Loutallica — Lulu

Metallica and Lou Reed didn't do themselves any favors by pushing one of the most awkward and pretentious songs on this album as it's first public release, and I think that after most people heard 'The View' they were done with this thing. I felt that way, but thanks to a free stream of the whole album on the web I changed my mind as soon as I heard the first song, 'Brandenburg Gate.'

"I would cut my legs and tits off when I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski in the dark." That Lou's opening line, and as soon as I heard that I realized that this wasn't such a humorless ego trip as it might have seemed. Then Hetfield comes in with his bellowed "small town gir-r-uh-l!" This is an ego trip with a decent sense of humor, roaring, feral guitars, and really hard drum hits. This is weird. This is like Bob Seger if he grew up with 80s metal and punk albums instead of Motown and CCR.

Almost none of the reviews that I read had much to say about the source material, a Weimar-era drama about a seemingly soulless manipulative woman who navigates through the social and financial chaos of the time with her wits and powers of seduction. It was later adapted into a brilliant opera by Alban Berg. Less still was said about the way that Lou and the gang updates the themes of 'Lulu' and adds his own layers through allusions to horror movies. Most internet music reviewers are lazy jerks. But most of them probably got paid the same as what I'm getting for this review (close your eyes and summon the void.)

I guess late-era Metallica isn't for everyone, but to me the guitars sound nice and saturated, Hetfield's singing is the same as ever (for better or worse,) and there are some tough riffs to be found here. Lou made a lot of weird albums at the end of his career, and this is definitely one of them, but if you're a little forgiving of the excesses, his experimentalism and voice are here, same as ever.

Here's the fateful meeting that initially inspired the collaboration:

Secession in/Visions of Astropolis 2011

Pure

Joy

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3, 2010)

Graphics: STUNNING. If you have an HD and a current-gen console, find a way to at least play *some* of it. Look at that screenshot! The blur between game-engine cutscenes and pre-renders is unnoticeable to me, unless I'm really looking for it.

Gameplay: I'm 8 hours in, and it turns out there is real merit to the apoplexy from the "OMG this isn't Final Fantasy" crowd. The game does, in fact, lead off with what's essentially an extended movie/tutorial with some gameplay in it. You have no choice but to see the story the way the developers want you to see it, from cutscene to straight-line run through an area with some fighting to the next cutscene. No map, no towns, no control over who's in your party (or even which one of the party you control), and no leveling up beyond a certain point - the game's enemies are visible when walking, and finite; plus, the game locks your more powerful abilities away until you beat the next boss.

What's weird is they'll tell you how to do something, then guide you through doing it, and it's tough to even know if you're going to need to remember it again. Quick example: kid jumps into a huge robot, Anakin-style, so he can go stomping all over the guys you've been fighting like a Colossus. A tutorial pops up saying, "OK, here's how you go about stomping and punching these guys." (Plus some other ridiculous thing about how the robot only has enough energy for three mega-punches, but the player can find energy for more punches by...knocking over a fence to proceed to the next area. What? I mean, why even place a limit on the number of punches? Or, why not have the robot regain energy by, I don't know, RECHARGING somewhere? Does running into a fence give it some kind of Kool-Aid Man, "OHHH YEEEAH!" adrenaline rush?)

So anyway, yeah. The player guides the kid in the robot down a line, at the end of which the robot trips over a step in the path and breaks. Well. I just read a two-minute tutorial for three minutes of gameplay. Is the kid going to Anakin it up in more robots later, or was that it? Is this more or less important than the how-to-fight-Eidolons tutorial, which was just as long?

(Also, Hope just said that word aloud. "Eye-DOH-luhns"? Seriously? In my head it was always "EYE-duh-lawns." I like my pronunciation more.)

Not to knock the Eidolon fights. They're some of the only moments of challenge in this whole introduction section. It's pretty cool to finally figure out how not to die in the first fifteen seconds of a fight. And - to find a positive to the JRPG-on-rails approach - it's precisely because the game isn't letting me grind my way past a boss that forces me to learn, and derive satisfaction from, strategy rather than just dogged persistence.

Characters: a bunch of 21-year-olds acting like they're 40 and carrying the weight of the world. Reminds me of FFX where i read in some bio that Auron, the grizzled Badass Longcoat, was the ripe old age of 35. The series knows what it's about, at least.

Speaking of TV Tropes, 8 hours in, I'm trying to decide if Hope is a Jerkass Woobie or a Break the Cutie.

They all look stupendously fabulous. Lightning is female Cloud, but more badass -- i.e., more belts and buckles. She also walks around on what appear to be femurs with a layer of skin wrapped around them. Vanille *really* needs a sandwich. Sazh isn't as "jive" as i was afraid he would be -- and I just found out his English voice actor was in Crank, which is totally sweet.

Story: Too early to tell if it's good. In true Scooby-Doo fashion they split the gang up and have you follow multiple plot threads, and they commit the cardinal sin of dropping you in medias res into a completely alien world with byzantine politics, conflicts, and weird made-up words. L'Cie? Fal'Cie? Cocoon? Pulse? To quote Rory, "The who and the what now?"

I think it's straight-up wrong to have to depend on the Star Wars title crawls that scroll while the game boots up to tell me what's going on. The developers relegated all the backstory that would allow you to make sense of those first 3 hours to the "datalog" in the menu, which is just a cheap and easy way to avoid weaving exposition into the action proper skillfully. This is why stories will have someone with no clue what's going on somewhere nearby, so they can have stuff explained to them (and the audience) without it being, like, the genius detective alone in his office talking out the thought process behind his amazing deductions.

Despite all my whining, you can tell loads of people put their heart and soul into this thing, and it's so pretty I can't just dismiss it out of hand. But I'm still waiting for it to, like, let me play it; in the meantime I'm just along for the ride.

More thoughts to come, or not.

And people said Japanese people are apathetic! NOT! Protests against U.S. Bases in Okinawa

Reclaiming the phrase "Tea Party!" Okinawans are taxed in many ways by the U.S. military bases- they foot half of the bill for the bases and have to suffer with violence, military personnel getting away with crimes as vicious as rape and hit and run murder, societal and environmental destruction, helicopters dropping out of the sky onto their elementary schools and universities then to be covered up by military take overs of their institutions to clean up the evidence, et cetera. All the while, the are the poorest prefecture in all of Japan, and Tokyo and Washington, D.C. have ignored 65 years of Okinawan democratic efforts to get rid of the bases on their land, claiming that the bases are necessary for the Okinawan economy and to protect Japan.Talk about being taxed without representation!


The link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xoYlL6WQZY) will take you to Footage of Open-Air Tea Party, Rally, and Demonstration on April 25th in Kyoto. You can also watch below.This action was in solidarity with the prefecture-wide rally against U.S. bases in Okinawa and particularly the relocation of bases to Henoko. 90-100,000 people participated in the rally in Okinawa (side by side with 39 mayors out of 41 total mayors in Okinawa) and 400 participated in Kyoto. The action was organized by Kyoto Action (http://kyoto-action.jugem.jp) and videotaped by me:)

XYZR_KX, Jack Tung, etc. -- Minotaur Mini-Tour

Talk about a great rock show. How about two in one night!!

The San Francisco swing of the Minotaur Mini-Tour brought XYZR_KX, Jack Tung, and a bunch of other bands and mini-bands to the mini-venue Giant Robot and Retox. (Jon, if you has pix, this is a good place to upload them.) Clearly, all in attendance at the in-store performance at Giant Robot were very impressed. Babies were dancing, people were buying merch and it was a great rock show. Jon did not sing, but let his fingertips do the dancing on his chaos pad, Behringer mixer, and MacBook. After a video gamey anthem, sampling Baseball Stars 2, Jon succumbed to the pop demon and bobbed the crowd atop cresting waves of Daft riddims. The 7-beat loops were lucky charms, the seething underbelly beats a world beneath.

