Modern Warfare 2: Can video games teach us about the horrors of war? The answer, of course, is no.

Modern Warfare 2 (nee Call of Duty 6) is the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 1: A New Hope, which was a massive hit and also an awesome game. This was partly because COD4 was actually able to transcend the narrative and thematic limitations inherent in the FPS genre in several key sequences in the single player campaign. The two that stick out for me are the one in which your playable character dies slowly and painfully in a nuclear blast and another in which your controllable perspective shifts from a squad under heavy and hectic fire by some or other Russian separatist battalion to a gunner comfortably ensconced in a AC130 gunship miles in the air who comes in to save the day by raining destruction on the attackers from an untouchable height. This sequence in particular, without being too heavy-handed about things, effectively used the gaming medium to contrast the vulnerability of traditional ground soldiering with the eerie detachment of computer-aided remote warfare.

Modern Warfare 2 tries really, really hard to replicate that, but doesn't quite hit the mark. The single player story, which in quick order blends Generation Kill, James Bond, 24, Red Dawn, The Rock, and the climax of Face/Off (which the last level essentially steals wholesale), has a lot of 'wow' moments and high points, but would really have benefited from focusing less on trying to top the original and more on explaining exactly what the hell is going on at any given moment. There is that 'controversial' optional level in which you control a participant in a terrorist attack, which is actually quite chilling and effective until you play further in and realize that the developers have utilized it as little more than a gateway to go completely over the top rather than as the emotional centerpiece of a coherent narrative.

This is disappointing, largely because you can tell that the developers (Infinity Ward, who also created COD4) put in some effort to make Modern Warfare 2 resonate on a level deeper than the average military shooter game. The Call of Duty series' trademark deathscreen historical quotes seem to be skewed more antiwar this go-round (and include at least one choice selection from Don Rumsfeld about the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), the game explicitly sets one level in Afghanistan (rather than COD4's vague 'The Middle East'). and there are several moments that attempt to highlight the perils of war. I think that the decision to directly continue the storyline from of the first Modern Warfare is a big limiting factor in constructing a serious narrative; as ludicrous as the levels depicting a land invasion of Washington D.C. by the Russian Army were, I still thought the game's story might have been able to right itself, until it nuked the fridge completely by bringing back one of the presumed-dead main characters from the first game. The entire final third of Modern Warfare 2 stays in an uninterrupted soap-opera mode, although the gameplay admittedly doesn't much suffer for it.

The single-player campaign is all well and good, but the real reason that Modern Warfare 2 is so hotly anticipated is the online competitive multiplayer. I never really played COD4 multiplayer more than a few times, but I made the mistake of popping online for a couple matches the first day I had the game and was almost immediately addicted. MW2's multiplayer weds the campaign's gameplay mechanics to a relatively standard selection of deathmatch modes, and grafts on a truly remarkable upgrade system whereby the player unlocks a range of weapons and other bonuses through earning experiences points in-game. Mostly, these points are earned by killing enemy players (natch), but there's all sorts of available bonuses and side-challenges to boost your totals. The net effect is a constant stream of positive reinforcement: one of the things that first endeared me to the game is the fact that if you get a kill after a dry streak, your point value for that kill is doubled as a 'comeback' bonus. Also, although the rules are somewhat more complex than similar games like Halo 3, the gameplay wasn't as hard for me to pick up because it tends to emphasize caution and situational awareness over fancy maneuvering and memorizing weapon locations.

As brilliant as the multiplayer is, I think it's also the biggest thing keeping Modern Warfare 2 from saying anything serious about modern warfare. It's simply not possible to postulate within two halves of the same product that shooting the shit out of people (feel free to insert mental quotation marks around that last word) is at the same time (a) a morally charged action with serious political and personal ramifications and (b) an endlessly rewarding competitive sport. In the end, this is the main problem of all video games with aspersions to seriousness: they're bound by the need to be fun as well as interactive. Even if it were possible to create an Xbox 360 equivalent of Casualties of War, who the hell would play it?

Important Breakthrough Alert!

That up there is the newly-FDA approved NeuroStar TMS system for treating depression. It works by sending electromagnetic waves to the prefrontal cortex to stimulate dopamine release, and has been shown to be as effective as antidepressant medication in clinical trials. Best of all, it only requires daily 40 minute treatments for a month, for the low price of $6,000. That's great! I just wish that somebody would come up with some other way to treat depression that would require even fewer sessions and less money, but would still be about as effective as antidepressant medication. Cough, cough.

Why men do need to reconsider masculinity, and why feminism can't help

Since gender politics is something of a tertiary intellectual interest of mine, I was excited to come across "What's the Alternative to Tucker Max?," Courtney Martin's web article in The American Prospect about the trials and tribulations of pro-feminist college men's struggles with the concept of masculinity. The reason I was particularly jazzed about this piece is that it both raises a question that I've been pondering (how men should assimilate the cultural shifts since the inception of the feminist movement into masculinity as a social construct) and admirably but unintentionally illustrates the shortcomings in the intellectual zeitgeist that make this project more difficult than it need be.

Martin is covering the happenings at a national conference for pro-feminist men. In the grand tradition of semantically-obsessed campus politics, the meeting is dubbed the National Conference for Campus-Based Men's Gender Equality and Anti-Violence Groups. In summarizing the proceedings, she cannily notes:

In attendance were about 200 individuals, representing 40 colleges and two dozen organizations, many of them sporting titles like Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse, Men Can Stop Rape, and Men Stopping Violence. Notice a trend here? This contemporary movement of gender-conscious young men is largely identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. They're not rapists. They're not misogynists. They're also not particularly effective in imagining what they do want to be.

To give credit where it's due, Martin pretty much nails the summary of the problem here: it's exceedingly difficult to form a coherent identity based on NOT doing things. So why is it so hard for progressive men to identify positive male role behaviors? Martin essentially fails to answer this question in the remainder of her essay, which is fine; it's not her question to answer, after all. What I find fascinating, and revealing, is the manner in which she attempts to engage it. This paragraph dropped my jaw:

This became painfully clear over the course of the weekend as speakers and students grappled to find what one presenter referred to as a "feminist masculinity." Is there such a thing? Does it look like President Barack Obama -- or does his insistence on talking about sports and drinking beers reveal that he's just one of the guys? Does it look like KRS-1, the veteran rapper who recently said that hip-hop needs more women -- or is his statement too little, too late? Stephen Colbert, in some ways, is the closest thing we've got. He consistently lampoons misogynist punditry and policy, yet his "feminist masculinity" is only visible vis-à-vis its blowhard foil.

Consider how remarkable it is that by whatever standards of acceptability that Martin/this men's group (it's unclear whether these examples are her own thoughts or if they were discussed at the conference), the President of the United States, who signed into law a bill designed to help women gain legal remuneration for pay discrimination and by most accounts has a fruitful and egalitarian partnership with his own wife, is crossed off of the list of potential role models for enjoying sports and beer. The other potential role model who also fails to make the grade, is an aging rapper with extremely little contemporary relevance in his chosen art form. And while Stephen Colbert is a brilliant comedian, to hold him up as the sole existing exemplar of "feminist masculinity" is beyond ridiculous: his public persona is based entirely on sly irony and he's notoriously protective of his private life and beliefs. How does this represent a workable model of gender identity in any sense?

Although she reaches a different conclusion by the end of her piece, with these examples, Martin essentially answers her own rhetorical question about the feasibility of a "feminist masculinity" with a resounding no. Which leads us to the next question: why can't these college men and Courtney Martin come up with a single alternative to Tucker Max? I believe that the answer is that both parties are thinking of "feminist masculinity" as equivalent to "a code of behavior for men that practitioners of contemporary feminist thought will have absolutely no quarrel with any aspect of."

I don't think that this is even achievable, and the reason why is ably demonstrated by Jezebel blogger, Anna North, who comments on Martin's article:

But do men need, in addition, "a positive, masculine gender identity?" It's something of a strange concept — few feminists would ever say that women needed "a positive, feminine gender identity." While plenty of women take pride in being female, "femininity" is so loaded with patriarchal expectation that, for feminists, it's kind of a dirty word. This may not be a bad thing — in fact, I'd argue that "masculine" should go the same way.

