The End of Eternity

Here's my second foray into Asimov novels, and once again it comes to me courtesy of a used book store. It's a time travel story from the early 1950s and its set all over the far off future. Just like the last Asimov book I read, Foundation, this one had some interesting premises but some mediocre writing and storytelling. I'll dive right in.

"Eternity" is a time traveling device that lets a select few people - "Eternals" - travel throughout the timeline, all the way to ten million years in the future, in order to make small tweaks and corrections for the betterment of mankind. Of course, every change made for the benefit of one century creates ripple effects that propagate forward, altering things for several millennia afterward. Interestingly though, there's no so-called butterfly effect, wherein altering something minor in one century completely changes the face of society a few million years down the line. Instead, the reverberations felt throughout the timeline kind of dissipate after a few thousand years, and things remain entirely unchanged before you make it to, say, ten thousand. This implies a sort of deterministic pattern to the universe and suggests that you can't really change the fate of the universe in any meaningful way. I buy it!

At any rate, it turns out that the protagonist in the book is sent way back in time in order to build Eternity in the first place. That's sort of weird, since it creates a causal loop, but, yeesh, whatever, time travel logic is all over the place depending on the author, scientist, philosopher, you name it. Except, someone else in the book doesn't want Eternity to get created at all; she's from the way, way, way distant future, and she thinks that by focusing entirely on time travel, humankind has deprived itself of space travel. Since the earth is doomed eventually, it's space travel that matters, not time travel. And that's more or less the conflict presented here after a hundred pages of exposition and explanations.

I didn't really love this one. There were some neat ideas presented here, but the story tying them all together was nothing special. Eh, oh well.

Saw VI

Holy cow! It's an honest-to-goodness one-off I-watched-this-on-DVD movie review. Vintage Back-Blogged, no? I haven't done this since March! In order to mark the occasion, I'm going to do something I don't think I've ever done in a few hundred movie posts on the blog - I'm going to live-blog this whole goddamn movie. It's ninety minutes long and probably sucks. Why not?

1:20 - We open on a woman whose head is stuck in some sort of vice grip. There's a dude in the same room with her in the same situation. Feels like we've seen this one before...

2:30 - Ah, these are predatory bankers! So says Jigsaw. He only tortures people who deserve it, after all.

3:30 - Okay, so only one of them gets to live, and it's going to be the one who cuts off the most of their own flesh. This is straight out of Seven, right down to the fat guy cutting chunks out of his own stomach. Isn't the fat guy at an unfair advantage here?

4:50 - The girl is just hacking off an arm. Smart! She can't get through the bone, though - NEVER MIND, here comes the cleaver!

5:30 - So many gratuitous cleaver hacks!

6:00 - No surprise here - arm gets the win, down goes the fat man, and here come the opening titles. Welcome to Saw VI everybody!

6:40 - I think we're recapping previous entries in the series now, which is good, as I've totally forgotten most of what happened in Saw IV and Saw V. This franchise has always at least pretended to have some sort of overarching linear story, which is hilarious since Jigsaw died in the third movie of seven total.

8:30 - We're in some health insurance office building. Some high-powered hot shot isn't going to make it home for his wife's birthday. BET HE'S GONNA REGRET THIS DECISION.

10:00 - Looks like our big wig health insurance asshole is a true monster - in a flashback, he's denying coverage to some guy with heart disease who failed to disclose an oral surgery from thirty years ago. Poor bastard is actually screaming, verbatim, "I HAVE A FAMILY!"

11:40 - Holy shit, is that Bryan Cranston?

12:00 - No, of course not.

12:50 - The grizzly aftermath of the opening scene is on display here, and Agent Hoffman is investigating. I just paused the movie to remind myself who Hoffman is, and apparently he's Jigsaw's apprentice. Did he set this trap?

14:10 - Another quick flashback confirms that Hoffman was indeed Jigsaw's apprentice, and that he tried to kill his partner, Perez. But here's Perez, back on the job! Awkward? Only for Hoffman, it seems.

15:30 - Now there's a conversation about Jigsaw leaving behind a mysterious box for his... wife? lover? Not all of this is coming back to me.

