What is this, the high hat?

Reading The Shallows as an ebook

2010-11-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-11-14T21:13:00.000-07:00


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

2010-10-07T05:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-06-08T21:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-05T21:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

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.

The greatness of multiplayer Halo

2010-05-16T13:09:00.004-07:00

Above: Blood Gulch, site of many fond memories. There's a shotgun in that building on the bottom screen!

The original Halo has a very special place in my heart. Not only was it one of the first games that I owned for the first Xbox, way back when it came out in 2001, the multiplayer was also a staple of my entire college career. After the massive popularity of the online-enabled Halo 2 and Halo 3, it's easy to forget how unlikely it was that the multiplayer in the original became a phenomenon in its own right. Halo, however, came out at a time when splitscreen was the only game in town. You could theoretically get up to 16 players into a game by networking four consoles with four controllers each, but who the hell would have the space and the resources to pull that off? When I first got the game, I had all of two controllers to work with, which meant that my friends and I were limited to one-on-one deathmatch. Mind you, Halo was not designed for one-on-one, most of the maps were actually targeted for 6-12 players. It should have been mindnumbingly boring. Instead, it was glorious.

Playing a multiplayer shooter with only two competitors dials the pace way back. With Halo, it turned a chaotic blastfest into a tactical affair, where long periods of mutual stalking build up to an explosive flurry of moves and countermoves. This worked so well in Halo for two reasons: the regenerating shield system, which is now an industry standard but was completely innovative and new at the time, and the fact that the default spawn loadout included a cache of grenades and a remarkably effective scoped pistol. In Halo, you can hold your own even if you wind up in a fight before you can find a better gun, and if an opponent gets the upper hand and starts inflicting damage, you have the option of falling back and recouping. Compared to other shooters of the time, Halo had a unique and fluid rhythm that fluctuated constantly between defense and offense, with no one tactic guaranteeing success at any moment. Not only was it fun to play, it was fun to watch - which was important, because with only two controllers, somebody would always be watching and waiting for their turn.

Later, when I bought some more controllers, we started played 3 and 4 player matches, which brought back some of the chaos and randomness of the game. One thing we did semi-regularly is setting up King of the Hill matches (where you score points from standing in a random spot on the map that moves every 30 seconds) where every player spawned with a rocket launcher by default. This turned the game into a kind of Warner Bros. cartoon, where within 5 seconds of getting into scoring position, you'd be nailed by multiple explosions that left you staring at your corpse as it pinwheels across the map through the third person death camera that's one of Halo multiplayer's subtler pleasures. Even though this was probably the least skill-intensive permutation of Halo competition, it was hilariously fun to play.

I skipped Halo 2 multiplayer, mostly because the game came out when I was in grad school and didn't really have online access or anyone to play splitscreen with. I did play quite a bit of Halo 3 online, which I enjoyed. Since that game concluded the story arc begun in the first game, I figured that it would wind up being the apex of the series and basically assumed that any subsequent games would be less inspired or more minor entries, which seemed to be born out by Halo 3: ODST, which was a lot of fun, but hewed pretty closely to the basic gameplay formula of the parent game. So when the two-week multiplayer beta test for this fall's Halo: Reach opened up to ODST owners, I figured that I'd download it and play a couple matches to check out the graphics and new weapons and that would be that.

You can guess how that turned out. I've been totally hooked on Halo: Reach. It's probably a good thing that the beta ends on Monday, because I'd probably keep playing it into the forseeable future, even though the selection of maps for the base game is limited to two (there's a couple other maps that are devoted to specialized modes, one of which is a kind of variant on the Assault gametype from Unreal Tournament). Reach is a chronological prequel to the existing Halo games, although it's not going to feature the same characters, and it seems pretty clear to me that Bungie's using the opportunity to bring back some of the feel of the original Halo multiplayer: there's no more dual-wielding mechanic, no more grenade types beyond frag and plasma, and the scoped pistol is back in slightly modified form as a default weapon. More importantly, they've tuned the game down substantially away from Halo 3's emphasis on close combat - the default strategy of running straight at an opponent while firing the shitty default assault rifle until you're close enough for a melee blow doesn't work nearly as well now, and the grenades are substantially more effective. There's also a mechanic where rapid-firing precision weapons reduces accuracy. All in all, the feel of the game is a lot closer to the tactical balance of the original Halo, and I love it.

There's also a lot of new stuff, with the most significant addition being the substitution of persistent abilities (jetpack, sprint, invisibility, or power armor) picked from a class-selection menu that replace the temporary power-ups of previous Halo outings. I was skeptical about this when I first heard they were doing it, but it's amazing how well-implemented it is in giving you more options to alter the flow of combat without breaking the game. I tend to favor the sprint ability, which lets me close into medium range more quickly to better use the pistol, but I've seen other players use each of the other powers in smart ways, and you're free to equip an different one between lives a'la the Call of Duty class system. The new weapons are also very cool and surprisingly substantial in terms of differences from Halo 3 - pretty much everything has been rethought or replaced. Below is a shot of me, captured using the Theater mode that's been brought over from the last game, in the process of taking out somebody with the new grenade launcher:

So I'm seriously impressed by Halo: Reach: it's much more of a new-feeling game than I was expecting given the wide acclaim and huge sales figures of Halo 3. The design choices evoke some serious nostalgia for the first Halo and all the good times I had playing it back in college, while also adding a bunch of new and modern wrinkles to the gameplay. This is definitely a must-buy for me when it comes out later this year, and based on the small taste available through the beta, I can see myself getting more than my money's worth out of the online multiplayer.

Law Abiding Citizen liveblog

2010-05-15T21:59:00.001-07:00

"(I)f trying to be intense and serious and succeeding only in looking completely goddamn ridiculous were an Olympic sport, Law Abiding Citizen would have been crowned its Michael Phelps based solely on the two-and-a-half minute span presented above." Me, after seeing the trailer for Law Abiding Citizen back in August of last year.

Join me to find out how far Gerard Butler will go to avenge his murdered family after being failed by the justice system. My guess: further than Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence, but not as far as Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

0:00: I have a question: how come the main takeaway from the success of 300 was "Gerard Butler should be a major mainstream movie star"? I haven't made a habit of seeing any of his movies since then - maybe I'm missing out, and The Ugly Truth is actually a new-era The Philadelphia Story - but he strikes me as a puffier Russell Crowe with the fratboy aloofness of Vince Vaughn. Now that I think about it, I guess I can see why a casting director would go for something like that. Though I wonder how he's going to fare in the Sam Worthington era.

0:00: Fun fact: Law Abiding Citizen was written by Kurt Wimmer, the writer/director of the underrated Equilibrium, which achieved a kind of greatness due to featuring some seriously inventive action sequences and Christian Bale in full-on overachiever mode. I don't know if the writing really distinguished itself in that one, though.

1:34: Gerard Butler gets hit in the face with a baseball bat by some robbers after a whopping 42 seconds of character establishment (summary: he has a cute family). The robbers rape his wife and kill his kid, but don't appear to actually steal anything except for a trophy from the mantelplace, presumably awarded to Gerard Butler for Family Least Likely To Be Killed.

3:35: Now we open on ambitious young prosecutor Jamie Foxx, being ambitious and young. He decides that he can't take the risk of prosecuting both the robbers, so he makes a deal to send one of them to Death Row while convicting the other one on a lesser charge. "This is just how the justice system works!" Gerard Butler is sad.

9:12: Now the deal is closed, and of course the more evil robber is the one that has the lighter sentence. The more evil robber shakes Jamie Foxx's hand and says "It's nice when the system works" in an evil voice. Oh, the irony! Gerard Butler looks on with a look of slight annoyance.

11:34: Now Jamie Foxx is talking to his pregnant wife's belly.

11:55: TEN YEARS LATER - this movie really doesn't waste a lot of time on exposition. Now Jamie Foxx is a slightly older but still ambitious prosecutor. His wife is bitching at him about never making it to their kid's piano recitals because he's so invested in his work.

14:00: It turns out that he's going to the execution of the less-evil robber that was sentenced to death, because he totally has to be there and couldn't possibly miss that to see his daughter play in a recital. There's some classy intercutting between the recital and the execution that probably should have been a match on action, but isn't.

14:15: This movie's commitment to not trying to make its actors look 10 years older despite having flashed forward ten years is truly impressive.

16:15: The execution goes bad! It's supposed to be a basic painless lethal injection, but instead it causes the less evil robber's heart to explode! Jamie Foxx is not happy and wants answers.

20:34: Now the more evil robber is running from the cops because they want to question him. But Gerard Butler calls him on his cellphone using the voice masking deal from Scream and guides him to safety. Then he pretends to be a cop using a wig and fake mustache and lets himself be captured by the more evil robber, only it's really a setup so Gerard Butler can turn the tables on him by letting the robber steal a fake gun that has spikes that come out of the grip.

22:00: The more evil robber is paralyzed with "toxin from a Caribbean puffer fish" that immobilizes him but still lets him feel pain. Gerard Butler does some Saw type torture stuff and cuts the more evil robber up into pieces.

24:19: The prosecutor team is now trying to figure out who could have messed with the lethal injection device. This is not what the intro to Law & Order (RIP) let me to believe prosecutors do. They find out that the more evil robber has been chopped up in a warehouse owned by Gerard Butler. We also learn that Gerard Butler is a "tinkerer" who holds "19 patents" which I think is shorthand for "super-genius."

29:15: Now they're off to arrest Gerard Butler, who takes his shirt off before the cops get there for some reason. He's wearing the bracelet his daughter gave him in the first 30 seconds of the movie. The prosecutors are helping to search the crime scene, because there are no other crimes in the city of Philadelphia that need their attention.

31:20: "We have zero evidence. We're going to need a confession!" Isn't the clear motive and the fact that the murder was committed on his property enough to make a case?

32:10: Jamie Foxx's daughter gets a DVD that she thinks is of her recital but is actually of Gerard Butler carving up the more evil robber.

33:30: Jamie Foxx is now interrogating Gerard Butler in the middle of a comically overlarge cell that looks like something from the third act of The Silence of the Lambs.

34:20: "You might want to cancel your 12:30 lunch with Judge Roberts." Gerard Butler really is a super-genius! He must have hacked into Jamie Foxx's Outlook calendar.

36:15: "You've got me confused, I don't deal with prison stuff." - Jamie Foxx, who based on what we've seen so far does pretty much everything except prosecute criminals, including probably planning the meals in the prison cafeteria.

38:15: Now they're trying to trace Gerard Butler's holdings, which are registered through a Panamanian dummy corporation.You can tell the movie is trying to make a half-assed nod to real police work here, while hoping that the viewer doesn't know what prosecutors actually do.

40:35: This movie is kind of a rip-off of the little remembered Anthony Hopkins-Ryan Gosling movie Fracture, which was itself kind of a rip-off of Primal Fear.

41:00: We see Jamie Foxx doing some actual prosecuting! More specifically, requesting that Gerard Butler not be granted bail. Gerard Butler gives a speech in his defense, which uses the words "law abiding citizen," and cites precedent. The judge is impressed and looks ready to grant him bail. Then he gives another speech about how the justice system is too lenient and says to the judge "I feed you a couple precedents and you jump on them like a bitch in heat!"

41:33: Gerard Butler is right about the American justice system. If this were say, good old Soviet Russia, criminals would be shot in the back of the head immediately after a show trial and a bill for the bullet would be sent to their surviving family. The way it's supposed to be!

48:13: Now Gerard Butler blackmails Jamie Foxx into buying him a steak lunch because he kidnapped the more evil robber's attorney and buried him alive with a bunch of oxygen tanks. They don't get to save the attorney because Gerard Butler didn't get his lunch exactly on time. Meanwhile, Gerard Butler kills his cellmate with the bone from his steak.

58:15: Jamie Foxx visits Gerard Butler in solitary confinement and gives him back the bracelet that his daughter made him. So far, there are shockingly few correctional officers in this prison.

59:20: Now some government agent guy is revealing that Gerard Butler is a super-smart brainy government operative who can plan anything. Actual dialogue: "Just assume this guy can hear and see everything you're doing. Every move he makes, it means something." I can't help but think this dialogue wouldn't be necessary to establish the character if Gerard Butler were a better actor.

1:00:34: Now Jamie Foxx is talking to the judge, who's going to let them keep Gerard Butler in solitary confinement even though it's against his constitutional rights (but not really, because he has committed a murder THE DAY BEFORE). Then the judge's cell phone rings and she picks it up and then the phone shoots her in the head, because that can happen.

1:03:41: More ranting from Gerard Butler about how the justice system doesn't work and he's going to bring it down with his terrorist campaign. I wonder if Nancy Grace did an uncredited punch-up on this script?

1:05:15: "Release me before 6 AM and drop all charges." "Or what?" "Or I kill... everyone!"

1:06:00: Now they're talking about Panamanian treaty law. Those corporate accounts are the real key to solving this murder case!

1:08:44: It's 6 AM - what's going to happen?

1:09:47: Gerard Butler kills Jamie Foxx' attractive deputy DA with a carbomb! He also planted two or three other carbombs that go off without killing anybody, because explosions are cool.

1:12:15: More actual dialogue, from a new character who appears to be a boss of some sort: "Let me get this straight. Not only do we know who did it, we have him locked up and he's still killing people? You boys sure fucked this one up. The press is going to kill us!" I like how in the world of Law Abiding Citizen the justice system is horribly inept at locking people up and the press is apparently voracious in speaking truth to power. That's cutting-edge social realism.

1:14:35: Now Jamie Foxx is beating up Gerard Butler and Gerard Butler is taunting him by saying that he's planning "von Clausewitz shit, total fucking war." How philosophical!

1:16:20: Older, wiser prosecutor at cute junior DA's funeral: "Did we bring this all on ourselves?" Cursed by their own hubris!

1:18:14: Now the prosecutors are leaving the funeral and they get ambushed by what appears to be a 50 caliber machine gun and rocket launcher mounted on the Mars Rover, controlled by an unseen figure with gloved hands. The older, wise prosecutor gets blown up.

1:20:52: Now, the person who was yelling at Jamie Foxx two scenes ago, who is apparently the mayor, is promoting him to head DA. Then she gives a briefing to Jamie Foxx and a couple other people about how the city of Philadelphia is too scared to go outside because of the killings

1:23:38: Back to the tax records, which is turning out to be the retarded sister of this movie's subplots. Jamie Foxx has a breakthrough and finds a property that Gerard Butler bought through his dummy corporation. He and the asshole DEA agent from Con Air break in while making more disparaging comments about civil rights. They find a big mining tunnel hidden under a car that leads into the prison that Gerard Butler is in, complete with an underground armory and a bunch of disguises. In an unbelievably half-assed attempt to make this movie look smarter than it clearly is, there's also a plaque with a quote from von Clausewitz that looks like it was produced by the custom sign department at a Staples.

1:28:10: "He tunneled into every cell!" Yes, this is actually what happens.

1:29:04: Now Gerard Butler is at City Hall disguised as a cleaning person, because apparently he's been operating a cleaning service for several years in anticipation of this plot. Jamie Foxx and the asshole DEA agent from Con Air run over to City Hall without calling for backup, probably because they're prosecutors, not law enforcement, and therefore aren't allowed to call for backup.

1:33:42: They find a bomb Gerard Butler left, but Jamie Foxx decides not to evacuate the building, becuase obviously that's what Gerard Butler would want them to do. Gerard Butler goes back to prison and watches the mayor's meeting on a device that looks like a mix between a portable TV and a piece of gym equipment.

1:36:09: Jamie Foxx is waiting in Gerard Butler's cell when he gets back. They have their fifth conversation about how Gerard Butler is betraying the memory of his family by killing everyone and Jamie Foxx tried to talk Gerard Butler out of blowing up City Hall because it will make him feel bad. Gerard Butler hits the detonator anyway.

1:39:15: Jamie Foxx moved the bomb to underneath the bed in Gerard Butler's cell! Gerard Butler blows up in a slow motion shot while looking at the bracelet his daughter made for him. Also the bomb appears to take out a good chunk of the prison wall, which you would think Jamie Foxx would have taken into account when formulating this plan.