I have to admit to some surprise at the statement about feminists not arguing for the positivity of female gender identity - I didn't realize Carol Gilligan had gone quite so out of vogue - but the latter half of her statement illustrates a prevalent explicit and implicit theme in feminist thought that renders the concept of "feminist masculinity" a contradiction in terms. To sum, the idea is that gender roles and gendered behavior are mostly or entirely socially constructed for the express purpose of creating or maintaining a societal power dynamic that is unfavorable to women, and the only way to rectify gender inequities is to remove the very idea of normative differences based in gender or sex. From this point of view, the ideas of "masculinity" or "femininity" imply pernicious social constructions regardless of the behaviors or values to which they refer.

I don't mean to imply that every feminist holds this exact belief, but it and its corollaries are a major cornerstone of both academic and activist feminism. Indeed, Martin's article on the erstwhile male gender warriors employs some familiar rhetorical tropes to this end, referring to the desire of progressive males to "separate themselves from all the gendered behaviors and beliefs that they now see as oppressive" and stating that "(i)t's not until privileged folks, men in this case, can own the ways in which they have a self-interest in resisting systems of oppression that their work becomes sustainable. " In my view, neither of these statements are inaccurate with regard to the challenges of contemporary masculinity, but they do hit upon the main reason why feminist thought is ill-equipped to help these young men with the task.

Simply put, the social constructionist view that is the warp and woof of the bulk of feminist gender critique is unable to lend any examples of gendered behavior that are not oppressive for these young men to latch on to. This isn't necessarily a problem: again, it shouldn't be the responsibility of feminists to tell men how to behave. What's problematic is that practitioners of the constructionist strains of feminist thought are increasingly unable to recognize within their own worldview that gendered behaviors might even vary by degree of oppressiveness. An example: one of the more widely deployed constructionist feminist concepts is 'rape culture,' a definition of which is offered here by a fairly prominent feminist blogger. I recommend that you click through to read it in full or part, but the post largely bypasses a traditional definition of the term in favor of offering multiple and extensive examples of 'rape culture' which range from "treating straight sexuality as the norm" and "encouraging men to use the language of rape to establish dominance over one another ("I'll make you my bitch")" to "1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes" and "rape being used as a weapon, a tool of war and genocide and oppression."

I believe that this post very nicely encapsulates the weakness of the social constructivist worldview. It's has absolutely nothing to do with the author's identification of the horrors of rape and the numerous other instances of violence and exploitation perpetrated upon women. Indeed, I think that more people, men particularly, need to be made aware of these issues and to condemn them in no uncertain terms. The issue is the way in which the concept of 'rape culture' takes a variety of problems and identifies them as the same problem.

The feminist critique of masculinity operates along many of the same lines, as evidenced by the insinuition that Barack Obama's enjoyment of beer and sports disqualifies him as an alternative to the 'toxic' misogynistic buffoonery of Tucker Max. I can't help but think that there's something deeply misguided in the notion that fighting rape, sexual violence, and bigotry against women involves rejecting masculine-identified behavior in every form. If there is to be a project of reclaiming or redefining masculinity for today's world (and I think there desperately needs to be, if for no other reason than to offer a counterweight to the various idiots and bigots who have taken up the mantle in), it needs to start with taking a fresh accounting of the positive aspects of the old masculinity along with the negative. I think that, good intentions aside, the men puzzling over the issue at the conference described by Martin, have gotten too caught up in the social constructionist idea that masculinity is by definition oppressive, and would benefit from pushing back against it to take a more nuanced view at the risk of alarming their feminist allies.

What might this look like? I have some thoughts, which I'll (maybe) offer up at a later time.

The Box review and a meditation on modern genre thillers

I liked The Box, the newly released film from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, quite a bit. For those who haven't heard of the movie, it's about a married couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) who are given a box with a button by a mysterious man (Frank Langella) who offers them a million dollars in cash if they press it, but tells them that someone they do not know will die if they do. The Box has a number of commendable qualities: it's attractively shot and layers on the period details (the film is set in 1976) rather than hitting the viewer over the head with them, it has a very good score by Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, and features strong performances by Marsden and Langella. The movie's biggest weakness, predictably enough, is Cameron Diaz, who still can't act to save her life and appears to be concentrating really hard on maintaining her Southern accent every time she's onscreen.

Nothing about The Box is particularly innovative or unique in the pantheon of sci-fi thrillers, but that's not really important. What the movie excels at is tone, putting itself in the tradition of middlebrow science fiction such as The Twilight Zone (The Box is based on a short story that was adapted for an episode of one of the Twilight Zone revivals), which take plausible and believable characters and place them into dramatic situations that become increasingly strange and unsettling as the plot progresses. I like stories of this type: the best ones grab your attention by uniting the audience and the main characters in the task of trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. I wrote about this aspect a couple days ago by way of explaining what I like about Lost, and The Box hits many of the same points, doubling down on cryptic elements regularly and managing to be dramatically stylized without going completely over the top or rejecting its own internal logic.

Unfortunately, movies with this sort of tone don't seem to get made very often these days, and when they do, they don't tend to be very well received. The recent movie that I found myself comparing the feel of The Box to is this year's Knowing, which I also enjoyed for its employment of many of the aforementioned elements, and which was at one point slated to be directed by Kelly until that fell through and Alex Proyas took it over. Knowing was mostly brutalized by critics (with the exception of noted Proyas fanboy Roger Ebert, who gave it four stars) and The Box isn't doing much better. What is it about these type of films that fails to catch on? I have a few ideas.

First, I think that modern viewers have a tough time accepting the sort of pulp genre tone that blends dramatic realism with fantastical elements when it's not presented in the context of an action movie. Unlike the 50s and 60s, sci-fi and horror movies these days tend to be built around action sequences, not character interaction or suspenseful developments, which are now associated more or less exclusively with 'realistic' dramas. I think that this makes it harder for audiences to stomach the exaggerated tone of character-based genre films when it's presented non-ironically, although movies set in the past tend to get more of a pass on this than those set in the present day, probably because audiences can rationalize to themselves that people probably just acted that way back then. Interestingly enough, this summer's Moon, which shares some of the character-based mystery elements of The Box's narrative but has a gritter, less pulpy tone, was (deservedly) well-received critically.

There's a second factor that I think negatively impacts the modern audience's tolerance for character-based pulp drama: M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan's films employ a lot of the same qualities I've been discussing; a dramatic but exaggerated tone, a focus on how characters interact with implausible and inexplicable events, and an emphasis on the fantastical or supernatural that deepens throughout the plot. Many of his films have been successful, which would seem to bode well for the type of movie that I've been discussing. However, I believe that Shyamalan's emphasis on the twist ending has had a detrimental effect on how people evaluate the quality of movies like Knowing and The Box. Since The Sixth Sense, people walk into movies pitched as mysteries and sit through the whole thing trying to guess what the ending will be. The problem with this is that although the twist ending is a storied device of pulp drama, the power of these movies comes from how they suck you into the experience as it goes along. When you treat 90% of the movie as a mere set-up to be dispensed with before you can evaluate the worthiness of the ending, a lot of the enjoyment is lost. The Box has quite a few narrative turns beyond the initial premise, but it doesn't build up to some grand coda that subverts all your previous expectations, although I found the ending to be quite satisfying.

Cameron Diaz aside, The Box is the type of well-made pulp drama entertainment that I could use more of in this day and age. It also feature the type of bullshit generic name that I could use less of in this day and age, but never mind that. I'd put it far above the likes of yet another Christmas Carol remake and I think it's a return to form for Richard Kelly after Southland Tales (a mess of a movie that I actually find quite compelling in some respects) even if it doesn't wind up being a commercial success. I'll gladly sign on to see whatever his next movie is.

