Arkham Asylum

For just about as long as there's been video games, there's been superhero video games. Some have been good, others have been pretty damn bad. Often times, especially back in the era of side-scrollers, the games sometimes seemed like rehashes of established games with sprites that happened to be superheroes to cash in on the popularity of the franchise. If you've played enough X-Men, Spiderman, Superman, Batman, etc., etc., games from back in the day, they probably sort of run together in your mind because a lot of them are all equally uninteresting beat 'em ups. Over time, more of an effort has been in giving superhero games the look and feel of the comics on which their based, but it hasn't always guaranteed their quality. I remember buying the tie-in game that coincided with the release of the first Spiderman movie, which just felt rushed and kind of uninspired. I've played a little bit of the X-Men Legends/Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series--which have the benefit of standing on their own and not having to be rushed out to match up with the release of a movie, or be tethered to the style and plotline of the movie--which are certainly fun, but games that I would describe as "good, not great."

Now has come Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game that I can confidently describe as great. In spite of the tremendous popularity of the Christopher Nolan movies, publisher Eidos and developer Rocksteady wisely decided not to use the style of the films as a crutch and decided to make a world all their own, in some ways more similar to the comics, but in other ways entirely dissimilar to anything. The amount of polish put into the same is incredible, and unlike the hastily thrown together beat 'em up reskins of old, the game absolutely smothers itself in Batman lore, and weaves a story that can be loved by casual and hardcore Batman fans alike. The game really does feel like it fits into the cannon of the Bat-verse, and was made by people who know and love the source material. All of the characters seem pretty much spot on to their comic book counterparts, aided by the fact that the voices of Batman, Joker (Mark Hamill!), and Harley Quinn from "Batman: The Animated Series" all reprise their roles here. The game's dialog is also pretty well written. I don't know if the script contains any great strokes of genius, but the essence of each character seems to have been captured well.

The game takes place a ways into the Bat-timeline. Its made clear that Batman has been doing what he's doing for a while, he's met and faced off against all the members of his rogue's gallery, and he's helped out by a wheelchair-bound Barbara Gordon, going by Oracle (the Joker paralyzes her in Alan Moore's graphic novel The Killing Joke from the late '80s). To this point, there hasn't been any sign of a Robin, although not ever Bat-Story in the era of Robins involves Robin anyway. The plot is pretty simple: Batman, for the umpteenth time, has apprehended the Joker and is delivering him back to Arkham. His transfers him over to Arkham's security, and they get him strapped into a Hannibal Lecter-esque board-on-wheels, but Batman decides to keep following them until the Joker is safely in his cell to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't. With the aid of his ever-faithful girlfriend Harley Quinn, the Joker replaces the Arkham guards with an army of thugs that were transferred from Blackgate Prison, sets the inmates loose, and kidnaps Arkham's warden. Hence, as Batman, your goal is to stop Joker and save the day. It all takes place over the course of one night and entirely within Arkham, but Rocksteady nevertheless does a commendable job making the game varied and expansive.

Batman is like the Da Vinci of vigilantism: he's a scientist and a detective, he's trained in ninjitsu and can stalk around in the shadows, and he can also just straight-up kick the crap out of people. Arkham's gameplay is reflective of this. At any point as you're exploring Arkham, you can tap L2 which puts you in "Detective Mode." Using Detective Mode, you can see enemies--including those behind through walls--highlighted in blue, with those armed with guns highlighted in red. It also highlights anything interactive in the environment in orange, and shows you vents that you can pry the covers off of to crawl through, or structurally weak walls that you can blow up. From time to time, the game will also have you search a room for clues that you then may get a fingerprint or DNA sample off of, and which you can then follow the trail of in Detective Mode. Usually, this is a pretty simple task, but I think these moments in the game more to make it a detective story, like a good Batman story, and not just a fighting game. The game gives you ample reason to be in Detective Mode pretty much constantly, although sometimes I switch it off just because the effect of it (it gives everything a Tron-esque digital look with a purple hue, and all the enemies show up as these neon X-Ray figures) gets kind of annoying, which is my only real complaint about it.