1:41:18: And now Jamie Foxx finally makes it to one of his daughter's music recitals, having learned a valuable lesson about fatherhood in one of the scenes we must not have seen. End of movie!

Bonus: There's a special feature on the DVD called "The Justice of Law Abiding Citizen" The self-aggrandizing special features attached to crappy movies are often times even more entertaining than the movies themselves, as they give the filmmakers a chance to engage in wild hyperbole about thematic elements that are either barely present or poorly handled in the finished product. The interview with Dan Brown on the DVD for The DaVinci Code is a bona-fide classic of this type.

From Law Abiding Citizen director F. Gary Gray: "The best thing about this concept is that it doesn't fit into the normal Hollywood formula." Exactly! There are formula movies about people taking violent revenge for the murders of their families, and there are formula movies about Machiavellian geniuses implementing ridiculously complex criminal plots while under the direct surveillance of authorities, but only Law Abiding Citizen has the iconoclastic spirit to adopt every single element of both of those types of movies and knit them together in a semi-coherent fashion. Also, whoever produced this special feature had the sheer balls to run that quote over a clip from the movie featuring a huge explosion.

From producer Lucas Foster: "Every scene is about 'are we really receiving justice or not in the modern age?' And I don't know if we are." I think that Lucas Foster is right, and I predict that one day, not too far from now, Law Abiding Citizen will be on the curriculum for Ethics courses in some of our nation's most forward thinking community colleges.

Also from Lucas Foster: "We think of the justice system as something where, when someone is arrested, and they're put into the system, that's more or less the end of it." Um, we do? Even someone who's knowledge of the legal system is based entirely on TV dramas has a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the justice system than this.

There's actually a former prosecutor explaining how when a felony murder is committed, everyone involved is considered culpable. She also says that Jamie Foxx in the movie would have a tough time trying the case of Gerard Butler's family's murder because it's based in eyewitness testimony. Then another former prosecutor says "eyewitness testimony can hold up, and frequently does, but there are no guarantees."

There's also a special feature about the visual effects of the movie, one of which is about how they added snow in one scene for a "visual, ethereal vibe." Other than that, it's the typical boring special feature where the producer brag about how much of their movie is unnecessarily produced inside of a computer.

Iron Man 2 review (in five brief points)

2010-05-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

Above: The most difficult part of scripting an Iron Man movie is probably coming up with reason after reason for his helmet to be off.

1.) Is there any other comic book movie franchise where the action set pieces feel like an unwelcome distraction from the character beats and dialogue exchanges? The first act of Iron Man 2 has a great action scene that takes place on the track of the Monaco Grand Prix, but the other battle moments are sort of lukewarm. The final fight sequence is better than its counterpart in the first movie, but isn't anything that's going to have you out of your seat and cheering. I think this has something to do with the fact that all the work the movies put into establishing how badass the Iron Man suit is makes it hard to believe the character ever faces any real threat. All the character banter is still great, though. I'm half-convinced that Robert Downey Jr.'s flippant playboy act can make any movie worth the price of admission. Since I'm starting to think that special effects have reached a point of diminishing returns with regard to making a genuine impression on the viewer, Avatar aside, Iron Man 2's approach is probably a smart one.

2.) The new characters in this movie are really well-cast. Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer, a glad-handing Tony Stark wanna-be, looks like he's having a ball, and more importantly, fits perfectly with the movie's comic edge. Mickey Rourke was a great choice for the main villain, who's set up as a doppelganger of Iron Man; he plays the character as a taciturn and deeply internal contrast to Tony Stark's showiness and charisma. Scarlett Johansson wears a lot of tight costumes, is mostly successful at affecting a grim determination, and blends in well with her fight double in a pretty well-choreographed. Don Cheadle is good, even though his character is kind of a thankless one, but honestly, when is he ever bad?

3.) Iron Man 2 is definitely worth seeing, but it's not up to the standard of Spider-Man 2 or The Dark Knight in terms of raising the bar. There's some missed opportunities that keep the film from being as good as the first. Like I said above, Mickey Rourke is a kick-ass villain. He plays off of Robert Downey, Jr. incredibly well. Unfortunately, he only does so in a whopping two scenes, one of which doesn't even really count because it's a fight sequence where everyone's wearing masks and blasting each other with lasers. It would have been killer to see the two of them match wits a couple more times in the second and third acts. What do we get instead? Fifty scenes of Mickey Rourke tinkering with electronics in various rooms. Also, there's a subplot about Tony Stark being poisoned by the reactor in his chest that doesn't really get too far off the ground. It's clearly intended to highlight how he's bit off more than he can chew with the Iron Man persona and mission, and that he needs to learn some humility, but that thematic point is somewhat undermined when he solves the problem completely on his own, and again, the movie can't really seem to commit to putting its hero into genuine danger.

4.) That being said, the continuity between this film and the first one is worthy of praise - Iron Man 2 picks up right where the first one left off and establishes the new characters and plot efficiently. There's not much "previously on Iron Man," so if you're fuzzy on the events of the first movie, better hit up Wikipedia before you go to the theater. The Marvel universe coherence effort is still in play, too. Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, introduced in the bit after the credits of the first Iron Man, has a full-on supporting part in the sequel, and the upcoming Avengers superhero-alliance movie continues to be telegraphed apace. There's another little bit after the credits in Iron Man 2 to tease the upcoming Thor movie, so if you are unlike me and have more than a vague understanding of the character of Thor, you may be excited for that.

5.) There's a sequence bridging the second and third act that shamelessly steals from the "Careers in Science" episode from season one of The Venture Bros. If you're familiar with the episode, you'll know it when you see it.

2012 liveblog

2010-05-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

Join me as I watch 2009 disasterpalooza flick 2012 on DVD and attempt to convey the experience of watching a megabucks SFX movie through pithy comments on the onscreen action.

0:00: The cover of the 2012 DVD (pictured above) shows Tibet getting hilariously pwned by a tsunami while a monk looks on haplessly. Is it too conspiratorial to theorize that this is a sly attempt to boost the movie's appeal to Chinese audiences?

:30: The credit sequence is a bunch of shots of planets. Is the solar system secretly working for the Mayans?

2:00: Hey, it's Chiwetel Ejiofor, universally beloved for his lead performance in David Mamet's Redbelt! He's apparently playing the Jeff Goldblum role in this movie. Neutrinos are coming from the sun and heating up the Earth's core!

5:50: Oliver Platt has fallen a long, long way from the heady days of Lake Placid.

8:00: Danny Glover is playing the Bill Pullman role. He's giving a grave speech to the G-8 about the world ending.

10:15: There have been approximately 15 scenes in the last 10 minutes, establishing what will no doubt prove to be a totally necessary cast of characters.

12:40: John Cusack, in the Will Smith role, is running late! His regular car won't start, so he has to drive a limo for some reason. Also, his ex-wife won't get off his back. Women!

16:30: One of these backstories is apparently about a conspiracy to use the end of the world to steal famous works of art. No, really.

20:15: Back to Danny Glover's White House. I've noticed that most of the characters in this movie are pretty much the same characters as in Independence Day, except the ones who were white in that movie are now black and vice versa.

24:00: John Cusack and his kids went on a hike in Yellowstone National Park and stumbled upon Chiwetel Ejiofor's secret geology study, which is located on a massive and easily visible location. They talk about John Cusack's book. No, really.

26:15: "All our scientific advances, all our fancy machines. The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago." - actual dialogue

28:00: Woody Harrelson is playing a kooky character because of course he is. No disasters yet, but John Cusack is apparently getting WiFi in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. His kids are bitching about how much they hate being children of divorce. Fucking kids.

32:00: Woody Harrelson is showing off his "blog," which is actually a Flash animation, to John Cusack. He's telling John Cusack about all the ways in which this movie plans to rip off Deep Impact.

36:45: Scott Templeton from The Wire is John Cusack's ex-wife's annoying new husband. Also, finally an effects shot, set in a supermarket to best facilitate a product placement for Vault energy drinks. It looks fake and stupid.

40:25: All the rich people in the world have been briefed on the end of the world ahead of time and are conspiring to consolidate their power after the cataclysm. Did Naomi Klein write this movie? John Cusack turns out to be a limo driver for a bunch of rich Russian stereotypes and their annoying kids say something that reflects Woody Harrelson's conspiracy theory so John Cusack automatically makes the assumption that it's completely true.

45:30: First big action sequence! It combines a bunch of CGI destruction with rear-projected reverse shots of John Cusack pretending to drive while yelling. Then Scott Templeton from the Wire has to fly a plane out of LA at low altitude as it collapses into the ground, because he hasn't had enough lessons to fly upward. More reaction shots of John Cusack yelling "whoooa."

53:00: Chiwetel Ejiofor's father, a jazz musician on a cruise ship, is introduced to dispense some standard wise old black man wisdom. And John Cusack is going back to Yellowstone to get Woody Harrelson who has some map to the rich people rocket ships. I like how the movie completely skipped over the logic of John Cusack going to Wyoming to take his kids camping instead of one of the many national parks in California.

57:00: Now there's a big volcano blast that looks like a nuclear explosion and throws off comets that John Cusack has to outrun in an RV to get to the airstrip. This action sequence has exactly the same premise as the one 10 minutes ago, but subs in a volcano for an earthquake.

1:05:00: I should mention that the compositing in this movie is horrible. It's about at the level of Conan O'Brien's old bit where he drives his desk around.

1:08:34: Danny Glover is praying in the White House chapel and sharing a pointless nostalgic anecdote with Chiwetel Ejiofor. Glover's idea of portraying gravitas involves standing like he has a rod in his ass and talking like he's recovering from laryngitis. It's something less than convincing. He's delivering a dramatic address to the nation which mercifully cuts out while he's quoting the Bible as something that represents all the faiths of the world.

1:10:23: Third "collapsing airfield" shot of the movie!

1:17:15: An airport control tower was just exploded by volcanic ash somehow.

1:18: 04: Remember when our heroes were flying out of a collapsing LA at low altitude? Get ready for a thrilling sequence of our heroes flying out of a collapsing Las Vegas at low altitude!

1:22:03: Now there's a dialogue sequence between John Cusack's ex-wife and a tertiary Russian trophy girlfriend character. Did anything they shot for this movie get left on the cutting room floor?

1:26:30: Now they're flying over Honolulu, which is being melted down by another volcano. They ought to have named this movie John Cusack Watching Buildings Collapse From The Air. It has an avant-garde quality to it.

1:29:10: Danny Glover's President is now helping to locate the missing father of a little girl. I can't remember the last time I wanted a character in a movie to die so badly.

1:31:05: Vatican City falls apart, crushing the Pope and a bunch of people praying. Most movies would probably choose to either emphasize the power of faith and the human spirit or show the futility of human endeavor in the face of certain death. Not only does 2012 do both, it does so within the same scene and does this over and over again.

1:34:29: Danny Glover finally dies, in the front lawn of the White House, after a huge wave drops an aircraft carrier on top of him. Yes, really - it's awesome. His last words: "Dorothy, I'm coming home." I presume the context for that was in one of the many speeches he gave that I tuned out in the first half of the movie.

1:41:13: The latest plot point: John Cusack and the rich Russians are about to run out of fuel in the middle of the ocean, but come to find out that the Earth's crust has shifted a thousand miles and now they're right where they need to be to catch the spaceship, which is in China. Can't argue with plotting like that!

1:47:40: This movie's commitment to maudlin nostalgic dialogue exchanges is truly heroic. Each of the roughly ten thousand characters has had at least one, and all the black characters have had at least three.

1:52:22: Now a minor character who was onscreen for 30 seconds in the first ten minutes of the movie gets a dramatic death scene.

1:55:10: John Cusack and Scott Templeton from The Wire are bonding over the fact that John Cusack's kids love him despite the fact that Scott Templeton from The Wire actually gives a shit about being a father figure. They're in the back of a pickup truck driven by a Tibetan monk we met in the first act. Also, John Cusack's ex-wife wheedles their way onto one of the spaceships, which are apparently really just big boats, by appealing to Asian mysticism.

2:01:45: Now Chiwetel Ejiofor is making an impassioned speech about altruism and humanity, which everyone listens to despite the fact that they're supposedly 15 minutes away from certain death. And they all agree to open the gates to save everybody in the immediate vicinity, who I guess are mostly rural Chinese peasants and some of the rich people who paid to be on the ship.

2:04:14: The gate winds up crushing Scott Templeton from the Wire to death.

2:08:40: "What is happening? What's going on?" - actual, and apropos, dialogue

2:11:19: Now they're running around the interior of the ship while it's flooding, in a sequence that seems blatantly ripped off from Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon, which I guess they can get away with because nobody saw that movie.

2:12:30: Also, Hollywood can't do CGI water for shit.

2:16:10: John Cusack is going on a "suicide mission" to unjam the gate that killed Scott Templeton from The Wire and is preventing the ship's motors from engaging, which means the ship can't avoid slamming into Mt. Everest. He manages to squeeze in a maudlin speech to one of his kids beforehand.

2:23:00: John Cusack saves the day, but is taking too long to come up for air and everyone is worried that he's dead, except for anyone who's ever seen a movie before.

2:26:30: Flashforward to 27 days past the apocalypse, and everyone seems to be in pretty good spirits. Chiwetel Ejiofor is making romance with Danny Glover's daughter! And John Cusack and his ex-wife are happily back together, which is OK because her husband was ground to death in the gears of a massive door.

2:29:15: Apparently the tectonic shifts worked out in a way that preserved the entire continent of Africa, so that's where the rescue vessels are heading to rebuild civilization. The screenwriters probably meant this to be a powerful allusion to the biological roots of humanity and not a hearty endorsement of colonialism, but it kind of fails at the former while succeeding at the latter.

2:30:34: And that's the movie, save for 8 minutes of credits for effects animators soundtracked to some of the worse music I've ever heard.

On Further Viewing... L.A. Confidential

2010-05-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

Since the fall of 2009, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the (long overdue) third of the series.

The movie: L.A. Confidential was a critical darling and a pretty successful 1997 pulp-noir film that was more or less overshadowed in the popular imagination by Titanic-mania, although it did net Oscars for Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress) and Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson (Best Adapted Screenplay). It's an adaptation of James Ellroy's novel of the same name.

What I thought at the time: I went into L.A. Confidential as a high-schooler thinking that it was going to be lame because of the 1950s period setting. Instead, I was blown away by the labyrinthine plot, violence, and blackhearted cynicism. It was probably one my first exposure to noir as a genre (although it's more of a homage), and it definitely sparked an interest in the form.

On further viewing: As a movie, L.A. Confidential is a great by pretty much any measure, but it's one of the absolute best adaptations ever made. The novel L.A. Confidential is brilliant but unfilmable: the plot of the book is incredibly convoluted and spans decades, and just establishing the sheer amount of characters would take most of the running time of a feature film. The movie trims all that down drastically, yet still manages to capture the spirit of the book to a surprising degree. How?

A big factor is the white-hot laser perfection of the casting. Check this list: along with Basinger, L.A. Confidential features Kevin Spacey when he was still good, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, James Cromwell, and David Strathairn. Although the plot diverges significantly from the source material, the characters are incredibly faithful, and a surprising amount of Ellroy's world comes through in small details peppered into the background. The screen adaptation smartly plays up the dynamic between underestimated hothead police officer Bud White (Crowe) and coolly analytic careerist detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce). Both actors disappear into their roles completely; re-watching L.A. Confidential reminds me why Russell Crowe is a major star and why Guy Pearce ought to be one (seriously, between this, Memento, and The Proposition, how many more reasons do casting directors need to put Pearce in their movies?).

The screenplay, which doesn't so much reproduce the plot of the novel as distill it into an extremely streamlined form, rarely suffers from the abridgment. The only real exception to this is Jack Vincennes' (Kevin Spacey) character arc, which is pretty severely pared down and ends in an effective but somewhat contrived twist that feels transparently motivated by the need to get to the third act underway. On the whole, though, there's remarkably few seams for such a complicated endeavor.