Quick Ft. Hood update w/ links

General Casey strikes the right notes of caution. Megan McArdle pushes back against any political interpretation of the tragedy. Jeffrey Goldberg urges that Hasan's Muslim background not be dismissed or downplayed. All good reads with smart points.

Thoughts on the massacre at Ft. Hood

Yesterday's shooting spree by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood affected me greatly. Usually I take tragic news more or less in stride, but this incident is so disturbing on so many levels that I've found myself looking at every bit of news I can get my hands on and turning the implications over in my head. The deepest and most immediate part of this tragedy, of course, is the fact that 13 American servicemembers are dead, killed on their own nation's soil as they prepared to deploy to war. At a time when our military is fighting two foreign wars characterized by unpredictable violence and insurgent tactics, to have this type of attack occur on the supposedly safe and friendly ground of an Army base is doubly horrifying. I can't even fathom the anger and pain that active-duty servicemembers, veterans, and their families are feeling in response to these murders, particularly given all the misinformation and speculation swirling around in the first hours of the attack.

Adding to that, we've got to deal with the fact that the shooter was, by all appearances, a religiously devout Muslim. Pretty much as soon as Hasan's name leaked out, when the inital reports were that he had been killed, political fault lines were forming over this issue. Broadly speaking, (and it should be noted that plenty of commentators across the ideological spectrum either refrained from weighing in due to lack of evidence or took a measured and appropriate tone in their analysis) the tack from liberal commentators was that Hasan's religion shouldn't be assumed as the motive for the attacks and the tack from conservatives was that Hasan is clearly a terrorist and that politically correct cowardice is making America vulnerable to Islamic extremism.

To put it bluntly, both of these general arguments make me extremely uncomfortable. As far as the first goes, it seems extremely likely that Hasan's religious beliefs played a substantial role in his actions. Even excluding the very real recent and historical phenomenon of acts of violence being committed as an affirmation of Islamic faith, what are the odds that a man as religiously devout as Hasan appears to have been would commit such an extreme act if he believed it to be at odds with his spiritual beliefs? His religion is absolutely fair game in this discussion, and I think it's disingenuous and false to pretend otherwise.

However, to address the other line of thought, just because Hasan's Islamic beliefs played a major role in this shooting doesn't mean that he committed the shooting because he was a Muslim. This in an important distinction to make for several reasons. First, there's a substantial strain of post 9/11 conservative thought that holds that Islam as an entity is the cultural enemy of the United States and that this idea should be an explicit cornerstone of the "war on terrorism." Note, for instance, the opening of this blog on the Fort Hood shootings: "The moment I first heard about the mass murders at Fort Hood I knew in my bones that the shooter or shooters were Muslims." One of the more extreme exemplars of this line of 'thinking' is Michelle Malkin's 2004 book In Defense of Internment, which offers up a retroactive justification for the WWII policy of detaining Japanese citizens on the basis of their ethnic background by way of advocating for racial profiling to be actively deployed to combat terrorism on American soil.

Unlike some on the left, I think that the U.S. government and American culture on the whole have on balance done a commendable job of clearly identifying the violent and totalitarian strains of Islam, rather than the religion as a whole, as the target of anti-terrorism efforts, the Afghanistan invasion, and the fight against the Iraqi insurgency. I believe that this is a reflection on the long tradition of religious freedom in America and is a major reason why our country hasn't had nearly the problems with organized radicalism and backlash from the Islamic population that areas of Europe have experienced in the time since 9/11. It's also the right decision on a tactical level: overt or covert declarations that America is the enemy of Islam only serve to reinforce the similar claims made by al-Qaeda types in their vile recruitment pitches, and there remains beside the small matter of the impracticality of declaring open hostility on an ideology with well over a billion adherents. But it's a nuanced position that can be difficult to maintain, particularly since there's a vocal segment of the American population who openly defines patriotism as being synonymous with evangelical Christian faith, and violent attacks perpetuated by Muslims on domestic soil can test it mightily in the eyes of the public. Conservative writer Reihan Salam has a great piece about this that's well worth reading.

The investigation into Hasan will hopefully clear some of this up, particularly on the question of whether he had any verifiable links to terrorist groups. My sense, based on the limited facts available, is that he was essentially an isolated and embittered man who became disenchanted with his job and his life, and in response immersed himself in the idea that the U.S. military was persecuting him personally and Islam generally. The shootings themselves feel sort of like a hybrid of a terrorist act and a suicide-by-cop; I have no idea which was foremost in Hasan's mind, but I suppose eventually we'll know more.

The final thing that disturbs me about the Ft. Hood shootings is the speculation about Hasan's role as a mental health provider who worked with soldiers suffering from PTSD. I've already seen at least two articles (here and here) claiming that Hasan may have been suffering from 'vicarious traumatization' from dealing with PTSD sufferers, that he may have had PTSD himself as a result, and that this may have been a factor in his rampage. This is an idea that needs to get smacked down as quickly and decisively as humanly possible.

First of all, treating PTSD or having interactions with PTSD sufferers is NOT in itself traumatic. Trauma is specifically defined as exposure to an event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury to a person or witnessing another person being exposed to same, and reacting with intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Listening to a person talk about trauma is NOT dangerous, and therefore cannot be traumatic. It can be very stressful, but stress is not the same thing as trauma. I have no doubt that Hasan was deeply affected by the stories he heard from the soldiers under his care (and the way, he was almost certainly not conducting psychotherapy with the soldiers under his care, because modern psychiatrists almost exclusively concern themselves with medication prescription and management) but he did not develop PTSD as a result of his work.

This is an unfathomably important point to make because the PTSD syndrome is based partially on how the sufferer reacts to his or her memories of the trauma as being potentially as harmful as the traumatic event itself. The gold-standard psychotherapies for PTSD derive much of their effectiveness from helping PTSD sufferers understand that their memories cannot hurt them and desensitizing them to their emotional power. If because of this incident the military and the public come to the utterly mistaken conclusion that talking about traumatic events can traumatize listeners or "give them" PTSD, that belief will absolutely impair our ability as a society to help those suffering from PTSD seek help and recover from the disorder. The very last thing that PTSD sufferers need is more reinforcement for the idea that their memories are dangerous to themselves and others, or another repetition of the overblown and inaccurate stereotype that PTSD 'causes' people to go on murder sprees.

I hope that many of these concerns don't come to pass, just as I hope that this tragic event gets the attention that it deserves. I'll definitely be following this story closely.

whoa...

I just stumbled across this blog post, in which Matt Yglesias pushes back against a David Brooks column complaining about how technology has ruined romance by presenting a passage from Brett Easton Ellis's pre-Internet and texting book The Rules of Attraction. It's a pretty good pushback, if you leave aside the fact that Yglesias kind of bricks the layup by picking a segment that depicts a rape rather than a seduction, which I chalk up to him being too lazy to look further into the book (if I recall correctly, the excerpt in question comes within the first couple chapters) to pick one of the countless other exchanges that would have been more suitable to the point. But what really caught my attention was this lead-in statement:

Here’s his depiction of the the “sanctified . . . choice of an erotic partner” in 1985, when Brooks was 24 and there was no SMS or World Wide Web:

Hold the phone. David Brooks is only 48 years old? According to the infallible Wikipedia, yep. I would have pegged him at least a decade over that. I guess his apostasy vis a vis the conservative CW on same-sex marriage and Barack Obama makes a little more sense to me now.

Let's parse last night's elections!

A disclaimer: I think that off-year elections, particularly those coming a scant 10 months into the first term of a presidency, aren't incredibly meaningful, and discussing them as such is really more akin to masturbation that serious analysis. Then again, you could say that about nine-tenths or more of contemporary political discussion and you wouldn't likely be wrong. I like masturbation, though. I also like politics, so let's do this.

