How to Train Your Dragon

Between my trip to Norway and the recent hijinks on Game of Thrones, this felt like a timely and topical plane watch. It was cute and easy and probably only as good as your average Pixar movie, which makes it one of the all time best ever Dreamworks movies. Not a lot else to say here - will I seek out the sequel? Nah, but if it found me one day on the Netflix queue or an HBO late night channel surf I'd at least give it the time of day.

What We Do in the Shadows

This snuck up on me. Someone called it "the goriest movie Christopher Guest never made" and that feels about exactly right and apt. It's a New Zealand-made vampire mockumentary that never overstays its 80-minute run time and just follows these four vampires around their horrible, dingy flat, watching them try to go out and score victims, doing cartoonish shit like arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes, sketching what each other looks like in what they're wearing since vampires have no reflections and can't use mirrors. A gang of werewolves shows up a couple of times and it's just the right amount of added absurdity. This was all very funny, is what I'm trying to say. Little more, but what else do you need?

Logan

Guys, you all know I'm as critical of the decade-long glut of comic book movies as anyone. I only end up seeing about half of them, and for half of those I'm kind of "eh" at best. X-Men in particular has been a huge source of "not giving a fuck" for me - there are so goddamn many of them, and only like three or four ever even matter! So when everyone and Trevor called Logan one of the best movies of the year I just sort of shrugged and thought, great, here we go again, people are going nuts over an X-Men movie. I'll just never understand the appeal!

Well, folks. I went ahead and saw Logan, and holy crap, I loved it! I want to say as little about it as possible, because I think anyone reading this should go see it knowing as little as possible, but suffice it to say it succeeded where so many other comic book movies fail for me for a number of reasons. One was that it was emphatically standalone in nature. Yes, a background knowledge of who Wolverine and Charles Xavier are is helpful, but I haven't seen an X-Men movie since 2005 or so and could still follow absolutely everything. And while the ending leaves itself open for some sort of connected sequel, so much of this thing just feels like a coda, a period, an ending. (Am I being vague enough to avoid spoiling things? probably not, but whatever.)

This is a Western. It takes place in El Paso and in North Dakota and everywhere in between. It also takes place in the future. it feels a little like Mad Max: Fury Road for a variety of reasons it's best not to get into. It also feels like The Last of Us, the video game whose story made waves for being so good and powerful and unexpected a few years ago. It's also this hyper-violent R-rated thing that's just thrilling to watch. Like, Deadpool was this big success because everyone realized you could make a comic book movie with swearing and fucking and over-the-top amounts of choreographed gore, but it was still ultimately dumb and worthless in the way all of those comic book movies are; that it didn't take itself seriously ended up being less of a strength and more of a half-hearted defense for its own shortcomings. But Logan? Logan takes the same graphic violence and sticks it into a story where it makes an impact, with characters for whom it makes sense to be obscenely violent, and it does take itself seriously, and it just works so much goddamn better for it.

The whole thing is trope-laden and "predictable" at every turn, but chalk this up as an example of tropes being tropes for a reason, of Westerns having a very specific formula for a reason, and so on. Does Wolverine grunt out a painful "I never asked for any of this!" right as the third act breaks after shit's gone horribly wrong? Yes, of course he does. But it works! It fits! It doens't feel lazy, it just feels like the right decision.

Logan isn't going to end, or even redefine, the steady and constant trend of comic book movies that have been coming out at a steady clip for a decade now and will continue to do so for at least another five years. But it already feels like something dark and different like nothing has to me since The Dark Knight. In five or ten years, when the big retrospectives come out and look at the history and evolution of the comic book movie trends from 2005 to 2025 or whatever, Logan is going to hold a special place in that history, and rightly so.

Dear White People: Season 1

Yep - the show whose title and existence launched a white supremacy backlash to Netflix that was far more absurd and damning than any of the things the satirical white people did in the very same show. Oh boy.

I intentionally put this one off for a while. For one thing, who needs to jump into any TV show while the controversy about it is hot and fresh and capable of slanting or jading an otherwise honest reaction to the show itself? For another thing, I hadn't seen the movie that the series is a sequel to. Well, I still haven't seen the movie, and I watched and followed and enjoyed the show just fine. (As a white person, even!) The title - #problematic though it may or may not be - is a misnomer, and one of the main characters explains this, verbatim, in the first episode.

What you have here is a show that takes place on a fictional Ivy League school's campus, primarily the black part of that campus, fraught with racial tension in the aftermath of a blackface party. (This is, I assume, what the movie was about.) It's disturbingly, depressingly relatable; it came out like three months before Charlottesville and one gets the impression that it was not even written and filmed with the realities of the Trump presidency in mind - just the ongoing Black Lives Matter-style protests and angst. It is thus, shockingly and sadly, tamer than reality. The most malicious white people it depicts are so, so far from the current actual far right movements going on among young dumb white people.