16:30 - Here's the newly one-armed survivor of the first trap, being interviewed by Hoffman, appearing strangely remorseful for ruining borrowers' lives with bad loans. Nice work, Hoffman! She learned.

17:40 - Okay yeah, here's Jigsaw's baby mama. Or would-be baby mama, except she miscarried, as we learned in the fourth film, when some asshole slammed a swinging door open right into her uterus.

19:10 - So much recapping. I'm honestly grateful.

19:40 - Lots of gratuitous shots of knives slicing jigsaw puzzle piece shapes out of dead people. Living people? Yeesh, maybe. Point is, dead fat banker has a puzzle piece chunk missing from him, but the coroners can tell that the knife used to remove it was serrated, where all of Jigsaw's previous victims have had precise surgical knives used on them. Relevant? I doubt it, but let's wait and see.

22:00 - Things are icy between Jigsaw's widow and Hoffman. Does she know who he is? He must know who she is, right?

23:10 - Here's a flashback of Jigsaw screaming at his lady about how too many people mistreat her.

23:50 - Oh right, Amanda. Jigsaw's last apprentice. She's long dead, I'm pretty sure.

24:40 - We're back on the health insurance agent, sitting alone in his office on a dark and stormy night.

25:10 - Oh did the power just go out? YOU BET the power just went out.

26:00 - He takes a shot at a hooded figure and seems to hit him! Walk up, pull down the hood to reveal... a security guard? Wrong guy, asshole.

26:20 - And sure enough, a previously unseen guy nabs him from behind. SHOULDA GONE HOME FOR YOUR WIFE'S BIRTHDAY, FUCKO!

26:30 - Smash cut, flood lights, respirator of some kind. IT'S A TRAP! Obviously.

26:50 - "Hello, William..." Ah, so his name is William. Jigsaw is upset that William's company's policies don't exist to benefit the sick people who need them. Pretty topical for a 2009 release, pre-Obamacare and all.

27:40 - William is tied up to a rack by each of his four limbs, each of which also has a bomb strapped to it. He's got a whole hour to escape this predicament, though the details are admittedly ambiguous.

28:20 - Here are two other people in another room, absolutely confused, watching William slail about on a video feed.

29:00 - Test one! Here's a chain smoker, tied up in the same spot. Every time William or the chain smoker breathers, a vice closes in around their ribcages. Last one standing wins. Can William hold his breath longer than a chain smoker?

31:00 - Of course he can! Was that supposed to be suspenseful? Chain smoker coughs up blood on his way out, and possibly some bone shards too. Neat!

32:00 - But wait, didn't that last test kind of prove that Jigsaw also doesn't care about people in poor health when they've put themselves in that predicament? That's kind of what he was yelling at his not-wife about, I think. What's the moral here? Jigsaw hates the self-destructive infirm, while also hating those who would deny them healthcare?

33:10 - Oh shit, the two people in the other room are William's wife and son. Happy birthday, baby!

35:00 - And now a hooded figure grabs Jigsaw's widow out of an apartment complex.

35:50 - She WAS his wife. And her name is Jill. Thanks, flashback!

36:20 - Okay, looks like William and Jigsaw have met before. Jigsaw is lecturing William on "the will to live." Snap back to the present, and William seems to understand what's going on.

37:20 - How many sprawling, dank, dingy basement labyrinths does Jigsaw have access to?

38:30 - Test two for William! He now has to choose which of his colleagues - each tied up and gagged and dangling from a chain - to save. The young man with no one who loves him, or the sickly middle-aged woman with a nice family? I'm guessing he saves the young guy here, because the theme of this movie seems to be "fuck sick people."

40:30 - NOPE! Sorry, YOUNG WHITE SINGLE DUDE. Maybe next time you'll think twice about checking your privilege, or something.

40:40 - Well, this is something. My DVD, fresh out of the case an hour ago, is having playback issues. No scratches visible on the disc. Why did I ever invest so thoroughly in these plastic circular pieces of garbage?

40:40 - Maybe it's a PS3 issue. Time to try this thing on the Xbox One Keith let me borrow. This is literally the first non-Destiny disc that's been in here since May.