A final aspect of L.A. Confidential that bears mention is the direction and the visual design. It must have been tempting to do the film as a fanboy-style homage to 1950s noir, but director Curtis Hanson downplays the anachronisms and recasts the genre to acknowledge the cultural and technical changes in filmmaking. Hanson's version emphasizes naturalistic acting, elaborate set design, masterful widescreen cinematography, and unrestrained profanity and violence, none of which were trademarks of the heyday of crime noir. Even though the film's unmistakably a period piece, there's a heavy emphasis on contemporary elements that make it compulsively watchable for non-genre buffs. The modern feel of L.A. Confidential has the side benefit of calling attention to the thematic parallels with the LAPD's early-90s corruption scandals without being heavy-handed about it.

In the final accounting, L.A. Confidential does justice to Ellroy's book. Hollywood is one for two in feature adaptations of Ellroy's work, with the demerit being Brian DePalma's campy butchering of The Black Dahlia. Apparently, George Clooney was cast as the lead in White Jazz, but dropped out. It's a shame, he's perfect for that character. What I'd really like to see is a big-budget miniseries adaptation of American Tabloid, Ellroy's fantastic historical conspiracy noir centered around the Kennedy assassination. Apparently this may actually happen, with HBO's backing. I'll believe it when I see it, but if it happens, it could really be something to look forward to.

Me and Ayn Rand

2010-05-01T15:08:00.001-07:00

Define irony: an stamp issued by the federal government bearing the likeness of Ayn Rand

One of the most interesting things for me personally in seeing the resurgence on the right of the parts of libertarian ideology that oppose government spending for the purposes of saving the economy and increasing access to health care (the libertarian influence on matters involving limiting the security state and reining in defense spending being curiously MIA) is Ayn Rand's return to semi-relevance in the national conversation. For the uninitiated, Ayn Rand is a Russian emigre who rose to prominence as a novelist and philosopher in the 1950s and 60s. Her topic du jour was the persecution of the individual by society, mostly by government and religion, which she believed needed to be fought by celebrating the moral importance of self-interest and by implementing an unrestricted economic system of lassiez-faire capitalism.

Rand's return to scrutiny was probably inevitable given the circumstances; she's by far the most accessible anti-regulation thinker around, and her apocalyptic streak fits well with the prevailing emotional tone of modern conservative populism, making her a natural avatar for the right on economic issues. For the left, Rand's relevance is more tied up with the contribution of her acolyte Alan Greenspan's deregulatory reforms during his lengthy tenure as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, which contributed substantially to the current economic crash. As such, the default attitude toward Ayn Rand among in-the-know liberals tends to involve eye-rolling and sneering, which isn't really a new development, but more pronounced these days. So it's in a bit of a strange position that I admit that Ayn Rand was a major influence on my intellectual development.

Hear me out - I'm not the type that'll be at the next Tea Party rally. I never exactly was. In fact, what drew me to Rand initally was her strident atheism. It's mentioned fairly infrequently in the present day, but Rand's contempt for the religious makes Richard Dawkins sound like Thomas Aquinas, and I first read her pretty shortly after I realized that religious faith held no meaning to me. This was in 1999, around the time of Bill Clinton's impeachment, and it felt to me like half the nation was suddenly stewing in moralistic outrage and pious theatrics. When I read Ayn Rand, I felt very acutely that she was the sort of thinker that would go blow for blow against the Jerry Falwells and Bob Barrs and match or exceed them in fury. The initial appeal of reading Ayn Rand (dissected brilliantly in this recent GQ article) comes from the sheer force of her stridency over all other factors, which spoke to me because I began reading her during a strident period of history and at the time in the lifespan (late adolescence) when force of passion seems most like a legitimate form of argument.

My attraction to Rand's social ideas made me more interested in her economic ones, which is actually fairly hard to avoid given her insistence that her philosophy is an irreducible whole. Now, this is where things got challenging, because I was raised in a solid Democratic household devoted to 1950s and 60s-vintage mainstream liberalism. By no means was it a radical milieu - in point of fact, my namesake is Robert F. Kennedy, famed for his efforts in elbowing out Eugene McCarthy - but enough to the left that Rand's jaundiced eye toward progressive social doctrine and unabashed championing of selfishness and capitalism were a fair shock to the system. Since the whole package was framed in terms that I found quite attractive -the importance of individuality and independence, the rewards that come from developing one's talents and capacities - I engaged with it in a serious way. In fact, in the span of about a year, I read both of Rand's major novels, the lengthy The Fountainhead and the gargantuan Atlas Shrugged, and probably four book-length collections of her essays. (I haven't actually picked up a Rand book since that time, and I probably never will again - thematically speaking, the sheer amount of internal redundancy built into her writings more or less obviates the benefits of revisitation, and only a masochist would read her for the prose.)

At this time, I hadn't ever really immersed myself in a topic intellectually the way that I did with Ayn Rand's philosophy, which was a formative experience in and of itself. I'd never felt the sense of immediacy and relevance that can accompany the act of thinking deeply about something (public high school is extraordinarily ill-suited to facilitate this kind of experience) and this was my first hint of how fulfilling and rewarding that can be. That's really more of a developmental milestone than something that can be attributed to Rand specifically - I'm sure I would have had it even if I had never read her. What Rand added to the mix was the insight that intellectual engagement is particularly valuable and important when ideas are being challenged.

The knee-jerk liberal critique of Rand's work is that it essentially carries the water for conservative establishment ideas, and post-Reagan and Greenspan, this isn't totally inaccurate, although it probably reverses the direction of influence. What this leaves out, though, is that Rand was essentially a pugilist and a contrarian rather than a supporter of one political establishment or popular line of argument. My favorite Rand essay is probably "Racism," written in 1963, which combines one of the brutally frank excoriations of the practice of racial prejudice that I've ever read with a pre-emptive strike against the Civil Rights Act of 1964; although I don't agree with her about the legislative aspects, it's impossible for me not to be impressed with someone who composed this paragraph while George Wallace was busily amassing a large national following and four-plus years before the notion of the Republican "Southern Strategy":

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called "conservatives" (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

Above everything else, I came away from Rand convinced of the value of considering things from a rational and independent viewpoint. It's not remotely a stretch to say that the time I spent with her works taught me how to think critically. I think I learned this lesson in a far better way than I would have just relying on my university education (which was excellent) alone - liberal arts curricula seem to have a way of explicitly encouraging students to "think and analyze material critically" while implicitly adding as long as you reach the conclusion I want you to or, more insidiously, as long as you don't "offend" anyone in the process.

It's practically a law of nature that reading Ayn Rand in late adolescence tends to turn one into an insufferable asshole. In fairness, that could be said of practically anyone getting into politically-oriented thought in that time of life - try and hold a conversation with a college sophomore who's read Naomi Klein - but I was certainly no exception to the rule. In retrospect, I was extremely fortunate that I didn't fall in with a crowd of Rand devotees during my college years, which would have worsened things considerably; one of the odder things surrounding Ayn Rand - which is really saying something - is the manner in which she ju-jitsued her philosophy of bold independent thought into a rigidly enforced cult of personality which is sadly still very much in existence.

As I got deeper into college, I became a lot less attached to what Rand thought, but I never really lost my appreciation for how she thought. This is a distinction that is too often obliterated by our discourse's relentless focus on categorizing people and their ideas into columns marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable." I've found that developing and maintaining a critical focus and a distrust of consensus to be extremely valuable in every area of my life. I should note that Rand isn't the only route to this conclusion (and very probably not the best); I recently read through Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian, which is a far more compact volume that anything Rand ever put together, yet concludes with a beautiful summary of exactly the type of mentality I've been attempting to describe:

"So I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the "transcendent" and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant and selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

Since it's rather impossible at this stage in time to admit of any affection for Ayn Rand and not discuss politics, I can say that I remain a self-identified liberal, and a registered Democrat, but I don't consider myself overly identified with party affiliation to the point where I would feel pressured to refrain from criticizing, say, Obama's shameful continuation of indefinite detention policies or his implementation of targeted assassination programs. I will admit to some sympathy and interest in libertarian thinking, which can and does promote things like a genuine respect for data (check out Megan McArdle's analysis of whether or not Toyota's cars were actually accelerating due to mechanical defects) or a commitment to challenging the long-held ideas of ideological allies (David Boaz's takedown of the myth that America "used to be more free" is truly praiseworthy). I'm very interested in the appearance of libertarian thinkers like Will Wilkinson who are advocating for replacing the longstanding conservative-libertarian alliance (the existence of which never made any sense to me) with a liberal-libertarian one, as elaborated in this essay by Cato's Brink Lindsey.

All of which is to say, I find these to be interesting times, for more reasons than the sport of speculating on whether or not the Tea Party is racist.

Questionable Marketing Strategy

2010-04-28T20:10:00.002-07:00

Is it really a good idea for Eminem to precede the release of the inevitably disappointing first single off of his upcoming album with this absolutely insane freestyle? Now people are actually going to be expecting a return to form.

Video Games as Art: A Proposition

2010-04-23T19:16:00.004-07:00

At the end of the post I did a month ago on video game addiction, I left an opening for future posts on the subjects of whether gaming is healthy and whether games are art. As it happens, this past week has presented an ideal context to address the second question, as famed film critic Roger Ebert posted a substantive rebuttal to a talk claiming the mantle of art for gaming. Ebert's critique builds off of an earlier exchange on the topic between himself and Clive Barker (yes, the one you're thinking of), and his position is stated boldly in the title of his latest post: video games can never be art. I won't link to any of the responses from gaming press and enthusiasts, but suffice it to say they range from polite engagement to petulant dismissal and none (that I've read) agree with Ebert.

I do agree with him, and I think that it would benefit the status of gaming as a cultural phenomenon immensely if more people immersed in gaming did, too. The essence of Ebert's case against gaming as an art form rests on two related observations. The first, which invokes the tradition of auteur theory in film criticism, notes that video games as an experience are not generally the product of a singular creative vision (i.e. there's no 'artist' whose work one can be said to be taking in while playing a game). The second observation, which is connected to the first one, is that games are ill-suited to producing emotional or intellectual insights about the human condition, which he states most explicitly as part of his 2007 reply to Barker:

(T)he real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them?

Ebert openly admits that the vast majority of ostensibly artistic works, including those in his favored medium, fail to clear this bar, but contends that for the reasons summarized above, no video game will ever make the cut.

The typical response to Ebert from gaming aficionados usually centers on two points: (a) the subjectivity and malleability of how one defines"art" and (b) the fact that gaming is in its relative infancy and no one can tell what the future of the medium will hold. I'm not going to engage these contentions because I find (a) to be tedious and pedantic and (b) to be impossible to discuss in any informed way, because time, not argument, will settle the score.

In fact, in agreeing with Ebert, I'm going to sidestep the particulars of the debate entirely and instead attack the underlying assumption behind it. As a jumping off-point, I want to expand on a point Ebert makes in the closing paragraphs of his most recent post:

"Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care. Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?""

To put it simply: pretty much. I'd venture that the average adult hardcore gamer who feels that he (or possibly she, but let's be real about the demographics here) has skin in the "are games art" debate is motivated at least in part by defensiveness over a lifetime of having their enthusiasm dismissed as childish. I think this is more of a human trait rather than something specific to gamers, although male nerds of all stripes seem more susceptible to it - consider the type of person who insists he's reading graphic novels, not comic books. There's a very strong, but mostly unspoken, rule in our culture that things which we do to Improve Ourselves are fundamentally superior to things we do just because we like to. The definition offered by Ebert that I excerpted above pretty much states that art and self-improvement are inseparable from one another, and all semantic debates aside, I think that tracks fairly well with the views of most people.

This idea regarding the preferability of Improving Ourselves, when filtered through the intense moralistic streak that somehow manages to simultaneously be both one of American culture's greatest strengths and one of it's greatest weaknesses, inevitably comes out as the idea that we should constantly be Improving, and should never consider passing on the opportunity to do so. Ask a gamer if any of these statements sound familiar:

"How can you waste the day inside playing video games when it's so beautiful out?"
"Why would you play Guitar Hero when you could be learning how to play real guitar?"
"Why don't you get together with your friends and do something, instead of just playing video games?"

I've played a lot of video games, and barring some sort of thumb incapacitating incident in the near future, I'll probably play a lot more. To answer Ebert's challenge, no video game has given me any sort of experience that has expanded me intellectually, emotionally, or culturally. I am perfectly OK with this, because I never picked up a controller expecting anything like that. I have many other sources of acculturation and learning in my life that more than compensate. What's more: with the time I've spent playing video games, I almost certainly could have learned another language, read more great literature, and cultivated a unique and interesting hobby of some sort. I chose to play video games instead, and I'm not sorry about that. I like playing video games, and that's a good enough reason for me to do it. It ought to be a good enough reason for anybody to do anything in their leisure time.

I understand the impulse to go on the defensive and try and stick games with the tag of "art" thus marking them as something with the potential to fulfill the holy task of Improving Ourselves, but it's the wrong path. Instead, I want to see some pushback against this idea that there's a moral obligation to maximizing our exposure to things designed to Improve Ourselves and that we should feel guilty about choosing to do things simply because we find them pleasurable. I want to be clear that this isn't about making different choices - we pretty much wind up doing the things we find pleasurable regardless of how anyone feels about them - but about consciously stating that our choices in entertainment, whether they be video games, watching pornography, or knitting, don't need to be transformative or Important to be worthy of respect. And I think we should get started on this before somebody decides to fuck around and try to make the Un Chien Andalou of games in an attempt to prove Ebert wrong, because I definitely don't want to play that shit.

Rolling Stone's hilariously bipolar cover features

2010-04-21T19:02:00.005-07:00

As a longtime subscriber to Rolling Stone who's lost almost all of my interest in actually reading the magazine (it usually winds up on my counter for a few weeks before I manage to even page through it), I'm continually amused by its desperate attempts to simultaneously satisfy its baby boomer audience, who count on it to be the reactionary standard bearer for 60's rock, while trying to woo the young audience, who I assume buy most of the iPod cases that occupy 70% of Rolling Stone's ad space. Basically, the magazine's incredibly half-assed strategy for pulling this off is running cover stories that oscillate between paleo-rock "legends" with no discernable reason for being on the cover of a contemporary music magazine a decade into the new millenium and whatever flash-in-the-pan pop culture phenomenon they can get to pose for a picture and sit for an interview. The main reason I find this entertaining is that I'm fairly convinced that the bulk of Rolling Stone's readership is 60's/70's Lost Causers who need a hit of nitroglycerin to tamp down their angina every time the magazine hits their porch with some teen singer on the cover.

As a demonstration, I present to you the three Rolling Stone covers for the month of April 2010, beginning with the obligatory sop to the boomer base:

I (obviously) didn't bother to actually read this article, but I assume the latest scuttlebutt on Jimi Hendrix is that he's still dead for 39 years. However, Rolling Stone must have thought that they'd earned major capital with the oldsters on this one, because the cover of the next issue features the cast of motherfucking Glee:
To be honest, I thought Rolling Stone covers had reached their nadir late last year, when they put that Indian kid from the Twilight movies on, but even that has something to do with vampires, which is kind of rock-and-roll if you don't think about it too hard. I'm at a loss for how anybody who works for Rolling Stone could even pretend to care about Glee for any reason other than the potential to sell a few magazines in a shitty economy. And then comes the coup de grâce:
A tip: if you are prepping a piece with the thesis statement that there are 40 reasons to get excited about music, and your first reason involves the Black Eyed Peas, you aren't doing a very good job. In fact, you may have just convinced me to never listen to music again. Enjoy your coronaries, original Woodstock attendees.

Splinter Cell Conviction Micro Kinda-Review

2010-04-20T21:35:00.006-07:00

I'm not done playing Splinter Cell Conviction yet, but I'm probably a bit over three quarters through with the single-player campaign. The Splinter Cell series has always occupied sort of a strange space for me: I've bought and played every single one that's been on Xbox/360 (this is the fifth in the series, excluding handheld spinoffs and cellphone de-makes) and enjoyed them all to one degree or another, but it's never been a series that I've felt an abiding passion for to the point where I would consciously identify them as some of my favorites. This is despite the fact that a strong case exists for Splinter Cell Chaos Theory as being one of the most finely crafted games of the previous generation.