But enough about our depressing new status quo - let's talk about the show on its own merits. In short - it's good! Each episode is told from the perspective of a different character - all of them black except for one - in a mostly linear but often chronologically overlapping fashion. It's genuinely funny and it feels very realistic with regard to the way young people actually talk and communicate and joke with each other. It also contains the single best "holy shit" level African on African-American burn I've ever heard, but that's neither here nor there.

Plenty of issues are brought up and discussed meaningfully but without much cheese or ham or after school special soap. One of the most vocal protesting black students is very light-skinned; one dates a white guy; one's got a very important father and a lot of money and huge expectations on his shoulders, and struggles to keep himself clean and career-focused without just coming across as a big old Uncle Tom. One thing the show almost entirely lacks is any actual outrage against white people, whether specifically or individually. I mean, the worst any single white character gets it is this earnest "white ally" who's genuinely confused about his place in any and all of the BLM-ish movement.

The show isn't perfect. (Few are, obviously.) The season never really built toward much of anything, if that matters to you, other than the idea of a second season, and - again, depressingly - it never feels like the show's got any solutions; when the black students argue with each other over how best to handle, say, a police officer pulling a gun on a student, they can't seem to agree on anything and the show makes no efforts to suggest that any of them are more "right" about what to do than the others. "Geez, this is a great big mess, isn't it?" the show seems to ask. And, again, that's before Trump and Charlottesville! Ugh. Now I'm sad again. There's just not enough sheetcake in the world...

Little Nightmares

Here's a quick, little platform-puzzle game somewhat in the same vein as Limbo and Inside.

As a whole, I really liked this game... much like I enjoyed playing Limbo and Inside. Now, it's worth noting this is not a sequel to those games. It's not even from the same developer. It just shares some gameplay elements.

Simple, platform-driven puzzles. Challenges that are compartmentalized from room to room. Relatively short game (my playtime was probably around the 2 hour marker). And a story thats isn't spoon fed to your, but gradually -- and mysteriously -- unravels through the gameplay.

If I had to rank this game against the other two, I think it just ekes out the competition. In fairness, they probably stand neck-and-neck in terms of challenge and overall fun, but what I really appreciated about Little Nightmares was the character design. Shit's just so creepy yet so beautiful. Probably helps the game is running on Unreal 4 game engine, but god-damn is it gorgeous. 

While this is not going to be my top game of 2017, it will rank high. And I would certainly recommend playing it if you're into puzzle platformers. 

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV

Ha. I didn't even realize I had started a post on this. 

Seeing as I just posted on Final Fantasy XV and my general disappointment with that game, let me say that feeling extends to this property as well.

The movie did offer additional context about game's story, but I think it's a weakness if you have to venture out to another medium in order to provide narrative details that are kind of essential to understanding what the fuck is going on in an already complicated-as-fuck story. 

All that aside, let me raise one issue that I had both in this movie and the game. An issue that I didn't touch upon in my previous post... The blatant product placement.

I get that partnership deals and product placement are sometimes the only way to get really expensive shit made... but, I must say, if it's a sci-fi story in a fictional, fantastic world mixed with magic and machines, blatantly having your character driving an Audi is going to totally pull me out of the story. Or, like in the game, having Coleman on all your camping equipment isn't helping the immersion experience. There was even a fucking AmEx sticker outside stores?!

I don't hate or love product placement. I'm sort of ambivalent towards it as I understand it's sometimes all too necessary. But if it's to be used, follow one rule: It should never pull you out of the story. And there's plenty of ways to get away with it. Hide it in the background. Make it apart of your character's costume. Or make it a part of the story. Whatever you do, make sure your audience doesn't do a double-take and say, "did I just do a side mission involving Cup of Noodles?"

Probably the best examples I can think of might be the use of Reece's Pieces in E.T. or the Wilson volleyball in Cast Away. Sure, there are plenty of other examples. James Bond's entire wardrobe is essential one giant fashion ad. 

Point is, this movie and game failed to use product placement effectively. Instead they just pulled me out of an already awful movie. 

Actually... maybe I should be thankful?

Final Fantasy XV

As a kid, there were two different tiers of getting in trouble with my parents. The first one was when I would royally piss them off causing them to get good and angry and yell at me, possibly ending with a punishment or grounding. Typical shit. 

Then there was the other tier of getting into trouble. The silent kind. The kind that only comes with the line, "I'm just disappointed." And while there's no direct punishment or yelling involved, that comment would cut so much deeper than any screaming could. 

That is what I give onto this game. The "I'm not mad... I'm just disappointed" criticism.

In whole, this game isn't bad, but it's certainly not good. However, I think there were so many opportunities for this game to do some really amazing shit, that could have elevated to not just a good game. Not just a great game. But an amazing game! A game you could look back years from now and still remember it as an iconic part of your video gaming history.

