Reading The Shallows as an ebook

As big a fan as I am of technology in general, I've had a skepticism of ebooks for quite some time. In some ways, this is clearly an irrational prejudice, since the vast, vast majority of the reading for pleasure I do takes place online in the form of news, blogs, and the like; and probably 75% of the academic-related reading I've done in the past 3 years or so has been in the form of PDF copies of articles. So it's safe to say that I don't have any inherent problem with reading off of a screen, but the idea of reading an entire book that way has never really sat comfortably with me. Although I don't read nearly as many books as I used to, the act of reading was a very substantial part of my childhood, and I have a pretty particular mental script for what the act of reading is like. Also, and this is not a small consideration, a big part of the enduring appeal of books is the ability to display them and/or loan them out. I feel the same way about DVDs (or Blu-Rays, if you will) - having a tangible collection has a way of transcending the category of "stuff" to become a reflection on your own character. It's possible and perhaps likely that my mind will change on this subject sooner or later. After all, I've pretty much accepted the idea that the digital file is the medium uber alles for music consumption.

Anyhow, despite my mistrust of ebooks, there is a lot of stuff that I'd like to read at a reduced cost and that I don't necessarily want to forever occupy volume alongside the rest of my worldly possessions. Case in point: The Shallows, Nick Carr's book-length expansion of his Atlantic essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", which I probably wouldn't consider paying hardcover retail for, but when I saw it on the Amazon Kindle store for 11 bucks, I figured I'd give it a go. Reading a cautionary polemic about technology in a digital format on a device designed expressly to promote all manners of networked consumption (my iPad, about which I may write more on a later date) had an appealing irony about it and seemed like a good test case for the ebook experience.

About both the book and the experience I can say this - good, but not great. The Shallows raises some good cautionary and exploratory points about the effects of the Internet on our attention spans and standards for intellectual engagement, but it suffers from the increasingly irritating problem of ignoring the commendable but modest explanatory achievements of the field of neuroscience in favor of the considerably sexier achievements that neuroscientists are perpetually saying they're about to make. I guess the subtitle "What the Internet Could Possibly, But May or May Not Be Doing To Our Brains" wouldn't have tested well. Also, there's a couple chapters about the history of reading technology that are perfectly serviceable but come across as kind of padding; I felt like Carr's thesis statement was strong enough and interesting enough to support an entire book without the extensive context that he builds in.

As far as the format goes, I went back and forth about how I felt about it, and I think that the duration of my reading sessions made a substantial difference in the experience. When I would spend 30-45 minutes reading, it felt pretty much like I was reading a book and I could mostly forget that it was all digital. When I spent 10-20 minutes reading, it felt quite a bit more like I had just begun reading a short article online, which was a bit strange to me. With a regular book, I'm usually able to pick up where I left off and get back into the text without much difficulty. On the iPad, it seemed to take longer to mentally re-establish the context of what I was reading when I left off. This is no doubt due to the fact that I've taken to doing a substantial portion of my Internet browsing on the iPad, which is similar in form to reading a book but very different in terms of duration of attention (as discussed capably by Carr in the book), so it may be a matter of rewiring that expectancy.

Another thing that bothered my more than I thought it would - there's no page numbers on an ebook, at least not in the format that they're vended in the Kindle store. This threw me because I'm used to PDF files, which are usually digitized versions of a paper proof, complete with page numbers and everything else the physical copy has. In the Kindle book, there's just a progress bar and an indicator of what "section" you're currently in. I get that page numbers aren't workable in a format where you can increase or decrease the size and number of words on the viewable portion of the page, but I'm used to regulating my reading by page numbers. Without them, and without the physical heft of the book, I had a tough time telling how far I was into the text, and I was kind of surprised when I finished - based on the progress bar, I figured I had another chapter to go (there's an extensive amount of footnotes, but on a digital copy, you're less prone to flip to the back end than you would be in an actual book).

Overall, I'd say that the ebook certainly has its place; it's sort of a thrill to pay ten bucks and be reading a full length book without getting off the couch. I enjoyed reading The Shallows despite some of the strangeness, and I wouldn't mind downloading another book to read in the same fashion - in fact, I wish I had one to read before bed tonight. I could see the Kindle store becoming a go-to source of impulse purchases, which is OK - very few of the Kindle books I've seen are that expensive, and risk taking with books is something that often pays good dividends. However, I don't see myself buying digital versions of things that I'm particularly excited to read and certainly not professional materials, at least not yet.

A Few Words About Halo: Reach

Above: Me, earlier this evening, pulling off one of the sweet new Assassination moves on some guy online.

Halo: Reach has been out for almost exactly two months, a modest span of time in which I have managed to devote comfortably over 100 hours to playing it. Yes, really. I'm stating that from the outset not to brag about the fact that some 4 and an half days of my life, which might have been applied toward any manner of personal or professional advancement in a not inconsiderably critical developmental period, have instead been spent in front of the 360, but rather to establish that Halo: Reach is a really good game. I had an inkling of this going in, from my experience with the multiplayer beta (chronicled here), but the extent to which Reach has become a staple of my nights poses an interesting question: why the hell do I still care about Halo?

After all, it's not incredibly different from the four Halo games that preceded it; there's a lot of tweaks, fine-tuning, and loving care put into the game, but that all really adds up to more of a refinement of the hallmarks of the franchise than any sort of reinvention. If anything, Reach deliberately sets out to evoke the first Halo and strips away quite a few of the added features of the sequels. It works brilliantly, even when it really shouldn't.

Here's why: as a franchise, Halo understands that video games as a form live and die by their controls. After you've played a Halo game for a few hours, the controls are about as natural as breathing; and moving to the latest incarnation rarely requires you to learn more than one or two new changes, which are characteristically more intuitive that what they are replacing. (Incidentally, the decision to break with tradition by remapping the melee button from B to right bumper in Reach was a stroke of genius that almost reinvents the game). When you're playing Halo, everything you could possibly want or need to do - shoot, toss a grenade, jump, pistol-whip, etc. - is a single button-press away. The ridiculous number of effective techniques and attack options underneath the essential simplicity of the control scheme means that you start to develop a personal style pretty quickly, which you are rarely punished for doing. Even hardcore skilled multiplayer Halo junkies vary widely in their favored tactics; there's not a whole lot of unfair advantages to be had.

In all the hours I've spent playing Reach and it's predecessors, I've never felt like there was one right way to play the game. The experience of playing Halo has always struck me as similar to a giant sandbox with a bunch of different toys that are all somehow fun in their own way; there's just this sort of tactile friendliness to the game that encourages that sort of engagement. Halo: Reach is the apex of the series because it takes the Halo mechanics and lets them be the endlessly reconfigurable Rubik's Cube they always were: out of the box, you can choose to play the excellent single-player campaign alone or with friends, you can go online and play any one of a slew of competitive game-types, you can team up with other people in the Firefight mode, which throws waves of enemies at you and grafts on an arcade-style scoring mode, or you can come up with something completely unique using the Forge editor that comes with the game.

I think that more than anything else, Halo: Reach succeeds so wildly as a game because it invites you to have the experience that you want to have (as long as that experience involves shooting things, naturally, but if that's not your cup of tea, there's always reading). Since I've been playing it, it's been hard for me to really contemplate switching to another game; I may eventually pick up Call of Duty: Black Ops since it's getting good reviews, and there's those neat-looking Borderlands and Red Dead Redemption expansions, but I think it's going to take some time before Reach gets its hooks out of me.

Today In Bullshit

Probably the biggest downside to having professional training in psychology is learning to cope with the cringe response as mainstream news and opinion types contort the discipline in idiotic ways to support arguments that mostly aren't worth making. A sterling example of this is an article published today on Slate as part of an ongoing series on "how your unconscious mind shapes you" that attempts to explain today's heated political climate by comparing the collective partisanships of the left and right to a married couple seeking counseling. The author, Shankar Vedantam, draws on research on predictors of marital conflict and dissatisfaction (conducted by John Gottman, the biggest name in the marital therapy field) to enlighten us on the fact that the "right" is expressing anger toward the "left" while the "left" is expressing contempt toward the "right," which by the way, is provably more toxic to the health of a marriage, and therefore worse for society by the logic of Vedantam's incredibly tortured analogy.

The first point to make here is one that's so obvious that Vendantam acknowledges it himself in the second to last paragraph of his article: opposing political persuasions are nothing like a marriage. The point of marriages are to help facilitate bonds of love and support between partners, which can be threatened by an excess of disagreement and dispute. Politics is about disagreement and dispute. If it wasn't, there'd be no need for multiple political points of view.