Conviction changes up the formula quite a bit: it strips Sam Fisher (the player character) of his government affiliation and gear and puts him in the middle of a revenge tale. The gameplay is a lot different as well; the emphasis is still very much on stealth, but whereas in previous games, killing patrolling enemies was a risk/reward proposition that encouraged you to try to find a way to sneak through undetected, in Conviction you're more or less expected, and often times forced, to shoot most of the bad guys. To the credit of the developers, this doesn't feel like as much of a radical change as it initially sounds - since you're always outgunned and relatively vulnerable, the game isn't structured like a Gears of War/Call of Duty straight-up shooter (with the exception of the fourth level, which is structured exactly like this, and the less about which is said, the better) but rather forces a more tactically aggressive bent while allowing you a fair degree of experimentation.

The centerpiece of this approach is the "mark and execute" system, which allows you to designate between 2-4 hostile targets, depending on your loadout, and hit a button to autotarget and kill them. The catch is that you can only do this after pulling off a hand to hand takedown of another target, so you're forced to use stealth up to get the ability. Since you can mark targets at any time, this creates some really cool scenarios where you can, say, stalk a trio of patrolling enemies from a second-floor vantage point, mark two of them, jump down to take out the third, and immediately nail his companions. The system really allows you to pull off these type of maneuvers in a way that maintains the sense of control while enabling things that wouldn't be possible with previous iterations of the control scheme.

Actually, the controls in Conviction overall deserve high marks. The overhauled system provides some of the most fluid third-person control I've experienced in an action game, with the possible exception of Gears of War, and Conviction is giving you a lot more complexity than does Gears. There are a few snags here and there (I always find myself having trouble getting out of a crouch when I want to run, which requires that you hit RB after leaving cover) but the improvement over previous entries is clear, and obvious care has been taken to make sure that the control scheme fits the new, more aggressive gameplay style.

So I like Conviction quite a bit, which paradoxically makes its flaws and shortcomings more frustrating. The first issue I have with the game is probably more an artifact of my past experience with the franchise, but some of the changes really are at odds with things that were at the core of prior Splinter Cell games, such as the fact that you can't hide bodies anymore and you wind up in situations where you have to shoot your way out with no stealth option. Even the "mark and execute" system, which I think is actually pretty consistent with the Splinter Cell ethos, comes off to me as something that would feel more at home in Max Payne 3 than in a Sam Fisher adventure (note to people making Max Payne 3: steal this idea!)

The second issue I have is with the design choice to make the enemy AI yell at you constantly (nicely skewed in this Penny Arcade strip from last week, which doesn't exaggerate the situation by much). I'm sure there's a solid gameplay rationale for this, because it does improve your ability to track the enemies as they stalk you, but to have supposedly elite combat troops give away their position every five seconds while engaged in a cat-and-mouse battle of tactics really does break the illusion more than is desirable. Finally, despite the promise of a grittier and more emotionally driven narrative, Conviction turns into a boilerplate Tom Clancy improbable-and-poorly-explained conspiracy tales surprisingly quickly, and the dialogue and voice acting, with the exception of the always-great Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher, could use a lot of improvement. Even by the hallowed standards of video games stories, Conviction's plot doesn't make a lot of sense, and the antagonists pretty quickly cross the line into cartoonish supervillainy (word to Waylon Smithers).

I don't know if I'd mark Conviction as a must-buy for people who aren't series stalwarts such as myself, but it's an interesting experiment that does a lot of things rights. I'm really interested to try the co-op mode (the trailer for which I've embedded below), which is a completely different story and set of environments from the single-player and has been highlighted for special praise in a lot of the professional reviews. I could really see how the balance between careful planning and improvisation that the game encourages could be a lot of fun to navigate with another player, and the nature of the gameplay is such that a lot more actual cooperation between players would be necessary as compared to your average shooter. Also, one of the co-op characters is named Archer, which conjures the hilarious FX animated show by the same name. If I get the chance to check this out, maybe my estimation of Conviction will improve.

Male Studies: A Good Idea That Needs To Be Saved From Itself

2010-04-18T12:39:00.003-07:00

As somebody with a dilettante's interest in gender issues, I was pretty interested to hear about the announcement of a new academic discipline called "male studies" last week. The tidbit that particularly caught my attention was the focus on biological differences and their influence on masculinity, which the academics highlighted as a feature distinguishing their vision from that of contemporary academic gender studies. This topic in particular is something that I've been fascinated by ever since I read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, a book-length argument for the influence of biology on human behavior that I found extremely compelling and would recommend to anybody.

So the argument that biological differences are insufficiently considered in gender studies is one that I buy completely. In fact, I think a lot of the critical commentary directed toward "male studies" in the blogosphere from writers (presumably) steeped in gender studies goes a long way to proving this point. The main line of argument, typified here by Mother Jones' Titania Kumeh and the Washington City Paper's Amanda Hess, is that Men's Studies already exists and already incorporates biological perspectives. The first point is definitely true: the American Men's Studies Association has a website and a president, who is quoted in the NYT labeling the proposed "Male Studies" discipline "kind of a Glenn Beck approach," which doesn't make any sense taken literally, but can be safely assumed to be an expression of disapproval given the context.

The second point, about biological differences being covered in Men's Studies, seems pretty dubious to me. Here's how the Men's Studies association defines the spectrum of topics covered by the discipline:

"Men’s studies includes scholarly, clinical, and activist endeavors engaging men and masculinities as social-historical-cultural constructions reflexively embedded in the material and bodily realities of men’s and women’s lives."

If you didn't understand any of that, good for you! You probably spent your postsecondary education pursuing marketable skills. The gist of it is that Men's Studies looks at the ways society, history, and culture affect the way men understand masculinity. Which is good! All those things are important. Notice, however, that biology doesn't make the cut, which would seem to contradict the argument for the redundancy of Male Studies. Kumeh approvingly states that the Men's Studies curriculum " investigates society's standards for masculinity in men and boys. It covers the effects a hyper-masculine status quo has on the XY-chromosomed among us." Again, no mention of biology, until later in the article (after analogizing the idea of male studies to excluding slavery from history courses, which strikes me as something less than a logical and restrained analysis) when she claims that "(b)iology is covered in men's studies, but not in a vaccum that discredits nature/nurture arguments."

What I take this to mean, and I don't think I'm being unfair here because I've heard similar sentiments expressed in the past, is "biological differences may exist, but we're not interested in talking about them because they don't seem to be something that we can influence as easily as social standards." Later in her post, Kumeh fears that teaching about biological differences "lacks context and conscience" and "gives people an excuse not to change." This basic idea, which again I believe to be fairly widespread among gender studies scholars and students, is exactly why we need an disciplined and intellectually serious examination of biological differences. I've never read, in either the popular or scientific press, any argument that social and cultural factors are irrelevant to gender differences.

Instead, most of the discussion (again, I can't recommend Pinker's book strongly enough) centers on the idea that the timeless nature/nurture argument is essentially a false dichotomy and that biology deserves to be considered seriously as a key influence on how and why the social context develops, including gender norms. Again: no credible commentator that I'm aware of on the topic is agitating for the strict "anatomy is destiny" hypothesis, or endorsing the idea that biology excuses discrimination or injustice. There are plenty of populist idiots beating that drum, but I'd argue that makes the case for more education about what biological differences imply and do not imply, not less.

Having said all this, there's a fine line to be walked in making this point, and based on the published accounts, the people behind Male Studies aren't doing a very good job in walking it. In a nutshell: the least productive thing possible in this instance is rhetorical mudslinging directed at feminism, which is exactly what one of the architects behind the discipline, Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger (apparently his real name) does in referring to it as “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.” This is a terrible idea for a very simple reason: "feminism" isn't an easily defined thing. It's a multifaceted and complex tradition that covers a diverse array of political, intellectual, and philosophical questions and features a continually evolving internal debate. I find it extremely unlikely that the Male Studies set categorically opposes all things identified as feminist; for instance, I doubt that Dr. Tiger is agitating for the repeal of women's suffrage or the decriminalization of marital rape. Rather, they're pushing back against one very specific component of some feminist thought: the idea that biological differences should be marginalized in discussions of gender.

Framing this argument as a broadside against the abstract notion of feminism is essentially an invitation to be dismissed summarily by anyone who self-identifies as feminist (if it wasn't for my prior interest in the topic, I would have done so myself). It also opens Male Studies proponents to the ad hominem charge of misogyny, which many gender studies stalwarts are quick to deploy. If the discipline of Male Studies wants to define itself as an antidote to feminism writ large, we can expect the level of rational discourse on both sides to roughly resemble that of an Internet forum debate between fans Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.

Much as I'd like to believe otherwise, I think this is probably the most likely scenario, which doesn't bode well for Male Studies as an intellectual undertaking. I don't think there's a future for ways of thinking about masculinity that gather steam from anti-feminist grievance (see also the Men's Rights "movement," a disastrous amalgamation of embittered men who claim that their child support payments are evidence of a vast conspiracy against the male gender). I do think that a broader conversation about biology and gender than the one currently taking place in the academic-activist spectrum is welcome and needed. In order to succeed, Male Studies has to figure out how to do the second while avoiding the first.

Kick-Ass review (in five brief points)

2010-04-17T18:40:00.000-07:00

1. The movie really ought to be named Hit Girl, because she's the real star of the movie. This character will be to Halloween costumes in 2010 what Sarah Palin was in 2008 and Lady Gaga was in 2009.

2. Nicolas Cage kills in this movie. Absolutely destroys. His Adam West cadence when in his Big Daddy costume is a great touch.

3. Against all odds, McLovin continues to have a viable career. Between this and Role Models, he's actually starting to look like a force in comedic supporting roles. Bet the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite is pissed.

4. Mark Strong is the new Sean Bean as far as portraying villains goes. He's got the knack for it. Apparently he's the bad guy in the upcoming Green Lantern movie and he almost played Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.

5. Apparently it's an ironclad rule that any superhero movie has to incorporate a limp romantic subplot. Even this one, which is almost certainly the hardest R comic book movie to date. Fortunately the film doesn't waste too much time on it, just enough to irritate you.

In conclusion, Kick-Ass, which is the 211th best movie ever made according to the sober film scholars that comprise the readership of imdb, is a lot of fun and definitely worth going out to see. I don't think the combination of extreme gore and playful deconstruction of superhero mythology works 100% of the time, but it's definitely a lot less ponderous than some of the more recent entries in the genre have been. Also, it's funny and the action sequences are very well-done. It'll probably have a long life on DVD, particularly since half the target audience won't be able to sneak it to see it theatrically.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

update: Cage on Cage

2010-04-13T20:42:00.003-07:00

Not long after I wrote that post on Nic Cage's late-period career last week, I came across this article, in which Cage talks about his upcoming movies Drive Angry and Some Bullshit About Witches, and in so doing, shines a light into his creative process. About the first:

"Drive Angry I'm doing right now," he said, "which is why I have this Celtic blonde hair. I was gonna shave my head and tattoo my skull with black fire but the producer talked me out of it. So I went blonde. I'm the undead. I've been called up from Hell, because Jonah King, played by Billie Burke, a charlatan satanic cultist, sacrificed my daughter; and I'm called up to get vengeance."

Again, let it never be said that Cage coasts through the B-movie roles he takes. Here he's in a movie about a reincarnated damned soul who goes around running people over with a car as if he were Matthew Broderick, and his producer has to convince him to tone it down. As for SBAW, Cage has this to say:

"Season of the Witch is another supernatural movie. As you may have noticed, I enjoy playing supernatural characters – City of Angels, Season of the Witch, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Ghost Rider, and Drive Angry. Because when you play a supernatural character the possibilities are limitless. It's endless what you can do with it, the choices, because it's infinity, right? You're not stuck in some contextual reality, whatever that is. So I can get abstract, get outside of the box, as I like to call it."

Translation: somebody's going to get paid for this movie, so it might as well be him. Also, the part of Cage's brain that controls his misunderstanding of quantum physics overlaps with the part that controls his desire for maniacal overacting.

The Curious Anthropology of Insane Clown Posse

2010-04-11T10:27:00.007-07:00

In case you haven't seen it yet, "Miracles," the new Insane Clown Posse video, is posted above. It's getting a serious amount of chatter from the lulz crowd, and deservedly so, because even when judged against the ridiculously low standards of the Insane Clown Posse oeuvre, it's laughably bad. It's basically a mishmash of curse words inserted into a list of things that ICP considers "miracles," none of which are actually miracles, similar to how nothing in Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" is actually ironic. There's also a part where one of the duo talks about hating scientists. Since the video came out a few days again, I'm sure that by now there's twenty thousand blog posts snarking on it, so in the interest of preventing redundancy, I'll forego commentary in lieu of encouraging you to read Daniel O'Brien's hilarious post.

Instead, I want to draw attention to the most fascinating thing about Insane Clown Posse besides the awesome badness of their music: the remarkably robust subculture that the group literally stands at the center of. Unless you know a fan of ICP personally or are atypically immersed in music culture, you've probably never heard any of their music before clicking on that video (or never at all if you didn't click on the video). Hell, I was part of ICP's strongest demographic (socially unpopular Midwestern male teenagers) during the group's brief period of mainstream semi-relevance in the late 90s, and counting "Miracles" I've heard maybe four of their songs in my entire life. ICP is not a major mainstream phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, and they're one of the most critically reviled musical acts in recent memory, if not of all time.

Despite all this, Insane Clown Posse runs a vertically-integrated media enterprise that between music, concerts, and licensed merchandise, grosses somewhere around 10 million dollars per year. Given the current climate in the music industry, that's an amazing accomplishment. Considering that ICP are regarded as a punchline by the vast majority of people who are even aware of their existence, it's downright miraculous.

Except it's not, because ICP have made their bones the old-fashioned way: by cultivating an intense and personal relationship with their fanbase. If you ever encounter an ICP fan (or a "Juggalo" as they refer to themselves), you'll know it, because they'll probably be wearing an ICP T-shirt. In fact they'll probably have one for every day of the week. Not only that, they'll have a surprisingly large vocabulary of ICP-centric slang words and rituals (should you dare to click through to it, this dictionary website somehow manages to convey all of the irritating, ridiculous, and ignorant aspects of Juggalo mentality within the first 30 seconds of loading it up).

Pretty much every last dollar if ICP's lucrative enterprise comes from this guy and the thousands of other diehards just like him. One of ICP's ventures is "The Gathering of Juggalos," a multi-day yearly music festival headlined by the band and affiliated acts held in a remote state park in Southern Illinois not terribly far from where I went to graduate school. It draws up to 20,000 fans. In 2007, writer Thomas Morton went to the festival and wrote up his experience as an article for Vice, a bit of work which probably stands as the definitive anthropological study of Insane Clown Posse fans to date, not that I have a comprehensive grasp of the alternatives. Anyhow, last fall, Morton wrote a stunning rant decrying the practice of smirking at ICP fans from a great height. In the process, he openly admits how writing the article challenged his preconceptions of his subject, makes a (convincing) case that ICP is the new Grateful Dead, and most importantly, nails down the essence of Insane Clown Posse fandom. Here's the key paragraph of his argument:

As for the big one, the joke about who would voluntarily be into this music and save up to go to this festival and be excited about the helicopter rides and Rowdy Roddy Piper and cheeseburgers, here’s your punchline: Poor midwestern kids from mostly broken homes with absolutely no prospects of material success who even goth and punk kids make fun of.

And that's pretty much the crux of it. ICP built an empire by embracing with both arms the exact segment of society that everyone else goes out of their way to avoid or ignore. Think about Abercrombie and Fitch forcing a (very attractive) female employee to sort hangars in the back where customers couldn't see her because she had a prosthetic arm and you get a fairly decent idea of the extremes modern consumer society goes to reinforce prevailing ideas of desirability and success, both as a goal to be achieved and an illusion to be created. The people who wind up in ICP fandom don't have a prayer of fulfilling anyone's conventional idea of those notions, or even making a convincing pretense at it, and they know it. In a lot of cases, they've been told it their entire lives.