Basically, what I imagine this game set out to be was freeing adventure in this truly immersive map that you could explore at your leisure in your own car, GTA-style. But what I actually experienced was this rigid journey that tested my patience again and again as I was forced to watch the gang auto-drive across the entire map and back again. I think I spent almost as much time sitting on my couch aimlessly staring at my characters driving around the country as I did actually PLAYING the game. At times, the game even incentivizes you to not play it. Like... WTF?!

That frustration aside, I don't even know where to begin in addressing all the different areas this game "disappointed" me. 

The gaming mechanics offered this really cool "warping" feature in battle. Yet the camera always seemed to find that one tree or rock to lock behind, making the battle fucking useless. I made it a point to really level up my characters just so I didn't need to actually use much strategy as I hack-n-slashed my way to victory.

Then there's that epic battle with Leviathan. What a clusterfuck that was. Just zipping around a typhoon of nonsense, not really capable of being injured by anything because Noctis is in Super Saiyan mode, but at the same time having no real sense that my actions could/did anything profound in the battle. In essence, I feel like I won the day just because I hit the X button enough times. 

Then there's also the story. Let's forget for a moment that in order to really understand anything that's going on, you'll need to watch both the movie and short vignettes to build an appreciation for this world. But the story ends on such a dramatic event. You give yourself over to this crystal bullshit to become the chosen one -- a hero to save the world from darkness -- which apparently has a gestation period of around 10 years. After that time you wake to find your world in ruins. It's essentially the apocalypse. Yet, when you meet the townsfolk, and everyone surprisingly cool with it. 

Ok...?

That aside, you meet up with your old gang -- a group that is essentially a rip-off of the ninja turtles. The game obsessively focuses around these characters for good reason... they are the heart of this story. But after meeting back up with them in what's suppose to be this triumphant reunion, and I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

Then I went on with them to battle the final boss, and they all look to one another in acknowledgement that this was the end to their grand, epic journey... I, once again, felt nothing. 

This game did an incredible job at making a moment I should have been tearing up over feel like a fucking chore. It bored me. It frustrated me. And, at its worse, it disappointed me.

Why the disappointment? Because these are easy problems to not only see, but to fix. And for a game that's rumored to have taken the better part of a decade to make, it's inexcusable. 

So, yeah... this game is a complete and utter disappointment.

While I've only played a small portion of the Final Fantasy games out there, this easily ranks at the bottom of my list.

Anyone curious here's my current standings:
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy XV

(Currently working my way through IX and XII as well -- both seem to be contenders for the top spot).

And if others are to say that there are other games in this franchise that should be considered worse, then I need to seriously question whether my time with these games is over from here on out. 

Okja

I give up. Netflix is just never going to have or make or own a legitimately great movie. This was as close as they've come - Bong Joon-ho, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal fucking going for it - and still it's a messy, fun but flawed, good-not-great mixed bag.

Okja is a super-pig. A giant hippo-dog of an animal, hanging out in South Korea with a young girl. But Okja's been genetically engineered for Big Agro, you see, and it's time to bring her back to America for a big old show and then of course some breeding and slaughtering. But the Animal Liberation Front is determined to make a mess of things for political gain. And Big Agro's run by Tilda Swinton, but her arc just sort of flattens out and disappears after one big scene. And then there's Jake Gyllenhaal, and seriously - what the fuck is he even doing? This thing's just so weird and uneven and messy. When it's fun it's fun - particularly in an early chase scene that just fucking owns - but I can't figure out why on earth it was made or what it's trying to say about anything.

Twisted Metal: Head-On

Not sure what possessed me to do it tonight, but I finally hooked up the old PlayStation 2 for the first time in three goddamn years and went ahead and played and beat a quick little video game. This one's Twisted Metal: Head-On, a PS2 port of a PSP game that looks like absolute feces today. Wow!

I always loved Twisted Metal. Ten-year-old me probably calls it his second favorite franchise of all time behind only Final Fantasy, and to this day I can remember all kinds of dumb cheats and Easter eggs from the second game. Like how by pressing up-down-up-up you could fire off an insane special move that froze an enemy and nailed him with three missiles. Or like how, in the New York level, if you shoot the Statue of Liberty for long enough, she'll get super fat. And then if you shoot that long enough, she'll turn into a bikini-wearing supermodel. Nineties humor, boys and girls!

But no, that's neither here nor there. The franchise went downhill fast after Twisted Metal 2, and this is the [checks] seventh game in the franchise. Interpolate and extrapolate as you see fit.

Still, I had fun! In a drunken "hey why the hell not spend an hour and change on a Friday night busting this thing out" sort of way. Crank the difficulty level down to easy, reacclimate to the wonky-ass controls (but seriously, did any PS2 game control with tight precision?), and let loose.