I suppose Vedantam might make the argument that our political discourse today is uniquely marked by anger on one side and contempt on the other, and that the emotional tone is baked in unconsciously to one's political leanings (this may be the point that he's making in the article, but it's difficult to tell because it's such an incoherent piece of work). That doesn't wash, though, because political tone, like everything else in politics, varies dramatically based on who's in power and who's out of it. Think back to the bygone days of the 2004 election, when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches. At that time, the Democratic base was at the peak of a nearly decade-long angry fist shake at George W. Bush. Meanwhile, the Republican base was sneering at John Kerry for having the sheer balls to be a decorated Vietnam veteran. Do those emotions sound familiar?

The thing that really gets me about this article is that it pulls the old trick of analyzing our "political discourse" without actually much, if any, reference to those who hold political office. I suppose if your sample size for liberal thinking is a smattering of blogs and Keith Olbermann, you could make the argument that contempt for the right is a dominant emotion, but wouldn't it be a good idea to mention President Barack Obama, who ran on promises to pursue bipartisan compromise and has, with severely limited success, actually tried to do so? This "both sides are at fault" thinking has gotten almost comical in an age where Senate Republicans have filibustered close to a hundred bills in the past 20 months.

So, no, marriage counseling can't tell us anything about liberals and conservatives.

The Social Network review

As you may or may not have already heard, The Social Network is an enormous critical hit. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a movie that was so widely acclaimed, which is particularly impressive considering it's a feature length movie about motherfucking Facebook. It actually reminds me a bit of when Brokeback Mountain was announced and endured 15 months of gay cowboy snark before being rapturously received upon its actual release. Granted, Brokeback Mountain seems to have since had more of a shelf-life as a punchline, because making jokes about gay people never goes out of vogue, and maybe in five years no one will remember why everyone thought that a movie about Facebook was so great, but right now, it's a pretty big deal.

I saw The Social Network over the weekend. I liked it a lot, and I think it's a great movie. In the couple days since I saw it, though, I've been doing a lot of thinking about exactly why it's a great movie and I've found it pretty difficult to pinpoint. Part of the issue is that The Social Network is supposed to be a movie about the founding of Facebook, but it's not really primarily concerned with telling that story as a dramatic narrative. It's really more of a character piece that focuses tightly on Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. One of the most interesting things about the movie is the way it purposefully ignores depicting the larger context and effects of Facebook, even though the exploding popularity of the site is the major driver of the narrative. There's no montage of college students at their computers getting hooked into the Facebook phenomenon, or anything comparable to dramatize the network's broadening impact besides snatches of dialogue and other exchanges.

It's a smart decision, because no moviegoing audience in 2010 needs to be told that Facebook is a big deal. It also reflects the clear fact that nobody involved in the making of this movie gives two shits about Facebook. That's understandable, but where it really gets interesting is that The Social Network also doesn't seem to be terribly concerned with being about Mark Zuckerberg, insofar as Mark Zuckerberg is an actual human being, who actually exists, founded, and runs Facebook. Comparing The Social Network to Citizen Kane feels like somewhat of a cliche already, but thinking about The Social Network as something of a goof on the narrative structure of Kane is really the most useful framework I can conjure to discuss it. Both movies tell the story of the rise of wealthy men, but do so mainly through the perspectives of others. This latter fact isn't entirely obvious in The Social Network, mostly because Zuckerberg's character is alive and present during the telling of the story while C.F. Kane is dead, but it's clear that the framing device of The Social Network (two depositions regarding lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg) signals that the storytelling reflects the biases of the plaintiffs on key points, rather than objective reality. Basically, The Social Network has two main characters: "Mark Zuckerberg," an asshole computer genius who may or may not have screwed over other people on his way to creating a world-beating Internet company, and Mark Zuckerberg, an asshole computer genius who points out various flaws and inconsistencies about the story of the first character as it's being told.

The reason that I called The Social Network a goof on Citizen Kane's narrative is that while Kane  explores the flaws and complexity of its main character in an ultimately futile quest to arrive at a larger understanding of his identity, The Social Network doesn't really ask any questions about Mark Zuckerberg at all. Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg is a fascinating character to watch onscreen, but more because of his lack of complexity than because of the presence of it. The character can be essentially summarized by extremes of two traits: intelligence and self-absorption, and it's the latter that really seems to be of the most interest to the filmmakers. I think it's entirely fair to argue that The Social Network is about solipsism more than it's about anything else. The genius move is that the movie explores this by focusing entirely on the founder (s?) of Facebook while ignoring the users entirely. If Fincher and Sorkin explicitly said that social network addicts are disappearing up their own asses, The Social Network would probably have come off as reactionary bullshit. Instead, by weaving a creation myth by which Facebook was born out of a series of interlocking acts of self-absorption, they make the argument by proxy. The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg isn't really a person as much as he is an avatar of a perceived generational flaw. As arresting as the closing image of the film is, it struck me as more of a red herring than a character insight - I don't believe Fincher or Sorkin think they're explaining anything substantial with it; just like Charlie Kane's secrets weren't really unlocked by that sled. (It may be a similar added "fuck you" to the character's real-life counterpart, though: The Social Network is pretty blatantly drawing on shopworn computer geek stereotypes, and "Rosebud" was William Hearst's secret nickname for his mistress's vagina).

I realize that all of this was probably pretty incoherent if you haven't seen The Social Network yet, so here's a couple general sentiments about the movie itself: the acting is phenomenal, the composition and cinematography is stunning and doubly so considering it's an entirely dialog driven movie about computers, the score is great, and it features movie history's hands-down most convincing use to date of one actor playing both halves of a pair of twins. Go see it already.

official end of hiatus post

This blog has laid fallow for far longer than I would have liked. In my defense, I've been fairly preoccupied in the time since my last post: working out the logistics of a move from one of the country's least humid cities to one if its most humid, officially getting my doctorate, and then the actual moving process itself, which involved me putting in a 16 hour day behind the wheel of a Budget truck towing an extremely bulky car carrier. I probably could have still managed to write a post here or there, but that would have involved cutting back on my prodigious schedule of time wasting activities, and obviously that wasn't gonna happen.Now that I'm pretty settled in over here, though, I'll be posting more regularly. I'm trying to make it a goal to update this blog with more frequent, but less lengthy, posts. I'll probably fail at both those goals, so caveat emptor and all that.

However, by way of fighting the good fight, I wanted to discuss briefly the new Arcade Fire music video. It's actually only kind of a music video; it's billed as an "interactive film." The hook is that you enter the street address for your childhood home and it pulls Google Maps data to incorporate images of the street you lived on into the onscreen action. The whole thing is synced quite nicely with "We Used To Wait," one of the strongest tracks on Arcade Fire's pretty excellent new album The Suburbs, and will probably strike you either as a neat trick or a deeply evocative work of art, depending on your emotional response to the sight of places you formerly lived. Personally, I'm a bit more on the "neat trick" side of the fence - the piece's use of pop-up windows as a method of editing seems more innovative to me than its incorporation of Street View and GMaps pictures - but I can definitely see how it could be genuinely affecting. It's certainly worth four minutes of your time. I watched it with Chrome, as the site recommends, but according to the Onion AV Club, it works in Firefox as well as long as you have a release version that supports HTML5.

P.S.: This probably goes without saying, but you don't have to enter the address of your childhood home. Here's a version of the video that centers on a Captain D's down the road from where I went to high school.

Extra Lives book review

Extra Lives is the best writing about video games I've read. It's so good that I'm not even mad that it's only 200 pages long and about a quarter of that is slightly expanded versions of articles I've already read (his piece in the Guardian that I wrote a post about in March and his New Yorker article on Gears of War 2.) Partly, this is because the quality of Bissell's writing is head and shoulders above even the more talented games writers currently working, but mainly it's because he understands that subjectivity is the special sauce of video games. Extra Lives's subtitle is Why Video Games Matter, which makes it sound like some sort of polemic entry in the "games as art" debate, but it's actually a gaming autobiography of sorts. That's a risky approach - somebody telling you what playing video games is like for them isn't the most immediately compelling hook for long-form writing - but Bissell captures it beautifully and comes closer than anyone else yet has to capturing what the experience of playing video games is like.

In the first chapter of the book, Bissell relays an anecdote that hooked me completely. He writes about living overseas and finally getting his hands on a copy of Fallout 3 on Election Day 2008. Intending to try it out for an hour or so before tuning to the news coverage, he winds up playing for 7 hours and missing the returns and Obama's victory speech. This made me smile, because although I did watch the evening coverage in full with a group of jubilant friends, I spent the majority of that day (which I had off from the state mental health facility I was interning at) trying to finish Dead Space so I could give it back to a friend I had borrowed it from. I didn't quite do it - Dead Space is a lengthier game than it probably needed to be, and I had to keep it until the end of the week - but the modest perversion of focusing so intently on a video game at the culmination of a historic and consequential presidential election was something that struck me at the time, and I liked reading Bissell's version of the experience.