And then along comes Insane Clown Posse, themselves none-too-bright burnouts from a city that itself has become a sort of American shorthand for failure (Detroit, if you're wondering) with music that combines the sort of barely articulated rage common to every teenage outcast since time immemorial with a goofy aesthetic that screams "I'm not even trying to impress the cool kids." See, the stupidity of Insane Clown Posse is a feature, not a bug; it means that only the people who see themselves as having nothing to lose in the eyes of society will embrace it. Imagine you fell into that category: would you rather go to a show put on by an up and coming buzz band and stand in a crowd of sneering poseurs who'll go out of their way to find fault with you, or would you rather go to a raucous and profane ICP show filled with people who are just happy to have a place to be accepted? Fuck Bruce Springsteen. Insane Clown Posse are the torchbearers of the real American underclass.

I'm a big, big music fan. I could rattle off a list of dozens of albums that have touched me greatly and, I believe, impacted the course of my life in a tangible way. But truthfully, I don't think any musical artist will ever mean as much to me as Insane Clown Posse does to its ardent fans. So by all means, laugh and gape at the video for "Miracles" (I watched it twice, just to make sure it was real) and any of the other dumbass ICP-related stuff you come across, because there sure as hell isn't any shortage of that.

Just don't wonder so hard about what type of person would like this kind of thing.

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it....

2010-04-11T10:02:00.003-07:00

If, like me, you've ever wondered what happened to Wes Bentley, the actor who played Ricky Fitts in American Beauty, over the last decade, mystery solved! He was strung out on heroin. Ironically, drug use did not help him reconnect with his true self and tap into hidden reserves of courage, as I would have expected based on the plot of American Beauty.

thesis statement: Nicolas Cage's late period career is fascinating and underappreciated

2010-04-04T14:53:00.012-07:00

Above: Nicolas Cage's eyebrows have their own acting coach. (Editor's note: probably not true.)

The upcoming release of Kick-Ass, which I'm probably more excited for than any other movie this summer with the possible exception of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, is as good a time as any to address this topic, which has been percolating in my brain for longer than it's probably healthy to admit. With the possible exception of Robert DeNiro, I can't think of any prolific actor whose career choices have been as widely and openly maligned. For instance: in commemoration of the opening of Knowing last winter, EW's Owen Gleiberman wrote a piece entitled "Nicolas Cage: Artist or Hack?", and Peter Travers wrote a blog-length kvetch about the (indisputably true) fact that Cage's worst movies are also his most financially successful. The standard format for the argument against Nicolas Cage is that he started out as a daring and promising young actor, sold out to blockbuster Hollywood immediately after winning Best Actor in 1995, and has since been cashing checks left and right by lazing his way through uninspired B-movies.

Factually, this analysis is correct. Cage did indeed have a pretty incredible string of roles in the late 80s/early 90s (Raising Arizona, Vampire's Kiss, Wild At Heart and the like), and pretty much immediately went into big-budget action filmmaking after winning the Oscar. Also, a substantial proportion of his movies since that time have been terrible (worst offenders being Ghost Rider and Gone in 60 Seconds, by my reckoning, although there's quite a few I haven't seen). Even so, I'm going to argue that not only has Nicolas Cage not wasted his talent in his post-Oscar work, his career choices make him one of the most interesting actors in the movie business. Let's break this down into a series of simple points.

1. Pretty much all award-winning actors go on to make underwhelming movies.
Let's be honest: most feature-length dramas aren't very good. In fact, most critically praised feature-length dramas aren't even very good. And yet, if an Oscar-winning actor wants to "live up" to his talent in his subsequent role choices, the widespread perception is that acting in dramas is the best way to do so. As a result, most of them follow up award wins with horseshit middlebrow films that everyone pretends to care about for five minutes and promptly forgets. Consider the subsequent films of some of the Best Actor winners since Cage won in '95 for Leaving Las Vegas. Roberto Benigni followed up Life is Beautiful (which, for the record, is a movie I despise) by playing the lead role in Pinocchio (no, really). I don't think we even need to mention Kevin Spacey, but in case you forgot: Pay It Forward, K-Pax, and The Shipping News. Denzel Washington did Antwone Fisher after winning for Training Day. Adrian Brody followed up The Pianist with motherfucking The Village. Even Daniel Day Lewis, who's been in something like three movies his entire career, did that musical remake of 8 1/2 that came out last Christmas after winning for There Will Be Blood.

The idea that Nicolas Cage deprived the world of a plethora of brilliant dramatic performances in order to become the next Sylvester Stallone is bullshit. If you were faced with the choice between making umpteen "respectable" variations on Captain Corelli's Mandolin for the remainder of your career or turning yourself into the most overqualified B-movie star in Hollywood history, which would you pick? Moreover, which would you find more challenging or artistically satisfying? This leads us to point number 2...

2. Nicolas Cage almost always substantially improves the bad movies he's in.
Whatever you can say about the quality of his movie choices (any you can obviously say a lot), Cage can't be accused of misunderstanding the fundamentals of B-movie acting. Take, for instance, Con Air, Cage's second action movie after winning the Oscar, which combines an idiotic premise with thoroughly incompetent direction and yet manages to be fantastically entertaining. The latter fact is almost completely due to the casting choices: along with Cage, the movie features John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, and John Cusack, plus a slew of recognizable B-listers, and gives all of them free reign to chew as much scenery as they like. Although the protagonist is written as a run of the mill action hero, Cage plays him with a stoned stupor and a gleefully over-the-top hillbilly drawl. His Forrest Gump-meets-Steven Seagal performance works because it acknowledges both the underlying ridiculousness of the movie and the need to make it entertaining (the same applies to a lot of the leads in Con Air, especially Malkovich).

I can't think of many Nicolas Cage movies that would have been better if they had starred someone else. In fact, most of them would have been worse. Cage gets a fair amount of shit for his overacting, but it's worth mentioning that very few of the movies to which that criticism applies would be improved in any tangible sense by more subtlety. If you've seen Knowing, try to mentally substitute, say, Johnny Depp in the lead role. Would it have been a more enjoyable movie if it featured Depp's trademark eyebrow raising and muttering instead of Nic Cage's trademark manic gesticulating? A hint: no. It would just have made it boring to watch.

Without question, the most glorious example of Nicolas Cage's willingness to go to excess in support of a work of dubious value is in Neil LaBute's staggeringly unnecessary remake of The Wicker Man. There's a fairly famous YouTube compilation of the most over-the-top moments from the film that I'm not going to link to (assuming it hasn't been removed for copyright violation) because seeing the scenes out of context hardly does justice to the sheer inexplicable craziness of the full film. I think of The Wicker Man remake not as a failed attempt at a coherent filmed narrative, but as a deeply personal collaborative attempt by Nicolas Cage and Neil LaBute to merge their dominant artistic impulses (respectively, barely suppressed emotional extremes and hatred of women) into a single work. In that sense (and none other), it's a complete success as a film. Even if you don't care to submit The Wicker Man to a close reading, you can't go wrong marveling at the ridiculousness of it with some friends over beers, and that's far from low praise in my book.

3. He's also done a surprising amount of legitimately fine work.
Something that often gets overlooked in the discussion about late-period Nicolas Cage is that he's also done a lot of good acting in some really good movies alongside the B-grade action flicks. Adaptation is probably the most widely acknowledged of these, but there are others, like the underrated Matchstick Men and Lord of War, and last year's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is probably the best argument for the artistic value of Cage's manic tendencies to date.

Moreover, it's hard to argue that Cage should have turned down many of the dramatic movies that he's starred in that didn't exactly set the world on fire. I doubt most leading men in Hollywood would pass on opportunities to work with Martin Scorcese, Brian DePalma, or Oliver Stone. Even something like Windtalkers, a World War II movie made back when people were still holding out hope for John Woo's Hollywood career, probably seemed like an acceptable risk.

The real issue with Nicolas Cage circa the past 15 years isn't that he does bad work, or even that the bad work outweighs the good work. Rather, it's that the sheer volume of movies he stars in makes him a difficult actor to pin down. This is an actor so prolific that in the first half of the 2000s, he starred in no less than three separate films entitled "The ______ Man." I don't think Cage's chronic inability to not be making a movie at any given point in time (which is hardly an exaggeration, per his IMDB page, he's averaged three films a year over the past decade) is necessarily a bad thing. It just guarantees that his output is going to be wildly uneven. This year alone he's in the promising-looking Kick-Ass and the promising-sounding The Hungry Rabbit Jumps (it has Guy Pearce and is from the director of the The Bank Job, which I enjoyed.) He's also in this movie, henceforth to be referred to as Some Bullshit About Witches:

So it goes. In 2011, he'll be starring in a 3-D movie called Drive Angry, summarized as "A vengeful father chases after the men who killed his daughter." I can't wait.

Public Service Announcement

2010-04-02T22:21:00.004-07:00

I recommend that you acquire a copy of The Monitor, by Titus Andronicus, because holy shit this album rules (it's available on eMusic, if you subscribe to that). There's probably no way to describe it that doesn't make it sound terrible (my best attempt would be: a concept album vaguely about the Civil War, but not really, that combines early Bright Eyes-esque lyrics with sprawling instrumental tracks and wraps the whole package in a serious anthemic bent). It's fearless, ambitious stuff, and definitely one of those albums that plays as a cohesive whole rather than just a collection of tracks. A sample:

Also, be careful who you marry.

That's enough, Kevin Smith

2010-03-27T21:59:00.005-07:00

Above: Kevin Smith makes a movie about his right temple and you'd better not criticize it.

Let me propose something: no single individual has been affected more negatively by the coarsening of American popular culture than Kevin Smith. Back in the day, after Clerks almost got an NC-17 rating for language and went on to become a word of mouth cult hit, Kevin Smith was widely seen as a daring counterculture auteur whose unabashed vulgarity stood in bold contrast to the staid mainstream cinema of the day. More simply put: Clerks had a lot of dick jokes at a time when people actually stood a chance at being legitimately offended by dick jokes. In the past 15 years, Kevin Smith has mostly demonstrated his ineptitude at all the part of movie making that don't involve writing down dick jokes and Star Wars references and our culture has pretty much lost the ability to be offended by anything. This is a big problem, not just for Kevin Smith's current terrible movies, but also for his past movies that everyone used to like. In a time when we can hop on the Internet to read the richest athlete in the world's text messages about wanting to piss on porn stars, I'd venture to guess that the blowjob jokes in Clerks don't hit as hard as they used to.

For whatever reason, complete artistic irrelevance hasn't made Kevin Smith any less visible. Mostly, this is because of Kevin Smith's other skill, which is starting to look more and more like his true calling: endless and defensive complaining about every single real and perceived slight he experiences. Last week, he posted a diatribe on Twitter about the injustice of professional film critics pointing out that his latest movie, Cop Out, is a piece of shit, including this rebuttal:

“Like, it's called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna s**t in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called "Schindler's Cop Out"?”

He then goes on to compare his movie to a retarded child. No, really. The substance of his argument isn't that his movie is actually good, it's that he wasn't trying very hard, so pointing out the fact that it isn't good is mean. Hey, Kevin Smith! People that go to the movies don't get a discount on the price of admission because you decided that doing a studio comedy gives you carte blanche to phone it in. We all still have to pay $9.50 to watch you fail at your job.

Smith goes on to unveil his master plan to replace the tyranny of professional criticism:

“Next flick, I'd rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why's their opinion more valid?"

I can spare Kevin Smith the cost of setting up a screening room for 500 of his Twitter followers for his next movie and tell everyone right now how this would turn out: they'd all give it rave reviews. Why? Because they're following Kevin Smith on Twitter, and Kevin Smith has one of the most slavish fanbases in the entertainment industry. This is a man who puts out DVDs of himself giving lectures and Q & A sessions as if he were Noam Chomsky or some shit, and people buy them. If they get invited by Kevin Smith himself to an advance screening of a new Kevin Smith movie, they're going to be coming in their pants no matter how objectively awful what's onscreen is. Of course, that's not a problem for Kevin Smith, but it is a problem for non-Kool Aid drinkers trying to figure out whether to spend their hard-earned dollar whatever self-indulgent bullshit Smith decides to throw onto the screen next go round.

The supreme irony of this whole episode is that Kevin Smith is bar none one of most critically over-praised filmmakers in recent memory. Gaze upon the favorable reviews for Clerks II, a movie I'm still bitter about wasting money on four years after the fact. Remember Dogma, which was marketed as a bold skewering of religion and was actually a tedious blend of pseudo-theological nonsense and forced attempts at "edginess"? Critics liked that one, too. (Sidebar: the Catholic League should have gotten some back-end points on Dogma, since their protests basically were the movie's marketing campaign. Although since the organization is currently attacking the New York Times for exposing a cover-up of horrific child abuse by priests, it's probably best they don't have any more money than they already do.) Even Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, essentially a feature-length complaint by Kevin Smith about how people make fun of him on Internet message boards, got average reviews.

Probably the real reason that Kevin Smith is so emotionally volatile about criticism at the moment is the relative commercial failure of his last movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which as I understand it was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Seth Rogan by remaking the little-remembered Comedy Central original movie Porn 'n Chicken. Clearly, that didn't work out the way it was supposed to. He admits as much in this junket interview:

“That was supposed to be the one that punched us through to the next level. Everyone thought it would do $60 (million) to $70 million, and it wound up doing Kevin Smith business. I was like, ‘I’m done.’ If I were to write at that point in my life, it would about the poor fat kid whose movie didn’t make enough money. . . ."

Whatever dark night of the soul the underperformance of Zack and Miri caused him to experience clearly didn't last long enough, because within the same fucking interview he's saying:

“All the (stuff) I used to put in the films, I can put into my blog or into my podcast, so that leaves me wide open in terms of what do I want to do in film.”

If you've paid to see more than two of Kevin Smith's films in your lifetime, did you ever leave the theater thinking that his problem was a surplus of good ideas that couldn't be fully mined by just one mode of expression? Unless you're a member of the Kevin Smith Cult, my guess is no. In fact, you were probably thinking something like "why does he keep dragging out Jay and Silent Bob again and again?"

In fact, Kevin Smith's unfettered access to so many forums for his ceaseless bitching, lucrative as it may be for his lecture DVD and book sales, is probably the worst thing that could happen to him as a film director. That's because it reinforces his biggest flaw over and over again: his pathological inability to detect the line at which a good idea starts becoming a bad one. For instance, take the incident in February in which he was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. It'd be pretty reasonable for him to be upset about that, to take the issue up with the airline, and to use his celebrity status to raise awareness of his displeasure at the incident and the broader (no pun intended) issue of the way the airline industry treats the overweight. Instead, he declared a goddamned electronic jihad against Southwest: according to his Wikipedia page, he devoted two hourlong podcasts and a series of 24 YouTube videos to the subject (the latter of which I was heartened to find out that hardly anyone watched), along with several lengthy diatribes (the second of which is hilariously titled "Running out of gas on this subject") on his blog and who knows how many tweets. I remember sitting in O'Hare airport right after this happened and wondering why in the fuck CNN was reporting on Kevin Smith's Twitter feed, and getting kind of annoyed with the whole thing.

Similarly, Kevin Smith's whole "I'm a regular dude with a limited formal background in movie making, and I'm not a great visual stylist" persona used to come across as refreshingly unpretentious and in keeping with the spirit of independent film making. When he does it nowadays, it looks like he doesn't give a shit about developing his formal command of his medium, despite his resources, because he knows that if he throws enough "fucks," oral sex jokes, and Star Wars references into a script, his devoted fanbase will eat it up with a spoon, and when his attempts at making a more serious film fail miserably, he can just shrug it off with a few one-liners in his interviews rather than trying to take any sort of lesson from it.

Anyhow, the other bit of Kevin Smith news from the past week is that his next movie is going to be Red State, a low budget horror film about fundamentalist Christianity reportedly inspired by the notorious Fred Phelps. It's being pitched as a dramatic departure from his usual work, which I guess it would have to be, so good for him. In typical Kevin Smith fashion, this quote about the film gives me pause:

"...it's not like a splatter film, it's not like slasher balls-to-the-wall gore, it's more unsettling and disturbing type of horror."