So Detective Mode, appropriately, covers the detective side of Batman. The other two aspects I mentioned are covered in your encounters with enemies which are divided into stealth sections and straight-up melees. The stealth sections will vaguely remind you of Metal Gear Solid gameplay, though the AI isn't as smart and its usually easier to escape if you get caught (that, and there's no exclamation points over people's heads). The stealth sections will generally pit you against a half-dozen or so armed guards--enough such that if you tried to just fight them head on you'd have no chance. Gunfire actually hurts a lot in this game. Usually, it'll be in a generously sized room lined with gargoyles that you can grapple to (you can grapple onto just about anything that will support you in the game by just hitting R1 as you're facing it) and perch on top of. From there, you have a few different options of how best to engage the enemies below you. You can throw batarangs to stun them and knock them down, drop down below them as they're facing away from you and silently KO them (by pressing triangle, if you're behind them and undetected), or, once you unlock the skill for it, by swooping them up as they walk below your perch (which looks particularly badass). However you want to do it, really the biggest key is to try and isolate guards from the rest of the group, which sometimes they'll do for you, but you can otherwise do by causing distractions. If you get caught, you usually have a split second to get back up to the top of the room and hop between a few different gargoyles to lose the guards before you get gunned down in a hail of bullets. When you're on the ground, you can do things like duck around corners and take out guards as they walk past, or catch guards in remotely detonated explosions (they never die though since, you know, you're Batman). Again, it has a lot of similarities to MGS, but its a bit more simplified and harder to muck up. A lot of what I just described can be done with one button, so long as its in the right context.

At other times, you find yourself fighting in closer quarters with random thugs armed with just their fists or the occasional bat, knife, or stun baton. Fighting them in hand-to-hand combat is done through an easy to use system whereby you hit one of the four face buttons while pointing towards an enemy to do one of the following: square just hits them, triangle will counter if they're about to attack (a little indicator will appear for this), X will have you tumble to try and get behind them, and circle will execute a cape stun move. So long as you keep stringing together these moves without getting hit, you'll accrue combo points, and once you get up to x8 (or x5 once you get an upgrade), you can execute special throw and knockdown moves. You can also tap L1 for a quick batarang stun. There are a ton of varied, fluid-looking animations for Batman's combat moves, and even though the button scheme is pretty simple, it ends up looking complex and exciting.

As you're playing through the main story, you can take time to look for special "Riddler challenges" as a sidequest. Doing so also gets you experience points, which you cash in to improve your combat movies, items, and armor. Basically, early on the game, The Riddler hacks into your communication system that you're using to speak to Oracle and heckles you about not being able to solve his riddles. In some rooms, when you enter them, you'll get a clue in the form of a riddle, and you'll have to find something that matches up with it in the room. Often times, these will unlock character bios, and are sort of a hat-tip to characters not involved in the main story. As an example, in one hallway you can find Catwoman's goggles in a display case. There are also a bunch of "Riddler trophies" to find hidden around Arkham. A few of them are genuinely difficult, although often times finding them is pretty rudimentary, and they'll just be behind a not too discreetly hidden vent cover or something. You can also find patient interview tapes to get more of a backstory on some of the villains, and find "chronicles of Arkham", supposedly written by the spirit of Amadeus Arkham, telling the history of his life and the island. Looking for these hidden items lets you appreciate the detail work put into the game, which is tremendous. They did a great job making Arkham exude a creepy, gothic style, and cut no corners working on every area. Floors will oft times be littered with papers, and you can zoom in on individual documents and individual photos, which will all move independently of one another if you disturb the file. And that's just random bits of what-have-you in the environment. The characters look tremendous as well. The Joker, especially of all, looks great, and his big, wide grin looks downright sinister.

Arkham Aslyum isn't a perfect game. Its a bit short and a bit easy (I played on Normal, not sure what Hard is like), but damn is it a lot of fun. I hope the same developer has plans for, or would be willing to discuss, a sequel. This game takes place entirely on one island. Seeing this kind of detail put into a game played out in Gotham City proper would be that much more amazing. I don't know if it'll happen, but I'm hoping it does now. Even if Arkham ends up being a singular entity though, on its own merits, its a great achievement.