40:40 - Ha! Of course you can't just play a DVD on the Xbox One! Now downloading the "Blu-ray Player" app...

40:50 - And we're back. Somehow the DVD menus load slower on the Xbox One than they did on the PS3, but I can't complain because the Xbox One is actually working... for now.

41:30 - Back to William's wife and kid, trying to figure out how to escape from their own cell. Their only tool seems to be a giant vat of acid.

43:00 - INTERESTING! On the other side of the door, in another cell, is Jill. And Hoffman looks on from behind a mirror... what's the endgame here, pal?

43:20 - Hang on, they just called Jill "Pam." There's a chance I've mistaken a few identities here.

43:40 - Yeah, okay, there's Jill, walking around in a hospital with a key around her neck and some files tucked under her arm. Who's Pam? No idea, but certainly the one who got kidnapped eight minutes ago.

44:00 - And... we're frozen again. Fuck this. Time to try the laptop in a last-ditch effort.

44:00 - No dice.

44:00 - I am now watching this movie online, probably illegally, although given my situation, I have no remorse whatsoever. This isn't stealing; this is circumventing a fatal flaw in a legally purchased product.

44:00 - Buffering...

44:00 - It's been an hour and a half since I started watching this. I honestly thought I'd be done by now. Silly me.

44:00 - Man, the second half of this movie better be worth it.

44:10 - Okay! We're back. And there's a bathtub with a dead black guy in it. Oh, because it's the black guy from Saw III who was killed, and this is another flashback. Of course. Because how else can Jigsaw keep shoing up in these movies when he's been dead for three of them by now?

45:00 - Hoffman, in the flashback, is arguing with Amanda. "I don't need a test," he says, referring to his own preference not to ever be put into one of Jigsaw's death traps. Something tells me Hoffman's gonna get his soon enough.

47:30 - Same flashback, and here's Jigsaw giving Jill the key. "When the time is right... you'll know what to do." Oh, Jigsaw, you clever minx!

48:10 - Back in the present now, here's William making his way through a piping hot boiler room. Don't touch the walls, Will!

48:40 - A-ha! Flashbackto Jigsaw, dying from cancer, requesting medical coverage from William. GUESS HOW THIS ONE GOES, GUYS!

50:30 - On his way out the door, a rejected Jigsaw spits some knowledge about Eastern medical practices. 'They pay pay their doctors when they're healthy... and not when they're sick. We got it all ass-backwards." You tell 'em, Jigsaw. And then go on and design another torture porn murder game where a dozen people die.

51:10 - Jigsaw stops to admire a piranha in a fishtank. "Pi-RAN-ha..." Really looking for filler in an hour-and-a-half movie, I guess.

52:20 - Oh, William - it's getting HOT IH HERE! Okay, so in this test, William's lawyer needs to walk through this HOT HOT HOT maze in ninety seconds or she's dead as shit.

54:30 - William gets to turn hot ass steam vents on and off for his lawyer, scalding his hands in the process. This seems like a really fun co-op puzzle!

55:30 - Been way more than ninety seconds, just saying.

55:40 - William just can't hang onto this steam vent valve, and DOWN GOES DEBBY! The lawyer. The lawyer's name was Debby.

55:50 - What's this? Debby makes it through! And now she just needs to find a key in order to unlock herself from her own death trap collar-thing. And here's a picture of an X-ray that seems to suggest the key is hiding in William's belly. And lo, here's a chainsaw. AND HERE COMES DEBBY! Swing away, Debby!

56:30 - Debby lands a good old fashioned kick in the nuts, but still can't manage to connect with the chainsaw.

57:00 - Yeah, like, four and a half minutes into her ninety second countdown, Debby loses. How in the fuck was she supposed to get the key out of William and then use it just ninety seconds? And did William not just fail his test? Guess not.

58:00 - Back to Pamela, sitting in her cage. And there's William's family, sitting in the other one. Ooh, prediction. William is totally fucking Pamela in the side, and now he's going to have to choose between her and his family in his final test. That's gotta be it, right?

58:20 - Here's Hoffman, back at HQ. They've set up a voice unscrambler thing in order to unscramble Jigsaw's voice on the latest video tapes. Oh Hoffman, things aren't looking good for you, pal!