They really should bring this series back. Not sure what that looks like on PS4, but it's sort of weirdly underrated and important in PlayStation history. Like, not their Zelda or anything, but perhaps at least their Star Fox or whatever. Sweet Tooth was in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, after all. Remember that game? I do! And I wish it had been better. Sony Smash, guys - come on!

I'm still drinking by the way.

Suspiria

Glad I finally saw this one, a 1977 Italian horror classic in Technicolor, but I can't say I was blown away. The theme was haunting, mesmerizing, beautiful, and perfect. Some of the scenes were very pretty, often in a nightmarish and dazzling hellscape. And that's where my admiration ends, because nothing else really worked, at all. Piss-poor sound editing is an expectation of mine whenever I see a movie from before, say, 1985, but even for a foreign '70s film this thing's a dubbed up mess. Nothing like watching an outdoor scene with wind and everything and hearing nothing but flat, indoor voices. No wind, no street noise - just poorly synchronized dialogue. Also - the performances are pretty much ass even if you squint your eyes and give the shaky dubbing the benefit of the doubt. And the less said about just how fake the blood and gore all looked, the better.

But, still. It's a classic for a reason and I'm probably better off for having seen it. Trev once said something to the effect of, "if you haven't seen a Dario Argento horror movie, your opinions on horror movies can't be fully trusted." Well, you can trust me now, Trev, when I say that this movie was a big ol' bucket of "eeeeeeeeeh." (I kid. Mostly.)

Oh, they're remaking this! It could be good. Given that the original version's biggest shortcomings were all budget and technology-based, it's not hard to claim that a 2017 remake could improve substantially on this. But we all know it won't. Lame!

Claws: Season 1

Time for another reminder that "Peak TV" doesn't mean that the best TV series out there are better than ever before, but rather, the idea that so much "at least pretty good" TV is out there, being made about subjects and stories you'd never have imagined could sustain TV shows, airing on networks you never watch.

I've been trying and quickly abandoning new shows all year. The textbook example for me is Taboo on FX. A period drama, starring Tom Hardy, about a man seeking vengeance in Napoleonic times, it had all the hallmarks of the "prestige TV" of yesteryear. I mean, take that exact show, debut it anywhere from 2005 to 2012 instead of 2017, and you very well might have had a legitimate contender for "best show on TV." I'm sure it's a good show in a vacuum. But I watched two or three episodes of it, and I just could not find a shit to give. It's not dissimilar to how I feel about the two dozen superhero movies that have come out in the last, oh, four years. "Cool. Great. Don't care anymore!"

This one, this TNT melodrama about a group of middle-aged women who run a nail salon in Florida and get caught up in Dixie Mafia politics and turf wars after a botched murder attempt - I stuck with this one! And I stuck with it not because it was particularly great, high-quality television (although it was, at the very least, pretty good and entertaining television) but because it was an interesting departure from anything else I'd ever really seen. There are elements of Justified here, but you can't really call this "Justified in Florida with manicurists." There are shades of, like, Ryan Murphy silliness and camp, but only barely - this isn't a show that winks at you or needs you to understand that it doesn't take itself 100% seriously. It began life as a half-hour for HBO before ending up as an hour-long on TNT, and that kind of sort of shows, because at no point while you're watching it can you think, "this is nothing like a half-hour on HBO might be."

The cast is great. The writing's nothing special, but the actors (and the production) sell the hell out of it. We got Niecy Nash at the center of it all, and folks, she is just fantastic here. We got Judy Reyes quietly playing a lesbian bouncer-enforcer. We got Harold Perrineau here too, playing someone somewhere on the autistic spectrum in such a convincing and excellent manner. We got Dean Norris - Dean fuckin' Norris, y'all! - taking a turn as the big bad, a bisexual crime boss who goes by "Uncle Daddy" and chews the ever-loving hell out of every aspect of this whole shenanigan, all Dixie-accented growling and glaring, living the most hedonistic life as he does things like, say, lounge on a poolside divan in a floral kimono outside his mansion, watching synchronized swimming routines with an adult beverage in one hand.

It's good! I genuinely liked it, and I like that I genuinely liked it. Certainly doesn't hurt that it was a summer Sunday-nighter - just not a whole lot else on - but I'll be back next year for a second season for sure.

This Side of Paradise

So I read Hemingway's first novel just a little while back, and figured I might as well check out Fitzgerald's debut as well. This was the fourth work of his I've read, and it's been nothing but steadily diminishing returns for me. Loved The Great Gatsby, liked Benjamin Button plenty, liked The Beautiful and  Damned enough... and only barely kind of sort of liked This Side of Paradise. What's going on here? It'd be one thing if I were reading his books in order of popularity, but no - this is probably his second-best known novel. Is it me? Is my tolerance for Fitzgerald slipping, the older I get? In this case, I actually think so, a little bit. It's not that I'm 100 years too young to have enjoyed this book. It's that I'm about five or ten years too old.