9

9 (***)

Animation is expensive, and certainly a minute's worth of sophisticated CGI is going to cost more in money and manpower than the average minute from a live action movie. As such, its understandable why 9 is a scant 79 minutes long, a length roughly comparable to the beloved stop-motion animated movie A Nightmare Before Christmas. However, unlike Nightmare--produced by Tim Burton, as was 9--79 minutes simply isn't enough time for 9 to really effectively tell its story. Its a movie trying to be a big, sprawling, epic crammed into the package of a tiny, barely feature-film length movie. Granted it does tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end, but all of it feels rushed, developing at break-neck speed, not in an "I'm on the edge of my seat with excitement!" sort of way, but a "Holy crap, give me a second to stop and catch by breath!" sort of way. The world that director Shane Acker and the animation team have created is intriguing and darkly beautiful, but we barely get a chance to really walk through more than a tiny fraction of it. The movie isn't unenjoyable, but certainly left me thinking about what it could have been as much as what it actually is after its done.

The movie draws you in immediately with a great hook: In the opening shots we see a little human-shaped doll figure made of cloth being stitched up. The scene fades, and when it fades back in, we see the humanoid figure hanging by one arm to the top of some sort of a circular tube. Suddenly, it springs to life, jumps down, and studies its surroundings with its two big, metal, cylindrical eyes, lined with curved white flaps that rotate in and out--the way circular doors close on spaceships in sci-fi movies--to simulate a pupil expanding and contracting. On his back is a big black number: "9". Peering over the table the construct finds himself on, he sees a dead body sprawled out on the floor, various papers scattered all around him. We suppose its his creator, but who was he exactly? There's a circular shaped object adorned with strange symbols on the ground that 9 seems compelled to pick up. Carrying it within himself via the zipper that traverses down his front side, 9 makes his way to the window, and gets a view of the bombed out city that he finds himself in. He tries to call for help, but finds he's unable to speak.

Eventually, 9 makes his way out of the building and onto the ground, where he meets 2, another construct like him, although apparently with some vision problems, as he has one giant (relative to him) eyeglass lens pulled over his face. 2 seems to know a bit about how each of them was created. He rummages through a trash heap and finds a voice box suitable for 9, and after some quick tweaking, 9 is speaking in the voice of Elijah Wood. While marveling the craftsmanship of 9's design, seemingly an upgrade on his own, he's ensnared by the "The Beast", a big robotic monster which is built in the shape of, and acts like, a wolf or a big-ass dog. 9, however, is barely able to escape and finds himself in the company of a few more numbered companions. There's 5 (John C. Reilley), who had part of his "face" blown off back when the world was still in the process of being bombed to smithereens and has a big sewn-on patch and a missing eye, 8, the tank of the party if you will, who's big and slow-witted and at one point seems to get high off of a magnet, 6, who is seemingly crazy and draws the same strange images over and over again and posts them everywhere, and 1 (Christopher Plummer) the old, wise (or maybe not so wise?) leader. Later on, we meet 7, who, seemingly just because, is a "woman," represented by the fact that she's voiced by Jennifer Connolly and is made of a slightly different shade of leather. She also wears a bird skull as a helmet. Whatever. 9 wants to go out and save 2, however 1 strictly forbids it, telling 9 that basically you're as good as dead when The Beast gets you, and that those that are still alive are alive because they've remained in hiding. 9, apparently capable of making complex life decisions a couple of hours after springing to life, decides he's going after 2 anyway, and 5 decides to come with out of a sense of duty to 2, who saved him back in the day. The most intriguing characters (or are they one character?) come later as well, the 3s: a set of twins who endlessly catalog any objects they come across, which they do by flashing morse code-like messages between them by flickering the lights in their eyes. I'm not sure what it says that the characters I found the most compelling are the ones who never speak. I don't have anything against what any of the voice actors did with their roles, I just think that more often than not, their characters don't get a whole lot to say that's interesting.

Eventually, our heroes force a final showdown with The Beast, actually not that far into the movie, and later on there are final showdowns with other, still more fearsome, mechanical creatures. Some of these action sequences have some fun moments, and one of the villanous robots--a spider-like shape that has half of a baby doll with glowing red eyes inside of it--is genuinely terrifying. There's also a clear resolution to the story, and most of the questions posed at its outset are answered, but the emotional climax isn't really all that stirring. There's only so much we can get attached to these bits of metal gears and leather sacks in 79 minutes, especially when a big chunk of those 79 minutes is them running away from various giant mechanical terrors. I wanted the movie to stop a breathe for a minute, and explore more of the post-apocalyptic world created for us, the way Wall-E stopped to show us a day in Wall-E's life alone on earth before getting on with the main plot that had him and Eve roaming around the mothership of the humans. The movie isn't unenjoyable, and the animation is excellent, I just feel as though better use could've been made of the imaginative world that the animation produced.