So it's going to rely on Kevin Smith's ability to convey tone, pacing, and insinuation? Good luck with that. If, say, Eli Roth were announcing this film, I'd be intrigued. Hell, if Kevin Smith were making this film six years ago, I'd be cautiously optimistic. Maybe I'm wrong, and Red State will turn out to be the next Exorcist or something. More likely though, it'll be a wildly uneven mix of Smith's trademark diminishing-returns "edgy" dialogue punched up with some gratuitous violence and a running, ham-fisted attempt at social commentary. None of that will matter, though, because Fox News will get wind of it and start running a series of its trademark saturation-level outraged editorials about "Hollywood sneering at conservatives again" a month or so before it releases. To which Kevin Smith will respond with his trademark genial mock-surprised smartassedness on the ten thousand forms of electronic communication over which he has provenance. Then the media coverage over the "controversial new film" will ensure that it at least recoups expenses with a bit of return, since Kevin Smith certainly isn't going to spend more than $15 dollars making it. Also, I imagine that a fair number of critics will praise it for its "boldness" and "irreverence" regardless of its actual quality, except for one or two scribes whom Kevin Smith will complain at length about in his podcast and next DVD. And everyone will come out a winner except the people who have to pay to see the movie.

Video Game Addiction and the Psychology of Gaming

2010-03-25T19:22:00.007-07:00

Above: Fake Magic Johnson and Fake Alan Alda enjoy a competitive videogame on a television that is not turned on.

There's a lengthy but compelling piece in the Guardian online about video game addiction that's well worth a read. It chronicles the author Tom Bissell's journey from being a prolific writer to what amounts to a video game-addicted cokehead, and centers around his obsession with Grand Theft Auto IV. The thing that grabbed me about this piece is that there's a million cliches that could have gone into this story, from analogizing video game makers and drug pushers to assuring readers he's given up games to spend more time sitting outside or some such, but Bissell avoids pretty much all of them. Instead, he gives one of the most frank and thoughtful depictions of games and their appeal that I've ever read.

A large part of this is the fact that Bissell devotes several paragraphs to a stream of consciousness description of the experience of playing a GTA game (Vice City, in this instance), and writes it in a way that really captures the sense of freedom and possibility that the games provide. Later, when he's started abusing cocaine heavily, Grand Theft Auto IV becomes his go-to activity while high, and the game and drug form a sort of symbiosis. This leads up to the climactic meditation of the piece:

What have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.

My experiences with life and with video games are hardly identical to Bissell's, to put it mildly, but I think he absolutely captures something vital about gaming with his point about games providing real experiences. This is a point that I do not believe non-gamers fully understand: so much of the quality of a game, especially a modern game, is tied into its ability to break down the sense of separation between the physical activity of playing a game (read: pressing buttons) and the actions onscreen. In short: the extent that a game can make you feel personally involved and empowered in what's happening onscreen, you'll probably like it.

In some ways, this is a grotesque oversimplification: there's many, many factors that have to come together to provide that experience. However, in great or even merely enjoyable games, the whole is more than the sum of the parts in a way that's difficult to capture with objective description. Here's the really interesting thing, though: despite all this complexity, games are getting much, much better at providing this quality of experience on a consistent basis. Think about this: a short game is roughly 5-7 hours of playtime in length, and a long game can easily be over 100 hours (I played Grand Theft Auto IV for at least 140 hours, and I imagine that Bissell played for triple that amount or more) or essentially endless if the focus is on competitive multiplayer. That means that a game has to keep your attention for much longer than a feature film does, and likely as much as an entire season of a TV program. What's more, almost all games are built around a fairly simple set of actions that repeat themselves over and over again with usually little more than minor variations over time. Even in expansive, free-form games like the Grand Theft Auto series, you'll get the main essentials of play in the first few hours.

By all rights, keeping someone interested in a video game ought to be an impossible task, but it turns out that it isn't. In fact, over the past several years, I've found that video games as a medium are not only more consistently compelling in my opinion than pretty much any other form of entertainment, but getting better all of the time, and I think Bissell has zeroed on the main reason why with his statement about experiences. A misconception that has plagued popular thinking about video games for some time now is the idea that the appeal of games is something like a more-participatory movie or television show, that the structured narrative is at the core and that the interactivity serves to make the narrative more compelling for the player. In fact, the reverse is true: games get most of their appeal from coming up with cool things for the player to do and letting the player control his or her experience of those things. Nobody plays video games for the story; if they did, nobody would ever play video games, because video game stories, with punishingly few exceptions, are terrible. GamesRadar wrote an article on the plot holes of Modern Warfare 2 that's three goddamn pages long (granted, mostly to maximize the number of pages clicked on, and thus ads viewed - welcome to the world of Internet games writing) and that's a game that's grossed more than one billion dollars since last November. MW2's narrative flaws didn't even stop it from amassing widespread critical acclaim, either. Hell, I'll even throw in my two cents: Modern Warfare 2's story was completely retarded, and I still played through the game twice, spent a solid two months with the multiplayer, and loved about every minute of it.

The contrast between games and other forms of entertainment has really hit home for me that past couple weeks as I've been playing Bioshock 2. A brief recap for the uninitiated: Bioshock is a first-person shooter game that came out in 2007 that became a massive critical and commercial hit. It is far and away one of the most original first-person shooters ever created; partly because of the setting (a failed underwater city resplendent in 1930s Art Deco architecture created as a libertarian utopia by a thinly veiled version of Ayn Rand), and partly because of the rich and well thought-out narrative, which actually came to a definitive resolution at the climax. This last point is important because virtually all major video games follow the modern Hollywood blockbuster model, of openly planning for a multi-sequeled franchise in pretty much all aspects of production, with none more glaringly obvious than the plot. Bioshock, however, felt self-contained from the get-go.

It also (deservedly) made a shitload of money, so when Bioshock 2 was announced, I was scornful. Here was an unnecessary cash-in sequel to a original and complete work, which to top it off wasn't even being made by the creators of the first. It's the sort of thing that drives fans crazy. The thing is, though, that Bioshock 2 didn't turn out to be the Blues Brothers 2000 of the video game world (fun challenge: come up with a snappier analogy and post in in the comments! I couldn't!), it's actually an immense amount of fun to play (less surprisingly, it's also selling by the bucketload).

Now, I don't want to give short shrift to the makers of Bioshock 2, who all things considered, did a fine job with the narrative and tonal aspects of the game, but most of what makes Bioshock 2 work in the way that it does are small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions. In fact, the phrase "small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions" is essentially a comprehensive summary of the philosophy behind video game sequeling. Simple as it is, this approach really works in games in a way that I don't think it can in other media. If somebody came up and told me that the upcoming sequel to a blockbuster movie was being hailed as "pretty much the same thing as the first one, only the hero shoots somebody with a speargun this time," I probably wouldn't make seeing it a priority. However, when I found the speargun in Bioshock 2 (it pins dead enemies to the wall, and you can pull out the spears to reuse them, which makes the corpse fall to the floor!) I was genuinely jazzed. I can't rule out the possibility that this speaks to a certain lack of sophistication on my part, but I think it has more to do with the point that the experience of playing games is qualitatively very different from our experience of other media. Playing Bioshock 2 made me realize that despite what I had thought, the not easily replicated aspects of the first game, its originality and narrative focus, were less important than I had previously thought, while more reproducible elements, the combat and exploration of the game world, were much more.

This has been a bit of a digression, but I think it relates profoundly to Bissell's piece on game addiction and the core role of experience in it. There's a reason that we can talk seriously about gaming being an "addiction," even if it doesn't fit the technical parameters of the term, in a way that's harder to apply to an equally avid consumer of movies, TV, or novels: video games give us feedback. They reward good play, punish bad play, and create a sense of improvement over time. Cracked's David Wong wrote a great piece a few weeks back on how video games use basic principles of behavioral psychology to hook people and keep them playing. Wong's focus is more on massively multiplayer RPGs like World of Warcraft, which I've never played and have no interest in, (although my girlfriend and I have sunk 80+ hours into playing Borderlands, which is essentially an scaled-back postapocalyptic shooter version of the same basic ideas) but I think that the basic framework he elaborates can be made to fit just about any type of video game to one degree or another. Simply put, the appeal of video games is ultimately a behavioral one, rather than an intellectual one.

I'm not sure what the full implications of this are, although I'm sure that the hoary old chestnuts of "are video games healthy?" and "are video games art?" will resurface fairly rapidly. I may have more to say on this topic in general, and those two questions in particular, at some future date. I am fairly sure, however, that it means that the current cultural ascendancy of video games will probably be a prolonged one, and may even just be getting started, given the explosion of platforms like Facebook and the iTunes App Store. Look for some 40 year old college student to publish an essay in Newsweek about the intermingling between her FarmVille and OxyContin habit by December or so.

"Old Detroit has a cancer. That cancer is crime."

2010-02-27T14:01:00.005-07:00

I got something in the mail today entitled a "Notice of Violation" from the Tucson Police Photo Enforcement Program. This bit of mail informed me that a vehicle registered to me has been recorded by photo enforcement as failing to stop at a red light and included a couple of camera shots showing a vehicle turning left at an intersection while the light is red (although the car seems to already be reasonably far into the intersection in the first photo).

Funny thing is, this "Notice of Violation" doesn't carry a fine or a court date. In fact, it says "This is not a Summons to Appear. There is no fine associated with this Notice." in plain English twice on the document. Instead, it asks me politely to identify the driver of my vehicle at the time of the violation and mail the paper back to a PO Box in Phoenix identified as the contact for the "Violation Processing Center."

Interesting, right? I do some cursory Googling and discover that this is part of the standard operating procedure for photo enforcement; when a potential violation is recorded and the driver can't be definitively identified for whatever reason, this notice (which looks like an official ticket on first glance, save for the disclaimer about not being a summons) gets sent out to the registered owner of the vehicle asking him or her to ID whoever it was behind the wheel. However, this isn't a legally binding order; it comes from the private company that operates the cameras, not the court. Hence the return address being some PO Box rather than the court or a law enforcement office.

That's right: phishing is now a law enforcement tactic. You can read about this phenomenon at this site dedicated to parsing photo enforcement (note: the site is geared toward California; my notice was slightly different but appears to be technically identical in terms of the legal language contained and omitted, and another section of the site devoted to Arizona confirms that what I got is equivalent). Since the notice isn't legally binding in any way, I don't personally feel comfortable making the decision about whether it was me in that picture or just somebody driving my car who looks like me and was driving the route I take home from work at approximately the time I come home in the evening.

In doing my research on this thing, I came across some interesting facts about photo enforcement of traffic laws, courtesy of this extensive review of the subject published by the Phoenix New Times. The most interesting tidbit contained within it is that vehicles registered to corporations or legal trusts are essentially immune from photo enforcement; they will always get the same, non-binding "please identify the driver" mailing I got, while private citizens will get actual citations with fines, provided that law enforcement can reasonably establish from the photo and the vehicle registration information that they were behind the wheel at the time of the violation. Another interesting fact is that even when a real citation is issued, it doesn't legally count in Arizona unless a process server tracks you down and delivers it personally to you within four months of the original complaint.

As far as I can tell, Arizona and California are the only states that have these systems deployed extensively, but I wouldn't be surprised if other states or metropolitan areas have started or are planning to start rolling similar things out more aggressively. I'd advise anyone in such areas to pay close attention to the laws and the fine print on any notices they receive, lest they be tricked into snitching on themselves.

Shutter Island review

2010-02-21T15:50:00.002-07:00

A note: I'm not going to get into spoilers in this review, but I'll be discussing some things about Shutter Island that'll probably affect the viewing experience going in, so if you haven't seen it yet and are hell-bent on going in pristine, you might want to save this for later.

As a Martin Scorsese diehard, I was really looking forward to Shutter Island. I'd probably go see anything that Scorsese puts out, but I was especially excited by the trailers for this one; which promised an unapologetic, atmospheric thriller with a great cast, topped off by Scorsese's unmatched visual command. And that's pretty much what it is. So why didn't it blow me away like I was hoping it would?

Here's the problem with Shutter Island: it's a genre picture. Specifically, it's what's often referred to as a 'psychological thriller,' which in these days is essentially shorthand for "a plot-driven drama constructed to set up at least one major third-act twist in the narrative.' It'll come as no surprise that I love this type of movie, when it's done well. That last caveat is important, because post -The Sixth Sense American cinema has been inundated with terrible twist-based movies. To my mind, there are two main determinants of whether this type of movie "works." It's obviously best if both are present, but if a movie doesn't have the first one, it really, really ought to nail the second. They are:

(a) The twist is something truly original.
(b) The film is so tightly plotted that the twist, although foreshadowed, catches the audience by surprise, usually because of clever misdirection created by emphasizing some other aspect of the plot.

Shutter Island doesn't pass either of these tests. Without spoiling it, the plot twist in Shutter Island is a variant of something I've seen so many separate times that I can't even associate it with just one other piece of work (although a few candidates come to mind). Again, that's not a make-or-break thing; the success of a thriller has much more to do with execution than with concept. But here's the problem: if somebody put a gun to Martin Scorsese's head and threatened to pull the trigger unless he made a movie with a running time of under two hours, Scorsese would, without fucking question, be dead. Shutter Island is 138 minutes long, which is at least 20 minutes too many, and probably 30. The bloat doesn't really become apparent until early in the third act, where Leonardo DiCaprio's character has two back-to-back interactions with characters who essentially reiterate thematic undertones that were fairly unsubtly voiced by completely different characters an hour earlier. This kind of flab is lethal to a thriller plot.

The issue with Shutter Island in a nutshell is that Martin Scorsese isn't really a director who focuses on plot; he's a director that focuses on visuals and theme. These strengths are on full display in Shutter Island. The set design and cinematography are typically stellar. From the opening of the film, Scorsese uses a truly brilliant array of cinematic tricks to foreshadow the climactic twist, and there's an impressive use of historical allusions and parallels woven into the story throughout. The highlights of the film are the set-piece flashbacks that Leonardo DiCaprio's character experiences continually; they're magnificently conceived and poetically executed. Unfortunately, they also telegraph the ending so heavily that they drain a lot of the ambiguity that the film desperately needs to sustain the narrative tension through the third act. The result is somewhat like watching a magician who performs a clever trick but can't quite sell the illusion to the audience. (Although, I have to add that the very last scene in the movie is fantastic and nearly redeems the disappointing elements of the twist).

I'd kind of like to see Scorsese put out two different versions of Shutter Island. One would be about 100 minutes long and would jettison the abstract visuals in favor of tightening up the plot around the central twist, as a traditional thriller would. The other would downplay the plot even further and go to town on the visual and thematic aspects to create an ambiguous tone. I think that the what's in theaters now plays like a compromise between elements of both of these "movies" that doesn't quite resolve the tensions between them in a satisfactory way.

I'm being rough on Shutter Island, but I actually think it's a very interesting film, and one I'd like to see again unburdened of the need to focus on the plot. Even though it's not a very efficient film, it is a very well-constructed one on a number of levels, which I think that I might appreciate better on another viewing. As it stands, though, it's not as good at first viewing as I had hoped it would be. Your mileage may vary.

True Tales Of Survival, Part VII

2010-02-07T05:38:00.001-07:00

I sleep fitfully, probably due in part to the three hour nap I took yesterday afternoon. When I wake up I gather my stuff, only to find that I have somehow lost my room keycard. I look through the room several times for it to no avail and decide to give up and go to the continental breakfast. The breakfast room is filled with good ol' boys, most likely from West Virginia. One of them is talking about how he can't figure out how to use his BlackBerry, which he refers to as "this phone with all them keys."

I check out of the hotel (the clerk doesn't care at all when I tell her I lost my key) and ask if the airport shuttle is running. She says it isn't and offers to call me a cab, which I take her up on. The dispatcher on the other end of the phone as the clerk calls takes an longer time explaining something about the transaction than would be expected, and the clerk looks annoyed. After hanging up, she tells me "They said they'd get here as soon as they can but they might be slowed up by conditions," adding "I don't really know what they're talking about, the main roads are clear." Sensing that this delay might be a final twist of the knife of the region's lack of moxie into my travel plans, I thank her, tell her I'm stepping outside to check out the conditions, and walk to the airport.

The route requires me to cross a divided highway, but no one is out, so it isn't a big deal. I make the walk in about 15 minutes. The weather isn't quite cold enough to bother me and there's no wind to speak of. I reflect that it's a good thing I got a hotel so close to the airport.