I'll explain. The book was written by Fitzgerald when he was 23 or so, and it's semi-autobiographical in nature. Which means not only was it a story about a teenager trying to find himself - rather, it was a story about a teenager trying to find himself written from the wise, old, mature viewpoint of someone who was... 23. We all mature as we age, particularly form young adulthood to middle age, gaining new perspective on everything all the time. This was actually a huge and poignant theme, at least for me, that Fitzgerlad hit on in The Beautiful and Damned. I'm not one for quotes, but Fitzgerald's so quotable, so here I go, from that book:

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”

(I had to look it up too, but an organ-grinder's just a street musician.) Granted, okay, Fitzgerald's only 26 at this point, when this quote is published in that book, but still - he recognizes even at 26 that by 30 he's just not going to give a shit about the romantic notions of young love and endless possibility that he had when he was 20. And now, to make you feel real old - Fitzgerald's 29 when The Great Gatsby is published. Twenty-nine! Twenty-nine, and able to write an all time classic story about the folly of trying to reclaim the past. Yowza! And, oh yeah, Benjamin Button is a lighter, easier, shorter read, but it's all about aging, too. Naturally. So as far as I've gotten through his bibliography, Fitzgerald's always been obsessed with exploring the way the past and the present interact, the way it's a shame how the wisdom and maturity and opportunities that come from aging can't replace the thrill and wonder of being young. And I've always liked that about him. It's a subject that transcends nearly a century at this point without losing any of its punch - hell, the age and timelessness of these works might even add another layer to the themes. The past that Fitzgerald's characters lament and can't revisit is, like, a hundred years farther out of reach for you and I. And man, what a shame that he went ahead and died at 44, and right at the dawn of World War II. Imagine how much a crotchety old man Fitzgerald could have said? Imagine him reflecting on the Holocaust and the atom bomb? Jesus.

Okay, back on track. This book. It starts with its protagonist, Amory, playing coy and hard to get with a cute girl... at the age of thirteen. He's a precocious kid, desperately trying to play it cool with the ladies in what we today would call, I dunno, eighth grade. And right off the bat, he fucks up a classic "late arrival, keep her waiting" plan by arriving well after the rest of their group has departed for the school dance or whatever it was. This I liked! This weird subgenre of "young, dumb kid who wants to act like an adult can't quite crack it because his brain isn't done developing yet," which Wes Anderson does so well - I dig it. I can get behind a story about a high school kid flailing around emotionally and trying to understand who he is and what he wants to be - that's Catcher in the Rye territory!

But it was all downhill from there. Middle school romance gave way to prep school hijinks, which gave way to Princeton egotism, which gave way to [snooooore]. Amory got less likable and more annoying the older he got, mostly because a vain 21-year-old is so much less likable than a vain 18-year-old, who in turn is less likable than a vain 16-year-old, and so on and so forth. After several failed romances and, oh yeah, World War fucking I, which is just sort of glossed over as an intermission of sorts, the book ends with Amory realizing that he knows nothing at all, but at least he finally knows himself!

It's a nice notion, but it's ultimately hollow - again, this whole thing's being written and reflected upon by Fitzgerald at the age where, today, he'd just barely be graduating college. And look, listen - I'm not suggesting, at all, that no one can properly reflect on their own journey through coming of age - the teens and early twenties - during and immediately following that time period. We've all been there, we've all done it, and Fitzgerald did it as good as anyone, even then. But here in 2017, as I close in on thirty myself - I'm sorry, but another tale of a young, moneyed, white guy trying to untangle his own desires in life - it just doesn't do it for me!

And lastly, can we revisit World War I? I spent the first half of the book knowing the war was looming and knowing Amory was going to go away for it - so I really expected Amory to come back from war a completely changed man. Hardened, maybe, a drastic and dramatic "loss of innocence" now complete. But truly, it barely resonates. Granted, Fitzgerald's writing all this in the war's immediate aftermath, long before we collectively had time to suss out the symbolism of World War I, long before we even dubbed terms like "Lost Generation" or "Roaring Twenties." But still - I really thought the war, appearing right in the middle of the book and spanning a two year hiatus from the girl-chasing and social climbing of life in America for Amory - would mean something. Nope! Oh well.

I've just come to expect more from Fitzgerald. This wasn't a bad book, especially for something written a hundred years ago, but it was a letdown compared to what I was hoping for. There's still one more Fitzgerald book on my shelf, though - Tender Is the Night. People rave about this one. Even Fitzgerald called it his personal favorite work.

5 Centimeters per Second

Some website called this the second-best anime movie of all time, and it's on YouTube, and it's only sixty minutes, so sure, why the hell not?