Sephiroth is Alive?

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 04:28-06:00

"Where's its fucking head? The whole thing's stupid."
"I'll talk as much as you want later, miss."
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
"Who you callin' Mr. Barret? That don't sound right!"

FF7's overworld theme is the best in the series. Felt the need to get that out of the way.

One of things that I think is pretty brilliant about the way the first act of FF7 is set up is the misdirection that's put into it. If you're someone who played the NES/SNES games and figured that eventually, in spite of the fancy new futuristic setting, FF7 would eventually start conforming to previous conventions, then maybe eventually getting out of Midgar and roaming around the overworld wasn't that much of a surprise. Its easy to imagine, though, someone going into the game completely blind finding it completely plausible that the game takes place entirely within the city of Midgar. The city would certainly be big enough. Similarly, even though every once in a while you get vague mentions of some guy named Sephiroth, the beginning of the game seemingly makes it perfectly clear that the object of the game is to thwart the schemes of the Shinra corporation within their own reactors and their own headquarters, and that the game's main antagonist is President Shinra and his gawdy red suit. All of this gets turned on its head, when, surprise, President Shinra gets killed, not by anyone in your party, but by Sephiroth. Rufus, the President's son, and the rest of Shinra certainly hang around for the rest of the game, but the main focus of the story shifts tremendously after you get out of Midgar. In some ways, Final Fantasy VII is a pretty simplistic "good saves the world from evil" story, but on another level, its pretty unique in the way it keeps the player guessing in where its going.

Right now I'm saved on the world map right outside of Kalm. Going to save the big long exposition setting up all of Sephiroth's backstory until next time. I ran into a little bit of an issue fighting whatever the hell the boss is that chases you down after the motorcycle pursuit minigame. Not thinking, I had an Elemental-Poison materia combination on Cloud's weapon (with no other attack magic), thus making him unable to hit the (non-living) tank type of thing. So he was completely useless for the entire battle. Still managed to win though. Crisis averted. Elemental-Poision isn't even that good of a combination, I realize now. I was confusing Elemental with Added Effect, which you get much later in the game. With Elemental, the enemy has to have a vulnerability to the Poison element in order for it to do anything, something that I don't believe applies to a lot of enemies in the game. With Added Effect, on the other hand, anything that isn't specifically immune to the Poison status effect (where their HP drains every turn) has a chance to have Poison inflicted on it every hit.

Oh yeah, and this section of the game has my absolute favorite line from Barrett. Cloud realizes that Jenova is being stored in the Shinra building, which pretty much induces a seizure in him. We the player can only imagine what the hell is going on with this grotesque creature and what Cloud's connection is to it. Meanwhile, Barrett just looks in and says, "Where's its @#&@# head? The whole thing's stupid!"

A Golden Shiny Wire of Hope

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 03:05-04:28

"In my veins courses the blood of the Ancients. I am one of the rightful heirs to this planet!"

I played through the pillar section, climbed the wire, and worked my way up to floor 64 of the Shinra building. Ran into another addition to the bizarre enemies list for this game (see the previous post) in the form of the enemy called "Sword Dance", which roams the halls of the Shinra building and appears to be a giant floating fish type creature. I believe they're the first enemy of the game to put my characters in Fury status--the status effect that there's no reason to ever get rid of. Fury increases the rate that your limit bar fills up, supposedly at the cost of weapon accuracy, but any sort of decline that actually exists really isn't noticeable at all. Throughout the game you get Tranquilizer items that take you out of fury, but there's no really why anyone would ever want to. I really don't think they tested that thoroughly enough if it was supposed to have any sort of real determent to your characters such that it would possibly outweigh the benefit of more limit breaks.