The smartest decision Bissell made in writing Extra Lives, focusing almost exclusively on contemporary games, is the one that will by his own admission almost certainly date the book quickly (it was just published last month). With one exception, all the games he writes about have been released in the past three years or so and are on the current generation of consoles. Part of my admiration for this decision almost certainly comes from the fact that every game he writes about at length, with the exception of LittleBigPlanet is one that I've played, which is a nice frame of reference to have. There's also something to be said for the idea that examining the latest and greatest is the only way to get a good understanding of a developing medium like video games. More to the point, though, focusing on recent games allows Bissell to sidestep the influence of nostalgia. This is the single biggest Achilles heel of writing and thinking about gaming; as with any medium, there's a strong contingent of enthusiasts who have a marked preference for past eras. This usually manifests in the insistence that a bunch of BS Super Nintendo RPGs (or more pretentiously, PC adventure games) represent the apotheosis of the form. The problem with this is that unlike other mediums, the formal qualities of video gaming are still very much in flux, which means that 1990s games held up as The Godfather-style masterworks actually seem like charming but primitive Georges Méliès short films.

I think that the most valuable aspect of Extra Lives is the manner in which Bissell grapples with the shortcomings of games as a medium and the resulting unease that comes with being both an intelligent adult and a gaming enthusiast. Here's the paragraph in which he captures this most succinctly:

" ...I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less fun. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sword is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin-haunted territory to claim it. For me, video games often restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence - an innocence derived of not knowing anything. For this and all sorts of other complicated historical reasons - starting with the fact that they began as toys marketed directly to children - video games crash any cocktail-party rationale you attempt to formulate as to why, exactly, you love them. More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that."

Bissell doesn't shy away from this topic, to his immense credit. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book are when he explores the mixed-bag role gaming has played in his personal life, such as when he spent 200 hours playing Oblivion in the grip of a depressive episode or the lengthy cocaine and Grand Theft Auto IV odyssey detailed in his Guardian article. I think that even someone relatively sympathetic to gaming could read these parts and justifiably come to the conclusion that it's a fundamentally problematic social pursuit. Despite my clear enthusiasm for it, it's something I question myself some days, and while Bissell comes out clearly in defense of his hobby, his admission that the issue remains open to interpretation is an admirable display of intellectual seriousness. This book is highly recommended. 

Alan Wake review

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Above: Memo to prospective Alan Wake players: Hope you like woods.

I was quite looking forward to Alan Wake, partly because of my admiration for the Max Payne noir-shooter diptych by the same creators, and partly because it promised to borrow narrative inspiration from pulp thriller novels and TV rather than the standard video game muses (respectively: Aliens and other video games). Briefly, Alan Wake is an action game in which you play a famous author who retreats to a hermetic community in the Pacific Northwest to cope with a chronic case of writer's block. Shortly after his arrival, his wife is kidnapped under mysterious circumstances, and he blacks out for a week. When he comes to, he finds that he has written a manuscript that he has no recollection of composing, and further discovers that the town has been taken over by a shadowy presence that possesses people and objects and imbues them with murderous intent. As you might guess, the player's role is to take control of Alan Wake, confront these people/objects, and shoot your way to the truth.

The gameplay hook in Alan Wake is that the possessing force renders the enemies impervious to injury, so you can't just shoot them outright. You first have to use a flashlight or other light source to burn away the darkness that protects them. This isn't the most mindblowingly original conceit, but it's a clever way of fulfilling several gameplay functions. Most significantly, it amps up the tension by increasing the amount of time between spotting an enemy and being able to kill it, and does so without gimping the controls, which is the route that most other horror-shooters take. It also allows your flashlight beam to double as a crosshairs, which goes a long way toward minimizing the HUD. Thirdly, it gives a gameplay excuse for the constant showcasing of Alan Wake's lighting graphics, which are quite impressive.

The thing about Alan Wake is that it's such a solid and well-crafted game that the few shortcomings it has seem all the more nagging as a result. Gameplay-wise, there isn't a whole lot to be mad at: the balance between burning away shadows with your flashlight, shooting, and keeping track of multiple enemies is fun and challenging, and the controls are very solid. The dodge button, which needs to be combined with a directional press, is very well implemented - when you pull off a successful dodge, which takes enough skill that you can't just spam the button, the game shifts into slow-mo for a second to showcase just how close you were to getting nailed by an axe aimed at your head or what have you, which leads to any number of memorable close-call moments. The graphics are great and do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of creating a spooky atmosphere. It's an enjoyable game, and has a lot to recommend it on that level.

Alan Wake, however, has set its sights a bit higher than "enjoyable game." This much is clear from the unique structure that divides the game into six episodes, which being with 'previously on' recaps and end with cliffhangers. This is a narratively-focused affair that wants to be a bold statement of purpose for gaming as a storytelling medium. And it's actually fairly effective in doing so; I liked playing the game half-an-episode at a time, and the plot twists and wanting to find out what happened next was a big part of what kept me engaged. It is refreshing to see a game put a clear emphasis on story and pacing.

The problem with Alan Wake as a narrative is that it can't balance its aspirations toward originality with its desire to pay homage to its influences, and the latter too often overwhelms the former. As reviews of Alan Wake never fail to note, the game is heavily inspired by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch. The Stephen King angle isn't really so bad, even though King is actually mentioned by name at least twice in the game's dialogue, but the constant cribbing from David Lynch in general and Twin Peaks in particular becomes actively distracting very early on in the game. Now if this were limited to the 'unsettling things happening in a bucolic Northwestern town' aspect, I'd say fair play and leave it at that. However, Alan Wake has the gall to deploy naked facsimiles of the characters of Shelly Johnson and the Log Lady from Twin Peaks. It uses coffee thermoses as hidden collectable items, with the inevitable associated Achievement being titled Damn Good Cup of Coffee. There was a part early in the game where a character told me to go to a lodge that made me groan audibly, although fortunately the lodge in question proved more concrete than the one from the show. The game's boner for David Lynch is such that the song soundtracking the first end-of-episode title is "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, and although I'm sure I probably don't need to jog your memory as to why that's relevant, I'd be seriously remiss if I didn't take the chance to embed:


This is probably substantially less of an issue for the vast majority of Alan Wake players, who likely don't care about the subtle line between a deft professional homage and a vaguely embarrassing fanboyish one. My issue with it is less about Alan Wake trying to punch above its weight class and more about a serious missed opportunity to incorporate its influences on a deeper level. The brilliance of Twin Peaks was the way that it placed its unsettling and avante-garde elements within a wholehearted embrace of the formal strictures of the primetime soap opera format. Given the fact that video games live and die by convention, there was a huge opening for Alan Wake to do the same thing within the milieu of third-person shooters. However, instead of balancing the base gameplay against sometime more experimental that takes advantage of the interactive form, Alan Wake too often opts to cut-and-paste David Lynch. The only point in which I felt Alan Wake was really doing something truly different comes in a playable sequence that closes out the game, and that's tucked safely away after the final boss fight, causing it to feel set apart from the "real" game.

To be fair, there's a lot to applaud about the way Alan Wake approaches the narrative-gameplay fusion; for one, the game actually works a subtle, non-superfluous rationale for the existence of scattered ammo and supplies into the narrative as it progresses. There's actually a significant aspect of the plot which struck me as inspired by Diary, one of Chuck Palahniuk's best novels; if this is intentional, it's carried out with the kind of grace I wish had been used in incorporating the influences I mentioned above. Secondly, although the final boss is rather limp, Alan Wake has one of the better endings to a game story I've seen in a while; it goes out on an ambiguous note without skimping on a sense of resolution. Granted, the former has probably more than a little to do with the impeding DLC bonus episodes (of which the first is free to retail buyers who keep the voucher packed in to the box, classy move there) but it still works within the context of the core game.

All told, Alan Wake is a worthy game. Given the focus on story and atmosphere, it seems like it might be one of those games that's fun to watch as well as play. Despite my quibbles with some of the choices, I'm looking forward to checking out the downloadable bonus episodes later this year, and I do hope that it does well enough to fund a sequel where the designers can hopefully broaden their palette some more.