The dominant spin from last night's elections is probably going to be that the Republicans taking the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey represents a Republican resurgence and a rebuke of sorts to the Obama Administration. Exhibit A of this line is Karl Rove's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today in which he essentially chalks up the Democratic losses to voter unease over the potential costs of Obama's health care reform proposals. I'm not sure that this argument holds water particularly, since it isn't like Obama decided to reform the health care system sometime in March of this year. It was a major part of his presidential campaign, and it didn't seem to dissuade a lot of people from voting Democratic then. It seems more plausible to me that the fact that there's been so little forward momentum on health care depressed Democratic turnout and created a lane for the energized Republican opposition, but I don't think that's what happened either.

Rather, I think people voted for the gubernatorial elections based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the governance of their state, rather than based on their antipathy or affection for Barack Obama. Chris Christie, newly elected Republican governor of New Jersey says that he's looking forward to "working with President Obama," not exactly words that will get him a headliner slot at any upcoming Tea Party rallies. It also bears mentioning that Jon Corzine is a Wall Street billionaire who bought his way into office, and "Wall Street billionaire" is a shade below "Roman Polanski" in the hierarchy of things people, let alone the Democratic base, are positively disposed to at present. If I lived in New Jersey, I sure as shit wouldn't take twenty hard-earned minutes out of my day to throw a vote Corzine's way.

As for the whole three-way ordeal in New York's 23rd district, I think more than anything it demonstrates that winning Congressional elections is basically a matter of convincing people that you're going to be fully dedicated to kicking loose those sweet, sweet federal pork dollars than your overarching allegiance to a philosophical theory of governance. From what I've read, Hoffman was running far more on the latter category and was notably weak in the former. It's not by accident that pretty much everybody in Congress gets re-elected for decades despite the fact that the voting public pretty much unanimously hates the House of Representatives as a collective entity. As such, I don't think it's really valid to draw a larger inference about the electoral future of the conservative movement from this one instance. However, I did come across a quote today from noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck that gave me pause:

And here's what the ‑‑ forget about the Democrats. Here's what the Republicans should learn. The tea party movement, if you think you're going to run people that are going to be, you know, ACORN wannabes and they're just part of the corruption, part of the system, if you're going to run those people, you can expect a tea party guy to come out, and the tea parties, they'll help you lose every single election. Every single election. Because I for one am not ‑‑ if I believe in the Republican, I'll vote for the Republican. But if you're running somebody who's like part of the system, I'm not interested. I'm not interested. And I think that a lot of Americans are like that. So the Republicans have a choice to make. You can either spend a million dollars trying to destroy a third party accountant, or you could say, wow, this accountant probably would come in within three points of beating the Democrat if we combined our efforts, Republicans and Democrats, spent a fortune, had our candidate then drop out and campaign for the Democrats, we might be able to come in with about a 3‑point margin. You might want to just say, "Maybe we should go with the accountants. Maybe we should go with the regular people."

Remember two months ago when I suggested that the right was succumbing to fallacies that had long plagued the left by mounting strident and inane protest marches? What noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck is suggesting here is literally a replica of the modern American left's worst idea, running ideological protest candidates to "send a message" to the mainstream party. Let's review the two most prominent examples. The first is successfully defeating Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. Rather than ushering in a new wave of unabashed legislative progressivism, Lieberman just won re-election as an Independent, proceeded to campaign wholeheartedly for John McCain in 2008, and was most recently seen vowing to help the Republican minority fuck over any meaningful healthcare reform bill from being brought to a vote in the Senate. The second is Ralph Nader's presidential bid in 2000, which was aimed squarely at siphoning votes from Democratic nominee Al Gore. Despite a rather pathetic nationwide showing, Nader still managed to accrue more than enough votes to cover the small margin separating Bush from Gore in Florida, clearing the way for Bush to win both the state and the election ('win' of course, being shorthand for 'U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the completion of vote recounting', although I think Bush would have wound up winning anyway). Suffice it to say that the Bush presidency isn't exactly what the average Nader voter had in mind on his or her way to the ballot box in 2000. I should know, I was a freshman in college at the time and I was acquainted with quite a few of them. If there's a similar situation that forms on the right in 2010/2012 (or the Republicans nominate Sarah Palin for president), I don't imagine that it'll turn out much better. I'm somewhat skeptical that this will actually happen, but the idea's obviously percolating out there.

From my point of view, the only thing about last night that should inspire anger or fear among liberals is the narrow passage of yet another gay marriage ban, this time in Maine. Specifically, I'm extremely disappointed that Obama and/or the DNC didn't lift one finger to suggest that Democrats should turn out to prevent rights being stripped from gay citizens. I know that that Obama's against gay marriage and the Democrats as a national political entity have absolutely no spine when it comes to taking a stand for social liberties, but this is really fucking shameful. Legal discrimination against gays is the defining civil rights issue of our time. These state constitutional bans are not going to last forever. They're going to fall, either by being repealed by less-bigoted future electorates (which I'd prefer) or by federal action (which I'll accept, despite the fact that it'll kick off yet another generations-long political battle a 'la Roe v. Wade). And eventually, Americans will look back at these laws with the same revulsion that we (or: most of us) look back at Jim Crow laws today. I expect better of Obama than the half-assed thumb-twiddling we're getting from him on these kinds of issues, and I hope that I'm far from alone in that view.

How to watch Lost: a primer

I've been watching quite a bit of Lost as of late, thanks to the fact that all of the early seasons are on Xbox 360 Netflix Watch Instantly in pseudo-HD. I've gotten almost to the end of the second season now, and I've got the third and fourth queued up. I'd pretty much avoided watching or even really learning that much about the show, despite its considerable popularity, mostly because of my general policy of eschewing TV dramas for more intellectual pursuits, such as playing Horde mode in Gears of War 2 for the nth + 1 hour. However, I've really come to like Lost, partly because it's a quality show and partly because it fits particularly well with my domestic lifestyle.

What I mean by that is that I sort of prefer to be doing multiple things at once given the option. The idea of spending an hour just watching a TV show doesn't appeal to me nearly as much as spending an hour watching a TV show while cooking dinner and surfing the Internet. The problem with this is that most sitcom/drama style TV shows require a fair amount of attention to make the experience worthwhile, either to catch the jokes or keep the progressing plot points straight within the episode. By contrast, I can watch Lost while doing pretty much anything else and still get about as much out of it as I would watching it in rapt attention.

The canny thing about Lost is that it's a show that understands that people like mystery more than they like resolution. Once you figure out that basically every Lost episode is going to end with a cliff-hanger, you can pretty much ignore everything between the first two minutes (which helpfully recap everything of relevance for the brain-damaged or slow-witted viewer) and the final seven minutes to 30 seconds or so, depending on the episode, and still follow the overarching plot. You'll miss some specific developments, mostly congregated around the planned commercial breaks, but the bulk of each episode's content is mainly the various survivors talking about their feelings or some such.

There's also a B-story for each episode, which are always flashbacks that flesh out the characters. These are pretty easy to pay minimal attention to because they (a) only focus on one character per episode and (b) really only develop one character trait per entire set of flashbacks (for instance: Charlie's the world's whiniest heroin addict! Jack's a surgeon with a God complex! Sawyer's an emotionally conflicted criminal! Kate's an emotionally conflicted criminal and is also female!). Given that Lost devotes flashback episodes to uninteresting or annoying characters such as Hurley and Charlie about as often as it does to interesting ones like John Locke, Ana Lucia, or Mr. Eko, you're looking at being able to ignore up to 80% of some episodes with no real sacrifice to your overall enjoyment of the show, as you'll probably be able to discern the major point of the backstory in the first ten minutes.

Finally, actually watching the action unfold onscreen is surprisingly inessential to the Lost experience. It's an extremely talky show with very little onscreen action unaccompanied by dialogue, so as long as you're listening to what's going on, you really don't need to be watching it. I'd estimate that I'm actually only looking at the screen for probably about half of the total time that I'm watching Lost. From that angle, the experience is more like a radio drama than a television show, and I actually think it makes the more melodramatic and ridiculous aspects of the show far more palatable. This is particularly true having it on instant-watcher streaming, because I can put on an episode every day and follow the cliffhangers and plot twists like it's a soap opera rather than having to wait week-to-week or longer to find out what's coming next. It helps keep my expectations more modest, so I don't really mind when the series piles on cliffhangers rather than giving straightforward explanations for anything. I understand that the show goes downhill somewhat in the third season, but it'd have to fall off pretty hard indeed to disappoint me in any substantive way.

when will it all end?