And you know what? This was a very pleasant experience! For the first time in my life - not that there's a huge sample size, here - I understand the power and beauty of, uh, good anime. Soon enough I'll be digging deep into Here's what I wrote over on Letterboxd:

A very, very pretty movie about a handful of earnest, brooding teenagers mediating profoundly on love and loss, wise way the hell beyond their years with their poetic thoughts and their lucid dreams. This is Murakami meets Malick with a heavy dose of melancholy and an absolutely beautiful score. Plus - sixty minutes! What's not to like?

Cool.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Season 11

At long last, I've come to the end of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. And - fuck me, this is can't possibly be true - I actually really enjoyed this season. It's almost as if knowing I was finally at the end allowed me to just breathe out, relax, and wax nostalgic about a show I long, long ago considered one of my favorites. Or maybe there was actually an uptick in quality here at the end. Who knows?

But let me go over, real quick, some of the synopses from this nine-episode final bow.

The opener's a claymation episode featuring Justin Roiland as an Abaraham Lincoln-esque hot dog arguing about his product placement contract. If that sounds absurd to you, come on, have you seen this show? I mean, yes, it is - but the claymation aspect is a very welcome change.

Another episode has the cast of a Dora the Explorer knock-off show up at the Aqua Teens' house. In short order it's made clear that they're running an amateur "barely legal" porn ring and, of course, Carl's its biggest fan.

Then there's one where Carl's mom has terminal lung cancer and needs to enter hospice care. Yeah, Aqua Teen goes there. The show with the talking cup and the 8-bit moon aliens. (She ends up turning into a hyperactive Native American. Because, of course, the show with the talking cup and the 8-bit moon aliens goes there.)

But the one I really want to spend some time pontificating on is the penultimate episode. It's twenty-two minutes long - double-length - and it's called "The Last One Forever and Ever." I remember back when I actually watched and liked this show, somewhere back in the second or third season, wanting there to be one - just one, that'd be the joke - episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force played straight. Like just, out of nowhere, an episode where Shake and Frylock and Meatwad are these badass space warrior bounty hunters like they sort of appear to be in the opening credits. And, lo and behold, that's almost exactly what this episode is! The trio journeys to a faraway planet in order to go on an undersea expedition to get a new jewel from a Mother Clam in order to save Frylock's life. It isn't played perfectly straight or anything - Shake's still an asshole, Meatwad's still an innocent child, Frylock's still over it all, Carl's still a hapless drunk loser - but they legitimately go out and have a high-stakes adventure... and die! They all die! And not in the way they die every other episode, but like, they full-on get killed during their adventure. All of them but Meatwad, who, in an epilogue, grows up and marries a woman and has hideous meat-human hybrid children with her and then grows old himself. It's... poignant? In a way Aqua Teen Hunger Force ought never to have been?

And then - psych! - the actual last episode comes on, and it's just an eleven minute standard fuck-around. Just Shake, Meatwad, and Frylock up to their same old bullshit, with Shake fucking with Meatwad and Frylock mostly staying out of it. And Carl's there, being a jackass. And they all become immortal, or something, but not really, or maybe really, but none of it matters because the show's over, folks. And not a year too soon!

Wet Hot American Summer: Season 2

When Netflix announced that they'd reunited the cast of Wet Hot American Summer for an eight-episode prequel some fifteen years later, I was thrilled. Who wasn't? And the resulting series was delightfully stupid and wink-wink nudge-nudge about the whole concept of forty-something actors, most of them still successful and working today, reprising their roles as teenage camp counselors. And now, two years later, we've got Ten Years Later, a completely unexpected follow-up that reunites the same cast (with one notable exception) for a 1991 ten-year reunion of sorts, all based on a throwaway joke from the movie. (Although frankly, come on, which of those jokes weren't throwaway jokes? The whole movie was a throwaway joke, and it knew exactly what it was, and that made it all the better.)

Of course, diminishing returns are a real bitch, and as thrilled as critics were in 2015 to reunite this all-star cast for a Netflix miniseries, here in 2017 there's an unmistakable whiff of "oh, really? again? we're doing this again?" from certain corners of the Internet. So I was worried, going into these eight newest episodes, that I'd be bound for disappointment. Fortunately, no! Not at all. The show's as dumb as First Day of Camp and the original movie ever were, but also just as funny and in exactly the same ways.

See, the movie was great in large part because it was so clearly not taking itself seriously on any level. Intentional continuity errors were thrown in and made explicit. It treated its own existence as little more than an excuse to get a bunch of funny people together and string together what were essentially a bunch of independent bits and sketches. At the risk of ruining the humor by explaining it, I mean, it works on multiple levels. What's going on within the movie itself is, sure, funny. But the juxtaposition of all the different plot lines against each other is also funny. And the actors breaking character in the middle of certain scenes reminds us that they are in fact actors, and the writers bending over backward to create and then deftly step around plot holes reminds us that he movie has been written, and the camera panning to the right and catching several of the actors standing motionless, facing a wall after exiting the frame previously reminds us that there are cameras. It's not quite accurate to say that Wet Hot American Summer breaks the fourth wall - no one ever looks directly into the camera or references the fact that they're in a movie - but so much of its humor relies on that mutual creator-consumer recognition of that wall. They're making fun of the process of making a movie by making it intentionally bad and broken and flawed, but you know it's all a joke, and they know you're in on the joke, and it's just no wonder at all that the original movie was such a cult classic. Plus, again, come on, have you seen that cast?