Mel Gibson Just Doesn't Give A Fuck

Above: Good to see that Mel Gibson's ability to glower ponderously hasn't been dulled by his hiatus from acting

Since the explosion of celebrity "news" has radically expanded our collective capacity to follow the lives of professional entertainers in something like real time, the idea of the comeback role has taken on a lot more importance. For instance: remember when everybody was upset at Tom Cruise because he jumped on a couch on the Oprah Winfrey show and then was mean to Matt Lauer? Then he had that funny cameo in Tropic Thunder and everybody laughed and forgave him, because nobody who would put on a fat suit and use hip-hop slang in a movie part could be a humorless, delusional prick in real life. The notion is that as long as an actor can convincingly pull off a role that counters whatever negative image he or she managed to acquire in the course of the preceding scandal, the damage can be minimized or even reversed.

With that in mind, as you might recall, a few years back Mel Gibson was arrested for driving drunk, which wouldn't be that big of a deal had he not used the procedure as an opportunity to sexually harass one of the arresting officers and to expound upon his belief that Jews are responsible for all the world's problems. As his first starring role since this event, Edge of Darkness is Mel Gibson's shot to change the public's perception of him as an unhinged paranoiac. So naturally, he chooses a role where he portrays an revenge-crazed police officer pitted against some sort of high-level conspiracy. My original intention was to do one of my traditional Saturday evening liveblogs while watching Edge of Darkness, which I in fact did for about the first hour of the movie. However, this isn't really one of those films that lends itself to that sort of off-the-cuff analysis, and rather than post something that would be little more than a summary of the onscreen action, I decided it would be better to write a post speculating on what could have possible gone into Mel Gibson's decision to take this role.

Sitting down to the movie with a post-scandal mindset is a fascinating exercise, because once I started down that road, it became pretty much all I could think about. Consider the following (obviously, spoilers for Edge of Darkness ensue, possibly slightly diminishing some future afternoon for you in which it is on cable):

1.) Mel Gibson is constantly in or around cars in this movie. Not only are there several scenes with him driving recklessly or actually causing an auto accident, there's also at least three scenes of him violently accosting people who are in their own cars, and another one where he takes on the driver of a car speeding toward him with his gun and causes a rather spectacular crash. I'd venture to say that Edge of Darkness contains the maximum amount of vehicle-based mayhem possible within the logical confines of the plot. Now, if I were Mel Gibson, which I am clearly not, I'd likely seek to avoid further associating my image with cars or driving for a bit, maybe by picking another one of my famed bloodthirsty period pieces for a return to acting. The fact that he actually appears to have sought out a movie that outright requires him to be doing crazy shit in cars seems telling. Of what, I don't quite know.

2.) This is a conspiracy movie that spends almost no effort in making the conspiracy make any type of sense. The basic outline is that Mel Gibson's daughter is killed at the beginning of the movie, and everyone assumes that the killers were targeting Mel, because he's a cop and missed, even though they were using a shotgun. But actually, Mel Gibson's daughter was the real intended target, because she was interning at a research company with a federal contract that was secretly producing nuclear weapons made to look like they were constructed in foreign countries. She tries to blow the whistle on the company, but no one will listen to her, so she hooks up with some eco-radical group and helps them break into the lab so they can steal the proof, but the company catches the eco-radicals in the act and kills them with 'irradiated steam' which is apparently a thing, and then kills Mel's daughter so she won't talk. There's also some angle with the federal government being in on the plot to kill Mel's daughter, as well as a character played by Ray Winstone, who's some sort of assassin hired by the government to kill Mel Gibson, but he doesn't because he's dying of cancer and he decides he likes Mel Gibson, possibly because of his ability to hold his own in a gruff-off.

So this is a standard "shadowy conspiracy kills everyone" plot, but the thing about it is that Mel Gibson's character never really seems to question anything of the conspiracy tidbits he's given, even when it's outlandish stuff, being told to him by clearly unreliable people. In a more than one case, he straightforwardly accepts information from people who just got done trying to kill him. The consipiracy aspect actually seems to be toned down considerably from the British miniseries that the movie is based on, which according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, diverges into some sort of batshit insane shadow war between man and nature in the final third of the story. However, Mel Gibson's character is still the type that just sort of assumes that of course there's a high level conspiracy at play here, rather than maintaining the sort of skepticism you might expect from a police detective. This is another thing that you would think is sort of at odds with drawing attention away from Mel's image as a paranoid lunatic, and yet, here he is. Did I mention that he's periodically hallucinating about his dead daughter as a young girl throughout the movie, and that there's a scene where he pretends to teach her to shave?

3.) At the climax of the movie, Mel's poisoned or something, and he's staggering around shooting people in a very convincing simulacrum of a drunken rage. Yes, really. There are no words.

The upside to all this is that there aren't any characters that are Jewish or thinly veiled Jewish-like stereotypes (e.g. no scenes of Mel beating up a banker or anything like that), but that aside, my take-away from Edge of Darkness is that Mel Gibson doesn't care that people look at him as an unstable loon. In fact, he might actually get off on it. I guess it makes a certain kind of sense, seeing as he could live comfortable off of royalties for The Passion of the Christ for the rest of his life and never work again. Still, you'd think he might consider toning it down a bit.

Is Unitasking A Forgotten Ideal?

Yesterday's New York Times had a lengthy and interesting article about the possible detrimental cognitive effects of hardcore computer usage. Appropriately enough, I read this article on the Internet while I should have been polishing off a report for work. This is a topic that's been floating around for a while, and has picked up recently with Nick Carr's book-length expansion of his widely-circulated 2008 Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Although the Times article focuses heavily on a man who appears to have one of the worst possible cases of technological dependence on record, which I think weakened the core argument a bit for me with regard to how widespread the problem is, its publication came at a good time, because this is a matter that's been on my mind quite a bit recently.

There's really no way to phrase this without making it sound banal, but I've always been a huge consumer of written information. When I was a kid, I'd read books by my nightlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. My parents were semi-wise to this and would sometimes come in to check and make sure I wasn't doing this; I'd have to shove the book under my covers or drop it on the floor as noiselessly as possible to avoid getting caught, with varying levels of success depending on how quick on the draw I was. So it's always been very hard for me to avoid reading something new or interesting, even when I really ought to be doing something else instead.

You can guess how this character trait can turn into a weakness when combined with the vast information reserves of the Internet. I've liked Web-surfing from the beginning, but I don't think my life and the Internet really became inextricable until early 2007, when I started consolidating most of my online activity through Google Reader, which not only gave me a one-stop place for checking for updates of sites and blogs I liked, it gave me a quick way to add new stuff to my daily browsing regimen.

I can't imagine life without Google Reader, but it's an immense distraction that's incredibly easy to fall into. A lot of times, I click over to take a quick break from whatever I'm doing and end up reading three or four articles before I even realize how off-track I'm getting. It's not uncommon for me to give myself a 5 minute break that winds up as a 30 minute break because I see a handful of things I can't resist reading.

Whereas the guy in the Times article's computer usage seemed to really affect his productivity and ability to function socially, I don't think that the problem is as severe for me (NB: other people's opinions may vary. I won't pretend that I haven't been busted for reading the Internet when I should have been engaging in a conversation). If there's something important I need to get done, it gets done 95%-plus of the time with what I think is a respectable minimum of procrastination. Where I've acquired this skill is somewhat of a mystery to me, as my formal organizational skills have always been mediocre to non-existent; my best guess is that a solid decade of relentless academic deadlines have hardwired some reflexive planning capacity into me. Anyhow, since that's pretty well intact, I don't think that the Internet is ruining my life or my functioning by any means.

What I've increasingly come to question is whether my Internet habits are interfering with my happiness. One thing that I've found to be indisputably true is that the Web in general (and Google Reader in particular) is really effective at breaking up the flow of attention and prolonged engagement in doing something. This is an issue for me because while I find it hard to resist having a constant inflow of information, I also really value the subjective experience of being engrossed in one particular task. I find that when I've been concentrating all or most of my attention on one thing, not only does it get done more effectively, but I feel more relaxed, calm, and alert in a way that's just not possible to achieve when browsing RSS feeds. At its best, I begin to see myself as putting all of my capacities to work and reaching a level of performance that's deeper and better than the day-to-day. The book by Nick Carr that I mentioned above is called The Shallows, and I get why he entitled it that, because I really do think that Web surfing and computer multitasking are fairly shallow endeavors, cognitively speaking.

Luckily, a decent part of my workday involves face to face contacts with patients for therapy or assessment, which I find to be very conducive to focusing, probably in large part because it's interesting and challenging and I'm not in front of a computer while doing it. I'm extremely fortunate in that regard; if my job required me to be at a desk in front of a computer all the time (as opposed to just part of the time, since I do a fairly substantial amount of entering notes and reports into medical records) I'd probably have a lot more difficulty with staying on task. Still, I've made it somewhat of a pet project to consciously decrease my tendencies toward distraction and multitasking and increase my ability to focus on one thing at a time. My inspirations for doing this were this old Lifehacker interview with an author of a book critical of multitasking, which solidified some of the observations I had made of myself, and another recent New York Times piece on people who collect and track data about their daily lives, which gave me some ideas on how to go about an endeavor like this.