1:00:00 - Meanwhile, Jill continues to grab pieces of paper and put them in her manilla envelope. Could it be that the "time" is "right?" Might Jill... "know" what to "do?"

1:00:50 - William's final test... and it's six of his colleagues chained to a spinning merry-go-round playground thing! I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that nobody survives this one...

1:01:40 - Jigsaw's video claims that William can save two - his choice! The mechanism of this trap involves a gun with six rounds in it that fires automatically. Presumably, William can let two people free by pressing some corresponding buttons before the gun goes off.

1:03:20 - Looks like each of the six get to plead their case. First guy's up. He doesn't have much to offer beyond "PLEASE!" and "PRESS THE BUTTON!" Gonna take more than that, son. BOOM, HEADSHOT, five remain.

1:03:40 - "I'm strong!" "I'm healthy!" "I have two kids!" "My parents are sick!" "I'm pregnant!" "She's lying!" There are some interesting utilitarian aspects riding on this one, but before we have time to explore them, BLAMMO! Another one bites the dust.

1:05:20 - William saves a young and attractive woman by pushing the button. Doing so sends spikes through his hands. Yeouch!

1:05:30 - The black guy never stood a chance.

1:06:10 - Okay, three dead, one "saved," two shots left. We've come down to Sweater Vest Nerd and Cleavage Blonde. We all know how this one's gonna turn out.

1:06:50 - Poor Sweater Vest Nerd. He knows what's coming. And he has some WORDS for William.

1:07:20 - Sweater Vest Nerd was the best character in this movie. He spat cold hard truths about sexism that William just wasn't ready to hear.

1:08:00 - William's got fourteen more minutes to save his family. He limps through the next door. It isn't really clear what constitutes "passing" or "failing" any of these tests. He's encountered ten of his employees at this point and saved three of them, out of what seems like a possible four. Is any of this meaningful? Will his choices end up biting him in the ass? Perhaps saving him?

1:08:10 - The door said "zoo maintenance area" - so they've been in a zoo this whole time? How? It's underground and dark and dingy and shitty. There are also no animals to be seen. This was the shittiest and most depressing zoo in the world even before it became the set of the latest Jigsaw snuff film.

1:08:40 - Back at the station, they're zeroing in on unmasking Jigsaw's voice. Hoffman, buddy - you're boned. (And he knows it!)

1:09:50 - By the way, this technology - much like the "zoom in and resolve the blur into a high resolution photo" technology on CBS procedurals - is, of course, pretend.

1:10:20 - HO-LEE SHIT, Hoffman wastes no time, knifing the fuck right out of his own supervisor. Hot coffee to the face dispatches another lady, and Perez takes it worse than anyone, with like a dozen abdominal stabbings.

1:11:30 - Current body count: 11.

1:12:00 - More rapid fire flashbacks remind us that Hoffman is a horrible person who has committed multiple murders. And now he's pouring gasoline all over the station, burning all the bodies. WOW!

1:13:30 - Okay, Jill arrives at a pair of screens, one showing William's family and the other showing Pamela. Is she the one who's going to make this call? There are sixteen minutes left, by the way, including closing credits.

1:14:20 - William's son is about to flip a giant switch from a position labeled "Live" to a position labeled "Die." This seems ill-advised, at best.

1:14:40 - Looks like Hoffman is arriving on the scene as well, placing all of our remaining living characters in the death zoo. LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR.

1:15:30 - Switch pulled... nothing happens. The vats of acid loom ominously above both cells.

1:16:00 - Hoffman arrives, finding a note left behind by Jill. Oh, shit, Jill. Did you just put Hoffman in a game of his own? Cue the ominous Saw music, and here come some more flashbacks!

1:16:40 - Here's that brutal miscarriage shot, one more time.

1:17:30 - Jill bursts back into the room and zaps Hoffman with a taser. I'm sure we'll learn why!

1:18:20 - William makes it through the final door with one second to spare! And now he's in his own cage. And up goes the partition. And on one side of him is his wife and kid, and on the other is the woman I'm sure he's been sleeping with.