At Retox, a basement outfitted to look like an industrial airplane fuselage, Jon did sing, quietly, in his way, and welcomed all the comers to a night of technological expertise, sweet melodies, flying fingers, and loudness. Inquiring crowd members asked, did Jon sample all of those bits and pieces, or did he record them himself, as this author suggested?

Next, Jack Tung blowed up the mic without singing a word. Exposing his hip hips to the crowd while working away on his loop-de-hoops and non-hoopde-loops, twiddling knobs and pressing buttons, he also used his head, spitting out cracked, fractured chits of rhythm in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,11 1/2, and 12, with some 14 to boot. The music laid out proofs heretofore unimaginable. "How much of that did he improvise?" asked my friend Ryan, incredulous at the intricacy of the designs. "None," I answered, confident that Jack's tongue anticipated each and every lick.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (PSP, 2008)

Stardate 070210

I guess I was going to write something about this back in February? And instead I left it totally blank. To quote the Commodore, "That, as they say, is that. [click]"

Oh yeah, this picture reminded me. Genesis's supposedly awe-inspiring poem was garbage and it pissed me off to have to keep hearing him say lines from it while he attacked Zack.

Also, the DMW was kind of cool, but also kind of annoying. Also also wik, all these kids were talking about how they cried at the end. I laughed. Mostly because I had the hilarious version of Zack's death from FF7 in my head, where two Shinra dudes just push him to the ground and pump him full of lead. Like, no sad music, 5x the number of necessary bullets, shooting his PS1-pixelated corpse. Way to go out like a punk there, buddy.

I sold my copy off so I have no way of developing a further opinion. I would like to commemorate how I would leave the mission where Zack fights like 300 slugs on the beach running on my PSP while I went and did something else, then come back a half hour later to see what the DMW Santa Claus brought me. Zack had Regen going so only the DMW attacks would kill dudes. The game got wise and stopped giving me much of anything after a while.

Final Fantasy VII (PC, 1997)

Two reasons I dusted off this golden oldie:

1) I wanted to play, and am currently playing, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII on the PSP. Crisis Core is a prequel to the big one and I knew there would be all kinds of references to the original that would be lost on me unless I refreshed my memory by playing it again.
2) At the Distant Worlds concert last month, the audience went nuts when the FF7 intro song started at the beginning of the second half, after politely clapping through several songs from FF8, 9, and 10 through the first half. Something about this game, that I did not understand when I first played it around 2001, compels all manner of devotion to this story and these characters, and I wanted to see if I could suss out what that was.

The graphics have not aged well. When it came out on the PS1 it was enough of a leap from sprites to polygons that people were all like "omg," but subsequent advances have led to the character models being denigrated as "Popeye-like," and they are. But it's a sign of the continuing love of FF7 that fan-made mods to the main .exe file on the PC version allow an intrepid and patient player to update the display resolution for high-definition monitors, as well as swap out the junky character models and profile pictures for more realistic shapes and updated pics from the Advent Children movie. Similarly, the even more computer-savvy PC player can replace the MIDI files with the original PS1 sound files - after all, what is "One Winged Angel" without an ominous Latin choir proclaiming "SE-PHI-ROTH!!" All this work, plus various patches and hacks to make playable on current versions of Windows a buggy, decade-old game.

I'm sort of savvy, but not that savvy. And really I just wanted the short blast of nostalgia, not the "ultimate" FF7 experience. So I did the minimum necessary to get FF7 working on my XP former studio computer, now enjoying a bittersweet and occasionally spyware-beset senescence, fired up a hacked god save file (all characters maxed out, all super items in inventory, etc. etc.), and got to blitzing through the thing.

I may have put the kibosh on my own goals for this reliving by giving myself the god save. It's probable that, my aversion to challenge and game-overs in RPG gaming notwithstanding, the psychological process of effort and time investment is part of what lends impact and meaning to a longform game story experience. Their struggle did not become my struggle, and the severe disconnect between the story segments where I would watch my guys flail around running from enemies and the battles where they would annihilate everyone in one turn was too comical to ignore and took me very much out of the experience.

Shopping Cart Hero 2

Supermarket sweep, meet MXC.

It took me around 400 rolls down the hill to master both the Monkey-in-hot-air balloon and the Giant Worm. In the process, Britt and I accomplished triple spins, distances beyond 1000, height over 1500, and many shuttle taps. Of course, first we had to die as many ways possible. If I keep it up, I'll break off the arrow key on my keyboard a la GTA2.

The simplicity of the game at first glance is deceptive. Stick figures give way to beautiful pirouettes, graceful baseball bat dumpster flips, and perfectly executed front and back Superman shopping cart holds. I haven't seen anyone have this much fun in a cart since that time in the strip mall parking lot before a Monster Pete show. You can get extra points easily with the tricks and flips with multiple people in the cart. I haven't played the iPhone format but I imagine it's similarly addicting.

The game could be improved with better record keeping, including max distance and height statistics. OK, back to TetrisFriends.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (PS2, 2003)

(I finished this game several months ago and just now discovered that I never finished - or wrote, really - anything about it. Here's some shizzle jotting.)

This is an RPG that thinks outside the box, for better and worse. I typically have a serious aversion to dying in an RPG - I take it very personally on some level. Maybe it speaks to some sort of empathy or identification I feel with the characters I'm playing as, or maybe I'm just averse to even temporary setbacks or down moments in a game where I'd rather imagine myself on an inexorable upward trajectory toward mastery over everything the game could throw at me.

(I should say as a caveat that I only feel this way when I play an RPG. If I were playing Mario, for instance, I'd think nothing of dying as many times as I had lives as long as I got through a level, and I certainly wouldn't expect myself to clear a game without losing a life. Something about seeing that "GAME OVER" screen in an RPG, though, tells me I just failed at things I think of myself as somewhat good at: resource management, upkeep and maintenance, preparing adequately for tough situations.)

I am also, I have discovered, a story player where RPGs are concerned. I typically ignore the "% complete" display should a game attempt to taunt me with its not saying 100%, and I would rather hit up walkthroughs than scour every town looking for the one NPC who I need to talk to to get some door to open halfway across the world. And if I'm underleveled facing a tough boss but there's a sidequest that will get me an overpowered weapon to take him out so I don't have to grind, you'd best believe I'm going to go and complete that sidequest, walkthrough-assisted, so I can beat the boss and get the next bit of story. And once I've seen the canon ending, I don't play the game again or engage much in post-game challenges. Those are where the game reveals itself to be a bunch of numbers and dice-rolling and lose the plot completely. Not having it.

Dragon Quarter has very little use for either of these attitudes toward gaming. First, the game expects you to die, repeatedly, before you can level up enough to get through even the first part of the game. (Your experience and some items carry over each time you restart.) Second, additional bits and pieces of the story are revealed to you only after dying and restarting several times. Third, the game uses extremely rare items to limit how often you can save. There's a temporary save every time you quit, but you lose it when you load it. Fourth, and what pushes this game into the crazy/innovative area is the ultimate-kill attack: you can use it to beat any boss with only a few hits, but use it too often and the game is over. Like, you have to restart the game, over.

As I'm sure a reader can infer, I tend to see games as games, not challenges, so I was reduced around the halfway point to tiptoeing through each successive dungeon clinging to a walkthrough for dear life. The walkthroughs tell you where you need to be in the ultimate-kill meter and how much of it you need to use up with each boss. And I still had to backtrack (gahh!!! breaking the fourth wall!!) to get the meter back from a few boss fights that I squandered ultimate-kill points on.

Regardless, actually finishing games is something I've become very sure that I do, and I did "beat" the game, though it brought only the accomplishment of barely surviving an ordeal rather than mastering and savoring a great experience.