Although it may seem bitterly ironic, my approach to this is actually extremely reliant on technology - specifically, my iPhone. I mainly use two programs, the first of which is Evernote, a very cool application that lets me enter and sync notes, photos, and web clips between my computer and my phone. Each day, I start a note specifically dedicated to that day's activities, which I update every hour or so with very basic information about what I'm doing and how well I feel like I'm focusing on a 1-10 scale, with 5 being my baseline and 7-8 being the sweet spot. I only update my note when it's convenient to do so to avoid the monitoring interfering with the activity, which isn't hard to do. This gives me a semi-quantitative account of how my day is going as well as a place to jot down ideas on the fly about how to reduce distractions. Right now, I'm not tracking anywhere near as much data as some of the people in the Times article do, basically just level of focus and number of hours of sleep per night, but I may add more in the future if it becomes useful to do so.

The second thing I use is Google Tasks, which is actually an integrated part of Gmail. It's fairly basic - there's a lot more elaborate things out there - but it's free and has a nice mobile interface that makes it easy to check off and add new things on the go. I've started separating my tasks out into separate lists, one for work, one for home, one for things I need to get at the store, etc. I do this partially for a reminder of things I need to get done and partially because I find it really rewarding to be able to cross things off of my list. One of the nice things about Google Tasks is that it gives you a checkbox and a line through items you check off until you clear out your completed tasks, which lets you bask in your accomplishments a little bit. Here's an example of my work-related task list right now:

I've also started playing around with some other ideas, like allowing myself 5-10 minute distraction breaks but enforcing them by turning on the stopwatch in my phone and having it visible so as to not let myself run over. I'm sure there's a lot of other things I could be doing, too. It's still early, but I'm excited about this project and I think it's going to be very valuable in the long run if I can stick with it. I'd appreciate any other tips or strategies that other people have found helpful in doing something like this. Also, I'd like to note that for the hour-plus I've been composing this entry, I didn't check my Google Reader once, despite it being open in the browser tab adjacent to this one, which is the sort of small victory I'm gunning for here...

Jennifer's Body liveblog

In something of a departure from my usual way of doing this, i.e. pick the worst movie I can find and mock it mercilessly, this week I'm watching Jennifer's Body, which was basically a critical and commercial failure, but never stuck out to me as an obvious misfire based on the previews. Actually, it seemed like it had several pretty smart ideas. In a lot of ways, horror is one of the more prominent movie genres in terms of utilizing female protagonists, so the concept of introducing a female antagonist and possibly subverting the retrograde sexual politics that are a more regrettable horror touchstone is a promising one. The fact that it was written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame seemed like it could either be a big strength or a big weakness depending on the whether the dialogue stays on the right line of "clever" versus "too clever by half." I know most of the critics felt that it was the latter, but I'm not going to rule out the possibility that I might actually like this movie.

0:00: Then again, the only quote on the back of the DVD box is from horror.com, and it reads "Sexy... and chilling!" which gives me pause, because what the hell could they have left out of that sentence with the ellipses? I looked up the actual review out of curiosity (it's positive) and the full quote is "Some of the lines in the film are probably better-read than said, but if you pay close attention to what's being said, you'll be much enriched by this very sexy, over-the-top and sometimes even chilling horror comedy." Does the fact that they left out the "very" on the box make up for leaving out the "sometimes?"


0:00: An early point in this movie's favor: it's only 102 minutes long. My rule of thumb is that a horror movie ought to be 90 plus-or-minus 10 minutes.


1:00: We open on a Halloween ripoff POV shot outside of Megan Fox's house, and a voiceover line "Hell is a teenage girl." If you're going to steal from The Virgin Suicides, might as well not make it subtle.


2:15: We find out that the VO belongs to Amanda Seyfried, who always kind of looked like a space alien to me. She's in a mental institution acting like a badass. "I wasn't always this cracked." Unnecessary framing device alert!


5:34: We're gradually getting to the actual story. There's some silly tidbit about how the town's waterfall has some sort of extradimensional vortex. 


6:45: This movie doesn't waste any time making the lesbian undertones between the lead characters ragingly explicit. Now Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend is saying "You do everything Jennifer says." Also, Amanda Seyfried's character is named Needy. They're going to a rock show in the sticks so Megan Fox can try to fuck the lead singer.


12:00: Megan Fox to Amanda Seyfried, re: breasts: "These things are like smart bombs. Point them in the right direction and shit gets real." Score one point for too clever by half.


14:00: Amanda Seyfried is salty because she overheard the lead singer talking about how he wants to fuck Megan Fox and tells him off.


15:00: I don't agree with the decision to have the fake band, who combines the look of Interpol with the sound of generic early 2000s pop-punk, play a song. More lesbian undertones ensure. Then the bar lights on fire a la the infamous Deep Purple incident of 2002. Megan Fox is in some sort of trance and the band guys haul her off to their van while the bar explodes in the background.


21:00: This is actually kind of boring so far. Isn't the point of being thuddingly obvious with character development that it lets you bypass this sort of gradual story development.


22:05: Now Amanda Seyfried is back at home and walking around the house in generic slow-burn horror mode when Megan Fox sneaks up on her, all bloody and evil looking, which almost looks creepy. Then she pukes out a bunch of black oil, which is kind of ridiculous-looking. After that, Megan Fox throws Amanda Seyfried against a wall and feels her up, then leaves. 


26:00: Now it's the next day in school, and Megan Fox appears to be back to normal, but we can tell she's not because slightly more of a bitch than usual.


26:45: J.K. Simmons is in this as kind of a hippie-ish teacher who's missing a hand. He's wearing a comical looking curly wig.


30:15: Did Diablo Cody actually go to high school? Based on these scenes, which make The Faculty look like a Fredrick Wiseman documentary, I'd say no.


32:05: Now Megan Fox is luring a lunkhead football player, who's grieving the loss of his friend in the fire last night, into the woods to make out. CGI wildlife surrounds them, because otherwise this scene might acquire a bit of tension. Megan Fox takes off her shirt and gives the football player a handjob, then her mouth splits open to reveal fangs and she bites him to death.


35:45: The problem with this movie is that it wants to be a horror comedy, but the comedy aspects completely undermine the horror part because there's no effort made to make the characters coherent or realistic and the movie pretty openly mocks the gravity of the deaths.


41:35: This movie is supposed to be set in Minnesota? And no funny accents? That's a missed opportunity.


46:15: Now Amanda Seyfried and her boyfriend are going to fuck as part of a montage set to a pop-punk cover of Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now. " Movie soundtracks tend to date the films they're attached to, but rarely do they date them to several fucking years before the film was actually produced. Also, Megan Fox is luring in her next high school stereotype, a Goth kid, into a boarded-up house. This is intercut with a joke about Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend fumbling to put on a condom, again because this movie would hate to build or sustain any sort of tension.


52:14: I should point out that Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried are actually nailing their roles here. It's the writing, directing, and editing that's sinking this movie.


53:22: Now Amanda Seyfried realizes, mid-coitus, that Megan Fox is the killer, through some sort of lesbian psychic hallucination link. She gets in her car to drive home and Megan Fox appears in the road and attacks her for some reason.


58:30: Amanda Seyfried gets home and walks around a little bit before going to bed. Megan Fox is waiting there! They make out, because Diablo Cody probably hasn't heard of Internet porn and thought that would be enough to get every horny man in America to see this underwhelming movie. 

1:00:32: Then Megan Fox reveals that the band from the burned down club were actually a Satanic cult of some sort, as if we hadn't figured that out 45 minutes ago. There's a lengthy cutaway dramatizing these events, which are apparently undertaken as a sacrifice to make the band famous "like Maroon 5." LOL! Megan Fox actually gives a really convincing portrayal of distress and violation. Unfortunately, everybody else in the scene is in a completely different movie, one where they're singing Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny." Yes, really.


1:08:23: Well, that was an unnecessary ten minutes that basically served to retroactively undo the lone element of subtlety contained in this movie to date!

1:09:15: Now Amanda Seyfried's doing paranormal research in the high-school library. I have a feeling that there's going to be a knowing ironic reference to this coming up.


1:12:35: Disco.


1:12:50: The climax is going to be at the school formal, because inviting comparison to Carrie is a great idea.


1:14:30: The woman who played Dylan Baker's wife in Happiness is in this shit!


1:17:43: Now Megan Fox is stalking Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend, who didn't believe her earlier when she warned him that Megan Fox was actually a demonic succubus. Also, the Satanic band is playing at the school formal. 