1:18:40 - RECORD SCRATCH! The rug's been pulled right out from under me, folks. That's not William's mistress - it's his sister! It was HER birthday he was missing. He doesn't even have a wife! Which means that the mother and son next to him in the other cell are - no! YES! They're the wife and son of the sick man William condemned way back at the beginning of the movie! The one who yelled "I HAVE A FAMILY!" Oh and they recognize him alright. And they are PISSED.

1:19:10 - And here's Jigsaw! And he's telling the mother and son that they get to choose whether William lives or dies. That explains the switch! And OH GOD, THE ACID!

1:20:30 - Meanwhile, Jill affixes the lockjaw death trap to Hoffman - the one Amanda escaped from, in the first movie. Jigsaw WANTED this! This was what was in the box! (Another Seven reference...)

1:21:00 - Mom WANTS to pull the switch and kill William...

1:21:40 - But Mom can't...

1:22:00 - But GUESS WHO CAN! "You killed my dad you motherfucker!"

1:23:10 - Okay, I thought William was going to be doused in the acid. Not so. Instead, a series of giant metal syringes fall from the ceiling, sticking William in the back, and proceed to PUMP HIM FULL of HYDROCHLORIC FUCKING ACID.

1:23:20 - William is now literally a soft pile of guts and clothing. Like, his head is gone. How?

1:23:50 - Meanwhile, Hoffman! He's got 45 seconds to break free from the venus fly trap thing. Is he gonna do it? He just might do it! He...

1:24:30 - FAILS!

1:25:00 - End credits.

Welp, that sure was something, guys. Some final takeaways:

• Literally everyone who works in the health insurance sector is fair game for torture-murder.
• In order to be a serial killer's apprentice, you have to survive an attempt on your life by the serial killer, NO EXCEPTIONS.
• DVD is a piece of shit Stone Age technology and everything is free somewhere on the Internet.

Good night everyone!

Final Fantasy XIII-2

I wrote up a doozy of a post on Final Fantasy XIII-2 over at gametimebro.com, so go read about my thoughts on this game over there.

South Park: Season 18

After a six-month hiatus, that's three TV seasons in a week. Wow!

There's so little left to say about South Park at this point, but honestly this was one of the best seasons of the show in a long time. Trey and Matt decided, after seventeen years, to start playing around with running gags and lightly serialized storytelling, and the results were amazing. From gluten to cock magic and drone hobbyists to transgender bathroom controversies, there were so many more hits than misses here in Season 18.

And, of course, Randy as Lorde. Just great stuff.

Parks and Recreation: Season 7

I already gave a brief write-up on the final season of Parks and Recreation back in my winter TV round-up, but the one thing that bears repeating is that this was one of my favorite shows of all time. Put it up against any other broadcast network comedy, and I can't think of one that I'd rank ahead of Parks. Maybe Arrested Development, but probably not.

Parks and Recreation wasn't flawless - no show can be, across seven seasons - but it was consistently great. Pawnee didn't just feel like a fully fleshed out place; it felt as familiar as a hometown thanks to a deep bench of supporting characters.

I will miss this show dearly.

Orphan Black: Season 3

Dang, when's the last time I posted about a TV show I actually bought and watched on DVD or Blu-ray? Checking now...

April. Justified and Sons of Anarchy. So that's something!

At any rate, here's the third season of Orphan Black. I liked it! It may have been my favorite season yet. I'd say more, but I think the only entity still reading this blog is a Clash of Kings spambot.

The Swiss Family Robinson

Back when this blog was just getting off the ground, the books in my backlog fell into a few interesting categories. One was "children's books" - young adult fiction if you're feeling generous - and another was nineteenth century literature. I struggled mightily with both of these genres. Reading chapter books written for fifth graders felt, understandably, like a waste of my time and effort. And on the other front, I quickly became painfully aware of how primitive the storytelling English language was and how bizarre sentence structure could be back in the 1800s.

This, of course, is a classic children's book from 1812 - a novel belonging to the rare intersection of those two troublesome categories. It wasn't terrible! It just also wasn't very good.