Via Kotaku, a story about an Indian man who broke the world record for most hours spent playing Grand Theft Auto IV in a row: 40.3.

The Mumbai, India resident started playing at his home on September 4 at 10:00 a.m. and wrapped up on September 6 at 2:00 a.m., taking only four breaks. His marathon play session was observed by observers and has earned its place in the Guinness Book, surpassing the previous record of playing GTAIV for 28 hours and 1 minute.

So now the Indians are better than us at science, engineering, wireless router tech support, and sitting around on their asses playing GTA? I weep for America's future, Glenn Beck-style.

This just in: we're winning the culture war

I didn't get much of a chance to read up on the blogosphere today, but I noticed that several of the writers I read commented in amazement at the Washington Post's decision to publish an editorial by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, entitled "America's Secular Saboteurs." These bloggers quite accurately pointed out that the content of this piece is unhinged and naked bigotry, and argued that its publication reflects extremely poorly on the Post's editorial standards. The truth is quite the contrary. The Post has done a great public service in giving this column such a prominent platform, as it ably illustrates the desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of religious conservatism in 2009. It would take far too much time to point out every instance of ignorance and historical contradiction in Donohue's piece (read it yourself and they'll likely jump right out at you), so I'll only address what I see as the highlights. The editorial's first paragraph:

"There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; elements in the Democratic party demonstrate an animus against Catholicism; and secular-minded malcontents within Catholicism and Protestantism seek to sabotage their religion from the inside."

The standard practice in this type of writing is to identify your ideological opponents as a marginalized but devious band of schemers seeking to deceive the larger body of honest citizens into complicity in their agenda. By contrast, Donohue rattles off a laundry list of conspirators: educators, sex enthusiasts, artists, civil libertarians, the Democratic Party, and even unnamed fifth columnists within Christianity itself. Note that this 'paragraph' is actually only a single hysterical sentence. One can almost feel Donohue's paranoia rising with each successive semi-colon. Indeed, given the vagueness of his language, Donohue may well be including up to half of the U.S. population under his "cultural nihilist" rubric.

Shortly thereafter, Donohue pinpoints his villains' sinister logic:

"If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it."

The magnitude of ignorance displayed in Donohue's equation of Catholicism with the essence of American culture is nothing short of breathtaking. The heyday of American anti-Catholicism to date took place in the nativist movement of the mid-to-late 19th century, when Catholic immigrants began arriving en masse to United States from Europe. The reaction from the largely Protestant populace was to mount a campaign of violence and economic and social marginalization against Catholic immigrants for - you guessed it - their perceived lack of allegiance to American culture. (Feel free to watch Gangs of New York for a fictionalized primer on the religious politics of the era, but be sure to fast-forward through the scenes where Cameron Diaz has speaking roles). In fact, as recently as 1960 John F. Kennedy, still the only Catholic to hold the U.S. Presidency, had to take pains during his campaign to assure the electorate that he would not be beholden to Papal authority in making decisions as President. Beyond the typical religious-right "religion is the primary arbiter of culture" fallacy (which I'll return to later), it's nearly impossible to argue that American history and culture are synonymous with Catholicism without ignoring a great deal of salient historical facts.

Donohue later follows with this bit of revisionism:

"There was a time when Hollywood made reverential movies about Christianity. But those days are long gone. Now they just insult. And when someone finally makes a film that makes Christians proud, he is run out of town. Were it not for Mel Gibson, there would have been no "Passion of the Christ." But for every Harvey Weinstein who likes to bash Catholics, there is always someone else waiting in the wings to do the same."

Mel Gibson was not "run out" of any town for making The Passion of the Christ. Donohue conveniently neglects to mention the very public incident in which Gibson was caught driving while intoxicated and proceeded to sexually harass a female arresting officer, all the while spewing the kind of rank anti-Semitic beliefs that he had so vigorously denied holding during the run-up to The Passion of the Christ's release. Isn't it interesting, in this context, that Donohue prefers to pin Gibson's downfall on the likes of Harvey Weinstein (what kind of last name is that, anyway?)

"The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State harbor an agenda to smash the last vestiges of Christianity in America. Lying about their real motives, they say their fidelity is to the Constitution. But there is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions the censorship of religious speech. From banning nativity scenes to punishing little kids for painting a picture of Jesus, the zealots give Fidel a good run for his money."

No. What Donohue and those who think like him fail to understand is that these groups and their supporters, with very few exceptions, have no designs on censoring private religious expression. Rather, they push back forcefully on the fiction that religious belief, in general or particular forms, is an intrinsic part of American society and should receive official sanction and support as such. Preventing public property and money from being employed to display a nativity scene or a statue of the Ten Commandments is not religious censorship and is no way equivalent to denying private citizens the right to do the same with their private property. Rather, it's a judicious assertion of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which remains deeply ingrained in American culture no matter how loudly the Donohues of the world disdain it.

"Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge. Indeed, practicing Catholics are no longer welcome in leadership roles in the Party: the contempt that pro-life Catholics experience is palpable. The fact that Catholics for Choice, a notoriously anti-Catholic front group funded by the Ford Foundation, has a close relationship with the Democrats says it all."

I'm sure that the gay activist overlords of the Democratic Party are quite pleased with President Obama's speedy and bold moves to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act and the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. More fascinating is the rapid sequence of assertions that (1) the Democratic Party does not welcome "practicing Catholics" (2) there exists a group called Catholics for Choice, which in fact has a close relationship with the party, and (3) Catholics for Choice is "notoriously anti-Catholic." The message here is fairly obvious: personal religious belief and identification mean nothing when it comes to determining whether or not a person "counts" as a Catholic, while toeing the Church's anti-abortion hardline means everything.

Donohue concludes with this gem:

"The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels."

Let's leave aside the more explicitly disturbing connotations of asymmetrical breeding as a strategy to achieve cultural and political goals for the time being and focus on the real implications of what Donohue is saying here. In a single sentence, he's managed to neatly encapsulate his view that children are little more than empty vessels to be indoctrinated with an unaltered version of their parent's religious, cultural, and political beliefs, for the purposes of continued engagement of a vaguely defined and ever-changing enemy on a metaphorical field of battle. It is inconceivable to Donohue that, absent some nefarious outside influence, children raised in a conservative religious family could grow up to become atheists, homosexuals, members of Catholics for Choice, or any other of the myriad means of "deviancy" that populate his worldview. To him, these are not their choices to make. They are to be made for them by authority; specifically, by a glorious singularity of parental power and religious dictate.

Bill Donohue is a grubbing fascist with not one shred of respect for the United States of America's rich and dynamic culture of individualism, mutual tolerance, and democracy. He makes no secret of his profound contempt for American citizens who fail to reflect in full his personal prejudices. All of this is abundantly clear in every sentence of his idiotic and vile editorial. We are fortunate to live in a time where this can be made clear, and even more fortunate that Donohue himself has chosen to discredit himself so thoroughly and nakedly on the public stage. It's clear that Donohue imagines himself to be a holy warrior leading a vast army of the devout to a divinely ordained victory. His writing reveals him to be little more than a cheap dictator huddled in a bunker, cursing the names of imagined conspirators under his breath, while promising his dwindling camarilla a glorious triumph in a war that he has already lost.

Why you shouldn't buy an e-book reader

Hot on the heels of the success of the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble announced the impeding release of a competing e-book machine called the Nook. Despite the terminally retarded name (couldn't they have named it FantastoBook or something? Grow a fucking pair, gadget marketers!) it actually sounds pretty cool.

