Role Models (2008)

This film written by David Wain, most likely known for his work on The State, follows the story of two energy drink sales reps, Danny and Wheeler (Paul Rudd and Stiffler respectively) who get in trouble with the law and have to do community service in the form of being Big Brothers to a couple of kids. And over the course of wacky antics, they learn some sorta lesson about themselves or something.

Wheeler is paired up with Ronnie, a rambunctious black kid who has a history of getting his big brothers to quit. He's funny when he hits Wheeler and says controversial things. The most annoying part of his character is his mom because she's just an annoying mom and kinda symbolizes to me what's wrong with lots of parents today. But that can also be said for Augie's (McLovin's) parents. Augie is Danny's little brother and he is into live-action role-playing (hereafter referred to as LARPing). To me this was the most entertaining part of the movie because LARPing is just funny. I could go on a long tangent on how I researched what LARPing is, but I'll only say that if you have free time, read some of the About and Rules in NERO Chicago's website. I was highly amused.

In any case, the movie has lots of cameos from members of The State, which surprised me because I originally mistaken in thinking this was an Apatow film. Acting was serviceable, but lets be honest in saying no one is trying to win an academy award here. The music was not very memorable to me outside of of few KISS songs. The costumes were great thanks to LARPers, but as for the rest of the production value, it wasn't not too spectacular. The overall story was kinda touching, I guess; it mostly was funny because I wasn't expecting much from it. I did zero watch checks and recommend it to people who just want some good clean laughs.

Sicko (2007)

We finally watched this Michael Moore documentary. I used to be a huge Moore fan, in high school, and still appreciate his stabs at the powers that be in the country, even though he's now one of them. He gives average Americans a mic and airtime, and though he exploits them from time to time, they more or less give themselves to the camera. If they didn't want to be manipulated a bit, they wouldn't have signed on to make the film.

I think France in particular gets a sweetheart treatment. The public demonstrations he fondly parades, no pun intended, across the screen don't show the race rioting that's occurred from those not so well treated by the national systems, including unions.

Taking 9/11 victims to Cuba for healthcare is a symbolic victory for the non-unionized volunteers who served at Ground Zero. I doubt many of the NYPD/firefighting unions have put up much of a fight for the volunteers, but hey -- the whole scene of them getting top quality care is really warm and necessary in the polemical film.

Obviously, someone in those foreign countries is paying for health care. Just because it comes out of taxes doesn't make it free. I wonder what the bureaucratic and administrative (billing, etc.) costs or savings are when there's a single payer, like the government. It must save a lot of resources when they don't have to track down delinquent and late-paying patients, like myself.

Shimotsuma monogatari (2004)

[English Title = Kamikaze Girls]

This movie, based on a light novel and comic in Japan, both of which I haven't read, is about a girl named Momoko (Kyoko Fukada) who grows up in a small town in Japan. She is into sweet lolita (not to be confused with gothic lolita) fashion characterized by cute elaborate dresses even though the town she lives in all buys their clothes from a Wal-Mart type megastore. She comes from a heritage of a Yakuza (japanese mafia) father and alcoholic mother. When she was a kid, her mom left to marry another guy but she chose to live with her dad. He made money selling bootleg Versace clothing and eventually got busted so the two move in with his mother in the small town of Shimotsuma.

Momoka then tried to make some money to support her dress buying habit by trying to sell the leftover bootleg clothing online. This is how she meets Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya), a member of a local all girl biker gang. Since she's in a biker gang, she dresses like a yankii (the Japanese term for a thug) and has bad manners. The movie follows the unlikely friendship of these two opposite personalities. Ichiko has Momoko embroider a tribute to the gang leader onto her gang jacket and it turns out Momoko is pretty awesome at it. This leads to Momoko getting a job embroidering dresses at the stor she gets all her sweet lolita dresses from. Though it also leads to her having to decide whether to finish the job or help her friend Ichiko.