1:21:40: Amanda Seyfried realizes that Megan Fox is probably trying to kill her boyfriend. Instead, she's lured him into an indoor swimming pool that's overgrown with trees on the inside for some reason. Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend decides he doesn't want to kiss Megan Fox because he's still in love with Amanda Seyfried, so she gets pissed and uses her succubus teeth to bite him just before Amanda Seyfried arrives.


1:25:09: Now Amanda Seyfried maces Megan Fox, who does the vomiting thing again and starts to levitate. Then the two of them get into some sort of dialogue about insecurity and female friendship, which I guess was inevitable. Then Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend impales Megan Fox with the back end of a pool skimmer, but instead of dying, she asks Amanda Seyfried for a tampon and then leaves. Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend dies but tells her he loves her first, which I guess is going to restore her self-esteem to the superpower levels that she'll need to take on Megan Fox.


1:30:00: Now we're back to where we were at the beginning of the movie for the climactic showdown, which is sort of an quasi-Exorcist levitation deal over Megan Fox's bed, where Amanda Seyfried rips off Megan Fox's BFF necklace and stabs her in the heart with box cutters, which I guess she read about as being the way to kill a succubus in the school library.


1:33:25: Now we're back to the pointless framing device in the insane asylum, where we learn that Amanda Seyfried "absorbed some of the demon's abilities."  She levitates herself out of the insane asylum, in what would be a logical ending to the movie. It does not, in fact, end.


1:35:35: Now Amanda Seyfried's hitchhiking out to take her revenge on the Satanic rock band, the aftermath of which is shown in flashes over the closing credits, Dawn of the Dead remake style. Remarkably, this movie hadn't used a Hole song on the soundtrack until this point. 


Final thoughts: Jesus, what a misfire. The shame of this is that, like I said before, the basic idea of this movie is really strong. Also, the leads are just about perfect - I think that Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried would absolutely still be the stars of this movie if it were done right. The problem is the writing, which never really seems to aspire to be creepy or scary and instead goes for wall to wall exaggerated quipping. If you rolled your eyes at the "Honest to blog" line in Juno, you'll probably want to throw your DVD player out of the window by the time you get to the point in Jennifer's Body where Megan Fox tells Amanda Seyfried to "move on dot org." Compounding the problem is the direction, which borrows camera moves and staging from other and better horror movies but never really tries to wrestle the script into anything resembling a tone. I could always be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised if this movie finds the cult audience that it's so obviously going for (speaking of which, do these prefab cult movies ever actually wind up working out in that way?)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: The Movie, or An Object Lesson In Why Hollywood Can't Make A Decent Video Game Adaptation

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Above: The hands on hips pose makes Jake Gyllenhaal look like less like a fearsome 'Persian warrior and more like he's waiting impatiently for bar service at a leather club. Who does a boy have to blow to get a vodka and Red Bull in this place?

Over last weekend, when I was visiting my family and girlfriend in St. Louis, we all went out to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. My sister was the main person who was interested in seeing it, but I was kind of curious myself, seeing as this is probably the highest-profile and most expensive video game to movie adaptation to date, having been midwifed by blockbuster merchant du jour Jerry Bruckheimer in a thinly veiled attempt to replicate the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Plus, I've played the 2003 Xbox/PS2 game, which I enjoyed and is widely regarded as a minor classic to boot, so I had a pretty good point of comparison against which to judge it.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time reviewing the movie itself - it sucked, but if you saw the ads, you probably guessed that already. I would like to point out that while I admire Jake Gyllenhaal's ability to Bowflex himself into the $10 million dollar abs you see on display above, he's really not right for this type of part. Gyllenhaal works best when he can break out that look of slight naive confusion that he employed to such good effect in Donnie Darko and most-underrated-movie-evar Zodiac. He can't really conjure the mocking insouciance that his character in Prince of Persia is clearly intended to have. Come to think of it, most of the under-40 A-list male crowd in Hollywood these days is lacking in the smart-ass factor - that was always the weakest part of Tobey Maguire's performance as Spider-Man as well.

Anyhow, the point I want to raise is that adapting a video game into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster shouldn't be nearly as hard as the dismal results of the many attempts to do so would seem to indicate. As I see it, this is a classic Hollywood problem: lack of respect for the source material. Check out this trailer for the original Sands of Time game:

 
You can basically summarize what the game's like from it: you play as a prince who performs amazing acrobatic feats and can rewind time with a dagger powered by magical sand. He spends a lot of time swordfighting with monsters possessed by the same magical sand that powers his dagger. This is kind of a stupid plot, but the plot isn't really the point. The cool stuff you can do in the game is the point, and the plot is a means to that end.

The Prince of Persia movie, by contrast (I'd embed the trailer below for comparison, if it weren't for the fact that the trailer is pretty misleading about the actual content of the movie) does away with the idea of possessed monsters, barely has any time rewinding at all, and stages the action scenes mostly in spatially confusing medium-close shots stitched together with quick-cut editing. Most of the movie is divided between watching Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton walking through the desert and engaging in limply-written bickering, and listening to various characters spout boring expository dialogue about court intrigue and the rules for protecting the dagger. To add insult to injury, whereas the game was renowned for its lighthearted storybook aesthetic, the tone of the movie veers erratically between goofiness and self-seriousness. 

Prince of Persia would have been a much better movie if it had been built around the same stuff that went into the game instead of all the superfluous crap thrown in as a desperate attempt to have a story to focus on. Summer blockbusters get a lot of crap for being overly reliant on action set pieces, but I think that criticism speaks more to mediocrity of action set pieces these days rather than the basic template. Put it this way: Raiders of the Lost Ark is just a bunch of set pieces with the barest minimum of exposition connecting them, and everybody in the world loves that movie. Prince of Persia was obviously never gonna come close to that, but why not try? Why not hire some parkour experts to try and top the foot chase sequences in Casino Royale or District B-13? Why not keep the sand monsters idea and turn the swordfights into a PG-13 friendly version of the battles in 300? Who decided that this movie needed to be a slow-witted homage to Romancing the Stone? Making a video-game based blockbuster movie doesn't entail re-inventing the wheel, but it ought to entail a careful consideration of how to keep whatever made the game appealing in the first place in the film. 

Lost finale liveblog

As I've mentioned before, until last August, I'd never seen an episode of Lost, but thanks to the wonders of Netflix Instant Streaming and Hulu, I got caught up on the entire run of the show over the past 9 months, just in time to partake in the epic finale as it airs. This will actually mark the first time I've watched a Lost episode on broadcast TV, in what promises to be a major television event on par with the series finale of M.A.S.H., with the minor difference that the series finale of M.A.S.H. would probably have made more sense to somebody who hadn't watched every single preceding episode of the series. Also, presumably there won't be a touching scene involving the death of a ragtag group of Chinese musician-soldiers, although it's possible.
Full disclosure: I've never really been that invested in the central mysteries of Lost being resolved in any meaningful way, so I doubt I'll wind up being that critical of whatever is aired tonight. Actually, the looseness and craziness of Lost is one of the things I like best about the show, along with the creators' willingness to screw with the audience, up to and including the time-travel and war-between-gods storylines of the past couple seasons. That antipenultimate episode two weeks ago, which focused almost entirely on two peripheral characters, used child actors, and didn't advance the main plot at all? I loved that shit. It was like that first-season South Park that pre-empted the reveal of Cartman's father with Terrance and Philip. Also, it inspired somebody on the Internet to make this:

I know the plurality of the Lost fanbase is expecting some sort of mindblower that'll tie all the unanswered mysteries together in a neat package, but I'm halfway hoping for something that'll piss people off. It'd be fitting. Narrative blue balls is the real secret ingredient of Lost.

8:01 PM: Wait - they're starting with a character montage set to a maudlin score? DO NOT WANT.

8:03: Desmond gets my vote for best Lost character, hands-down. Kate is probably the worst, particularly when she's whining (which is always) so her inclusion somewhat dampens my enjoyment of this scene.

8:06: Before the first commercial break, we've already had two self-referential winks at this show's tropes (Desmond refusing to explain anything to Kate, and the Sawyer-Kate quipping about telling her she can't come along). They'd better restrain this shit or it's going to be a long couple of hours.

8:09: I have to admit that I like Hurley a lot better this last season, although I can't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's the fact that he actually serves some sort of narrative purpose now.

8:13: Ben Linus is my second-favorite Lost character. I'm wondering what kind of angle he's playing by allying with BlackLocke.

8:15: Could do without seeing Bernard and Rose again, but whatever.

8:18: Remember when you didn't shudder at the previews for Adam Sandler movies? That Grown-Ups movie looks like an elaborate parody rather than an actual movie.

