really good, but I still can't help but feel a bit underwhelmed anyway due to the immense hype I know this show once generated. This was the cultural phenomenon that people went crazy for? Some shows just beg for viewing parties and week-long discussions between episodes- Lost, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad; but watching The Sopranos reminded me of how I watch Mad Men- I always enjoy it, but when an episode ends I'm rarely begging for more. I guess it's just not trying to be that type of show, and it's tough to say "that type" of show even existed before The Sopranos aside from cult hits like Twin Peaks or something. Still though we're in the home stretch- I've heard varying reports on whether the final split season was as good as the others, so we'll see in due time. Oh yeah one last thing, Steve Buscemi shows up this season as a recently-released-from-prison cousin of Tony's who had never been mentioned before, and I was surprised how easily he fit in with the rest of the cast and how well that decision worked. Much better than anything I've seen on Boardwalk Empire! Next up for me will be The Wire's final season.

Harmontown

Seeing Stan's post about Community's fifth season, I thought I should also shed some light on another Community-related topic: a documentary following the show's creator (Dan Harmon) as he goes on a nation-wide tour with his podcast, Harmontown, following him shortly after being fired from the fourth season.

First off, I'm a big podcast listener. Whether it be while riding the El, walking around the city, working, jogging, or whatever, I always enjoying tuning out while tuning in to my favorite shows. A few months ago I stumbled onto Dan Harmon's unscripted podcast where he just shoots the shit with a few of his friends on stage in front of a live audience. The majority of his shows involve him doing Q&A with fans, freestyle rapping that normally falls back on the refrain of Dan fucking people's mama, him ranting about everything he hates/loves in life, and each episode closes with a game of D&D -- great stuff! No structure or real purpose, but the show is entertaining as all hell. As I worked my way back through episodes of  the podcast (the show has only been running for a little over two years now), I stumbled up upon a series of episodes dedicated to the Harmontown tour. Basically it was the podcast tapings of what was being filmed for the documentary that was released to VOD last month. 

Without rambling any longer I'll get to the punch: Was the documentary any good? Yes, it was. Was it anything like the podcast? Nope. Not really. The podcast revolves around hearing the anecdotes of an -- often times drunk -- Hollywood creative as he mingles with fans and really just blabs about whatever is on his mind. The documentary, though, explores Dan Harmon, himself. The several rise and falls of his career. His relationships. And, a very candid look at a dude with many faults who ultimately just wants to make people laugh. 

One of the best parts of the documentary was how naked it made Harmon look. The film was directed by Neil Berkeley -- neither a friend or foe of the subject material -- was a able to give a completely fresh and unbiased look at the Hollywood writer. Something that Harmon would praise in his podcast often saying, "This is my podcast, but it's your movie." Giving Berkeley final cut and ultimate say in what goes in the movie, which definitely shows. All this means is that film is not quite so flattering to Harmon. (Then again, neither is the podcast.) It shows him drinking (a lot), slacking off on writing scripts that are long, long overdue with various studios, and just cursing up a storm while flailing around on stage in front of a audience with no real material prepared. 

At it's heart, you realize it's just a guy, no matter how difficult he is to work with or how brash he can sound at times, who just wants to make people smile and laugh with his work. For anyone who's a fan of Community, I would give the podcast a listen. And if the podcast seems to float your boat... give this documentary and watch and see what it is to be a "Harmon-ite". 

Community: Season 5

The history of Community is just unbelievable at this point. Consider that at this point it has lost three of its seven lead actors, fired its own creator, put forth an entire fourth season that had its own cult turning on the show, brought back the very same creator that had just been fired a year ago, been canceled, and been brought back from cancelation by a search engine. And we're only five seasons in!