(Speaking of not savoring an experience, a quick note on the A/V. Post-apocalyptic underground steampunk environment leads to 1) soundtrack having some bad-ass electronic-orchestral hybrid music, but 2) an aggravatingly claustrophobic series of low-ceiling passageways and corridors that contributes to the unpleasantness.)

The Princess and the Frog // Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) // District 9

Q: What do these three movies have in common?

A: Human to non-human animal transformations.

OK, Brain Candy doesn't really have that, but people do go comatose. Pretty close. The real answer is that I saw them all this weekend.

The Disney film returns to the company's hand-drawn animation roots. It feels like Jungle Book, touring the swamp and New Orleans. There's a cute alligator playing the trumpet, snakes that act like dogs, and voodoo galore. The music, going from jazz to zydeco to gospel and back, was decent. Dancing too. Say what you want about voodoo religion having a bad stereotype, I don't care. Because the voodoo priest in this film, the bad guy, was really badass. He's a total pimp. His shadow even kicks ass.  Of course, the film retreads stereotypes about princesses marrying to make everything OK.  But my real gripe is that the hot princess was a frog for most of the film, even though she made a pretty sexy frog.

Brain Candy was the midnight movie, part of the SF Sketchfest, a comedy festival. The crowd was rowdy, and I kind of resent paying $12 for a midnight movie, but at least there was parking. I noticed that the recurring scene where all the gay guys come spilling out of a door, implying there was lots of illicit gay sex going on behind the door, was ripped off by There's Something About Mary (when Ben Stiller stumbles over the naked guy at the rest stop). I like the message, that it's OK to be depressed sometimes.

District 9 was a little disappointing. Sure, plenty of people got liquidated by alien weaponry, and the POV cameras made it feel like a video game, and there were alien prostitutes, but.... wait a second, this movie was awesome! The cliches were jumping off the screen -- using 'live' television coverage as exposition as well as for dramatic tension, and setting up an obvious sequel by telling the protagonist he'd be saved 3 years after the movie ends -- but at least there's no everything-is-back-to-normal ending. The South Africa setting threw me off, as I wasn't sure whether the quarantined aliens represented Apartheid-era blacks or the more contemporary and obvious Palestinian metaphor. For some reason, though, South African whites (Afrikaners) make really good mercenaries. See Blood Diamond and The Constant Gardener. They're just convincing. Something about history, maybe, I dunno.

It Might Get Loud (2008)

I was excited going into this, and underwhelmed coming out. But I am amused that the publicity for this film emphasizes director Davis Guggenheim's last movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Because if there's one thing where the subject matter overlaps like no other, it's environmental warnings and guitar wankery.

Tough to say who this is for. You couldn't pick three much more different guitarists than Jimmy Page, U2's Edge, and Jack White. I appreciate all of their contributions on different levels, though technique-wise Page could wipe the floor with the other two with plenty of jet-engine-imitating facial expressions to spare. If you're already a rock music fan you probably already know the significance of the places they visit to pad out the runtime: Headley Grange for Zep, where IV was recorded- seeing the room where the Levee Breaks drums were recorded is pretty sweet- and U2's high school, where the band met. White doesn't have that legendary lore attached to his backstory (will he ever? the verdict is out), so his sections make do with a lot of old/lo-fi fetishism, all "Son House was standing in a room stomping and singing, it's my favorite record, technology sucks."

I kind of wish there had been some kind of fireworks between White and Edge at the "summit" where the three sit in a fake living room on a soundstage and learn each other's songs, instead of the litany of poker faces we're treated to. "Yes, yes, show me again how to play Seven Nation Army. That one's tough." (Quotation marks indicating, in this case, something no one actually said, but the level of emotional honesty and willingness to debate is about on that level.)

It seems clear that Guggenheim was hoping for *some* kind of discussion of differences in approach or values to emerge by bringing these three guys together- the technique master, the technology wizard, and the feeling-over-complexity, back-to-basics advocate- but his subjects aren't willing to oblige. If I remember the press material correctly, he made sure the three never met before taping the meeting. And it feels like that, like total strangers feeling each other out and scared to do or say anything stupid...which is the total opposite of what music, and artistry in general, is about.

It's like some kind of host-less music talk show, three guests just biding their time until they can take off. A more interesting approach would have been a round-robin covers thing, where for instance, Page would learn Sunday Bloody Sunday, Edge would learn Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, and White would learn In My Time of Dying, and then we could compare how the song retains or changes its shape in the hands of another artist. Then they'd have something to talk about. As it is, it's like they're practicing for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame show and are trying to decide what songs to play, in a uniquely passive-aggressive musician way. "Hey how about that one of yours. That one's cool, let's try it." [originator plays song and other two half-ass their way through it] "Yeah, that one's cool...Oh, how about this one instead?"

Final Fantasy X (PS2, 2001)

(Howdy RGB. It's a new decade and I'm ringing in the year by keeping the ol' girl running.)

Don't let that iconic picture of a sartorially challenged beach bum standing in the ocean with a hundred-pound sword fool you, and fight that urge to rip out your eardrums so you can't hear yourself scream when he speaks. Get ready to suffer some bad voices and a clunky early-00s control scheme, because despite its flaws, this one is really great.

The clock has just turned on making this game nine years old instead of a mere eight. I'm currently a little sour on the whole experience as I'm at the very end and the difficulty hits an inflection point right at the final dungeon. While I understand the motivation for the game suddenly becoming pretty hard right at the moment the majority of the sidequests become available, if almost all the game is going to be such a walk in the park, it really throws me when out of nowhere they expect you to grind and explore the crap out of every last corner.

Up to that point I had been enjoying the game more as an extended interactive movie than a grindfest, and I was unhappily forced to switch gears just to see the end. By the time I was actually ready to take the final boss down, I had lost the narrative thread. It's certainly a credit to the game's hold on me that I stuck with it through to the bitter end...which in my case judging by the play clock, consumed a full 1/5 or so of my total play time. (I was somewhere around 64 hours when I hit the last save point and lost, and at a robust 81:16 when I came back with the goods.)

Incidentally, DQ8 suffered from the same thing. I'm too easily swayed by what the NPCs are telling me to do, in games and IRL, but when all anyone I find in the game wants to talk to me about is beating that final boss, it's hard for me to remember that I'm trying to collect some monsters on a mountain I went through 15 hours ago so some guy will give me this item that I combine with another item to open two seals to get the best summon. Or worse, they're still talking to me about beating the guy after I already beat him! I mean, come on. Next time don't set your world up so that winning the game means the immediate end of all possible enemy encounters. Actually that would be pretty great, a game where you go through all this trouble and then you beat it and playing after the "end," people are all mad at you because they expected you to solve all their problems.

I enjoyed some of the mini-games (the Cloisters of Trials were very Myst/Ico-esque, a huge plus in my book, except they should have taken a cue from those games and cut out the aggravating music) and hated others (Blitzball...just so, you know, wtf). There are a few moments where an ambitious or at least interesting attempt to change up the gameplay falls flat, due mostly to not giving the player any clue how to proceed. I.e., don't just stick me in a room with randomly generating icicles and spheres and a number in the corner of the screen and expect me to know what to do. If this was Wario Ware, maybe; but again, the game to this point has been all but holding my hand showing me how to play it, and in that context it just seems cheap to go another route without warning, rather than "challenging" or "difficult." More to the point, the execution of that room in terms of presentation is so bad and out-of-the-blue that it feels like a half-finished demo screen or a beta version of a future final version.

And how hard would it have been to include navigating the world via airship? I get that the maps are 3D-rendered rather than the 2D overworld maps of previous games, but I would take the fade-out/in to switch between the two over what the game gives you--a button saying "board airship" at save points and a list of locations on the airship's nav screen. Not once do you see the airship move outside of the cutscenes, and you never get to control it. I might as well be teleporting to places in Spira from another dimension, or Tidus's mom's house, given how poorly this mechanic integrates the airship with the map. There's no sense of "let me explore this world!" when you get the airship, which is a classic FF moment in games where you can navigate the world map. Instead it's "let me teleport to this save spot so I can run backward trying to remember where this place I have to get to was."

