Sons of Anarchy: Season 4

So - Steve just posted about this because we watched it together. They're officially his DVDs but we're married so what's his is also mine. Sharing is caring, people. So these are my DVDs too and I've never seen Sons Season 4 before so this counts more for me than it does for Steve, damnit!

Observation 1: Jax looks a ton like Paul Walker with short hair.
Observation 2: Gemma is a dirty gross crude woman. However, she does a lot for this club without getting any thanks. She's real bad ass a lot of the time. She and Tara have been fun to watch throughout Sons Seasons 1-4. They are an important part of this TV show.
Observation 3: Episodes 1-13A were fantastic. There was a ton going on in this season, and Seasons 1-3 have set the tone for all the conflict. There were new characters introduced but it felt natural and I didn't struggle to remember who they were which did happen in previous seasons. I knew most people's motivations the entire season. The conflict helped build the characters who we already knew a lot about.

Steve made a good analogy. Season 4 puts pots of water on the stove all season to boil. Instead of boiling over in the finale, multiple pots are just taken off the stove. I have an inkling where Season 7 will go based on Steve's post, and I think I will continue to enjoy Sons over the next three seasons even if they decline in quality.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

About a year ago I played the recently-brought-to-America port of Sin and Punishment, a very short rails shooter on the Nintendo 64 that felt a little like StarFox 64 on acid. Now I have completed the series by playing its second installment, the Wii sequel Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, and while the Wii is obviously a perfect fit for any rails shooter, it felt like only a marginal step up from the first game. Controlling a reticle with a Wii-mote feels a bit more natural, sure, but the addition of defensive play that's not usually found in rails shooters means controls mostly felt the same as its predecessor, and as such Star Successor was really that- more of the same. For most games that would be a strike against it. But for Sin and Punishment, a series that prides itself on being basically insane (one boss is made up of robotic whales; another is defeated by kicking giant bison in his direction), it kinda works. Rails shooters are fun in short amounts but can get stale pretty fast, so to compensate they need to get gimmicky- Dead Space: Extraction found this in hallucinations and its survival-horror focus on ammo conservation; Sin and Punishment: Star Successor mostly just throws as much shit on screen as the Wii can handle and wants you to shoot almost everything. The one major improvement here was getting rid of the dated Continues system from the first game which required you to restart the game several times before you got good enough to beat it, and combined with its longer length Star Successor is probably the better game. It's worth a play if you're in the mood for an on-rails shooter, but there's a reason why that genre has for the most part died out completely and Star Successor is no sign that it should come back.

Mad Men: Season 5

Two years ago I made an absurdly long post about the fourth season of Mad Men. It was the best season of one of the best shows ever made, and I did it no favors by rambling on and on and on about it, so I'll keep this one brief.

As I said, Season 4 was Mad Men's best season, and Season 5 was better than Season 6, which means the show has technically been in a qualitative slide for a few years now. But I'd forgotten just how good Season 5 was until re-watching it these last few days. There's an awful lot of meat here, from Pete's dissatisfaction with living the American Dream - married with a kid in the suburbs - to Don's honeymoon period with his new wife to Roger's LSD-induced reawakening and new-found happiness. Peggy and Joan each make some bold decisions, Lane winds up in a financial pickle that turns tragic, and Sally continues to grow up. This season introduces us to the great character that is Michael Ginsberg and even revisits Paul Kinsey for kicks. And Betty got fat.

The season takes place between the summer of 1966 and the spring of 1967, and "the '60s" are very much in full swing. SCDP hires both a black woman and a Jew and even makes a woman a junior partner. Casual drug use is up, even for these Madison Avenue suits, and it's hard to believe sometimes that this is the same group of people doing the same job from the first season, which took place in the shadow of the dour and restrained 1950s. At any rate, it was a pleasure to revisit Season 5, and the episodes in general were stronger on average than I'd remembered. Here's hoping Season 6 can pleasantly surprise me too on the second time around.

Sons of Anarchy: Season 4

It's been a long time since I've posted about Sons of Anarchy, and in the interim I've seen Seasons 4-6 in real time and then gone back to watch Seasons 1-4 again with the wife. I went back and read some of my posts from Seasons 1-3, and while it's always cringe-inducing to read old writing, some of my glowing praise for this show back then was particularly hard to stomach: "It's certainly one of the best dramas I've seen and warrants consideration for placement in that elite tier that includes Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and perhaps Boardwalk Empire." Blech. It's safe to say that at this point I have a much better understanding of just what this show is, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. "An elite drama" it ain't, and we'll leave it at that.