So at any rate, the first Netflix season was no different. But now there was an added layer of humor in the same vein, which was, "come on, these people are way too effing old to be playing teenagers and way too effing successful to be making this show." And, of course, they have fun with it, over-explaining character absences and intricately setting up plot points that would become dumb throwaway gags during the show. Things like "Jon Benjamin voices a talking can of vegetables." How do you explain that, uh, "mystery" from the movie? Well, obviously, in your prequel, you take a real human character played by Jon Benjamin and you have him fall into some radioactive ooze or whatever, while holding a can of vegetables.

All of this long-winded joke-explaining leads me to this - the biggest joke of all in Ten Years Later is the idea that Ten Years Later even exists. Not only is it absurd that a bunch of former camp counselors would reconvene ten years later - it's absurd that the actors would do so. And this inherent absurdity leads to a number of great gags, which I'll walk through below, because at this point, fuck it, why not?

• The aforementioned notable missing cast member is Bradley Cooper. He was just too busy to make it back for a second season after barely being in the first one. In my heart of hearts I do think Cooper wanted to make it work, but just couldn't. Fine, makes sense. But don't think they wrote him out or anything. No, just as they got around his absence for large portions of the first season by having his character wear a ski mask for no reason in a few episodes, they've wink-wink-nudge-nudged their way into simply replacing him with Adam Scott this time around. The different appearance is explained as a "minor nose job to fix a deviated septum." Everyone who makes any reference to it at all tells him he looks almost exactly identical, and if anything, a little better. Which is of course absurd. Which is the joke!
• Several actors just disappear for multiple episodes in a row, and if you thought the ski mask was blatant on Bradley Cooper last time around, get a load of what they did with Joe Lo Truglio this season. When his character, Neal, gets back to camp, the first thing he does is lie down on his old bunk and say something to the tune of, "oh man, I took so many great naps on this bunk! Let's see if she's still got that magic." He promptly pulls a bed sheet all the way up over his body and is next seen waking up drenched in sweat several episodes later. Now, look at the poster above. There are like twenty-five people in this eight-episode season of TV. There's no reason to explain the absence of Joe Lo Truglio from half the season in such an absurd way except to explicitly call attention to it. It's the whole joke! Get it?
• Elizabeth Banks isn't absent or anything, but her character is off on her own arc in New York City, never crossing paths with anyone else until the very end of the season for one scene. I'm assuming she had scheduling conflicts and couldn't actually be there with any of the rest of the cast, but still wanted to be a part of the season. (Her character even says, "Sorry I missed the reunion, guys, but I had to work!") If this is true, I mean, good for her. But also, why? What is the point of doing another season of this nonsense (instead of, uh, "work") if you can't even really be part of the nonsense? Which all leads me to believe that her inclusion here - off on her own arc entirely - is itself a joke. The show knows that I know that it makes no sense for Elizabeth fucking Banks to be part of this without actually being part of it, and as such, that's exactly where it went. (No, I won't Google any of these theories to see if I'm way off base or not. It's more fun this way.)
• Chris Pine and Jason Schwartzman both reprise their roles despite being killed off in First Day of Camp. Pine's non-death is at least believable, as he was shot at night from a distance in the body and fell backward off a building. Schwartzman, on the other hand, was shot directly through the head (by Jon Hamm, of course - sadly absent this time around). When a character asks Pine how he survived, he explains in intricate detail, complete with flashbacks, how he fell off the roof but landed just right, and then paramedics were able to rush him into surgery, and now he's basically half cyborg. He then details how he spent the next ten years making it big as a music producer before having a moment of catharsis. "And how about you?" Schwartzman is asked - to which he responds by just waving his hand back and forth and saying, "eh, you know. Something similar."
• Paul Rudd, who's notoriously ageless and handsome in real life, looks like a total bum and a burnout here. His character is 26. I almost believe Paul Rudd put on some weight and grew out a bit of a beer belly just to look older and uglier for the first time ever. To play a 26-year old. Come on, that's amazing.
• Lastly, there are two new main characters who the show just pulls a Nikki and Paulo with. It pretends they were there the whole time during the original movie, just part of the gang, all of their exploits simply happening just off screen. They're even edited, poorly and obviously, into the scene from the movie that inspires the ten-year reunion. "We'll be there," they say. Goobers, all!