So that's all the sucky stuff. And Tidus being a complete tool until he grows a pair, which still doesn't make his voice any less whiny. And not being able to move the camera, which I'm sure was an innovation a few years down the road, but which would make doing things like finding treasure chests or, say, avoiding randomly generating icicles much easier.

What's good? The characters, story, and world. The music (hearing "To Zanarkand" at the Distant Worlds concert last month, scored to the FMV of Yuna performing the sending at Kilika, prompted me to get this game from a friend, finally overcoming my nigh-irreparable Tidus turnoff). The battle system and sphere-grid leveling system. Some of the visuals, particularly if you're a generation or more behind like I am. As far as landmark PS2 RPGs go, I still prefer DQ8 because there's a bit of uncanny valley to the faces in FFX and inconsistency between how they look in the in-game cutscenes vs. the FMVs (Tidus gets bony and Wakka gets jaw-y), plus I prefer the old-school-cartoon feel and music of DQ8 overall.

Basically, there is more than valid reason to love this game. I focused on my gripes because it's not perfect. But I was surprised at how good it was. Despite its flaws I think it's better than VII. Eat that, Eight Winged Angel!

PS YouTube is so great. Watching an FFX-2 walkthrough as I write this so I don't have to actually play it. It's like a surreal alternate-reality FFX, or like a bunch of random junk that should have just been optional material after the end of FFX. "How much can we undermine the mood of the visuals from the first game with wildly inappropriate music? Funk, anyone?" And this is coming from someone who doesn't mind J-pop, but as a soundtrack to a slog up a barren rocky mountainside it's just off. And, still the faux airship.

The Hurt Locker / Gunner Palace

Most Iraq war movies focus on how dishonest the push to war was, or how hopeless the fight is. Hurt Locker assumes both, then dismisses them through a protagonist addicted to war and its adrenaline-inducing chaos. The movie is hard to watch if you actually consider the cost of supporting people like him, with its minimal ROI, and as displayed in embedded documentary Gunner Palace, about a squad living out of one of Uday Hussein's palaces just after the "victory" in the war in Iraq, around 2003. But Hurt Locker is easy to get pulled into, if you've ever enjoyed an episode of GI Joe.

The main character is a bomb, or IED, defuser. He's old school, doing such gallant acts as throwing off his communication devices and forgoing use of the bomb robot; if you can imagine an action hero star who prefers analog life (see Die Hard) you'll get my drift. So this flawed hero ignores his family, rides his men, and never gets hurt. Nearly everyone else does. How is he such a superman?

We never really find out. He's Daniel Craig style tormented, ripped--diesel, and not afraid to fight. I guess he's the ideal soldier. So he saves a few lives, places too much emphasis on his relationship with a young local boy, to compensate for failing with his family at home, I guess, and the rest of the characters falter and pray for home. He's not cruel, as one of the higher ranking officers in the film is, preferring to let an insurgent die than receive medical care. He's just addicted to war.

So it goes. Hurt Locker dares you to dream of a world where war is sport, and just as meaningless. Go team USA!

Gunner Palace, on the other hand, is more comfortable dwelling in the silent moments, after the enthusiasm wears off, and soldiers are left with only their weak explanations and vivid memories.

The only hint of Locker's addiction to war found in the doc Gunner Palace is when a young soldier exclaims his joy for being in Iraq. From a small town, natch, the young man says that at his age, about 19, he can say he's been in war, with combat experience. How many people can say that? he asks. The expression of enthusiasm on his face proves that the need still exists to prove your manhood or see the world through war. I wonder whether any alternatives can capture the imagination in such a romantic way. That said, there's nothing too romantic about all the raps--literally, mostly African-American soldiers spitting rhymes next to their Humvees, while beat-keepers smack their hands on the hood--that Gunner Palace prominently features. I liked those.

Zombieland 2009

Because it opens tomorrow and I saw a sneakpeek last week I'll clue you in.
I'm not much for zombie movies. They usually have more plot holes than Swiss cheese has plot, but I went for free and I liked what I saw I'm not even going to mention spoiler alert here. Everyone survives, almost.
I think everyone gives decent performances and has some good comedic timing.
It worth a look see. More like an essay than a narrative, which lends to it's almost Michael Cera charm.

Really though I just wrote this to try writing from my phone as referrenced by this automatic signature.…

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Jon & Carly, or was it Carly & Jon @ SubT 08/26/09

So I was among the intimates invited to bear witness to an awesome display of indie rock duo prowess.
These two cats can play any intimate setting I host anytime. They shamelessly self-promoted how hard they rocked by referencing the very sweat they left on stage. Carly rocks some heart achingly good lyrics while Jon plays some sweet (if not sweat inducing) acoustic.
By far the most fun I had was hearing the direct influence of Xyzr_kx on some pro-quality iPod action. You can tell it's pro because of the case, to paraphrase Jon from Jon & Carly (or Carly & Jon.... depends on who brought more people).
The beats that came out really tie their style together, well... not to say I didn't enjoy the acoustic + bass duo in their own rite. What happens though when it goes electric + acoustic/standup bass? I'm curious. I want to see that. I'd pay double to see that up in the house—even my own house. Sure why not.
They're not moody, but they play with feeling; they're artistic without being overly self-indulgent. Frankly I wonder if hipsters get confused about whether they should go or not, though in my humblest of opinion, you should at least try'm out to say, "Yeah, I tried 'em, 'n' they're not too shabby. They play some tracks and we have a drink and it's great night out. They're super accessible for being pretty good. We chatted. Pretty sweet."

Okami (PS2, 2006)

[next-morning edit: other people nailed it much better than i did.]

I've been playing this on and off ever since I finally put down DQ8, really, and just managed to get up my need-for-weekend-accomplishment drive up enough to see it through to the bitter end. Just under 40 hours of playtime logged, though it was actually probably 80% of that due to my occasionally walking away to do other stuff (since the game was so compelling I couldn't be bothered to play it for months at a time).

It must be my age showing, but I really didn't get into this game. It was long and easy and too cutesy, with a lot of the gameplay taken up by drudgery like wandering around a massive world map and sitting through cutscenes that 1) have some random irritating Peanuts-style "wa wa wa" going on instead of actual voice acting, and 2) you can't hit X through to speed up. Then I hop on reviews and boards and all these kids are telling the world it's the best game of the year, the best game on the PS2, this and that. Clover Studio, the developers, certainly adhered to the "more is more" school in terms of plot, sidequests, items, and which I find myself revolting against as I get older. Maybe it's also that I had just logged some outrageous hours doing sidequests in a game that felt much more familiar to me and