But Sons of Anarchy is still a very solid show, and one I've probably soured on too much. This very fourth season is when I recall turning on the show; after raising stakes on half a dozen different fronts all season long and building toward an inevitable explosive showdown, the show coasted into hibernation mode for Season 5 without really resolving anything, and it did so in the form of a cop out of sorts, when some of the major players involved in this season's biggest arc turned out to be working for the CIA undercover. Elsewhere, hatchets were buried and a few key characters were left dangling between various rocks and hard places, unable to bring long-brewing conflicts to their conclusions in favor of maintaining the status quo. The ending cheapened the otherwise fantastic season that had come before it, and the show's inability to kill off or otherwise write out some of its favorite characters felt like a fatal flaw.

That's what it felt like at the time, at least, to the extent where I found it hard to get excited for Season 5 at all and don't honestly remember much of what happened in that one. But, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing how this season would end - or maybe it was the foresight of what Season 5 and 6 look like - I was much happier this time around with Season 4. Yeah, it was a clumsy landing with more than one cop-out, but it also sets in motion - or maybe just keeps in motion - some more compelling stuff that comes in Seasons 5 and 6, and that I anticipate will come in Season 7. I look forward to re-watching Season 5 next, and hopefully walking away from that one with an improved opinion, too.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Before I get to the movie, I'd like to start with a question about something that has bothered me for a long time. Does anyone like Ed Helms? At all? The guy just annoys me. He annoyed me in the Office, but man was he unlikeable in this movie. And I don't want to hear that his characters are supposed to be unlikeable. Because I hate him in everything. I don't find him funny.

Anyway, this movie tried too hard. It had very little plot, and although it thought that was a positive, it most certainly was not. I could care less about Jeff or his brother or his mom. And don't expect to laugh. Ever.

Recapping 2013

This is already the fifth post of the new year, but let's take a minute to reflect on the year that was: 2013. First, a personal take. Then, a blog-wide look.

I'll own up to it - 2013 was a pretty big failure with regard to my overall goal of trimming my backlog down to nothing. No specific category carries the brunt of the blame; I read just a dozen books, but also acquired only eleven. Meanwhile my movie-watching was up, but so was my movie-acquiring. And as much as I'd like to blame some big milestones this year for my underwhelming progress - planning a wedding, moving, going on a honeymoon, and so forth - I really can't blame my life events for the bad year on the blog. Yeah, my logging was at an all time low, but I could have easily countered that by not getting anymore books, movies, or games. Instead I went on a few too many acquisition splurges, and what could easily have been a successful year turned instead into a bust. Here are two interesting year-ending trends. First, sixteen straight video game loggings from me were either handheld games or downloadable games. The last console game I played on an actual disc (or cartridge) was Donkey Kong Country Returns back in late May. Wow! Second, fifteen straight movie posts were actually TV season posts; I've watched fifteen straight TV seasons since I last watched a movie. Both of these trends seem weird, as does my completely apparent lack of reading.

Enough about me, though. Let's look at what everyone did collectively.

Books

No series or author really stood out in 2013, although it warrants mentioning that both Webber and Dee were heavy on the Brandon Mull posts early on in the year. Elsewhere, Marissa and Keith both read The Giver and its sequels and both Webber and I dabbled in The Dark Tower just a bit. Sweeney posted a couple of Song of Ice and Fire books and I pitched in a third from George R. R. Martin. Tack on a couple of Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King books, and you've more or less got the year covered, aside from a late diverse run by Marissa. Nothing really "trended" in 2013, I guess, but it was nice to see a bunch of people looking into stuff that had previously been blogged by others.

Video Games

We had another eight Final Fantasy games posted, again avoiding repeating the same one twice. This time four of us - Webber and Trevor in addition to Sween and me - combined for Theatrhythm, Tactics, IV, IX, Crystal Chronicles, VI, X, and XIII. There were four more Zelda games as well, along with three Sonic the Hedgehog postings. Strangely, no other franchise registered more than a pair of games on the year. One trend I did notice, though, was the emergence of shorter indie titles, whether those were PC downloads or console-based content. Titles like Dear Esther, Little Inferno, Starship Defense, Pushmo, Proteus, Hotline Miami, and Thomas Was Alone appeared on the blog this year, in addition to many others like them.