Season 5 marked the return of Dan Harmon and the departure of both Chevy Chase and Donald Glover. In just thirteen episodes, the crew needed to address both departures, "reboot" the series to an extent - or at least bring back all the characters who ostensibly graduated back at the end of Season 4. Considering both the task at hand and the difficult state in which the show and characters had been left, this was an impressive run to say the least! Not "Season 2" good, but then, how many great comedies are still "Season 2" good by Season 5? Not many, that's how many, and even fewer that have gone through all the shit Community has.

Look, against all odds, this thing is coming back in a few months for a sixth season. On Yahoo! Ratings-wise, it shouldn't have lasted more than two. The hashtag "six seasons and a movie" became a wishful rallying cry when Season 3 looked to be the end of the road. And now we're only a movie away from making that dream a reality. Wow! Who'd'a thunk it?

For real though, I don't even need a movie. I'm just glad that Community didn't end after four seasons, and, in particular, didn't end after that fourth season.

South Park: Season 17

Another up and down season of South Park, this one with more misses than hits. But rather than spend a few paragraphs talking about the episodes that worked here and the ones that didn't, I want to focus on a big change in the way this season was produced.

In the very early days of South Park, episodes took a long time to create. This is because they were made with computer software from the late 1990s. The first season led off with six straight weekly episodes, then slowed to a pace of one new episode a month for a little while before taking a two-month break and returning with the final four episodes in four weeks. The second season saw more of the same herky-jerky release schedule, with one uninterrupted run of six episodes amid a year of sporadic airings. Only by the fourth season were all of the episodes grouped into lengthy and consistent runs. Sometimes there were three a year and sometimes only two. By Season 8, the show's schedule finally fell into a consistent pattern it would hold for close to a decade: seven consecutive episodes in the spring and then seven more in the fall.

In recent years when the show seemed to struggle, I often blamed its production schedule. The crew works close to twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week during runs, and it's well known that most episodes are conceptualized on Thursday and then created from scratch in just six days. It's no wonder they've run dry on creative juices sometimes. My recommendation into the empty void of the Internet was that South Park should go back to three-part seasons, with month-long runs of four or five episodes at most. They've done this in the past, after all. Instead, starting here with Season 17, South Park has shifted in the other direction, to one extended run of ten episodes, once a year, in the fall. I'm not sure how I feel about this. In addition to cutting seasons by four episodes, the decision now only extends the runs by three weeks, increasing all that burn out potential. The crew also gets two weeks off during the ten-episode run, making the entire season a twelve-week affair, so maybe that's a better situation for them than seven consecutive weeks was. I don't know.

All that was pretty boring, I'm sure, but it beats reading me rant about the lacking quality in episodes about emo kids and Yo Gabba Gabba!, right?

Parks and Recreation: Season 6

Parks and Recreation is a great show, and it's long been a personal favorite of mine. With those disclaimers out of the way, I've got to say, this really felt like the season where it fell into the trappings of diminishing returns. So many character arcs now feel complete. Ann and Chris are gone. April and Andy remain married and childless. Jerry came back from retirement and turned into Larry. Tom's finally a successful business "mogul" of sorts. And the legend of Ron Swanson can't grow any larger without feeling like self-parody. And Ben and Leslie are still perfectly happily married and by the season's end they've got themselves some triplets. Actually, the season's biggest weakness may have been Leslie herself, who too often took the role of the antagonist in whatever weekly low-stakes conflict the writers had cooked up.

Even before this season wrapped up, it was known that the next one would be Parks and Recreation's last. I approve of this decision, as I'm always more interested in seeing a TV series go out on top - or at least its own terms - than to fade into irrelevance or obscurity. Parks and Recreation has already made an interesting decision with regard to its endgame, jumping forward three years to 2017 in the Season 6 finale. I'm excited but nervous about this. On one hand, as I mentioned above, this season felt like it had hit diminishing returns and so many characters seemed to have no more growing to do, so maybe by jumping forward three years we'll have a slew of interesting final season story possibilities that we just weren't going to have otherwise. On the other, a season full of bad "short term future" jokes about iPhone 7s and PlayStation 5s could really hamper this show's legacy. It's pretty easy to be very wrong on plenty of predictions, especially if they're mostly made jokingly. I'd like to be able to rewatch this whole thing in five years, for instance, and not be shaking my head in 2019 at woefully off-base jokes made about 2017 in 2014. Does that make sense? Anyway, I trust everyone responsible for making Parks and Recreation to pull this off just fine, but still, I'll feel better once I see it.