On the 62nd floor you meet the mayor, a very minor character, but an amusing one. I love the idea that Shinra has so completely taken over Midgar that they've literally stuffed the mayor into a tiny room in the library and he spends all day making up odd little riddles. They really go to great lengths establishing Shinra as being completely, cartoonishly evil throughout the game. I guessed The Mayor's password right on the first try in the little minigame where you have to find the misplaced books in the library and get a letter for the password from their titles. That got me an Elemental materia. Not all that useful to me right now, but I can start leveling it up. I also picked up all three item coupons on floor 63, although I screwed it up a couple of times to begin with. That got me a Star Pendant (immunity to poison), Four Slots (armor), and an All materia. You can never have too much All materia.

Up next I fight to the top of Shinra tower, meet Red XIII--the favorite of furries "anthros" everywhere, and get the first glimpse of Jenova as the game's plot starts to shift from an anti-giant corporation, death to tyrants sort of thing, towards something much more operatic and heavy on fantasy. That, and the bizarre Road Rash-like driving minigame.

You're the One Who Wants to be Cute

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 01:46-02:50

Well, if nobody else, apparently my friend in L.A. and proprietor of Don't Cross the Streams is reading this. So that's cool.

For whatever reason, FF games always have at least one or two completely random, bizarre enemies. This section of FF7 has one of them, the "Hell House", literally a big house that inexplicably shoots rockets at you and occasionally sprouts arms and legs. As to how or why these are roaming around the streets of Midgar--apparently in big packs because I fought three in a row--I'm not sure. I ran into another one in the train graveyard a bit later on--Elegor, some sort of demon thing riding on what I think is supposed to be a chariot, but looks more like a wheelchair with a horse head sticking out of it. He shoots lasers at you. There's a couple of other bizarre ones later on, like the guy who swings from an axe and every once in a while falls off of it. Sometimes JRPGs are just odd beyond explanation.

I played through the whole Wall Market cross-dressing sequence. Sadly, Don Corino did not choose me. I don't remember at all the combination of stuff that you need, and frankly, it wasn't really worth the effort. It takes a solid half hour or so to get through the whole sequence if you do the optional stuff like staying at the inn to get something from the vending machine and venturing into the Honeybee Inn. Once you've done it a couple of times and you know the gag, its a little tedious to go through, although I have to admit that it still has a certain amusing quality to it, namely because of the sheer creepiness of everyone you meet. It's funny to watch the whole situation devolve and get progressively weirder, like when Aeris says you need a wig and so the person at the dress shop tells you to visit the gym because there's other people "like you" there. Then when you get there you're confronted by the very manly men who patronize it ask if you're the one who "wants to be cute," as if you're encroaching on their territory. The whole sequence has to be just about the most bizarre sequence in an FF game. Yes, more bizarre than the leg-sprouting rocket houses.

Up next I have to fight my way up the pillar, then its up the wire and into the Shinra building.

Don't Step on the Flowers

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 00:56-01:46

"They say you can't grow grass and flowers in Midgar. But for some reason the flowers have no trouble blooming here."
"Oh! And don't step on the flowers!"

Got in a quick bit of playtime here on Sunday night. Wasn't much, but I managed to get through the whole sequence with the Sector 5 reactor where you eventually fight the "Airbuster" boss that blows up and sends Cloud plummeting until he falls through the roof of Aeris's church. Aeris (or Aerith, whichever works for you) is probably my favorite character. In the middle of the dankest, dirtiest, most violent, most morally empty slum imaginable, somehow she's a giddily happy, somewhat aloof girl content to grow flowers all day. Logic would seem to dictate that it would be impossible for her to exist. Either she'd get killed, or the cold reality of the world would leave her bitter and hardened inside. Somehow she does exist though, and she becomes an incredibly endearing character, even before her whole importance to the game's larger plot really comes into play much later in the game. The scene where Cloud and Aeris are hopping along the rooftops trying to evade Reno and the soldiers who are with him--where Aeris tells Cloud to slow down as she very cautiously and deliberately works out her jump between each one--is kind of adorable. With the very blocky character models, the very simple and often repeatedly used character animations, and the fixed camera which is often far away from the characters, sometimes it can be hard to figure out what the hell they were really going for. This scene actually works well though.

I have Cloud at level 11 right now. I plan on trying to keep myself at a fairly comfortable level as I play through the story, but I'm not going to power level to the point where battles become a complete joke. After a brief stopover at Aeris's house, I get to the Wall Market, and the infamous cross-dressing part. Hoo boy. To be continued...