No, no, there are definitely things about this game that even though I'm pushing 30 and clearly impatient, are just not great game design. To wit:
- required random battles. Like, you're in a dungeon, and they've established that you can see the enemies as kind of ambulatory floor rugs of different colors that chase you if you get near them. And that's fine, I figure I'll just speed up and get around them and I won't have to fight anyone, and what's the point of fighting anyway because the only way to gain points toward upgrading health and brush capacity is by doing stuff like feeding animals and engaging in horticulture. All you gain from fighting is money and, if you're good at fighting, a self-esteem boost based on how fast you were at killing or how much damage you inflicted, the award for which is more money. (More on that point in a second.) Since the bosses are so easy you can just walk all over them with the right techniques, I'd prefer to not bother fighting and just enjoy solving the puzzles (some of which are very good) and take a SotC-like approach to beating bosses, treating them as puzzles as well. Given this setup, random encounters are nothing but wastes of time. But STILL, in dungeons, you walk through the very linear path from point A to point B, and out of nowhere the fight music starts and some punks ambush you. And they're not even hard and you get like 5000 yen to add to the 200000 yen you already have because you don't need to spend it on anything to progress in the game. It's ridiculous. Either randomize the encounters, or don't.
- Another thing about time and damage evaluation after every battle. I know I'm a terrible action gamer, but do I really need to be reminded of that every single time I fight something by having you show me some pitiful saplings instead of the full-grown or bursting-with-red-life-energy tree I'd have gotten if I was any good? I know most gamers like their achievements and their stats, but in all seriousness, it sucks to have all the other characters thank me profusely for defeating the bad guy, and tell me I'm their hero the SUN GOD AMATERASU who did what NO MERE MORTAL could do, and then a second later have the game tell me that actually, this particular sun god kinda blew chunks and gets no bonus yen. Adding insult to injury, the "you win the fight" music tag is exactly the same whether you do really well or terribly, so it takes on a sarcastic/insulting tone in the contrast between this triumphant sound and your weak, crumbling excuse for plant life.
- ending straight out of Earthbound. I done played that everyone-you-met-during-the-quest-joins-in-prayer-to-give-you-the-strength-to-beat-the-final-boss thing in '94! (though this game being about Celestial Beings and such, it might be more applicable...but really, there's no churches or prayer before they rip off Earthbound for the ending, just a bunch of cartoony cavorting.)
- Japanese mythology and classic presentation vs. juvenile humor and poor taste. I was just not able to go back and forth from based-on-actual ancient legends of gods and demons to pipsqueak sidekicks mouthing off like a prepubescent and slobbering over every moderately attractive female. In retrospect, I should have known what I was in for when Issun your "clever" miniature companion started blatantly ogling the woodland sprite goddess Sakuya, and when later female characters' watermelon-breasts get a smash zoom and the same sound effect as when the Eagle Man said "I've got something for youuuu" and laid his egg, traumatizing those poor women.

By the endgame, I was consulting the walkthrough willy-nilly and using bombs from the inventory everywhere I could rather than using any brush techniques. I found myself reduced to that "let's just get this over with" mentality that is the nadir of the solo gaming experience. (I will say that getting unapologetically schooled by someone half your age sucks a lot more, but that only applies in a multiplayer environment.) My need to see how it all ended had less to do with being particularly enthralled with the story and more to do with justifying the investment I had already made getting to that point, essentially throwing good time after bad. But it's over and I haven't learned anything, except that if I was 37 hours into a game and had to re-fight 5 bosses, some of them for the THIRD TIME, I'd do it just to see what random plot "twist" they can shoehorn onto mysterious reappearing characters to justify their periodic intrusion on the storyline. (a. he's...YOUR FATHER b. he's...THE VILLAIN c. he's...THE SAVIOR)

To gank The Hudsucker Proxy, "It's for kids!" -- specifically, 12-year-old boys. Which is cool, I was a 12-year-old boy once, and I blew innumerable hours on games I thought were awesome and inspiring at the time, but if I played them now I'm sure I'd find them corny and cliched and not funny. By comparison, DQ8 was nothing but cliches, but the production value was a whole other level and just that was enough to make me love it. Me and this game just met too late.

Despite all of the above, as I write this I'm thinking back over the months it took me to finish it and remembering puzzles, dungeons, and whole passages of the game that I found very enjoyable. I think there were at least two too many fake-out "final" bosses - where you're all geared up for the end and you think you did it, but then suddenly it's not over and the game contrives a way for you to go to some new area to fight the even bigger REAL boss - and I didn't care enough where the story was going to slog through more bad cutscenes and crappy random battles.

But yeah, Okami is the hula hoop of the PS2. I believe I have written myself out of my insomnia and will now publish these thoughts in their current unfinished, rambling, in-jokey, sleep-deprived state. Artsy.

GPS knows better - Mio Digiwalker C230

My brother and his wife gave me the Mio C230 Digiwalker a couple years ago as a present. I left it in the box, thinking I would sell it.

"I don't need that," I thought to myself. "I know this city."

However, I whipped it out recently. I thought it would be fun and perhaps helpful, especially with my girlfriend in the car to navigate while I drive.

Boy was I right. The small, rectangular box, less than an inch thick, is fairly simple. It has only two buttons, the standby button and an On/Off switch we never use. It took Britt a few times out and about to get the hang of it, with touch-screen typing and menu options and a couple of different views, one called "cockpit" and the other more of a map overview, I believe.

The gadget has gotten us into, and out of trouble. One memorable moment came as I drove in daytime out toward Britt's school about a month ago. Britt was fumbling with the thing, and I heard all kinds of noises coming out of it. She was sounding frustrated, but I was driving through the busy streets of the Richmond and couldn't help her much.

This thing is broken, Britt said as I drove on. I more or less knew the route, but still enjoy hearing the directions the Mio gives. Britt usually enjoys playing with it as well. But the "view" was messed up, Britt said. Usually in the cockpit view, the land is black, with a red line showing our projected route and a blue line for the streets, or something like that. Now, though, the land was beige, with black lines on screen.

Pretty soon we figured out the problem. It was the first time we had used the device during daytime, when it switches to a brighter mode. Tee-hee.

We haven't got a good nickname for the Mio but tried out Magellan and Sir Francis Drake. It's usually accurate with directions, though sometimes it tells me to turn where turns aren't allowed. It also can lead me to some troubled neighborhoods. Recently, we used it to get from the Dogpatch area of San Francisco, an up and coming spot near the new ballpark, to Keith's house in the Mission. Mio guided us right up and over the dodgy part of Potrero Hill, the projects where OJ Simpson grew up. There were some characters out on that Friday night, but we weren't hassled. Could I have sued its makers if I were?

The voice is an older female, and mangles some pronunciation, especially Spanish street names. "Arguello" sounds more like arugula. "Gough" sounds like nguoi. It cries "route recalculation," a mouthful, every time I get off track. That happens often. Britt says I'm just trying to piss off the machine. Maybe.

Despite the Mio's simplistic worldview, and constant nagging, it takes me places I would never otherwise go. For this objective, technological naivete, I enjoy my Mio.

old country buffet in joliet

the staff of OCB has this to look forward to when they exit the establishment. wicked.



OCB was OCB, except this was special for the realization of a long-time dream of ian's: the creation of fried ice cream from a taco shell with softserve and brown sugar. and hot fudge.



the above slide goes into deep detail in case further exploration of this unique treat is required. here's a step-by-step howto for the project:
1. go to ocb
2. get a taco shell, soft serve, brown sugar, and hot fudge
3. combine as shown
4. ???
5. profit...emotionally.

the other most notable thing about the trip was that the orange chicken and chicken strips looked more like popcorn chicken variants or even little balls of breading and flavor. we conjectured that OCB had no chicken at that time. I'm the type to go scrounging the bottom of the Popeye's box for crispy goodness, so i didn't mind.

Mental... or M backwards e/backwards ntal

Ummmm.
I read a preview of this show that said it was bad.
It was pretty bad.
I worry though that by posting this bad review of a bad TV show might cause people to fall into the trap of following that trail that says, "No it's bad don't go this way." But then the innocent ends up thinking she can turn back at any moment. No. Not the case.
It raises questions like: Who are the inmates and who are the asylum keepers?
Who could have guessed that the main House-like new sheriff/doctor in town could have a deep seeded secret he's keeping from his colleagues?
Of course, why not drop a cancer plot point in because it's hospital and cancer changes lives? Was that a spoiler? No.
It was indicative of explaining everything away in the first episode so that we can get down to the nitty gritty of writing crazy people in normal situations and normal people in crazy situations and put the sexual tension over that which makes great TV.
Wrong.
As the kids say, "As the kids say, 'fail.'"
I like this post:
Viewing a TV death in 4 acts
And while we're at it...
In defense of distraction
Both come reposted from Arts & Letters Daily. They were far more valuable than the TV skull atrocity I watched. Just made that phrase up. I'll leave it to the pundits to decide what it means.