Silent Hill: Revelation

Good god what a piece of crap.

This is the second movie in the Silent Hill film franchise... and I'm going to do my best to make what little sense I can from it. 

First off, anyone play the games? I only played the second one. From what I could make of the plot, some dude arrives to the town of Silent Hill (a fictional place in the northeast of America) based on a letter he received from his dead wife. As you progress through the game, you basically just see this town fade in-and-out of a "hell mode" where monsters come out to kill you. Why is the town like this? Honestly, I cannot recall. I just assumed this place was hell or something. There were various endings to try and explain things -- one even showing a dog behind a set of computers running the show -- but I don't think an honest ending really mattered in the game. It was enough to just explore creepy, desolate streets layered in fog and mystery. I mean, did there have to be any more than that? Apparently there did.

Later I saw the first movie -- still confusing as fuck -- but provides some context to the story that was actually established in the first game. Here's the low-down, which is kind of necessary to understand before I even begin to unpack the second film (SPOILERS): So there's this small, ultra-religious town where a young girl, who's bullied in school and has no friends, is raped by the school's janitor leading to her becoming pregnant. The town turns on the girl, citing it's evil to have a child out of wedlock, and attempts to burn her at the stake. Things go wrong and the girl falls free of the fire before she could die (just before) and a few non-crazy people smuggle her away to safety. With burns all over her body, the girl goes into this pain-fueled rage that causes her soul to split into two parts: one good and one evil. Both parts of the soul taking on the manifestation of a little girl; the good girl is taken away from Silent Hill to an orphanage (later to be adopted by Sean Bean) while the evil one chills in town conjuring demons from Hell to torment any passersby. 

That's the backstory on Silent Hill -- again, from what I could loosely grasp at.

Here we come to this film -- the sequel to a film we never really needed to being with. Remember that good little girl that was adopted by Sean Bean? We follow the events of the first film (where she's a little girl and her mom takes her into Silent Hill only to recuse her from it), she's now a teenager and on the road with dear old dad apparently evading cult members from Silent Hill (mind you... not the demons, but the super religious townsfolk that have somehow survive the horrors their town). Upon entering a new city and a new school, the girl makes friends with Kit Harington (yeah... there are two GoT stars in this film!) who she's forced to flee the school with once she learns that the cult has caught her father. Learning that her father has been dragged back to Silent Hill, she faces her fears and returns to the place with her evil other half still lives. (And her mother... but we conveniently forget that.) 

Now, I think the title refers to the fact that our main character (which I haven't referred to her by name yet because she uses several fake names -- used while on the run with pa -- and I could never keep it straight what her actual name is... so I call her girl!) who has to re-learn the horrible truth of Silent Hill (the same shit her mother discovers in the first film when she's just a kid) then has the revelation that the evil is her other half. 

By the way, this is her evil other half. The source of insurmountable hatred and destruction looks like Snoopy. 

Casting aside that the scary evil source of Silent Hill looks like a kid in a trick-or-treat costume, the whole second film is essentially just a repeat of information found in the first movie only our main character is just a few years older and is able to take on this shit herself. Still... Meh...

We also have other more common problems outside just a redundant and unnecessarily complicated story. There's shitty acting, shitty dialogue, and relatively non-scary, non-sensical monsters.

A spider, mannequin monster... This was a thing.

All-in-all, the film is boring. And, although stupid, just not stupid enough for me really find enjoyment in it. Much like the eerie fog covering the town of Silent Hill, the movie exists in this grey banality where I found myself just not giving a shit about what happened to the characters.