This is the type of book that's a classic not because it's any good, but because it's emblematic of a particular genre - in this case the "new society on an uninhabited island" genre. The titular family - mother, father, and four sons - get shipwrecked off the coast of what turns out to be a sprawling and  impossibly biodiverse island. The rest of the book - 350 pages or so - just recounts their various adventures and anecdotes.

In a way, the book reads like an episodic television show. There's no deeper plot or story building up throughout the chapters; nothing interesting happens within the family dynamic, even across ten years, as four boys become four teens and young adults. Granted, this was always a book intended for a young audience, so I wasn't really expecting a story with any depth of thematic flow. There's no three-act structure here. It's just several dozen chapters of, "and then one day, Fritz came upon a kangaroo - isn't that something?" No one can blame me for skimming huge chunks of this.

Back to that biodiversity comment - seriously, there are kangaroos and buffalo and ostriches and lions and monkeys on this island. And there's also an impossible array of farmable plants. It's almost like the Robinsons just rolled their boat right into a meticulously set up wildlife sanctuary. Hey, there's a fanfiction idea - The Swiss Family Robinson set in present times, but they're all on hidden cameras for an audience of millions back at home. It's like Survivor but also The Hunger Games. "Hey, Franz just found the apple orchard - release the wolves!"

Mostly, this was just boring. Low stakes, nothing interesting, no deeper exploration of the human psyche or what it means to be marooned on an island. Maybe kids found this shit wildly entertaining back in the 1800s - hell, maybe I'd have found it mildly entertaining as a child myself - but there's no denying that here and now, this was a dud.

One last semi-interesting note. No one has any idea what constitutes the "original" Swiss Family Robinson story. As soon as it was written, it was less than faithfully translated into a number of different European languages with all kinds of new additions, slight tweaks, and new changes. Since the book was nothing more than a series of encounters anyway, no one really cared that Wyss's original tale had been modified - to the point where subsequent editions released in German had adapted a number of these changes and additions. After all, who cares?

Oh, sorry, one last note, for real this time. I forgot to mention that the book ends not with a rescue, but with the Robinson family declining an opportunity to be rescued after living on the island for ten years. That's right; four dudes between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would rather stay with their parents than ever have the opportunity to take wives, have children, or live with the luxuries and conveniences of modern society. Mama's boys - am I right?

Advance Wars

One of the best things about the generally disappointing Wii U is its Virtual Console catalog. I never had a Gameboy Advance, but I've been able to go nuts with all kinds of GBA games - GBA games that would cost $20 or more to buy in their original cartridge format - for like $6 a pop. Anyway, one of the most highly rated GBA games of all time is this little title called Advance Wars. It's a grid-based turn-based strategy game that feels a whole lot like Fire Emblem with tanks and helicopters. Some of the maps also feature bases, shipyards, and airports that let you build more units as the given battle continues, and other maps have a fog of war aspect that doesn't allow you to see your enemies' movements. In these respects, Advance Wars also kind of reminded me of Warcraft and Starcraft - again, with tanks and helicopters.

The story mode consisted of a lengthy tutorial followed by around twenty missions that ranged anywhere from ten minutes to over an hour in length. I'm sure each level can be beaten in a matter of minutes, but doing so would have required optimal strategies on my part. Some of the levels, particularly those where reinforcements could be summoned by both sides, grew very long and monotonous. I recall one level in particular with a long bridge; both my units and my opponents' were just stacked into lengthy single-file lines, and only two could battle at any given time. It took me close to an hour to advance the four or five grid-spaces I needed in order to win the battle. The final level of the game, which was actually really well-designed, took me close to two hours thanks to the enemy having six reinforcement locations and almost unlimited resources to create new troops.

It's hard to complain about the lengthy missions, though. While a handful of the levels in the campaign were tedious, the sheer variety of missions and maps kept things fresh and interesting. Some levels were blitzes of sorts, where all enemy troops needed to be eradicated within a certain number of turns. Other levels required that I capture a certain number of cities or defend a certain unit for a fixed length of time. Furthermore, there's an entire "war room" section of the game full of non-campaign challenges and missions. I haven't even touched that yet. For all I know, I'm less than halfway done with the game's overall total content amount.