Ultimately, this is a chick movie but it's done it such a stylized way that it's not too sappy and sentimental way. The film is full of vivid colors and some trippy hallucinations and animation inserts. The music very fitting with good opening and closing songs by pop-rock artist Tommy February6 and varying soothing to upbeat to guitar riff filled background music provided by Yoko Kano, famous for providing music to mecha (giant robot) anime. For someone not knowledgeable about Japanese culture, this is a nice look into a fashion trends among other cultural aspects. I think the acting is done well enough, I man I could see Momoko as a princess and Ichiko being believable punk. They also did a good job of showing how their friendship developed. I don't think this movie is for everyone. It's probably for girls, people into Japanese culture, or people just looking for something different from the norm. I did 0 watch checks, most likely because I was captivated by the colors in the movie and I had to read subtitles the whole time. This is not a love story in any way, I just used the improbable hook-up tag referring to their seemingly mis-matched friendship.

Mother 3 (2006)

If this picture doesn't make you want to play Mother 3, none of my words will either.

Continuing my pursuit of "next-level" video games, I found a way to get my hands on this one and give it a go. This game was released in Japan in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance. The story of its coming to be is almost as good as the game's plot. It's a sequel to Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan), a SNES game that saw release in the US but meager sales (and which I think I can safely credit for turning my cousin into an RPG-head like me). This title was in development for N64 as Earthbound, and spent five years in development for the Nintendo 64 DD drive that never came out, before finally being cancelled along with the peripheral in 2000. Three years later, Nintendo asked the developer, Shigesato Itoi, if he wanted to take another crack at the game for the Game Boy Advance. Three years after that, the game drew near.

Eager Earthbound fans waited for the announcement of an English release that never came, then took matters into their own hands and created a fan translation, an increasingly common occurrence for games that have a small but very dedicated fanbase outside Japan. Not knowing Japanese, I played the translation.

It's pretty short for an RPG; unlike DQ8 which as in my previous post I mentioned took 200,000 hours, I finished this one in just over 20. (As an aside, I wonder if they couldn't make viewing the game clock optional. It's an unavoidable sinking feeling that I get when I see I've put in almost three days of work hours on a piece of entertainment. Maybe this calls for better time management instead.)

It's also better than Earthbound, by a lot.

Those little musical notes you see in the battle screen are one of the keys to Mother 3's fantabulousness. There's a hidden rhythm game built into every battle, where if you start your attack and time it with the beat of the music, you can score up to 16-hit combos and make grinding/leveling MUCH less of an issue to getting the story. But there are an insane amount of battle songs (~20 each with 2-3 variations) and as you get further into the game, there are changeups or stops in the beat that will throw you off, so you really have to pay attention (or settle for 4-hit combos as I did). I think I only had to grind once in the middle for about a half hour, and even then I overshot the mark and made the next boss too easy.

The second awesome gameplay mechanic is the rolling HP meter. Say you have 100 HP and the enemy smacks you for 110 HP damage. In another game, you'd just keel over dead. In Mother 3, your meter goes into a countdown toward 0 HP. This leaves you a (very short) time to select a heal item or cure spell to rescue yourself from death. The rolling means battles can get frantic in an instant, with lots of A-button pushing to flip through everyone's actions so you can get to the healing before the character dies. There were moments in the boss battles near the end where all four of my guys' meters were either going up from being healed near death, or going down toward death. It was a flurry of numbers that heightened the excitement beyond a standard RPG where you can spend hours thinking about your next turn.

Also, while Earthbound looked goofy for the sake of being goofy (tweaking many of the prevailing RPG conventions of the first few generations of gaming), Mother 3 takes the same pixellated children's-story approach but destroys your heart with a tragedy of loss, exploitation, and commercialization. Not BSing here, that's what it's about. And yes, it manages to do that AND still be tons of fun.

SPOILER LINK ALERT: The end might leave you scratching your head, but this interview with developer Itoi sheds light on what he believes it means.

I've discovered a site that shares many of my sensibilities regarding "pushing" the video game format beyond its kid-centric origins to more of an art form. They published this list of the "best" games of all time, and unlike many junky Internet lists, I actually agree with most of it...except Secret of Evermore over Secret of Mana, no frickin' way.