What does happen to them?

Well the girl and John Snow rescue Sean Bean after the girl discovers she can control aspects of the Silent Hill evil. Protected by Pyramid Head (perhaps the only cool thing left in the film) who battles the head of the cult, Carrie-Anne Moss, and defeats her. As the group of survivors go to leave the town, Sean Bean stops, remembers his wife is technically still trapped somewhere in the town from events in the first film all those years ago. So he ditches his daughter (???) and heads back into the fog unarmed and injured leaving the two kids to drive off out of sight. Yup... That all totally makes sense. Surprisingly, this is probably one of the very few roles Sean Bean has played where he's yet to die. Perhaps that will happen in a potential sequel. 

You see... the film ends with a prison bus and two police cruisers driving into the fog of Silent Hill and our heroes leave for safety. Another sequel? God, I hope not. 

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

A couple years back, I saw Oldboy, a South Korean film from 2003. It ended up being the best movie I saw in 2012. I later learned that its director, Park Chan-wook, made two other movies in the early 2000s and that together the three are known as the The Vengeance Trilogy. Though they share no common characters or events, all three films share the same thematic focus of, well, revenge. Here's the first film in the "trilogy." Brace yourselves, because it's downright harrowing.

A deaf and mute man - Ryu - learns that his sister needs a kidney transplant. He isn't a match to donate, and once he gets laid off from his shitty factory job, he can no longer afford to bump her up the transport recipient list. Instead Ryu explores the black market, where he cuts a deal; he'll donate his own kidney, along with his bulk savings of ten million won (about $928 in 2014 according to Google) in exchange for a matching kidney for his sister. Lo and behold, he's double-crossed, and he wakes up from his surgery with no kidney and no money. Ironically enough, a donor for his sister has now been found; but Ryu's got no money to pay for the surgery. So he and his girlfriend concoct a scheme to kidnap his former employer's daughter and hold her ransom for the money. It appears to work! But once Ryu's sister catches wind of this, she kills herself so as not to be a burden. South Korea! So Ryu heads back to this riverbed they used to play in as kids, to bury his sister, with his ex-boss's kidnapped daughter in tow. She falls into the river, screaming for him, but deaf old Ryu can't hear her and she drowns.

That's about the halfway point. Pretty shitty so far, huh? So now Ryu takes it upon himself to go take out the organ dealers who fucked him over in the first place. Meanwhile the dead girl's father takes it upon himself to find out who kidnapped his daughter and exact his own revenge. What follows is an intense, gory, violent hour of two men on motivated rampages. I absolutely loved it.

Oldboy was a better movie, but Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was more visually effective with its punches, opting for tightly focused and deliberately-paced justice killings where Oldboy had a much more action-movie-choreographed pattern of violence. And by the way, please excuse the silly title; the original Korean title translates to something like "Vengeance is Mine," which although generic is far more adequate; after all, which of our two angry vengeance killers is the titular "Mr. Vengeance?"

I know foreign films aren't for everyone, but honestly, there's so little dialogue in this one that it's great even if you're turned off by subtitles or voiceover dubs. Check this out. Or, give Oldboy a try. Soon enough I'll get to the third movie in the trilogy, Lady Vengeance. That one's original title translates to "Kind-hearted Gemun-ja," so your guess is as good as mine for now.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

About a week or two ago, the blog's resident good deals watchdog gave me the heads up that this game was down to twenty bucks on Amazon. (Thanks, Keith!) It's a game I've been interested in a long time now; I'm a big South Park fan and I really like turn-based RPGs. And lo and behold, I loved this game!

Trev and Keith have already hit on most of what you need to know here; the game is a bit glitchy and very easy, but it's hilarious and a ton of fun. It's too bad that, as Keith said, you're limited to using just one supporting party member at a time. Still, because the game is so easy and so much fun to play, it's absolutely worth it to do every side quest and really shoot for 100% completion. I didn't quite get there - at some point, collecting every piece of equipment in the game just turns into a nearly endless fetch quest - but this was a game that deserved to have all its corners explored and enjoyed.