There's still no way in hell I'd buy one, though. Consider this: the major social benefit to book reading in our modern age is the ability to lord it over people who either (a) don't read or (b) spend most of their time reading bullshit young adult fiction. The corollary to this is the ability to arrive at a rough estimation of a person's intellect by the size and content of their bookshelf or show off your brilliance through the size and content of your own. That's why I have a handful of antiquated books on psychotherapy that I didn't pay for and have no intention of reading, yet keep in plain view in my apartment. The whole point of books in this day and age is that they're retrograde and inefficient. A healthy book collection is the perfect complement to your useless liberal arts degree.

The e-book reader fucks all that up. First off, you can't tell what other people are reading on it and nobody can tell what you're reading, effectively ending the time-honored social ritual of reading a book in public to make yourself look smarter. Also lost is the ability to sneer at another person for reading Deepak Chopra or one of those "inspirational" books where a retired pro-football coach tortures personal anecdotes into dubious metaphors for achieving success in business. Worse, the Kindle/Nook ruins the convenient more books = smarter person shorthand by being the same size whether you have one book or a couple thousand. Consider: despite the fact that everyone now owns an iPod or comparable MP3 player, all of which can hold a couple thousand songs at a minimum, the average number of songs kept on such devices is somewhere in the 300s. All most people do is copy the 15 or so greatest-hits albums they own over to their MP3 player and call it a day. Similarly, I bet most people who get an e-book reader once the market expands more mainstream will probably buy the Twilight books and maybe one or two other things and just read those over and over again, and no one will ever be the wiser.

In conclusion, buying an e-book reader forfeits a great deal of the educated American's established avenues of pretentiousness. With the economy being the way it is today, that's a price we can't afford to pay. It's bad enough that HBO had to make it to where we can't look down on people for enjoying television anymore. Now we're gonna turn reading books into the functional equivalent of browsing sports scores on a BlackBerry?

Proof of my greatness: part one

Andrew Sullivan linked to a blog post tonight by some libertarian blogger named Peter Suderman pondering whether or not video games are supplanting B-movies. This caught my attention primarily because I wrote a blog post a little over two years ago making essentially the same argument on the eve of the release of Halo 3. I doubt that Peter Suderman was copying me, seeing as the post was on my friends-only MySpace page (mind you, I was writing back in the heady days of 2007, before it was scientifically proven that using MySpace marks you permanently as a member of the urban poor) but still, chalk me up as being ahead of the curve. Adding to my greatness, I also predicted in this post that The Dark Knight was going to be good, that Halo 3 was going to be better than any of the bullshit blockbuster movies of summer 2007, and that I'd never wind up seeing the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. All of which came true! The entire post is re-printed below so you can bask in my reflected glory.

The hype around the release of Halo 3 this week generally says that the game stands a good chance of bringing in more money on the day of its release than any entertainment event, ever. Traditionally, of course, big-money openings are the province of blockbuster action movies, with the current champ being this year's god-awful Spider-Man 3. The comparison poses an interesting question: namely, how long is it going to be before big mindless summer blockbuster action movies are rendered irrelevant by video games? My line of reasoning is this: of all the action films I saw this summer, the only one that strikes me as particularly notable is Live Free or Die Hard, and that's mostly because I expected it to suck and it didn't. I saw Transformers, but I can't remember a goddamn thing that actually happened in it. Obviously, the less said about Spider-Man 3, the better. In fact, pretty much the only one I didn't see was Pirates of the Caribbean Go To China or whatever it was called, which I decided to skip when I found out it was like 3 hours long. Clearly, I haven't played Halo 3 yet, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that it's going to be a lot better than any of those movies. With the level of production value and interactivity that games offer in the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 era, at some point, we have to ask ourselves what the point of watching some CGI robot blow shit up is when you can do it yourself from the comfort of your own home? Obviously, action movies will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, given the fact that box office takes are still rising and I still hear a lot of people talk about how they can't handle the amount of buttons on modern video game controllers. But you have to wonder how long that's going to last given the fact that by this point, the bottom half of the crucial 18-25 demographic came of age in the Playstation 2 era, and more and more of the types of people who might not have played many video games in past generations (read: girls) are getting into the hobby. My guess is that summer event movies will survive the transition, but they're going to have to step their game up a peg by emphasizing the elements that film does better than video games, like story and performance (I'm crossing my fingers for The Dark Knight to represent the critical step in this direction), because they aren't going to be able to compete much longer in terms of sheer visceral experience.

Where The Wild Things Are review and thoughts on children's movies

Spike Jonze's film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are is a masterpiece. The cinematography and art direction create visually stunning tableaus throughout the entire running time. The script is an evocative and nakedly emotional exploration of childhood. Max Records, the child actor who plays the main character Max, is note-perfect. The Wild Things, voiced to perfection by a variety of well-regarded actors and actresses, are completely convincing as characters and never come across as whiz-bang special effects despite the obvious technical virtuosity involved in their creation. The movie steadfastly avoids pat moralizing and tiresome postmodern wink-and-nudge reference smuggling. To sum, it's difficult to summarize Where The Wild Things Are as being anything besides a complete artistic triumph.

So why the hell do I feel so uneasy about it?

Where The Wild Things Are is an adaptation of one of the most famous children's books of all time. Presumably, it's very faithful to the source material. Re-reading children's books hasn't been a high priority of mine in my adult life, and I don't have any kids of my own, so my memory of the book outside of the more iconic images from it are a little hazy. However, it's been loudly praised by author Maurice Sendak, who served as a producer on the movie, and the quality of the production marks it generally as a far cry from the corpse-fucking live action Dr. Seuss movies from the beginning of the decade. Despite all that faithfulness and care, Where The Wild Things Are isn't a children's movie. It's a movie targeted largely, though by no means exclusively, to millenial hipster types. In some ways, it's probably the crowning achievement to date of that culture and ethos, partly because of the sheer breadth and wattage of the creators - Spike Jonze! Dave Eggers! Karen O! - but mostly because of how it zeroes in on the tension between childhood fantasy and adult emotional complexity that undergirds so much of the hipster zeitgeist.

But, unlike the book, it's not made for kids, and it's got nothing to do with the content of the film itself, which is straight down the middle PG stuff. I think that the real crux of the issue has to do with the inherent difference between books and movies as media. Children's books are mainly designed to give young kids a visually oriented story that they can, ideally, read with their parents. It's supposed to be a tactile experience, where the kid can go at his or her own pace, looking at the pictures, sounding out the words, and asking mom or dad about what's going to happen next before turning the page to find out. The whole process takes a half-hour, forty-five minutes tops. In contrast, watching a movie, especially in the theater, is a passive experience. The kid sits in the dark and watches things happen until the movie's over and then he or she can talk about it, because while it's going on, any talk will fetch a quick reprimand and annoyed looks from the nearby people in the audience. Even a short movie requires sustaining this for an hour and a half.

As a result, most kids movies are designed to give repeated manic bursts of attention-grabbing fun. This is a large contributor to why most kids movies are so unbearable to anybody over the age of 12. Take, for instance, the trailer for the upcoming Jackie Chan movie The Spy Next Door, which played before my showing of Where The Wild Things Are:


Looks terrible, right? The Spy Next Door, as near as I can tell, has the exact same plot as Vin Diesel's 2005 movie The Pacifier, which in turn had the exact same plot at Hulk Hogan's 1993 movie Mr. Nanny. There's probably three or four more identical movies in between those two that I'm just not aware of. The reason that Hollywood gets away with this is that the target audience is (a) not old enough to be cognizant of the fact that an identical movie was made just four years ago and (b) more concerned with high-spirited action and fun than plot, character, and originality.

That's not to say that ALL kids movie lack those things, of course. Pixar's entire output, and corresponding boffo box office numbers, are more than enough proof that kids can appreciate heartfelt characters and a well-crafted and resonant story. The thing of it is, though, is that Pixar's movies and other "quality" kids movies provide plot and heart without skimping on a generous dose of the action and funny antics that are the perpetual hallmarks of the form.