Savage Republic

this band is pretty good, mm-kay (dig the giant HTML page, v old school, black background). all this talk of throbbing gristle makes me want to throw them in the mix. I have the Jamahiriya album, which is "acid surf" at its finest according to the lone Amazon review. The stuff runs on and drones, almost, with mucho reverb and tribal chanting, but it's actually good, too. Kind of an earthy industrial feel. Evidently they've had reunion tours. Per Wikipedia, Jamahirya was Omar Kaddafi's word for his "state of the masses" in Libya. well, whatever.

Star Trek, you know, the new one (2009)

Yes, a bit early for a Star Trek review, but we saw a preview last night. Going in I did not realize that this was going to be a reboot of The Original Series, and right up till the end, I thought that they were going to clear up the discrepancies with the original series with some time traveling sleight of hand. I suppose they managed to explain the reboot in a fairly creative way; it's pretty "meta" for a film to actually address the fact that it's rewriting the story of its source material. I won't say any more for the risk of excessive spoilage.

One early highlight was the inclusion of an Indian guy in Starfleet. Have you ever noticed that there are no South Asians or Chinese people in Starfleet, despite those groups making up a large portion of the world's population? Beyond that, the beginning of the film is dominated by action sequences, and after a brief lull, the action takes hold again right up until the end. This was the biggest disappointment of the film for me, the oddness of watching a Star Trek film that had way more action than many Star Wars movies. There was nothing wrong with the action in itself, it's well directed and the special effects are good. Yes there are tons of holes in the physics the screen writers deployed, read Ebert's review for a lot more on that. But the real problem is that all the action doesn't leave a lot of room for the moral dilemmas and clash of ideologies that always animated the best conflicts in Star Trek. Sometimes this more cerebral content ends up as admittedly little more than window dressing, but it still contributes to the unique flavor of the Star Trek universe, just like mystic mumbo-jumbo is essential to Star Wars.

You'd be right to point out I shouldn't be surprised that this repackaging of Star Trek aims in a more marketable direction that's amenable to an action filled, high gloss finish. The good news is that it does a pretty good job of transporting familiar characters into a different kind of setting. For me, the performance that was key in evoking that classic TOS feel was Karl Urban as Bones. Part of the fun is seeing the characters as they were as younger people, and hilariously young Bones is just as crabby and crotchety as is his older self. Most other performances are adequate to good. Spock is probably the most important role, and he's quite a bit different than in TOS, but that tension is definitely part of what's driving the story. Ultimately Zachary Quinto gives an interesting performance in a movie that doesn't permit too much subtlety. On the other hand, Simon Pegg is overly jokey as Scotty, a character whose comic appeal was based more on a mild stuffiness than buffoonery. And his accent here is entirely too authentic; that's what you get for hiring a British guy.

The treatment of Uhura's character shows both how far our culture has come in adopting the ideals of feminism since the time of TOS in that she is a much more three dimensional, assertive character here, as opposed to being little more than an extra for most of the series; and how incomplete the realization of feminist ideals has been, because in many ways Uhura remains a sex object, though certainly a less passive one.

So, a good Summer movie. Terminator still bears my hopes for a totally awesome action blockbuster, but this could be the beginning of an interesting series.

Anything Else (2003) / The Front (1976) / Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)

In response to Ian's heartfelt search for a different comedy, I propose Woody Allen films. I've seen three lately, The Front, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Anything Else. To be honest, The Front wasn't an Allen film, because he starred in but didn't direct.

Christina Ricci, co-star in Anything Else, gets me going in that good way. To quote Jason Biggs, Ricci's boyfriend in the film, or maybe it was Biggs' then-girlfriend who said it, she's got an offbeat sexual energy. But her whole aura is offset in this movie pretty quickly by her outright craziness, like a nightmare in Brooklyn kind of torture-your-boyfriend nutiness. She tries to set Biggs's character up with different women, depriving him of sex while encouraging him to sleep around, and lets her mom move into the living room of their apartment. The film's set in Queens or thereabouts, with a bunch of brown stone houses, I think.

Not to be outdone, the crazy girlfriend in Vicky Xtina (Penelope Cruz) wields a gun and rummages through other peoples' luggage. She got the Best Supporting Actress award but doesn't appear in the film until about halfway through. We were misled, hoping for another Volver (my gf is a huge P. and Suri Cruz fan. We own Vanilla Sky). Javier Bardem rules in this film, making out with pretty much everyone worth kissing in the thing, yet still retaining some integrity as an artist.

So what's with Allen and crazy women? Who knows.

No watch checks in either of those films, although I did watch Anything Else on two consecutive nights, about half each time. The dialogue is good, with Biggs doing his best Woody Allen. Allen himself co-stars as a paranoid best buddy/mentor. It made me miss having a crazy mentor like I did at my last job.

So these are different comedies, not gross-out, wittier, perhaps snootier, than the Apatowian stuff. Anything Else gets a little slow or tries a little too hard, with split screens at one point showing the zany action in three different situations at once. It's definitely old style.

The Front, meanwhile, tried way too hard. It was based on the Hollywood blacklist, but set in New York, where some TV was filmed/aired live back in the 50s, evidently. The actors were real blacklisted types, except Allen I guess. I feel like everyone took it a little too seriously to be funny. There is a great Allen moment at the end though, where he sticks it to his WASP-y persecutors. He avoids answering their questions, without taking the 5th, and mumbles his way into an indictment of the communist witchhunt. Take that G-men!

I Love You, Man (2009)

You know, I think I've reached critical mass with this group of actors, the Apatow people that is. It seems like they are in every comedy coming out these days. Because not only do they have their stuff, but they also work with people from The State. And if it's not them, then it's Will Ferrell and his group, also known as the Frat Pack. And it's getting to the point that they all seems the same. It's sorta like eating a lot of leftovers: sure it was good when you first had it and it was fresh, but then you have it later in the week, and then again, and eventually you just get satiated and want something new. Well I want something new in the comedic movies I see. The sad part is I don't even think the writer or director (John Hamburg) of this movie is related to those groups, but just having these people cast makes it seem so.

This movie is about a realty agent, Peter (Paul Rudd), who has no guy friends because he has always focused on relationships with women. So now he needs to find a best man for his wedding to Zooey (Rashida Jones). After a series of bad bromance meet and greets, Peter just about gives up. Enter Sydney (Jason Segel) who meets Peter at one of his open houses. They begin to hang out and so begins the story about their friendship. Peter and Sydney's friendship has an Odd Couple dynamic too it, with Peter being the straight man. But Peter isn't consistent as the straight man, so it's not really that funny compared to classic combos like Martin and Lewis, Lemmon and Matthau, or even Randall and Klugman.

I'm not gonna lie though, the movie made me laugh. The best part, for me, being a speech made by Sydney at the wedding shower. It was the only Part I remember laughing out loud at. Also humorous was Andy Samberg's take on being a gay guy. He's not the stereotypical flaming homosexual, and it's a refreshing take on the average gay male without being preachy in the "gay people are no different than everyone else" sorta way. Sure the movie is evenly sprinkled with funny observational humor, with a minor dabbing of gross out humor, but it's not really strong throughout. Overall, it's not as funny as I wanted it to be. I didn't look at my watch once, but that's not a real indication of the disappointment I had watching. And sure Rashida Jones and Jaime Pressly are pretty, but they weren't in any gratuitous bikini or naked scenes, actually no woman was now that I think about it. And that's a minus too. I recommend rental or torrent for this one.

I guess what I really need is to watch a completely different comedy. Frat Pack, Apatow, Broken Lizard, The State, Farrelly Brothers... I grow tired of them all. I think I'm also satiated by my guilty pleasure comedies, things by the Wayans Brothers; there's only such of Terry Crews one can take. I always said it would be a cold day in hell before I watched anything whose title is preceded by the phrase "Tyler Perry's..." or the general format of "_______ Movie", but I just may have to to break up the monotony of current comedic movies. Actually, that's probably going too far.