If there's any additional criticism I have for the game, it's merely a less flattering comparison to the numerous turn-based strategy JRPGs I've enjoyed through the years. I compared Advance Wars to Fire Emblem, but the latter has a rich level of customization built into its gameplay as well as a deeper and more character-driven story. (And games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyria Chronicles are, in my mind, even deeper and richer than Fire Emblem.) Advance Wars doesn't exactly suffer for neglecting to flesh out its numerous army men with distinct personalities and attributes, but it does make all the units completely interchangeable. No death or loss can "hit you right in the feels" when the soldiers are nothing more than pieces on a chessboard. Of course, no one has ever criticized chess for being a game in which you can't get more personally invested in some pieces than others. Advance Wars is a well-balanced turn-based strategy game on its own right, regardless of my own preference for customizable or scripted character development in such games.

I liked Advance Wars enough to consider looking into its many sequels. Advance Wars 2 is also a Wii U-ported GBA game, and beyond that there are two DS games, a GameCube title, and even a game on the Wii. The thing is, I'm in no rush to dig into any of those games when I've still got all kinds of untapped content waiting for me in the war room mode of this one. Someday, maybe.

Stan's Movie Dump: August/September 2015

Short one! I slowed up on my movie binging as summer drew to a close, but here are six more titles I can talk about.

Clueless

Here's one of those movies I'd seen bits and pieces of without ever seeing the whole thing start to finish. I liked it just fine. Whenever a fictional character is spoiled, rich, and ignorant about the world around her, it's very easy to make that character entirely unlikable. In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone manages to do the opposite by finding all the right ways to portray Cher as an earnest and well-meaning valley girl who just doesn't know any better. (She's, um, "clueless.") It's the type of movie that could have only been made in the '90s - which is impressive, since it's apparently based on a Jane Austen novel.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

I never meant to watch the first one, but I ended up enjoying it just fine after Trev put it on in the Cape this past summer. When I found this sequel on Netflix a few weeks ago, it seemed like the perfect low-stakes movie to pop on in the background while I played something on my 3DS. And it was! Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 wasn't quite as charming and enjoyable as its predecessor thanks to a few dozen animals-as-food puns, but it was harmless enough. What more do you want?

Primer

I've been at least moderately interested in Primer ever since this xkcd comic. It's an ultra-low budget time traveling movie from 2004 that's developed a bit of a cult following through the years. It was easy enough to follow for about an hour and change, but then different timelines started looping back on each other and everything went to shit. I've been assured that nobody understands the movie during their first viewing, which is kind of cool. This feels like the type of movie I'd have watched five or six times back in high school. And it came out when I was in high school! Where was I for that one? At any rate, I probably won't watch Primer again any time soon, but I did spend at least as long reading about it on the Internet as I did watching it. Take that for what it's worth!

Mad Max: Fury Road

I had no interest in this movie until basically every review under the sun called it the best action movie in years. They weren't wrong! As a general rule, action movies tend to bore me - not because the action itself is boring, but because the movies are so damn predictable. Mad Max: Fury Road was no less predictable than a lot of other action movies, but man, did the action itself make up for any unoriginality the plot was burdened with. I really, really enjoyed this movie - just like everybody else.

The Spectacular Now

Perhaps most notable for being the subject of Roger Ebert's last published review, The Spectacular Now was a teen rom-com based on a novel. I really liked it! It was made by the same guy who directed (500) Days of Summer and it took everything good from that movie while ditching some of the overly twee undertones. This wasn't a movie that aspired to connect with trendy young cool kids; this was just a very believable movie about a couple of kids. Watching it, I was reminded of what it was like to be in high school. Life in front of you, down for whatever, no real capability to comprehend any type of bigger picture... this took me back.

Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro was awesome in this one. And so young! And there's very little for me to say about such an all time classic film like this one. Sadly, I just can't seem to get into these older movies the way I'd like to. I respect the hell out of Scorsese's legacy and all, but there's just a dated look and feel to these movies from the 1970s. Once cameras got smaller and cheaper and you could shoot scenes from a dozen different angles, movies were better off for it. I mean, this movie is only ten years younger than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Now that's an old movie! The industry has come a long way since then, is all.

Anyway, like I said, quick one this time around. I'll be back with more soon enough.