Those corners included not just the town of South Park, but also alien spaceships, sewers, and "the Kingdom of the North" - Canada, rendered in 8-bit, where the background music is a chiptune rendition of "O Canada" played on a loop. And in addition to aliens and sewer rats and Canadians, you fight the likes of Al Gore, ManBearPig, Underpants Gnomes, "Mongorians," gingers, Nazi zombies, aborted fetuses, sixth graders, and the myriad of creatures in Mr. Slave's ass. Typical South Park, through and through.

All in all, this was a great game. It wasn't the most technically impressive RPG I've seen in a while, but it was a blast to play. Even the fetch quests were a treat. Any fan of the show with an Xbox 360 or PS3 would do well to give this one a shot.

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

And with that, I'm halfway through the Dark Tower series. This is the twenty-first blog post on the franchise if I've counted correctly, easily outnumbering any other series to date. But this is just the second post on Wizard and Glass, a pivotal center-point for the story of Roland and his ka-tet and their quest to reach the Dark Tower. It is a book in which, paradoxically, almost nothing happens to Roland and his ka-tet with regard to their quest for the Dark Tower. And not due to brevity - this is the longest Dark Tower book yet, clocking in with a word count of 264,000. In the rest of the series, only the final installment is longer.

I'll stop being coy; the reason this book matters even without advancing the plot at hand very much is that it is almost entirely a flashback. The ka-tet resolves the cliffhanger from The Waste Lands - where a demonic train is hellbent on killing them all unless they can satisfy it with good riddles - before stumbling out into what appears to be Stephen King's version of Kansas from The Stand. They set out and follow I-70... eastward? Westward? It doesn't matter; more on this later. Regardless, they eventually come across something called a thinny, and that prompts the usually tight-lipped and guarded Roland to share a great big long story from his past. That flashback takes up the vast majority of the book. It's an odd choice by King, and a daring one, but one I'm glad he made. I've complained throughout this series that I just can't get all that invested in the vague goals of an obscure protagonist in an unfamiliar world. So this right here, a several-hundred-page helping of pure  Roland background story, was Stephen King's chance to rope me all the way in for the back nine.

Before I go any further, though, it's time for a collaborative exercise between bloggers. Sween told me about a week ago, when I was halfway through this book, that the flashback had these three purposes:

1. To flesh out Roland's character
2. To explain the thinny
3. To teach the ka-tet a lesson

If this is the case - and granted, these are Sween's words, and not a statement of intent made directly by King himself - then perhaps I can best gauge the extent to which the book succeeds by visiting each of these in order. Here we go.

1. Flesh out Roland's character: Check.

Over 500 of these 700 pages are spent on Roland's past, detailing his relationships with his original ka-tet and also with his first (and perhaps only?) love, Susan. Here at last was all that character definition I've been waiting for. I've still got plenty of questions about Roland and his quest, but I've finally bought into the protagonist of the series. This is no small feat, as I was openly question why I should be rooting for him after reading the first book, in which Roland murders an entire town's population and leaves a little boy to die so that he can continue obsessively stalking someone. Yeah, Roland, it turns out, is pretty quiet and serious because he's been through a great deal of shit. He loved, and he lost. And he blames himself for it. And then he accidentally kills his mom. None of this is shocking or anything, but it's nice to have this, going forward. I would have liked to find out what became of his original ka-tet, but perhaps that's a story for another book in the series.

2. Explain the thinny: Check.

Granted, this was explained in a matter of pages. We didn't need a great big flashback to learn that thinnies are places where "reality is eroding away." They'll lure you in despite giving off terrible high-pitched whining noises. Don't go near them. Maybe force your enemies to do so instead. Also there are a lot more thinnies in the present day because the Dark Tower is failing to hold all the different worlds at bay from each other and realities are beginning to collapse or meld into each other, I think.