Throbbing Gristle: bullet list of annoyances and reliefs, undistinguished

- just the soundtrack? no songs? wait, one set is the soundtrack and the other set is the songs, with an opener? but each set is the same price so concertgoers including yours truly think you mean you're doing both sets at both shows? cue "price is right" fail here.

- OTOH, as chris was quick to point out, the soundtrack and film were great. all y'all in the other cities who don't get to see it are SUCKAZ. also, you really don't get to see such an enthusiastic reception for something so out...or see something so out at all...much anymore.

- throbbing gristle, seeing as they make completely maladroit music, manage to attract completely maladroit people with no concept of concert etiquette to their shows. To wit:
1) the guy in front of us who was old enough to be my dad making sad hand puppets and rabbit ears at the heads of people he didn't know. a sad, sad, sad, sad, sad attempt at establishing some social bond? (maybe the bond of some crustpunk's fist with his face)
2) a different guy in front of us who was old enough to be my dad who TOOK PICTURES EVERY THREE SECONDS DURING A 54-MINUTE FILM. wtf. and also, did not turn off EITHER the camera's redeye light OR its FAKE shutter sound, so EVERY THREE SECONDS we all got to see a red light mix with the projection and then a "ch-click" from a tinny stupid digital camera POS. WTF!!!
3) tall dudes barging into the miniscule open space i left in front of me so i wouldn't have someone's ass in my face and trying to look around them. well, this happens at every show, not just throbbing gristle. that's why i should wear boosters from here on out.

- despite what you may infer about my opinions of old people after the previous entry, i don't have anything against old people as a group. i WILL stoop to any level to denigrate idiots who have no concern for the quality of the concert experience of the people around them. especially older people who should know better, instead of proving that 1) the kids have a better grasp on social mores than the old-timers, and 2) old people are clueless about technology.

- there were probably much more flagrant violations of social norms at the 10p show. i wouldn't know because i turned in early.

- hoping to see some kind of old-reunion-band version of this, but alas, no luck:

Fast & Furious (2009)

Not to be confused with The Fast and the Furious, Fast & Furious is the sequel that many fans, and by that I mean an unfathomable US$70 million+ opening weekend worth fan base, waited nearly 10 years for. It brings back the entire original cast: Vin "we almost got rid of his movie career" Diesel, Paul "Keanu Lite" Walker, the sexy (and probably very high maintenance) Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez. I didn't say anything about Michelle Rodriguez because she may try to find and kill me in her drunken rage.

Back to the review, the in the time line of this fast and furious universe, this movie takes place after 2 Fast 2 Furious and before The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. So Brian (Paul Walker) is still a cop, Dom (Vin Diesel) is still on the lam, and the girls are alive somewhere doing something or other. This movie changes that, thus creating the driving force of the film. That pun was not intended, I just noticed it. The story goes that Brian and Dom, being on opposite sides of the law, now kinda team up for a common goal, sorta.

The opening is probably the best part of the movie as far as creative car scenes go. The race sequence later on in the film seemed too video game like, but I did get a laugh out of what happened when the GPS directions weren't adhered to. Any owner of a GPS unit who often misses turns would know what I'm talking about. And those types of scenes, along with the ricers and muscle cars included in them, are the main reason to watch the film. That and some skankily dressed girls. Though I did get pleasure from the fact that Koreans played whiney two-bit punks since they obviously aren't cut out to be masterminds.

If you're looking for a deep plot, go elsewhere. If you want brilliant acting, go elsewhere. If you want a touching love story, go elsewhere. If you want mindless entertainment and lose a few brain cells, here you go. I checked my watch once, which is pretty good, but maybe that's because I was too brain dead to want to be aware of time. I'd much rather recommend you attend a evening at Hot Import Nights (Or at least a Friday night at the White Caste at 4 Corners in Downers Grove) instead of watching this movie because then you'd get to see the cars and skanky ho's up close. It's not a good movie. And it didn't have memorable quotes like the original, for example:

Dom: You nevah had me.

or

Brian: Hey man, he was in my face
Dom: I'm in your face.

But hey, what do I know about movies that deserve sequels? Diesel has already signed on for Fa5t 'n' Furiou5.

Prog Metal Roundup

Metal gets real complicated. It's probably because drama is an essential quality of metal that so many bands tend to draw their songs out to epic lengths and even link them together with often hilariously fantastical story lines.

Mastodon's new album Crack the Skye has long songs and a story line, though I wouldn't necessarily say it's hilarious. This album is the major label debut of a band that has done really well on independent labels, and it's dead serious. I'm just not entirely sure what it's so serious about. Astral projection is definitely in there, and Rasputin. Maybe the bizarre story line is just a justification for the totally awesome album art depicting spirit warriors and ghost bears you can see above. And that's just fine with me.

Mastodon can definitely play them some metal. Their level of musicianship seems to be very high, but they are still comfortable laying down some thick ass power chords when it's called for. They sound better screaming than singing, but they're sufficiently passionate to pull off the more melodic bits. I think the best attribute of Crack the Skye is that although long, the songs don't stray too far into the outer limits. There's one song that has a weird psych bridge, but they don't get nuts and put weird psych bridges into every song. They do it once, and satisfied with a mind melting interlude well crafted, they call it a day and flesh the other songs out with other little touches.

This was probably the key to keeping this album down to a relatively trim fifty minutes. There's no fat present, no forgettable acoustic ditties that fall between the big rocking tracks, just keepers. At the same time, the tracks all sound layered and huge (this album was produced by the guy who did all the Pearl Jam album from Vs to when they got completely forgettable) with really tasty metal guitar tones. Well done.



Hammers of Misfortune are a very different band, and a lot harder to pigeonhole than Mastodon. Mastodon are rockers at heart, but the Hammers are quite a bit more ambitious while working with significantly less resources. Their new(ish) double album Fields/Church of Broken Glass is a two-in-one concept album, two different albums recorded and released at one time, mostly because of constraints on recording budget, or so I gather. Fields is apparently some kind of historical meditation on conflict between aristocracy and peasantry, while Church seems to be about post-industrial decay.

The Hammers have a very different sound than Mastodon. Though I'm not a metal expert, it's sounds somewhere between power metal (no distortion pedals allowed, just over-driven amps) and seventies prog rock ala Yes. When everything is working right, it sounds pretty good, but I can't help but feel that it would have benefited from a better recording. Given that the sound is pretty live (not a lot of overdubs) the individual instruments aren't always captured clearly enough to lend the songs the necessary weight, or to put it another way, rocking-ness.

Another issue is the singing. The mastermind and songwriter of Hammers doesn't do the singing, he farms it out to dude(ette)s who have fairly impressive chops. But the result sounds pretty theatrical, which is not something that I'm very used to in metal. People love Ozzy so much because he sang about Iron Man like some dude he knew. He didn't let the fact that he was singing about a science fiction hero who saved the human race in the future throw him off his game or block up his passion, he may as well have been singing about an alcoholic panhandler that he passed on the street every day. You definitely don't get that kind of personal commitment to the subject matter on these records, the singing is a little more in the realm of show tunes. Everything is telegraphed and really clearly enunciated. But there are plenty of good tunes and interesting images here if it sounds like your kind of thing.

Burt's Place in Morton Grove

I went here last night with some Collective kids because of Anthony Bourdain:


A few things Bourdain didn't go over (but I knew in advance thanks to Yelp):
- Burt and Sharon run a TIGHT ship. As in, if you don't call ahead and reserve both your time AND your order, they will get very flustered and you stand a good chance of not only being turned away, but also getting scolded.
- Following on from the previous point, be sure to show up on time.
- No serving yourself this pizza. Sharon puts it down at ANOTHER table and serves you slices herself. Want another one? You're gonna wait.