8:20: There's Miles, aka the only remaining ethnic minority character in the main storyline since they killed off all the others in one scene three episodes ago. I'm not counting Rose in that tally because she doesn't count.

8:24: Is it racist that I've always been indifferent to the Sun-Jin storyline? And how many more flash-sideways epiphanies are we going to have to sit through in this episode? I'm guessing a lot - at least Kate, Sayid, Charlie, and Sawyer are still in the pipe.

8:31: Now Richard Alpert is mortal and coincidentally no longer suicidal.

8:33: Also, Frank Lapides survived the submarine explosion, because he's white.

8:34: Knowing wink number 3: "You're sort of the obvious choice." - BlackLocke to GodJack

8:36: Oh, right. Toy Story 3 is coming out this year. I hope it lives up to the second one.

8:39: I'm kind of indifferent to the revelation that Juliet is Jack's ex-wife in flash-sideways world.

8:43: Now GodJack and BlackLocke are throwing Desmond into the magic waterfall for some reason that I don't understand.

8:44: The Target ads featuring the smoke monster as an ad for a smoke detector sale is a bit much. I guess a bit of craven selling-out during the finale isn't going to hurt the show's legacy. Wait, now there's one for keyboards featuring the countdown-reset stuff from Season 2.

8:45: I wonder if the producers of the Ashton Kutcher-Katherine Heigl flick Killers cast their movie based on the tops of nationwide surveys of most annoying celebrities, male and female division.

8:49: Remember the Seinfeld series finale, where they shoehorned in every bit character in the show's history? This is turning into that. Boone and Shannon just showed up in flash-sideways world.

8:51: I kind of like the way Lost turned Claire into the new Rosseau this season.

8:53: I hope Desmond doesn't die halfway through this thing. That would suck.

8:54: I'm up for seeing Get Him To The Greek. That character was the best thing about Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

8:55: "Doing more and trying more depends on your attitude, not your birth control!" Isn't the birth control pill something that sells itself? Why is this shit necessary?

8:59: Basic outline for this episode: "Remember all those elaborate character connections we developed over five-plus seasons? We're going to recreate all of them at the rate of one every 30 seconds over the course of an hour and a half!" It comes across as kind of pat, which is something I always felt Lost did a pretty good job of avoiding.

9:02: Now Desmond is down in the magic fountain, which is shooting magic light at him, which doesn't really affect him because he's special. He pulls out a big rock blocking a hole in the fountain and everything goes dark. So the wine-bottle stopper metaphor for the island as presented by Jacob wasn't really a metaphor at all. I've noticed that making past elements of the show seem retroactively less subtle is sort of a theme of this episode.

9:04: Now BlackLocke can feel pain, just in time for a brief fistfight with GodJack. Guess that means the rules about the gods not being able to attack and kill each other are rendered null and void. That probably frees BlackLocke up to thin out the character count a little, as this episode has been disappointingly short on shocking deaths so far.


9:08: You can get breakfast at motherfucking Subway now?

9:10: A scene where characters have to deliver a baby without the help of a doctor? What's next, a hilarious dilemma with Sawyer inadvertently making dates with two women on the same night?

9:14: Speaking of retroactive effects, this tearjerker reunion bullshit really flies in the face of Lost's former willingness to kill off major characters. Charlie's dead, damn it, and I liked it that way!

9:17: Now an epic cliffside smackdown between BlackLocke and GodJack, aka the moment we've been anxiously awaiting for at least five days. The fact that Lost took so long to settle on a central conflict kind of hampers this episode's ability to convey a sense of climax. Is anybody really that invested in the Jacob vs. Man in Black deal?

9:22: Kate shoots BlackLocke in the back and GodJack kicks him off the cliff. Where is this going exactly?

9:24: Wait, now the characters are showing wounds they get in the main storyline in the flash-sideways scenes? Is the idea that everyone's respawning from the island into the flash-sideways world, first-person shooter style?

9:31: Sawyer: "Sure don't feel like it's over!" The contrast with all the happy people in the flash-sideways world kind of sucks the tension out of what's happening on the island, whatever that is.

9:35: I'm sure there are a lot of people that were thrilled to see Jack and Kate kiss and say "I love you." Not me! I remember when this show was a sci-fi mystery deal instead of a buncha sentimental nonsense.

9:44: Why did Sawyer taking a candy bar from Juliet trigger the crossover memory when the two or three scenes of him bantering with Kate we've seen in the flash-sideways arc this season didn't? I don't recall Juliet ever giving him a candy bar on the island, but him and Kate were sniping at each other all the time. I guess this is supposed to be some bullshit about true love, right? Maybe this explains why Jacob didn't select any gay people as candidates. Actually, if you think about it, this sort of makes Lost an incredibly elaborate allegory about the superiority of heterosexuality. Don't let me find out that the "defend traditional marriage" crowd was behind this show the whole time.

9:55: Now there's some crap about Hurley being the new defender of the island. Nobody cares! I wonder if Ben Linus is going to kill Hurley out of jealousy. Wait, is Ben Linus gay? Him being evil and all, that would fit nicely into my theory, if I could remember what it was that triggered him in the flash-sideways world. Or did that not happen to him? It's hard to keep this shit straight.

10:00: Now Kate's giving some reassuring words about motherhood to Claire, furthering this episode's quest to leave no stone of sentimentality unturned.

10:02: Jack puts the long stone back in the hole to try and stop the destruction of the island. This could also be seen as a visual representation of the civilizing power of heterosexuality if one were so inclined. As I am, seeing as it's the only way I can seem to get any enjoyment out of this episode.

10:11: Now Locke is going to Eloise Hawking's temple in the flash-sideways world. Ben Linus is there and he gives some sort of tearjerker apology to Locke about how he was jealous of him because he was "special." He also says that he "has some things he needs to work out." This seems to strengthen my Linus-is-gay theory considerably.

10:13: There's also a shot of Locke rising from his wheelchair and walking that would have been as poignant as it was intended to be if Locke hadn't been walking for THE ENTIRE FUCKING SERIES.

10:15: Now Linus is giving Hurley some self-actualizing pep talk about being the guardian of the island. Then Hurley makes Ben his Richard Alpert.

10:16: Hurley, to Ben, in the flash-sideways: "You were a good number 2." Ben, in return: "You were a great number 1, Hugo!" This is maybe the gayest exchange of dialogue in the history of dramatic representation. I'm actually kind of shocked at how robust this theory of mine is turning out to be.

10:20: Jack's dad is apparently alive in the flash-sideways? Is this the Man in Black's escape from the island or some sort of allusion to the similarly bullshit ending of Contact? And why is there so much crying in this episode?

10:23: Now Jack's dad is talking about the importance of friendship and some touchy-feely crap about "moving on." Apparently they're in heaven or purgatory or some such nonsense.

10:24: Now all of the show's characters are having an ice-cream social in the church. Lots of hugging is involved. How come Mr. Eko, Michael, and Ana-Lucia don't make the cut while Charlie and Boone do? Did Hurley, Sun and Jin fulfill the token minority quotient?

10:28: Notice how all the male and female characters are cuddling up to one another in a church, aka the only place where romantic unions can be consecrated in the eyes of God almighty. My theory will not be defied!

10:30: Jack dies on the island as the rest of the survivors escape on the jet. Roll credits. Brief review: this finale sucked.

Suspect Zero liveblog

I wasn't sure if I was going to do one of these this week, but it so happens that I was cruising Netflix Watch Instantly, which functions as an online repository of every shitty movie ever made and twelve or so good ones, when I stumbled across Suspect Zero, which I vaguely recall hearing about at the time of its release. I read the description of the movie, which I'll reproduce verbatim here:

A serial killer is on the loose, and FBI agent Thomas Mackelway is on the case, sifting through clues to uncover the criminal's identity. But there's one unusual twist: The bloodthirsty felon's victims of choice are other serial killers.

I can't pass up a movie that sells itself on its sheer density of serial kilers. Plus, it's in high-def. 

0:30: The credits are in a scratchy font that's overlaid with a distortion effect, which means that this movie has managed to rip-off of Seven before the first scene even begins.

1:15: We open on a diner in the rain, which could also be considered a ripoff of Seven, although I guess Seven doesn't really have a copyright on rain in movies. Although it probably could.

3:43: Ben Kingsley sits down across from a fat man and starts up a stereotypical "crazy person conversation" by asking invasive questions and by showing the fat man some pencil sketches, which I guess we're supposed to assume are crazy person drawings.

5:25: The fat man gets in his car and starts driving away nervously. I wonder how long it's going to take before we find out that he's really a serial killer.