The airport is fairly sleepy at 7 in the morning. Everyone there seems to be getting on the same flight I am. Most of the passengers are members of the Florida Gators Track and Field squad and are dressed in identical track suits. The plane pulls into the gate and the runway looks clear. I might be able to make it out of Virginia yet.

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True Tales Of Survival, Part VI

2010-02-06T20:06:00.001-07:00

Liveblogging the Sarah Palin speech, for some reason. It's Ronald Reagan's birthday! She starts out with a shoutout to sweet tea, a "clever" tie into the name of the movement and a shout out to one of the few Southern traditions that doesn't directly involve racism.

She refers to a "conservative election sweep" of three off cycle special elections, and also drops the "good to be among real people" canard again. As opposed to those big city dwelling androids out there.

I never understood why the fact that Obama uses a Teleprompter has become such a punch line on the right. It feels like a completely insubstantial and superficial critique.

Now she's talking about national security and to be honest I can't understand what she's saying. She moves on to Abdulmutallab and the travesty that he was Mirandized rather than being immediately waterboarded and having his fingernails pulled out or whatnot. This despite the widespread reports that he was singing like a canary while in custody.

Side note: it's strange that in the talk about the Christmas day attempt and the systemic failures therein, nobody mentions that the directorship of DHS is vacant because Jim DeMint is obstructing a vote on Obama's nominee. Doesn't that make it a bit harder to ensure national security?

"We need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lecturn!" That gets a standing ovation. Words fail.

She follows by praising Obama for the Afghanistan surge and immediately moves on to attacking him for not undermining the credibility of the Iranian democracy movement by offering public support. She also suggests that we should be involved in more foreign wars, rather nonspecifically.

Now she's on to attacking the stimulus. I'm looking forward to hearing Palin's plan for economic turnaround.

"The foundational principles of this are pretty easy to understand, when you get into the red, cut back on your budget!" Worked for Herbert Hoover.

Now the solution: lower taxes! Big surprise! Hey, wasn't a third of the stimulus tax cuts on small business and the middle class? Oh, never mind.

On health care: why do the Democrats insist on cost controls and subsidies when clearly tort reform will solve all of our problems?

Calling for spending cuts now. Where? How about the record military budget that's a quarter of GDP? I doubt that's going to be floated.

"I've been thinking for the past year about what I can do to help the country." Apparently nothing could be done toward that end as a state governor.

Another question: when has Obama ever 'apologized' for American military strength? Did anybody see his Nobel speech? This is another common criticism that I don't see any factual basis for whatsoever.

Surprisingly, it took another 35 minutes for her to
mention Ronald Reagan again.

"Who can argue with a movement that is about the people?" Who indeed?

Now there's a Q & A featuring questions submitted by conventiongoers. Despite the fact that she's facing the friendliest possible audience, she still looks really nervous. I've never really gotten over Palin's tendency to answer questions with run-on sentences that bulldoze through several unrelated topics in a rambling fashion. She's seemingly always veering into incoherency.

Is "lamestream media" a Palin original or is it just something I haven't heard before?

She's now totally ducking a question about the "Palin plan" by giving a vague invocation of free market priniciples and saying that she wants to "win, not lose" the war on terror. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?

Now people are cheering for the prospect of Palin running for president. Honestly, so am I; I can't imagine her getting 538 electoral votes with her record and general incoherence.

Even the conservative guest on msnbc is saying that Palin has no shot at the White House. I don't know who Neal Boortz is, maybe he's a straw man ringer or something.

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True Tales Of Survival, Part V

2010-02-06T19:02:00.001-07:00

Note the picture of my dinner remainents above. Yes, that's a Hot Pockets sleeve.

As much as I hate to be turning into one of "those people," I have to remark on just how useful my iPhone has been on this trip. I used it as a GPS to find my way around to my interview, to search for hotels once this delay hit, to respond to emails from a couple people that I'd been corresponding with, to post these blog updates to stave off boredom, to take pictures to supplement them, and to surf the Internet. That's on top of using it as a phone. It's been really useful.

There is once again jackshit to watch on TV so I'm watching an episode of NCIS on USA. I guess this is the most popular show on TV now, so I probably shouldn't be surprised that it's the goofiest shit ever. It's another one of those shows where the cops spend half their time fucking around on computers trading wisecracks and then go out on raids pointing guns around as if any law enforcement job consists of doing both of those things. I remember seeing series star Mark Harmon playing Ted Bundy in a made for TV movie that I watched as part of a dubiously educational course on serial killers I took in college. I guess this is a step up from that in terms of recognition and paycheck, but man, it's impossible to overstate just how retarded this show is. I think there's a marathon on this evening but I can't take more than one hour of this so I may switch to CNN to watch the Tea Party convention, which seems like sort of an apropos thing to do on a weekend like this.

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True Tales Of Survival, Part IV

2010-02-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

The cable news this morning is all snow apolocalypse, mainly breathless reports of how badly DC got hit, with occasional mention that Baltimore was actually hit worse. Conditions here seem fairly stable. The airport is running again apparently, but a lot of flights are still canceled. I'm keeping hope alive that I'll get out tomorrow morning. The hotel is fairly deserted except for cleaning staff, one of whom is an older lady that chats me up as I pass in the halls in a rambling manner that suggests a sort of desperation for an audience. After our exchange I pass an younger cleaning lady who pokes her head from the room she's working on to exclaim "She'll talk your head off if you let her!" in a tone more exasperated than accepting.

I talk to the employee at the desk who checked me in last afternoon to let her know that I'll be staying another day. I mean to ask if my rate will change, but I'm distracted by a girl sitting in the lobby with luggage who overhears our exchange and tells me that I should call Delta about getting a lodging voucher, stating that they'd given her one. I put off reupping with the clerk to return to my room and call several Delta numbers and the airport, which has no live human operators, just a recorded message about conditions. As I'm put on hold for a Delta representative, The Clientele's 2005 song "(I Can't Seem To) Make You Mine" plays over the line, interrupted roughly every 30 seconds by a recorded message telling me about the great things Delta offers. For some reason or another, hearing that song as hold-time Muzak strikes me as being incredibly bizarre and a sense of unreality sets in until the song ends and is replaced by some strummy tune I don't recognize.

The Delta rep tells me that the company doesn't offer lodging reimbursement for cancellations due to weather, and besides doesn't arrange anything like that over the phone; all vouchers must be handled in person through a Delta employee at the airport. I choose to interpret this bit of double-speak as indication that I'm on my own rather than as a dare to hike out to the airport to argue with Delta in person. I relay this information to the lady at the counter when I return to. She encourages me to keep calling to try and arrange something. Feeling resigned, don't even ask her about the rate, despite the fact that I had promised myself I would this morning shortly after awakening. Despite my objective knowlege that the amount of money I'm already committing to interview travel over the next couple weeks is going to be a debt burden that I will almost certainly shoulder for several years hence, I'm at the point where what I'll pay for this hotel stay almost feels irrelevant to me. Whether this is due to my mental state, a conditioned vestige of the credit-based economy, or some unholy union of the two, nobody can say.

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True Tales Of Survival, Part III

2010-02-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

Public service announcement: It's important to respect the separation of roles between sprinkler system and coat hanger.

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True Tales Of Survival, Part II

2010-02-05T19:15:00.001-07:00

The television situation in this hotel room is fairly disappointing. First, the remote doesn't work, forcing me to flip through the channels with the crappy buttons on the tv itself. Secondly, HBO is showing Big Love, a critically acclaimed show I have no interest in watching, rather than any number of crappy movies that I would prefer to be watching at this time. Fortunately I've started drinking, which can only improve things. Also, Space Cowboys is on AMC, which is also a possible improvement. Clint Eastwood is making out with some old woman in a garage.

Things don't seem to be much worse outside.

I ate lunch today at storied Southern chicken sandwich joint Chick-fil-A. In the Midwest Chick-fil-A is usually in malls or airports, but are rarely freestanding stores. This means that a great deal of the Chick-fil-A experience elides the Midwestern diner, as the design of the franchise's restaurants neatly splice traditional fast-food design tropes with a healthy dose of self-mythologizing. Specifically, all the decarations prominently feature the life story and musings of 88 year old Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy who is credited with inventing the chicken sandwich, insomuch as the decision to put a specific type of meat into a sandwich can be termed an "invention." Cathy is a noted evangelical Baptist who has authored several motivational books and an autobiography, which are available for sale in a combo pack for twenty bucks at Chick-fil-A. One of Cathy's stipulations to his francisees is that all Chick-fil-A restaurants be closed for buisiness on Sundays so employees can attend church services with their families; this policy is explained in detail on a board near the restaurant entrance. At the location I ate at, there was a large box near the napkins and ketchup marked 'prayer requests'. The story of how Cathy and his brother started selling chicken sandwiches at a jointly owned restaurant that was the precursor to Chick-fil-A is lovingly detailed on wall posters. Strangely, what happened to the brother subsequently is not mentioned.

The experience isn't so much a bad one - the food is really quite good- just strange. Most fast food places try to appeal broadly through bland, market tested pleasantries. Chick-fil-A centers itself on the charm of a geriatric man-of-faith, which would probably be considered marketing suicide anywhere else, but in the context of a semirural area in the South, it fits. I've spent a lot of time in rural areas, but there's a different atmosphere in the South that feels like it would take some getting used to.

Role Models is on HBO now, maybe I'll watch that again instead of finishing Space Cowboys.

A view of my quarters...

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True Tales Of Survival, Part I

2010-02-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

As you may know, yesterday I traveled to Salem, Virginia for an interview. The good news is I made it in, albeit a bit late, and mostly beat the winter weather that was coming in. It snowed a decent bit throughout the night (maybe 5 inches or so) but no ice to speak of and the roads were fairly clear and eminently drivable this morning, so I figured I was good. I made it to the interview with no problem. It was shortly thereafter that I realized there was basically nobody else in the building except for the people I had come to interview with, and even they weren't all there. This was my first indicator that this is a region that Does Not Deal Well With Snow. My second indicator was when the person who was heading up the interview kindly offered to check and see if there were any earlier flights out of Roanoake that I could catch to beat the weather, and came back a short time later to inform me that my flight and pretty much every other flight out of the airport had been canceled and I wouldn't be able to get anything until Sunday morning.

Fuck.

I guess I figured that the worst thing that would come out of this winter weather deal was that my flight would be pushed back a few hours. Overnight, maybe. I didn't expect that the airport would give up the goddamn ghost so readily that I'd be stuck here an additional two fucking nights. Keep in mind that if airports couldn't function in snowy conditions, most of the Eastern seaboard and all the Northern states would be pretty well inaccessible during the winter months, which I'm reasonably sure is not actually the case. It's fairly obvious to me that the real issue here is a severe lack of moxie on the part of the region as a whole. I know it's harsh, but it has to be said. Here's a view of how the airport looked about an hour ago:

Definitely wintry, but is it really that insurmountable? Keep in mind that is isn't like they only canceled my flight; this airport is for all intents and purposes closed entirely. There wasn't even a person manning the rental car desk when I returned my car at 2:30 this afternoon, having made the decision that there was no fucking way I was going to pay an extra hundred bucks to keep it until Sunday. I found a hotel near the airport where the clerk cut me a deal for 65 bucks since I was stranded, although the receipt was ominously only for one night, leaving me to suspect that I'll get charged the full rate for tomorrow night, which is probably going to be something I'm not keen to pay. After I took my rental car back to the airport and put the key in the drop box, I walked back to my hotel to demonstrate to the people of this area what it looks like to bear up under unfavorable circumstances, and also because I didn't want to bother with the hassle of getting a cab. That of course assumes that the cab drivers in this town are on the job and not cowering under their beds because of the snow. Which seems entirely possible, given that even TGI Friday's is closed despite the fact that it's fucking Friday, and that ought to mean something sacred to those people.

I did have the foresight to make a run to Wal Mart before turning in the car so I could get some essentials (sandwich supplies, beer, a few apples) to survive the next day and a half, during which I anticipate being largely confined to this room. I also picked up a pint of ice cream just in case the booze wasn't going to be enough to comfort me during this period. It occurred to me that I'd need something to eat the ice cream with, and I think my solution to this problem adequately sums up my frame of mind at present:

Four spoons for a dollar? Seems reasonable. Even though I'm only going to use one of them, and only one time, you've got to power through somehow.

Seeing as updating this blog as a living document of my descent into cabin-fevered madness is one of a scant handful of options for occupying my time during this limbo period, be sure to check back for what promises to be a string of half coherent updates.

Why the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad controversy is good for abortion rights supporters

2010-01-30T16:27:00.003-07:00

There's been a fair amount of heated discussion over the past week about CBS's decision to accept an ad from noted conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family to be aired during the Super Bowl next weekend. The ad reportedly features Pam Tebow, the mother of Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow, telling a story about how she ignored some doctor's advice that she get an abortion when she fell ill during her pregnancy with him. Cue the usual firestorm of back and forth between women's advocacy groups and various anti-abortion rights figures. In this instance, though, I think that fighting the decision to air the ad is a bad move. Moreover, I think that the airing of the ad has a lot of upsides for the pro-abortion rights movement that become more apparent on further analysis. Consider:

1. No one is likely to be heavily influenced by the ad.
I'm not one to scoff at the effectiveness of advertising, particularly when it relates to a televised event that most people watch for the expressed purpose of seeing expensive commercials. If advertising didn't work, companies wouldn't be lining up to pay 3 million dollars for a 30 second spot. However, I do think that there's a marked difference between a TV ad that aims to convince you that Bud Light is suitable for human consumption and one that aims to talk you into reconsidering the desirability of abortion rights. And based on the description of the ad, it's not even going to be that heavy-handed. Clearly, Focus on the Family's hoping that the inspirational story of Tim Tebow's mom will convince some abortion rights supporters to change their stance, lest they be complicit in the deprivation of the nation's collegiate athletics recruiters of twenty years from now, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. Most likely, the reactions of viewers to the ad are just going to reflect their pre-existing beliefs about abortion and things will carry on much the same as they have been.

2. Featuring an athlete in this role is kind of a dumb move that can easily backfire.
In the pantheon of things I can bring myself to give a shit about, college football is about on par with the market price of soybeans. A large part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that I went to a college that ruthlessly enforces a minimum 27 ACT score for admission and is located in one of the least desirable places to live in America, thus ensuring that nobody even remotely talented at football would be willing or able to go there. As a result, I only barely knew who Tim Tebow was before this whole ad firestorm kicked up. Upon some cursory research, I learned that he's the heir apparent to my longtime nemesis Kurt Warner in combing dual talents at quarterbacking and irritating hyper-proselytization. I also learned that he is dating, or was once photographed standing next to, a woman with an insane rack:
But although my apathy regarding college football runs deep and wide, a substantial portion of America is fanatical about it. Like the abortion debate, college football tends to be a hyper-partisan affair; people have their lifelong allegiances and focus most of their cheering on whatever is going to best benefit their favorite team. So while I'm sure Florida Gators fans will lap up the Tim Tebow Super Bowl as with a spoon, I'm willing to bet that a good percentage of the rest of the college football fans in the country will be wishing that his mom had gone ahead and had that abortion, if only because it could have helped their alma mater get a slightly higher ranking going into Bowl season this year. It would have been more effective if Focus on the Family had gotten somebody more universally beloved, like Justin Timberlake, to star in the ad.

3. It's probably a huge financial boondoggle for Focus on the Family.
While Focus on the Family is putting up north of 2.5 million dollars for this 30 second ad, these aren't exactly boom times for the organization, which has laid off almost 300 employees in the past year and a half. The organization claims that the money for the ad came from donations, not their general fund, but you have to figure that anyone who likes Focus on the Family enough to give them money for the purposes of running an ad would probably also have given them that money to help them keep the lights on, so I think it's safe to say that there's some measure of financial sacrifice involved here. Since the ad doesn't appear to be selling anything except for the idea that each aborted fetus may be costing the world yet another Jesus-powered football wunderkind, I'm skeptical that Focus is going to recoup on expenses. For those who are ideologically opposed to their agenda, each dollar that Focus on the Family spends on this ad is a dollar they aren't spending pushing "cures" for homosexuality or branding mainstream entertainment as "cultural terrorism."