Where The Wild Things Are doesn't really have much of that. That's a credit to it as an artistic and thematic work; the film would have been a total abortion if it were reworked to include a wacky sidekick and an extended chase scene. Be honest, though: if you were 8 years old again, would you rather see a movie about a kung-fu expert, a sassy Average American family, and the dad from Hannah Montana, or one about a bunch of monsters sitting around in a forest talking about their feelings? Because the latter is literally the plot of Where The Wild Things Are.

I could be wrong about this. Despite the bluster of the preceding paragraphs, I don't really know that much about kids. Maybe they'll absolutely flip their shit for an allegorical psychodrama about childhood. Maybe they'll just groove on the cool creatures and pretty pictures and wind up liking it. In that case, hey, problem solved (more accurately, problem non-existent). I certainly think that Where The Wild Things Are will provide a hands-down more rewarding experience over the course of growing up than any one of the dozens of DreamWorks CGI movies produced each year. I'm seriously considering seeing it again just to enjoy the experience without wondering what the kids in the audience think about it in the back of my mind the whole time (after all, why should I give a shit?). But my gut tells me that Where The Wild Things Are is going to go over a lot of little heads. And wouldn't it be ironic if thousands of kids were to be bored to tears by one of cinema's greatest depictions of being a misunderstood child?

Paranormal Activity review

Having sold $7 million in tickets over the weekend despite playing in only 160 theaters, Paranormal Activity is already a huge hit. It's already received a good deal of mythologizing news coverage, and thanks to a grassroots Internet campaign where people cast votes to bring the movie to their city, is probably ingrained enough in the mass consciousness now to get a wide release in the next couple of weeks. Paranormal Activity tells the story of Katie and Micah, a young couple played by two unknown actors named Katie and Micah, who begin video-recording their home life in the hopes of capturing the supernatural events that have been happening to them at night and have seemingly followed Katie around for her entire life. The onscreen action unfolds entirely from the point of view of the couple's camera, and Katie and Micah are the only significant characters who appear onscreen, with the exception of a "ghost expert" who only appears briefly. The film's naturalistic camera work, sound design, and judiciously paced scare moments ramp up the sense of tension throughout, focusing particularly on the characters' growing unease with their surroundings.

Let's stop a minute and acknowledge that the details of Paranormal Activity, from the style right down to the marketing, are extremely reminiscent of 1999's mega-hit The Blair Witch Project. And indeed, I think that your feelings about The Blair Witch Project will probably prove to be the best predictor of how you'll respond to Paranormal Activity, at least in terms of how scary you'll find it to be. I know people who were genuinely frightened by The Blair Witch Project, but to me it came off like an hour and a half of rustling leaf sounds and vaguely spooky stick men capped off with a two-and-a-half second death scene. Similarly, I could tell that a lot of people in the theater watching Paranormal Activity with me (a surprisingly big crowd, given that I went to an 11:15 AM showing) were really scared, but the movie never really rose to that level for me. Even though it builds tension effectively, and has some very creepy moments, I wasn't ever really able to make the mental leap from "door closing unexpectedly" to "abject terror." I think that's more of a reflection of what I find scary than the an indictment of craft on display in Paranormal Activity, and I expect that my opinion of this aspect of the film will be in the minority.

Unlike The Blair Witch Project, however, Paranormal Activity has other virtues beside scare value. First of all, it really nails the intended naturalistic feeling, particularly in the acting. Katie and Micah are among the most believable couples I've seen in a modern film. Katie Featherston's performance is particularly phenomenal, in how her work never feels like she's playing a character in a film. I found myself liking both Katie and Micah quite a bit, which is a positive contrast to how I felt about the main characters in both Blair Witch and Cloverfield. Also, the plot smartly makes the issue of the camera a way of exposing the dynamic between the two main characters; Micah insists on it over Katie's objections and takes a flippantly combative tone toward the haunting that's completely discordant with Katie's emotional turmoil. As the film progresses, their different approaches to the issue increasingly drive a wedge between them.

On a certain level, Paranormal Activity almost plays like an art-house breakup drama with a ghost story in the background. Even thought it's reasonably clear that this was part of the intent, I wish the creators of the film had played up these elements even more. In particular, there's a kinda-foreshadowed plot development in the last five minutes of the film that could have easily been introduced earlier in the third act, which in turn might have opened up more of an arc for Micah's character (I may expand on this more in a post in a couple of weeks once the movie goes wide, so as not to spoil it - watching Paranormal Activity really made me reflect on what I find scary in movies). It's a bit of a nitpicking criticism, but I think that if Paranormal Activity did as good a job of resolving the haunting/relationship trouble parallel as it did setting it up, it'd have a shot at being a real classic. As it stands, it's a very well-crafted horror film that's worth getting excited over. Don't succumb to the coming hype about it being the scariest movie ever made (or the inevitable coming backlash against its overexposure, for that matter) because it isn't. It is, however, a worthwhile movie that's probably best experienced on the big screen with a large audience, and if you think you're interested, I'd suggest that you get together with some friends and go as soon as it opens near you. If nothing else, it'll make for a hell of a fantastic alternative to Saw VI.

Leave General McChrystal alone!

The political chatter of the week is quickly coalescing around U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, who last week publicly stated his support for a large troop increase in the war in Afghanistan and his belief that a more narrow approach that does not revolve around ensuring political stability, as has apparently been advocated by the Vice President's office, will not be effective in securing the U.S.'s strategic interests in the region. Much of the published opinion has been critical of McChrystal, with at least one commentator going so far as to dub it a "plain violation of the principle of civilian control." The idea, it seems, is that McChrystal is trying to force Obama's hand into giving him what he wants through press leaks and public pronouncements.

I'm skeptical. McChrystal's job isn't to avoid having a professional opinion on the conduct of the military operation that he is in charge of overseeing, and he isn't required to refrain from sharing his professional opinion with others, except, I suppose, in cases where it would threaten the operational security of his stated mission. Rather, McChrystal's job is to obey the orders of the commander-in-chief, Barack Obama. As far as I can tell, he hasn't disobeyed an executive order or even communicated an intent to do so. All he's done is state a tactical preference based on his analysis of the situation. If Obama doesn't like how he's behaving, he's free to relieve him of his command, as presidents have frequently done to military generals throughout U.S. history.

Yes, McChrystal's comments go against the grain of chain-of-command protocol as it's typically understood, and yes, it's hardly good decorum to put your boss on the spot. But, as is so often the case, what's bad for discipline and protocol is good for American democracy. Lest we forget, American men and women are currently on Afghan soil putting their lives at stake in this conflict, with the potential of more joining them depending on the decisions made. Let's also remember former General Eric Shinseki, who Donald Rumsfeld threw under the bus in the George W. Bush days for having the sheer balls to suggest that the U.S. bring enough ground troops into the invasion of Iraq to maintain order in the country. The American people didn't get the benefit of the full debate then. I'm not about to argue that they should be denied it now.

All this isn't to say that Obama has to take McChrystal's advice. There's no telling whether or not he's even right about Afghanistan. After all, if the Iraqi people had greeted the U.S. invasion with party hats and kazoos, like Bill Kristol promised, and begun throwing Sunni/Shiite get-to-know-you block parties as soon as that statue of Saddam hit the concrete, no one outside of a few military historians would even know who Eric Shinseki is right now. Obama's the President, and the decision is his alone to make based on the facts and strategic objectives as he sees them. Does he expose himself to more potential criticism because of McChrystal's statements? You bet. But that's the burden of leadership.

I'm a strong Obama supporter, and I genuinely don't know what the best course of action in Afghanistan is at this juncture. I trust him to weigh the alternatives and make an appropriate choice. But I also expect him to be open and accountable to the American people about the reasoning behind that decision, and having this discussion take place in the public sphere will only serve to motivate that transparency. Obama's supporters don't owe him any protection from the political risk that tough decisions entail. We'd be better served by advocating our own views and values, whatever they may be, in hopes of having our own influence on the outcome (advocates of full withdrawal are probably in for lean times on this front).