6:55: Ben Kingsley is hiding in the fat man's backseat pulling on surgical gloves! He shows one of his "creepy" drawings and implies that he's going to kill the fat man. End scene. I'm impressed that nobody who made this movie was tempted to put any sort of clever spin in lifting the old killer in the backseat urban legend.

8:15: Hey, Aaron Eckhart's in this movie, playing an FBI agent who's been transferred to Albuquerque from Dallas. The office also contains the guy who played Boyd in Dollhouse and someone who had a bit role on lost.

10:14: Now Aaron Eckhart's getting some strange faxes of missing people marked for his eyes only.

12:15: Aaron Eckhart and Boyd from Dollhouse go to investigate the death of the fat guy from the first scene. The Albuquerque police/FBI are being portrayed as

13:22: Did I mention that the score for this movie is a combination of vaguely Native American woodwinds and chanting? It's clearly supposed to be arty, but it comes off as kind of annoying. Also, Ben Kingsley's doing some sort of guided imagery meditation and having some sort of psychic vision of Aaron Eckhart investigating the dead fat guy's car, which he draws a picture of.

17:13: Now Trinity from The Matrix is here, who is also an FBI agent from Dallas sent to help with the fat guy's murder. They're reviewing pictures of forensic evidence on a table in the middle of a diner. Are they allowed to do that?

20:23: Aaron Eckhart and Trinity from The Matrix are alluding to a boring backstory when they find a dead guy in the trunk of a car in the diner's parking lot with the movie's logo carved into the back of his chest.

21:00: Remember when I said this movie was trying to rip off Seven? I was wrong. It's trying to rip off Twin Peaks. Inexplicably, it's apparently doing so by shooting on the crappiest digital video I've ever seen and having all the actors to deliver their lines with no intonation, and not setting any sort of context for what the hell is going on.

26:12: Aaron Eckhart and Trinity find Ben Kingsley's lair. He has a bunch of clippings of newspapers that detail how Aaron Eckhart got in trouble by arresting a killer in another state without an extradition treaty. This is reiterated in a flashback scene that also intimates that Aaron Eckhart also has psychic powers.

31:10: I need to point out that there appears to have been no attempt whatsoever to employ lighting in this movie.


31:52: Now we're in psychic-vision again (read: a red filter slapped across a canted long-shot) and we're seeing someone who's probably Ben Kingsley sketching Aaron Eckhart's face and writing "Heightened Awareness. Chronic Insomnia. Acute Migranes. He Is The One." Is this all an elaborate clinical trial for Excedrin PM?

32:13: Another arty montage of Ben Kingsley drawing and more psychic visions of Aaron Eckhart doing police stuff.

34:44: More serial killin's afoot! Some redneck abducts a woman in the parking lot of a bar and rapes her in a truck. Then Ben Kingsley shows up, pulls him out of the window of the truck, and kicks his ass, which seems physically improbable. Then he kills him.

37:40: It turns out this victim is the same guy that got off when Aaron Eckhart flagrantly disregarded state jurisdiction statutes. More ambient music and lots of close-ups of Aaron Eckhart's face, presumably conveying his harried emotional state. Aaron Eckhart finds a message left by Ben Kingsley saying "You're Welcome Tom"

41:11: Now they're at the FBI office talking about how the locations of the bodies match GPS coordinates found at Ben Kingsley's old room. I can envision the meeting where the writer and director of this movie are desperately trying to think of plot devices that haven't been used in a thousand other serial killer movies. "I know - GPS coordinates!"

42:28: Now Aaron Eckhart's getting a message from a "professor of criminal biology." What the fuck does that mean? The movie, of course, doesn't bother to even make it sound like a real thing. Aaron Eckhart goes to visit this guy, who has a bunch of Native American crap on his walls. Cue more fucking flute music. The professor of criminal biology explains that Ben Kingsley was once a student of his, his Anakin Skywalker if you will, and that he had a pet theory about somebody he called the "suspect zero," who is basically a serial killer that nobody can tell is a serial killer because he's so good at being a serial killer there's no consistent pattern to the murders.

44:33: Aaron Eckhart asks the professor of criminal biology if Ben Kingsley might be the suspect zero. "That's a plausible theory." Based on this, we can safely assume that there's no way that Ben Kingsley is the real suspect zero and that it's going to turn out to be Aaron Eckhart himself in a shocking twist ending in about 45 minutes. The "he is the one" thing would seem to foreshadow this. Backup possibility: it's Trinity from The Matrix.

47:42: Now Ben Kingsley is at a funeral in a black church and is crying for whatever reason.

49:11: Aaron Eckhart is looking over all of the crazy scribblings that Ben Kingsley has sent him. One of them is a drawing of a vagina. He's also having psychic visions, which are different from Ben Kingsley's because they are grainy black and white.

50:12: Now Aaron Eckhart goes over to Trinity's house (in the rain, natch) and mumbles a bunch of stuff about how he's close to cracking open the case and also expresses some generic torment about his headaches. It's revealed that he and Trinity have a romantic past. Have I mentioned this is a terrible movie?

53:13: Aaron Eckhart goes to question the fat guy's wife again on a hunch, but she can't talk to him for very long because she has a PTA meeting to go to. You'd think she'd take a break from that shit considering her husband just died. As she leaves, Aaron Eckhart notices that Ben Kingsley's sent him a bunch of drawings of the house, so he breaks back into it and finds a big trunk in the attic with a bunch of serial killer stuff. Then in a voiceover scene Aaron Eckhart tells us that the FBI also figures out that the other dead guy who Aaron Eckhart and Trinity found in the car a half-hour ago was also a serial killer. We are now officially caught up to the amount of information that was contained in the two-sentence Netflix summary.

1:00:23: Now Ben Kingsley gets pulled over by a cop and has an essentially pointless conversation where he claims to be a former FBI agent. This was also mentioned earlier. Ben Kingsley sends Aaron Eckhart a message to come over to his weird basement deal. When he gets there, there's a filmstrip playing that basically says that Ben Kingsley really was in the FBI, in some sort of special experimental deal codenamed "Project Icarus" which isn't at all a retarded codename for a special project. Was "Project Hindenburg" already taken?

1:07:08: Ben Kingsley's doing his scribbling thing again, and seeing another psychic vision of what's probably another murder victim, only you can't tell because it's just a kid on a swing who then disappears and his mother starts frantically running around looking for him. During this time, Aaron Eckhart is tearing wallpaper off of a wall for some reason and revealing a mural of a black hole or some shit. Apparently the mural is of all of the murder victims that Ben Kingsley has psychically seen.

1:13:11: Now Aaron Eckhart is trying to convince Trinity and Boyd from Dollhouse that Ben Kingsley is a good guy. Now apparently he's chasing some trucker who's abducting little kids. Yes, all this is supposed to be happening in one part of New Mexico.

1:15:45: Aaron Eckhart starts tracking the child killer using his psychic visions or just happens to catch sight of him on the roadway (I can't tell). Then Ben Kingsley shows up and kidnaps Aaron Eckhart somehow.

1:18:33: Aaron Eckhart's hogtied on the floor and Ben Kingsley is yelling about killing him but doesn't for some reason. Then it cuts to them riding in a car where Ben Kingsley is talking about being psychic and how it sucks because he doesn't know how to not be psychic anymore and he's always seeing murder in his mind. What a crybaby.

1:22:34: They drive to a farm somewhere that has a ton of bodies buried in mounds in the backyard and then Ben Kingsley given Aaron Eckhart a gun and they start to chase the serial killer, who's driving a refrigerated truck. Everybody goes off the road and flips over for reasons that are not evident. Aaron Eckhart chases the serial killer guy on foot while Trinity saves the kidnapped kid. More fruity music plays in the background.

1:29:13: The serial killer trucker manages to get the drop on Aaron Eckhart even though Aaron Eckhart is chasing him through the desert, has a gun, and is psychic. Aaron Eckhart turns the tables and kills the serial killer with a big rock. Then Ben Kingsley drops to his knees and put Aaron Eckhart's gun to his head in an exact replica of the staging of the climactic scene from - yes - Seven.

1:33:15: Ben Kingsley goes into an outrageously hammy speech about how he wants to die because he can't take the psychic visions any more and how he wants Aaron Eckhart to take his place as the new psychic avenger or some such. Aaron Eckhart refuses to kill him, but then Ben Kingsley pulls out his knife to attack him and Trinity shoots him instead.

1:36:11: Ben Kingsley's final words: "So...tired." Me, too. This is one of the most incompetent movies I've ever seen. It's not entertaining-bad, it's hack film-student bad. It didn't even have the decency to shoehorn in a wildly implausible twist ending. Also, I never want to hear Native American music ever again.