4. The ad actually supports the pro-abortion rights point of view.
Hey, Mrs. Tebow chose life and she loves her son and is proud of his accomplishments. Good for her! It's refreshing to see an adult speak plainly about exercising her autonomy and making a decision that reflects her personal values. Isn't it wonderful to live in a time where the autonomy of citizens to make difficult choices about reproduction is respected and encouraged?

Yes, it is. But if Focus on the Family had their way about things, we wouldn't be living in one. The truly incredible thing about this debate is that relatively few abortion rights supporters have stopped to point out that the dramatic tension, so to speak, in Tebow's mom's story is entirely due to the fact that she had the legal right to seek an abortion if she so chose. Without that element, it would be a fairly mundane story: she conceived and gave birth to a baby despite some complications. Contrary to the picture painted by fringe elements of the religious right, most proponents of abortion rights aren't misanthopic genocidists who earn a commission on each fetal termination performed, they're people who believe that decisions about reproduction are an inviolate matter of personal liberty. Focus on the Family wants us to applaud the choice that Pam Tebow made and ignore that the people who paid for the ad really wish that she had been denied any opportunity to make that choice in the first place. The most powerful message that abortion rights supporters can send about the Tebow Super Bowl ad is to highlight that simple fact.

I Killed Conan: A Perspective on the Late-Night Hubbub

2010-01-23T11:16:00.004-07:00

Like seemingly everyone else on the Internet, I'm a fan of Conan O'Brien, who not only served as a producer on the the two best Simpsons seasons evar, he also wrote one of the show's all-time best episodes. I have fond memories of watching Conan and Andy Richter banter back and forth on Late Night when I was in high school in the late 90s. However, unlike seemingly everyone else, I'm finding it hard to get too incredibly outraged over Conan losing his show, primarily because I haven't watched his show since at least 2003.

I don't think I'm alone in this either. The infrequently-updated Stuff White People Like blog put out an entry last week on Conan that characterized the issue thusly:

"Now, the biggest and most important thing to remember is to never, under any circumstances bring up a Conan O’Brien sketch or joke that has taken place in the last three years. You will be met with only blank stares. For you see, while white people will fiercely support Conan O’Brien in any public forum, they always fail to support him in the only way that actually helps – by watching his show."

That pretty well sums it up. I know that the consensus view is that NBC didn't give Conan enough support in developing his version of The Tonight Show, that Jay Leno stabbed Conan in the back by not retiring according to plan, and that American audiences are insufficiently appreciative of Conan's brand of bent humor. And all these things are probably true to some extent, but they give short shrift to the fact that Conan has a natural constituency: 20 and 30-something fans of The Simpsons and The Late Show, my demographic, and we didn't tune in enough to make the show successful. Why not?

I can't speak for everyone, but here's why I didn't watch. First off, I don't feel that the form and function of the late-night talk show (a monologue, a skit, some celebrity interviews) has the appeal that it did for past generations. As beloved as late-night shows and their various hosts have become over the past half-century, I think they essentially built their massive audiences because of wide appeal and a lack of other options. Watching Jack Paar and Johnny Carson was a communal experience. The viewer knew that millions of other Americans were unwinding in the same way before going to sleep and that there would be some joke or interview to talk about at work the morning after. I imagine that's a pretty powerful motivator to watch, even if you weren't an ardent fan of the host or the guests. Besides, what the hell else where you going to watch? There were only like three channels. And once you start watching a show every night of the week, it pretty quickly becomes a habit.

Now these days, how many people under the age of 50 can even be bothered to watch a show at the time it actually airs? Between DVR and Hulu, it's increasingly uncommon. The late-show format thrives on a sort of relaxed, clubby atmosphere that's perfect for winding down the end of the day; it's the entertainment equivalent of a casual evening conversation over drinks. It doesn't really translate well to regular on-demand watching a day or more after the fact. I don't pay for cable or get decent antenna reception, so all of my television viewing (which basically amounts to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the latter of which probably siphoned off a not-insubstantial portion of Conan's potential Tonight Show audience) is done on Hulu. Basically, I really like being able to control what I watch and when I watch it, and a standard format late-night talk show, even one with a host I like as much as I like Conan, just isn't something that's going to make it to the top of the queue for my entertainment choices.

I think that generational fickleness is the key to understanding why Conan struggled. Contrast my viewing habits with those of my parents, who tuned into Leno religiously. People give Leno a hard time for being soft and unfunny, which is a hard accusation to dispute in any serious way, but I think that overlooks Leno's real appeal as The Tonight Show host, which is that he works tenaciously hard to put on a show as broadly entertaining as possible. Leno's monologues, which are two or three times as long as those of other hosts, are his bread and butter; my parents would usually watch Leno's monologue and skit and then turn off the show before the interviews. My thought process while watching a Jay Leno monologue is something like "this isn't very funny and I'd rather be doing something else," which probably tracks pretty closely with the majority of Leno detractors. I imagine my parent's though process while watching the same monologue is "he worked hard and told a lot of jokes, and I laughed once or twice, which is enough entertainment before bedtime." Two years ago, during the writer's strike, Sam Anderson essentially made this exact argument in New York Magazine, in the best and most incisive account of Leno's appeal I've ever read.

Now Conan's ratio of hits vs. misses is far higher than Leno's, but as long as we're being honest, I don't really feel like I missed out on a whole lot by not watching his show all these years. I've never found myself in the middle of a conversation as the odd person out as everyone else trades punchlines and favorite moments, as I would have if I didn't watch South Park, and until this meltdown over the past three weeks, I've never logged onto Facebook to a see chorus of status updates trumpeting the must-see moment from last night's Conan, as I so frequently do (and contribute to) with Stewart and Colbert. I like and respect Conan a great deal, but he's not a terribly relevant presence in my daily existence, and I honestly don't know what he or I could have done differently that would have changed that.

At the end of this mess, I wish Conan hadn't gotten fucked over in the way he did, and I hope he goes on to have a lot of success at Fox or wherever else he winds up. However, much as I might like to, I'm not going to pretend that this whole affair has affected me in some significant way, or even that it represents some sort of resounding cosmic injustice. Rather, I feel like it's an unfortunate thing that I didn't really pay much attention to when it might have mattered and that I probably won't think about much after it ends. Sorry, Conan.

Why personality testing won't be the future of medical school

2010-01-18T17:12:00.003-07:00

I stumbled upon an interesting article in the New York Times a couple of days ago about medical school admissions. Apparently, academics have returned to contemplating the age-old mystery of how medical schools are so hard to get into and yet produce so many doctors who are complete assholes. The Times article raises the question of whether the MCAT, or the SAT of medical school, is really the best sole predictor of whether or not someone should be a doctor. It discusses this question in reference to a recently published study in which researchers administered what I assume to be the NEO-PI-R personality measure to Belgian medical students and followed up on their success in education and practice to see whether personality factors contributed to performance. This test utilizes the Five Factor Model of personality, which is a theory so ridiculously well-supported that competing theorists have more or less been reduced to arguing for slight variations on it rather than challenging it outright, so the researchers seem to be standing on fairly solid methodological grounds.

Anyhow, the results rather unsurprisingly indicate that personality factors can have a large impact on medical school performance, with the factor relating to emotional distress having a negative effect across the board, the factor relating to discipline and planning having a positive effect, and the factor relating to social extraversion having a great deal of impact when the budding docs start to do clinical practicums and residencies. To the layperson in psychology, all this probably seems like a "no shit" kind of thing, but the fact that these influences exist isn't the real news here - it's that they exist and we can measure them in a meaningful way. Indeed, the study authors come out with the logical conclusion: that medical schools should administer personality tests and take their results into account when deciding who to admit. It's all perfectly logical, and it will never, ever happen.

Here's why: the Five Factor Model has two main features that make it such a spectacular measurement of personality: first, it's been replicated across numerous cultures, and second, it's been strongly linked to genetic influences. These things are great because any theory of personality pretty much ipso facto needs to demonstrate some degree of universality and stability, otherwise it won't fit in with what pretty much everyone, including scientists, consider personality to be. The second fact, however, poses a huge problem for competitive medical school admission, and not because it wouldn't actually improve the quality of the trainees (it probably would). Consider a hypothetical: Student X has worked diligently in his or her undergraduate biology and anatomy courses and managed to score in whatever passes for the decent to good range on the MCAT. He/she applies for their dream medical school, only to be denied admission because the personality test has (accurately) pegged him/her as an aloof and unpleasant person whose bedside manner would almost certainly not be highly rated by future patients. What action will this person take, particularly if he/she discovers that the personality factors that the test measures have a strong genetic component and as such, were mostly beyond their control? To make matters worse: research has generally found that women are on the average higher in the emotional distress factor that the researchers found to be a negative influence on medical training, which puts the grim specter of sexism into play. To put it bluntly, any medical school who implements this type of procedure in their admissions ought to turn around and file suit against themselves, just to be able to say they did it before it got all trendy.

Astute readers will note that the MCAT, the current medical school qualification uber alles, is itself constructed to be a general measure of intelligence, which also has a lot of research suggesting it has a strong genetic component, and nothing has stopped medical schools from continuing to utilize it. While that's inarguably true, it's a lot harder to make the case to the legal system or the general public that intelligence shouldn't be a factor in picking out future doctors, because while very few people are against dumb people having jobs, most people are against them having jobs that directly endanger their lives. Whereas doctors with unpleasant personalities, which lead them to do things like make you wait 3 hours for a 15 minute appointment and work to thwart the creation of national health insurance for 90 goddamned years, are practically a storied tradition in America.

Youth in Revolt review

2010-01-17T11:06:00.006-07:00

I think that by this point, pretty much every Arrested Development fan who's followed Michael Cera's movie career has wondered when he's going to stop playing the same character. You know the one: the brainy but awkward and passive 'nice guy,' the type that Michael Cera now defines so completely that the movie industry had to invent Jesse Eisenberg to take on the roles he turns down. After Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Year One which I didn't like and didn't see, respectively, I figured that his shtick needed to evolve or die. On that basis, I probably wouldn't have gone to see Youth in Revolt if I hadn't gotten a positive vibe from the trailer and read a couple good reviews of it. As a Michael Cera fan, I'm glad I did, because Youth in Revolt lets him out of his comfort zone, albeit just a bit, and the results are pretty funny.

The advertising for Youth in Revolt pitches it as a teen sex comedy in the vein of Superbad, (a film I think will be remembered as one of the deathless classics of the 2000s), but that's not really accurate. Where Superbad and the long line of preceding comedies of its type are mainly about how horniness and awkwardness create common bonds between teen boys, Youth in Revolt focuses almost exclusively on Nick Twisp (Michael Cera's character) and the circumstances that separate him from his love interest Sheeni Saunders. One of the pleasant surprises of Youth in Revolt is that Nick and Sheeni actually get into a semi-relationship early in the movie, which allows the movie to mostly avoid portraying Sheeni as a typical sex comedy love interest (i.e. an aloof and unattainable figure with a basically oblivious attitude toward the lead until the climax of the film). The dramatic tension mainly comes from Nick's efforts to reunite with Sheeni after a variety of circumstances conspire to separate them. The central gag of the movie is that Nick invents 'Francois Dillinger,' an alternative persona transparently based on Jean-Paul Belmondo's character in Breathless, to overcome the passivity that prevents him from taking bold action to pursue Sheeni.

The interplay between Nick and 'Francois' is one of the high points of Youth in Revolt. 'Francois' is the type of smooth, confident person who exists only in the imaginations of awkward people like Nick, who rely far too much on fiction for an understanding of what qualities other people find appealing and why, and Cera does a great job of working this evident fact into his performance. The sections where he plays 'Francois' are probably the best argument yet for Michael Cera as an actor with range. Suffice it to say that I'm really looking forward to what he'll pull off in this summer's Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.

Beyond Michael Cera-related matters, the most apt way I can describe Youth in Revolt is that it doesn't so much transcend the conventions of its genre as it tweaks them just enough so they aren't irritating. For instance, Nick and Sheeni basically use the same reference-heavy quirkspeak that was so retrospectively annoying in Juno, namechecking Yasujiro Ozu and Serge Gainesbourg and what have you, but instead of treating it as a signifier of how totally awesome the characters are, Youth in Revolt takes the far more realistic tack of using it to highlight how alienated they are from their surroundings. There's a great exchange early in the movie where Nick runs into a female classmate in a video store who then asks him what he's renting; when he shows her Fellini's La Strada, she exclaims "So random!" Then her boyfriend comes up behind her and asks him "Does that movie come with a tampon for your pussy?"

Youth in Revolt also benefits from its surprisingly strong supporting cast, which includes Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis, Jean Smart, M. Emmet Walsh, and Fred Willard. The movie essentially focuses on Nick, rotating the background players in and out liberally as the plot progresses. The result is a constant parade of new characters, none of which are onscreen long enough to wear out their welcome. The best out of lot is Adhir Kalyan as Vijay, a hyper-articulate classmate of Nick's who helps him sneak into a French-speaking boarding school in one of the film's best sequences; I really wish he'd gotten more screen time.

In all, Youth in Revolt isn't exactly a movie that you'll kick yourself for missing in the theater, but it's definitely worth seeing, particularly for fans of Michael Cera who've been disheartened by his recent work. It's not a reinvention of the genre, but it's a well made and funny movie that does a great job of capitalizing on its strengths. At a minimum, keep it on your radar for DVD or cable.

CNN brings journalism back from the dead

2010-01-11T20:08:00.006-07:00

The cynics who say the news media has stopped serving the public interest have officially been put on notice with CNN's scoop today that Avatar, the most expensive and therefore best movie ever made, is causing audiences to slip into bouts of depression because of the sheer awesomeness of the special effects. This hard-hitting investigation, which incidentally revolves entirely around the emotional lives of people who post on movie fan sites, reveals the plight of afflicted heroes like 'Elequin', who mourns:

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie."

I hope he doesn't pick Steel Magnolias or something like that, because I think he'd probably slit his own wrists before he hit the credits. Says another user, 'Mike':

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and that everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Did 'Mike' actually see Avatar? If I'm not mistaken, the defining feature of Pandora, besides 'sparkliness', was the fact that it was jam-packed with merciless killer space-dogs, space-rhinos, space-panthers, and space-flying-Komodo dragons. Plus, suicide seems like seems like kind of a risky plan. Think of all the repeat viewings of Avatar that 'Mike' will be missing out on if the whole Pandora-resurrection hypothesis doesn't pan out. Not to mention the special-edition Blu-Ray boxset, the inevitable sequel/s, and the chance to own what will probably be a very respectably detailed set of action figures.

As any respectable journalist knows, something isn't a real trend until you can find three separate people to attest to its existence, so behold the third member of the Avatar-caused depression epidemic:

"Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality."

J'accuse, Avatar! Not even a teenage boy pursuing a field of study widely associated with social isolation while living in a country with a 97% suicide rate is immune from your siren song of melancholy.

Fortunately, the article ends on a note of hope for these young men, who were almost certainly not suffering from any sort of mental issues before they bought a ticket to Avatar, or as CNN probably calls it, James Cameron's Abattoir of Souls. As is so often the case, they can find solace in the wisdom of their brethren:

"Within the fan community, suggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing "Avatar" video games or downloading the movie soundtrack, in addition to encouraging members to relate to other people outside the virtual realm and to seek out positive and constructive activities."

It was good of them to throw those last two suggestions in there as a last-ditch resort, in case the whole playing video games and listening to the soundtrack thing somehow doesn't pan out.

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

2009-11-27T23:39:00.009-07:00

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!

2009-11-13T21:51:00.003-07:00

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

2009-11-11T12:09:00.003-07:00

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

2009-11-08T18:40:00.001-07:00

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

2009-11-08T10:07:00.002-07:00

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

2009-11-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-11-04T21:30:00.003-07:00

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!

2009-11-04T19:52:00.003-07:00

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

2009-11-03T20:15:00.002-07:00

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?

2009-10-23T23:22:00.003-07:00

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

2009-10-21T18:51:00.003-07:00

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

2009-10-20T19:33:00.003-07:00

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

2009-10-18T20:42:00.003-07:00

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.