And if things don't go well, maybe in 2012 we'll wind up with President Mitt Romney, aka the only American executive to preside over a government that's both legalized gay marriage and mandated universal healthcare.

Halo 3: ODST review

It's on some level kind of pointless to review a new Halo game, and not only because every release in the series is destined to rack up huge sales figures regardless of critical reception. Rather, it's because the fundamental gameplay experience of playing a Halo game hasn't really changed since the first game came out in 2001. This is coming from an ardent fan of the series, someone who practically minored in the original Halo for the Xbox in undergrad. Believe it or not, we played that shit for two solid years in two-player splitscreen deathmatch mode. A deathmatch with two players is the first-person shooter equivalent of hitting a half-deflated volleyball against a basement wall and trying to hit it again before the second bounce, but who gives a fuck? Halo is just that much fun to play, and it's pretty well stayed that way. Yeah, Bungie has added a bunch of new guns, prettied up the graphics, and increased the sense of scale, but the only real earth-shaking change the series has seen is the addition of online multiplayer, which came about five years ago with Halo 2. At this point, you either know whether or not you'll like a Halo game, or you haven't ever played one.

For a series that seen so little substantive iteration in its core mechanics, the campaign mode in Halo 3: ODST is clearly geared as a throwback to the original Halo: Combat Evolved. You have to worry about finding healthpacks again, they've brought back a variant of the fan-favorite scoped pistol, and you can't dual-wield weapons anymore. They've also removed the vehicle-jacking mechanic, although you can still jump on a tank and throw a grenade in the engine to blow it up. Ostensibly, this is because you're playing as an ODST, a different and less powerful type of elite space marine from the main series' part-cyborg Master Chief. However, in the classic style of not fixing what isn't broken, there's not a great deal of functional difference in how these changes cause you to, except for making cover a bit more important in gunfights.

I was hoping that ODST would be a bit more narratively focused than the other Halo entries, as I think the Halo mythos is actually fairly compelling for a video game (I know), but it really isn't. ODST does feature the voice talents of several actors from the late, lamented Firefly TV show, which is probably a treat for people who care about that sort of thing (i.e., not me). There are some new-to-Halo bits grafted on in ODST, such as the vaguely non-linear gameplay in the New Mombasa overworld that forms the bridging device for the story segments and the discoverable audio logs in the vein of Dead Space/Bioshock/Batman: Arkham Asylum that tell the story of a young woman attempting to escape the city. Probably the best addition is the night-vision goggles, which are used extensively in the free roaming city bits; in most games, "enhanced vision" modes are very useful in gameplay but ruin the art design (Arkham Asylum is a particularly egregious offender in this area), but in ODST the effect is slick and more subtle.

I have a feeling that the relative brevity of the campaign in ODST might be a sticking point for some; it's probably only about seven hours of gameplay all told. I'd recommend that you play it in short bursts of an hour or so at a time, which is much easier to do because the missions are shorter than Halo 3's. Additionally, play it on at least 'Heroic' difficulty, which makes it more challenging and more fun; as with Halo 2 and Halo 3, the easier modes remove a lot of the flavor from the game.

ODST comes with two major multiplayer modes to supplement the campaign. The first, which comes on a bonus disc, is essentially the entire multiplayer portion of Halo 3 with all of the for-pay downloadable maps, which is a stupendous deal if you didn't already pay for Halo 3 and all its downloadable maps (yes, and no, in my case) and you can tolerate the odd cocktail of joy and frustration that is Halo 3 competitive multiplayer. By the latter, I mean that Halo 3 is an amazingly well crafted multiplayer game that's unfortunately suffused with homophobic 14-year olds with godlike deathmatch skills.

The second multiplayer mode, which is new entirely to ODST, is dubbed Firefight, and is essentially Gears of War 2's Horde mode. For those unfamiliar, the conceit is that teams of up to four players attempt to survive increasingly difficult waves of computer-controlled bad guys, with points assigned and tracked for each kill. I haven't actually played Firefight with other people yet, but I have jumped on solo a couple of times "just to see what it's like" and found myself playing for a half-hour plus each time. It's Halo distilled to its pure essence, and is therefore fun. Firefight seems to have more of an emphasis on point scoring than in Gears, with various multipliers being assigned for kill streaks and particular kinds of kills rather than the fixed point values in Horde mode. Satisfyingly, the point total for each kill pops up in the middle of the screen with a plus sign, Call of Duty 4 style. There's also more of a focus on resource management, with a limited pool of lives for players and only four healthpacks and a handful of weapons available (respawning every ten waves or so). I haven't delved too deeply into it yet, but my extensive experience with Gears of War 2 tells me that Firefight alone is probably worth the retail price of ODST, as it combines the fun of single-player Halo and the open-endedness of multiplayer Halo without the annoyances of competing against junior-high idiots. I'm pleased by the recent trend toward cooperative online gameplay this generation; Halo's always been a torch-bearer in this regard, and with Firefight poised to echo the popularity of Gears 2's Horde, I think that this type of gameplay mode is going to quickly become de rigueur in blockbuster shooters going forward. I've been toying with the idea of doing a blog-tribute to Horde mode. I may hold off until I have some more Firefight experience under my belt and expand that out into a general summation of why this type of multiplayer is such a good idea. In the meantime, if you buy ODST, hit me up on Xbox Live for a game!

Man has always loved his buildings. But what happens when the buildings say: no more?

A preview scene from 2012, Roland Emmerich's latest salvo in his Sisyphean career-long effort to digitally destroy every recognizable physical manifestation of human culture at least twice. It features John Cusack, the guy who played Scott Templeton in season 5 of The Wire, and a truly admirable disrespect for the laws of physics and the mechanical capabilities of limousines.



I think this about sums it up:

Zombieland review

Zombieland is the best kind of B-movie: the kind that knows full well that it's a B-movie. Pretty much everything about this flick exudes a big-hearted "slapped together for maximum fun" quality, right down to the casting of Jesse "Michael Cera was busy" Eisenberg and Woody "Matthew McConaughey was too expensive" Harrelson in the lead roles. And damned if Zombieland doesn't pull it off by making all the right choices: keeping the running time down to a drum-tight 80 minutes, keeping the non-zombie members of the cast down to the four leads and one priceless cameo (way too good to spoil here), not overselling the romantic subplot or lingering on the "dramatic" moments. Despite the shot I took at Eisenberg and Harrelson not two sentences ago, they do have a great dynamic here, and Woody in particular is obviously having the time of his life spewing one-liners as the badass killing machine Tallahassee (the characters are all named after their home cities because proper names would invite emotional bonding, a Zombieland no-no).

Probably the most impressive thing about Zombieland is it manages to be clever and fun despite the fact that zombies have basically been done to death cinematically. Zombieland actually doesn't even bother with the traditional horror elements of zombie cinema; it goes straight for action-comedy, milking the lead characters bonding under duress to sustain the narrative. This, of course, puts it in dangerous territory by inviting comparison to Edgar Wright's modern classic Shaun of the Dead, but that's really not what Zombieland is going for tonally and I didn't find myself making that mental comparison while watching it. Instead, Zombieland plays like a loose mash-up of the road-trip genre, Evil Dead 2, and Dead Rising, the great Xbox 360 game from 2006. Most of Zombieland's best moments come directly out of that playful spirit, like the awesome credit sequence (hyper slow-motion scenes from the zombie apocalypse soundtracked to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls") and the running gag of superimposing Jessie Eisenberg's neurotic character's rules for zombie survival on the screen at relevant moments.

Zombieland isn't going to rewrite the rules of genre movies, and it probably won't become a midnight movie classic (although it very well might), but it's so much fun that it's an easy recommendation. This is the type of movie best seen with a raucous audience in a crowded theater; the type you'll probably watch all the way through without really even intending to if you catch the opening of it when flipping through cable channels in a couple years. It'll put a smile on your face, and that's not an accomplishment to be taken lightly.

Also not an accomplishment to be taken lightly, the trailer for Legion, which played before Zombieland, made me think that I owe the makers of Law Abiding Citizen an apology.