Here's the problem. I never hoped for a second season of Wet Hot American Summer. But now that we have one... I have no reason not to want more! And perhaps even to expect more. Give me Twenty Years Later, set in 2001 and where the campers are all somewhat roughly believably the age of the actors portraying them. Or if that's too obvious, give me Fifty Years Later, set in 2031 with everyone aged up instead of down. Shit, I dunno, maybe this well's gone dry after all. Well, either way, I've enjoyed the ride while it lasted.

Narcos: Season 1

This started strong - real strong, actually, like "how is the pilot not a standalone movie?" strong - but predictably it faded and slowed down a bit and at this point I'm annoyed that there are at least two more seasons of this thing. Oh, right, it's a biopic Netflix series about Pablo Escobar - you know, Vinnie Chase in Medellín. The whole thing's told form the perspective of this Ryan Gosling-looking DEA whose partner is Pedro Pascal, a.k.a. the Red Viper from Game of Thrones and the only remotely big name in this whole dang production. But, hey, it's a hard sell for an acting gig, I get it - this thing's shot on location in Columbia after all, and it's gorgeous and beautiful for it. And that kind of seems to be the Netflix MO when it comes to dramas. Take an idea for a drama, produce the living hell out of it, and let that fucker draaag and breeeathe and soooak. (Okay, alright, so I'm taking out some Bloodline frustration on Narcos. Sue me.)

The third season of Narcos begins in a month or so, and I'm just not sure how much of a rush Marissa and I are in to finish the second. This is better than Bloodline, make no mistake. But it's already slowing down and slowing down hard.

The Big Sick

Saw The Big Sick last night and really, really liked it. This will surely make its way onto one streaming platform or another within a month or two - keep an eye out for it. The less you know, the better, but I don't think it spoils much to say this is a romantic comedy (but a good one, written by and starring Kumail Nanjiani) in which a Pakistani-American man defies his family by pursuing a white woman. And yeah, someone at some point gets sick. That's all you need to know, all you should know. You'll enjoy this. You will enjoy it whether you watch it with your parents or your girlfriend or your siblings or your bros or all by your lonesome. It's just a good, universally appealing, enjoyable movie and it deserves two hours of your time, I think!

The Accountant

I went into this expecting to hate it - nothing like a good old "mediocre mid-budget movie" for a hate watch - but you know what? It was fine. Not good. Not original, not memorable in any way whatsoever. But fine. It's Ben Affleck doing a simultaneous take on Will Hunting and Jason Bourne, which, come on man, back off Matt Damon's nuts already. Affleck's both a number savant and a well-oiled shootin' fightin' killin' machine. Okay, great, fine, yes - but why? There's nothing funny here, nothing that'll put you on the edge of your seat. It's just Affleck doing Rain Man with none of the charm but a much bigger mean streak. And again, it's not bad. It's nothing, really. It barely even "is" at all.

The Art of War

Here's a classic example of something that's so old I can't adequately judge it. My copy was only 45 pages long and they're filled with repetitive and, at least by modern day standards, painfully obvious bits of advice. "All warfare is based on deception," is the recurring theme here and only real takeaway. Is your enemy expecting you to attack him? Then don't. Let him tense up instead. Is your army smaller than your enemy's army? Then do everything you can to make it seem like your army is bigger. And vice versa.

And it only gets more obvious than that. Is your army crossing a swamp? Don't stop there, keep crossing the swamp. Are your men hungry and tired? Then they aren't going to fight very well.

There may be some poetic quality to the whole thing lost in the translation to English and also across 2500 years, but this felt like nothing special to me whatsoever. At least it was a quick one! We're onto whatever's next.

The Stanley Parable

So I finally got around to playing The Stanley Parable - years late, I know - a small indie game made from a Half-Life 2 mod famous for its complete non-linearity and fourth wall breaking.

I reached about five or six of the nineteen possible endings, stopping for good once I reached the "happy" one that unlocks a "beat the game achievement." I won't spoil how that's done, but there's a great ironic twist in there.

This isn't even really a game as much as a little work of art about free will and determinism in video games. The gameplay is incredibly simple. You just walk around and very occasionally press buttons by clicking the mouse. All the while, an omniscient narrator provides an account of what's going on. But here's the deal - you'll come very quickly to a set of two doors. The narrator will say, "...and Stanley took the door on the left." What you do from here is up to you. What's interesting is how the narrator reacts to being disobeyed. The whole game was, I won't lie, creeping me the hell out early on. It was all so unsettling, in part because it was an experience I'd never really had before.

Lots of games these days - particularly short, indie games - will let player choice determine the story to an extent. This, already six years old, is the only one I've ever played where you can do almost anything at all and be treated to such a wide array of different endings. A lot of them are dark and a few of them are philosophical in nature, exploring and commenting on the idea of video games presenting linear paths.

I do recommend giving it a go if you've never played it, and going in blind at that. You can get a whole lot of different experiences with this game just by fooling around for an hour or so and it's an interesting exercise to boot.