Television

To my great delight, The Wire really blew up in 2013, with Keith, Marissa, and Sween making ten posts about that show. Keith and Sween also made ten posts on The Sopranos and Keith and I did the same for Dexter. Not far behind was Game of Thrones, which racked up eight. Friday Night Lights and Sons of Anarchy each received four posts, and if you want to count it as its own show, WWE was responsible for five posts in 2013. That each of those posts was made by Keith should surprise no one. As always, I was our biggest TV contributor, so a lot of shows that I watched - Six Feet Under, Big Love, The IT Crowd - were also posted several times.

Movies

World War Z and Looper each got posted twice. It looks like JFK almost did, but the second post - Trevor's - is still in "draft" form. There was a decent amount of Kubrick from Trevor and me, and then a large amount of Wes Anderson for which I must take full responsibility.

And of course, a job well done by all to clear 400 posts on the year. Let's shoot for 500 this time around. I think we can do it!

Alien Storm

Hey, that wasn't so bad. Couldn't have taken me more than half an hour to beat this game, a straight up arcade style beat-em-up that felt overwhelmingly like an undercooked Turtles in Time. I suspect I'll be seeing a lot more of these. I played as a chick with a flame-throwing gun of sorts. I believe I could have also played as a man or a robot. Whether or not it mattered, I have no idea. Anyway, that's two games down in one night. At this rate the entire Genesis stockpile will be depleted by mid-January. Of course, there's no way I maintain this rate, and there's no way these games stay this quick and easy.

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

As all the most frequent readers of this blog know, I recently received quite the Christmas gift: a Chinese knock-off Sega Genesis that came pre-loaded with 80 games. Yeah, that's right. Eighty fucking games! It was a great gift - I've never owned a Sega system, and now I can go back and play a lot of old gems. But it was also the single most devastating blow to my backlog in, well, ever.

There are two silver linings here. The first is that forty of the games were of a trivial homebrew-like variety. We're talking about "titles" like "Air Hockey," "Chess," and "Mahjong." None were ever licensed by Sega or given a full release, and as such, I see no reason to count these toward my backlog. They're not even real games. The second silver lining is that eight of the forty legitimate titles were repeats from my Sonic Mega Collection. So those aren't in the backlog either. Still, that leaves 32 games of varying quality. One day into 2014 I've already matched my game acquisition total from last year. It's going to be a long year if I want to break even on my video game totals, let alone make some progress.

Anyway, the first game I tackled was Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, a 1989 platformer. There's not much to say about the game, other than that it was a 1989 platformer. Did you know Alex Kidd was Sega's unofficial mascot before Sonic came along? You'd never have guessed it by playing this game, which was - I stress again - just a 1989 platformer. With a strange emphasis on rock-paper-scissors duels.

Next up, if I just storm through these games in alphabetical order? Alien Storm.

Sons of Anarchy: Season 3

So I went into this season knowing two things:
1. SAMCRO will go to Ireland and they don't until episode 6 which is lame.
2. Steve did not like it as much as the previous two seasons.

Personally, I think this was a great season! I actually almost liked this better than Season 2. I may have somewhat of a bias because I was able to watch all of the seasons in rapid succession rather than week by week, but oh well! My biggest flaw with the first half of the season was it was confusing. I really did not know what anyone's motives were at any times. Maybe that was the point, but it made it a wee bit hard to follow. My second biggest flaw with the season has to do with the use of the word "shag" more than one times. Something I gained from this season is that the club is nothing without their old ladies. Overall, I thought was a great season with a thoroughly satisfying ending. On to season 4 lads!

New Years Resolution Update: Going well so far, but fairly pissed I couldn't be the first post of the year. Dag nab it!

Friday Night Lights Season 5

After 5 seasons, my journey with Friday Night Lights is over. And wow, this show had no right being as good as it was. Not just good, but great. Like one of the best shows of all time. That's a strong statement for sure, but I've never seen a show with more genuine emotion or a more widespread appeal. This show literally can be enjoyed by anyone and everyone. I think that has a whole lot to do with Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. Michael B. Jordan did a hell of a job. Aimee Teagarden sucked but whatever. Anyway, this show ended exactly as it needed to in a logical point. I'm really glad to have been able to watch it and recommend it highly to any of you fools who haven't watched the whole series. Other than season 2, it seemed to get better as it went on and not many shows can say that. Alright, onto smaller and worse things.