3. Teach the ka-tet a lesson: Unknown.

This one's a puzzler for me. It could just be that I'm leaning too literally on Sweeney's casual G-chat line, but I think I'm missing something. (Some spoilers follow, for anyone who cares.) Is it that the ka-tet learns what Roland has sacrificed and will sacrifice in order to reach the Dark Tower? That seems to fall more under fleshing out the guy's character. The group definitely finds themselves completely united and bonded on a deeper level as the book ends, but beyond understanding Roland's particular circumstances a bit, I can't put a finger on what, specifically, they learned. Sweeney, care to help me out here?

Lastly, it's become a tradition for me to talk about these books in stray thought bullet form. The gist of my experience is contained above, but who am I to break with tradition? Onward!

• "Eastward? Westward? It doesn't matter," I said above, and that's because it's just plain impossible to put Stephen King's Mid-World on a map. Here's the consensus attempt to do so, as seen on the Internet. This image completely contradicts everything that was hammered home in the first book (where Gilead-to-Tull-to-the-Way-Station is "west") and also requires a ridiculous suspension of disbelief for the crew to end the second book just north of "The Doors" and start the third one near "Shardik's Lair." At least everything from that point forward seems to consist of a direct beeline for the Dark Tower; no map is needed from here on out to understand the geography of Roland's quest. (And honestly, none was needed once the third book began. I'm a bit late, but, good riddance!)
• In the book's afterword, Stephen King points out that twenty-six years had now elapsed since he'd begun writing The Dark Tower. It shows! I just re-read my post on The Gunslinger, and man, was I brutal in that one, just ripping on King's over-reliance on mystique and "telling, not showing." I still don't love King as a writer, but he's clearly learned a lot about how to tell a story and build a character in those twenty-six years. Good for him.
• In the same afterword: "I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland's young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard." Props to King - he described himself here perfectly. I know I've railed on his shortcomings a lot on this blog, but I'm not saying anything about the guy he wouldn't freely admit about himself, it seems. It's also interesting to me that he "knew" the fourth book needed to tell Roland's backstory.
• Let's zoom out for a moment and consider the picture at large. Through four books, I'm 625,000 words into The Dark Tower overall. The series in total is 1,300,000 words long. (This excludes The Wind Through the Keyhole.) So despite having four books down and three to go, it appears I'm actually less than halfway through King's saga. That's only enhanced by 500 pages of this fourth book being flashback-based. Although I've read plenty about the ka-tet, even more is still in store, apparently. Nice. I look forward to it, even though I've had my issues with this first half and most people suggest that the back half isn't even as good.
• Alright, this one has nothing to do with The Dark Tower but I went down a rabbit hole and here are some interesting comparisons. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is 473,000 words long, and that jumps to 565,000 when you include The Hobbit. Some of the longest well-known single novels out there, like Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and War and Peace, are around 575,000. Sources differ, but most peg the Bible - both testaments - at around 775,000 words. Harry Potter just cracks a million at 1,080,000, but you could cut either of the first two books entirely and still clear a million. A Song of Ice and Fire is already sitting at 1,770,000 words, and that's through just five books; if rumors that there could be eight books are to be believed, that thing could easily clear three million when all is said and done. You know, if all is ever said and done. And no one's done the hard counting, but estimates for Goosebumps and Animorphs, respectively, are 982,000 and 1,417,000. Imagine that! K.A. Applegate, putting more pen to paper for her magnum opus than Stephen King for his. So what if half that shit was ghostwritten? Also for whatever it's worth (nothing?) if you include all 42 Give Yourself Goosebumps books and six short story collections in addition to the 62 in the main series you get to 1,742,000. There's no way in hell I read all of those as a kid, but, guys, consider - R.L. Stine just may be among my top ten most-read authors. Wow!

That last one really got away from me. My apologies. Good night!