It was a rainy and blustery trip out to the MG whereupon I parked myself in front of this:



That crumbling gazebo just right of the restaurant proper is indescribable. Approaching Saw territory. And if you thought Burt's Place looked intimidating from the outside...



Okay so this doesn't look so elitist-club-ariffic from the picture, but what if I told you you were looking at fully 1/2 of the dining space in the establishment?

Bourdain didn't just call out Burt and Sharon for the shoot either; they pretty much do this coming-out-and-shooting-the-breeze thing with every customer in the place, often unpredictably. And since they demand that you call ahead, they know the first name of at least one person at every table, and don't hesitate to use that name every time they come back to you. They also don't hesitate to razz you for such transgressions as having party members show up late ("this pizza is really good when it's warm") or changing party size ("maybe next time you'll learn how to count").

I've enumerated all the amusing/bemusing aspects of the experience so far. The pizza, nevertheless, is super terrific - moments-out-of-the-oven fresh, not drowning in cheese (and thus made to be enjoyed by the lactose-intolerant), dough from heaven. If you ever wanted to be in an episode of Seinfeld (you know which one I'm talking about) right here in Chicago, you know where to go.

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.

Steve Winwood - "Higher Love" (1986)

Jon just gave me an LP, Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life. It's great. This music triggers a lot of memories for me, mostly the neighbor's pool on summer nights, staying in hotels on vacation, and watching music videos on cable in someone's basement. This is the kind of music that instantly strikes you as sounding "eighties." It was made in 1986, which i believe was the most "eighties" year of the eighties. In support of this thesis, i have compiled a truncated list of movies and records that came out in 1986:

Movies - Blue Velvet, Crocodile Dundee, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Short Circuit, Top Gun

Music - Big Black's Atomizer, a terrible Cheap Trick album The Doctor, Bad Brains's I Against I, Master of Puppets, Reign in Blood, Slippery When Wet, Peter Gabriel's So, Graceland, PIL's Album

The most striking thing about this album is how great it sounds. Take the first song, which you will surely recognize, "Higher Love." This makes me wistful for the days of analogue recording. It starts off with a pretty spare drum intro (and in full 80s style features live and programmed drums as well as extra percussion) that establishes the wonderfully spacious sound of the recording. It's really like entering an aurally defined open, reverberant room... it's hard to explain why this is so cool, but much like My Bloody Valentine, there is a physical aspect to the sound that draws you into it in a way that's altogether different from the appeal of rhythms and words.

Once the song gets going there are plenty of layers of instrumentation, and I should add that the bass sounds particularly amazing. Great bass is definitely one of the areas in which vinyl cannot be beaten. The lyrics are pretty astounding, embracing fully first world privilege in a way that now seems so emblematic of the 80s. On the one hand, there are the obligatory reference to the state of things: "Things look so bad everywhere/In this whole world, what is fair?" Just about the level of awareness of the global situation evinced in "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

But what's the real vibe of this song? There's a totally triumphant feeling here, that we've achieved such a marvel of material comforts that all that remains is direct and unmediated communion with God Itself. You know, a Higher Love. Morning in America. Maybe the dude from the video will take that super hot girl to some unspecified exotic local and help out some locals, gaining a deep spiritual understanding in the process, and perhaps birthing world music as well. If Peter Gabriel hadn't done it, it just might have been Steve Winwood.

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (2004)

This is an RPG for the PS2. I got it for $6.67 at Gamestop (a $10 game but part of a "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" deal and the other two games were also $10...so $20/3). Looking at the play clock as I wrap up the alternate ending, I see upwards of 110 hours. Even allowing for about 10 hours of occasions where I left the system on if I had to walk away in the middle of a dungeon and couldn't save, I'm still faced with the fact that I spent 100 hours playing this game.

There are two ways to process that number:

1) OMGWTFBBQ I am a nerd. I grew up on NES and SNES RPGs (Final Fantasy/Dragon Warrior and countless derivatives thereof), but the highest play clock I can remember was Final Fantasy VI (or III as it was called at the time), which was somewhere near 50 and was only not 35-40 because I had to grind at the end to get through the final boss Kefka, that cackling punk. I remember that leveling up process as mind-numbingly boring, though I didn't have years of mind-numbing "real" work in an office as a frame of reference then like I do now.

Still, that's just half the amount of time I put into Dragon Quest VIII. I must be regressing into my childhood, right? Who has that kind of time to play video games? Aren't they for kids?

2) Using a metric, say, dollar per hour of entertainment, and comparing to another form of leisure activity. $6.67/100 = $.07/hour of entertainment. By contrast, $10 for a 2-hour night at the movies is $5/hour of entertainment. That's over 70 times as expensive.

Undoubtedly there are also negative repercussions to consider in terms of sheer timesuck and social negligence when I choose to disappear into the world of a videogame. The purely financial/"quant" argument doesn't take into account the spread of those 100 hours, which were concentrated entirely in the space of a month rather than dispersed over a much longer period, as watching 50 movies would be. And I can't deny that by the end I had turned into an addict, flipping on the PS2 almost before I had even got my jacket off at the end of the day, staying up odd hours to find out where the story went next or scouring FAQs and forums filled with unpunctuated tween jibber-jabber about where this or that extremely rare item was.

But any amount of solipsism, psychoanalyzing, or guilt I feel about my time investment won't take away from how awesome this game is. The story is stock Dragon Quest, swords-and-sorcery-and-fair-maidens fantasy stuff, and if you've never been a fan of the old-school JRPG game engine, it strictly adheres to the formula - no Active Time Battle or anything like that to try and force some time-critical "excitement" into battles. (Some of the aforementioned 10 extra play-clock hours where I walked away were in the middle of a battle, and it was amusing to come back and see the enemies just as I left them, still breathing heavily and doing their little dances waiting for me to attack.) But I think originality is overrated, and it's all in the presentation, as they say, and holy crap the presentation!



It's like taking the reins of your favorite 2D animated movie, but in 3D. I think that's the most succinct way to put it - playing a movie. The character/map/dungeon designs are classic: where many games strain so hard to ape reality in their graphics that they take on a creepy quality and magnify the distance between the game and real life, DQ8 embraces its cartoon fantasy roots. The soundtrack was recorded by a REAL symphonic orchestra and the voice acting is across-the-board TREMENDOUS good. As I'm typing this a playthrough of Final Fantasy X is on in the background via YouTube, and it's insane how much bad voice acting destroys my enthusiasm and exposes all the cliches and flaws behind the game right away - by which I really mean, I will never finish Metal Gear Solid 3 because David Hayter's growling as Solid Snake is atrocious. Okay, I might finish it, but I'll have my hands to my ears all the way.

(From what I gather DQ purists are not fans of much of what I mentioned above. The original Japanese version of DQ8 has (of course) Japanese voices, but also MIDI music, and I actually read some comment (I know, first mistake) saying that dudeman preferred the MIDI to the symphonic because the mix was "clearer." Yeah, clearer, and lifeless. Many of the NPCs in towns will say different things to you depending on whether it's day or night, but the night music was MIDI and I was so turned off by it that I didn't bother talking to people at night unless I had to.)

The depth of the characters is astounding, and I envision hundreds of man-hours being put into the script. You can talk to your three companions at any moment on the map, and depending on where you are and what you're doing, they almost always have something different to say, and it's very often right along the lines of what you're thinking. The game really comes alive and gives you the feeling of an actual adventure with companions and not fountains of exposition and motivation.

I haven't even begun to touch on the mini-games (a monster team and arena, a casino) and sidequests that are actually fun, and besides which were excuses to prolong the experience, but I'm running out of enthusiasm gas. I found a random clip that doesn't give much away and shows what the "everyday" experience of the game is like, so if this looks appealing, imagine what it would be like with REALLY GOOD characters and writing, and I will have successfully conveyed how great it is.