This Isn't Just a Reactor

Final Fantasy VII Play-through
Playtime: 00:00-00:56

"This city don't have no day or night."
"The upper world... a city on a plate. Its 'cuz of that @#$& pizza that people underneath are sufferin!"

Once upon a time, FF7's opening CG movie looked amazing. Two generations of systems later, it of course looks incredibly primitive now, even compared to graphics now rendered in real time. Part of its probably the nostalgia I get from it, but even now as dated as it looks there's still a certain impact that it has. Were they ever to adapt FF7 into a movie, (I mean based on the original story, Advent Children doesn't count) I can't imagine how it would open any other way. We start out adrift in space, only to suddenly transition to an extreme close-up of Aries, who we don't formally meet for a while, but who is in some ways as much of a protagonist as is Cloud. Aries walks away and we pull back to see the totality of the giant sprawl of the city and the enormity of the Shinra tower in the center. The title appears, and then suddenly we get another quick cut as a train comes barreling into the station down below, the train that later Cloud is going to use as a metaphor for destiny. In just a couple of minutes and with no words, only Nobuo Uematsu's music the game's creators perfectly introduce the game's near-future, super-industrial, dystopian setting while leading right into the opening mission. Few other games contributed more to giving video games a cinematic element, and FF7's opening sequence is one of its best examples.

The bombing run mission which directly follows the opening is mostly about new players getting their bearings about them, and introducing Cloud and Barrett. Cloud is widely mocked, and admittedly deservedly so, as being the first example of the "angsty" phase of Sqaure protagonists, the precursor to Squall in FF8, who was MUCH worse. The first hour of gameplay gives us the first example of the infamous "....." text box, and Cloud literally says about a half a dozen times some variation of "I don't care about the planet, I just want to get my money and go home!!" As Cloud sets the bomb in the Mako reactor, (side note: given that the first hour of the game has you blowing up a reactor for a terrorist organization, do you think this game would've been released in America had it been made after 9/11) he has a minor freakout, and a voice seemingly in his head says "This isn't just a reactor," giving us the first hint of Cloud's insanity that eventually is going to lead to the whole Cloud/Zach dual-life plot. Once that really starts to unravel, Cloud becomes much more interesting than the walking pile of angst that he is here.

A lot of people seem to dislike Barrett as well, complaining that Square basically made him a walking caricature--a black guy, permanently armed, with a gun grafted to his arm who talks a bit like Mister T. I can't really deny that there's a certain inherent ridiculousness to his character, but I also can't deny that I like him as a character in spite of it all. His frantic, overbearing personality is a great equalizer for Cloud's sullen nihilism, and he has some of the most memorable lines early in the game, like the "fuckin' pizza" line at the beginning of this post. Later in the game, once Sephiroth comes into the fold and the story becomes a battle of mythical forces, Barrett gets lost in the shuffle a bit, but in the game's first act he has his own sort of complete story arc. Here, we see him leading a terrorist cell as they complete their most brazen attack. Later, he leads them on another, still bigger attack which fails, leading Shinra to retaliate by eviscerating his entire neighborhood and nearly killing his daughter, after which Barrett is distraught but decides to fight on. I believe its Barrett who comments that the wire you climb up to get from the Wall Market to the Upper Plate "looks like hope," but I'll have to confirm that when I get there.

I mentioned Nobuo Uematsu's music when talking about the opening CG, and it really can't be stressed enough how brilliant his music is throughout the game. I love the background music for the mako reactor, where he combines a melody in the form of an electronic buzzing sort of sound overlayed with big bellowing chime sounds. The music envokes the same sort of feeling that the opening CG does, that this is taking place in a city that often seems less like a real living city and more one giant, cold, sterile, and dark machine. Once you get back to the surface, you hear the track that I think is called "Heart's Anxiety" on the soundtrack, with its haunting string sounds that fade in and out ethereally. Uematsu's music on the NES and SNES was absolutely amazing, given the great limitations of the hardware he was working with, and here in FF7 on a system that can actually approximate the sounds of real-life instruments with some degree of success, Uematsu is absolutely on fire.

I'm currently saved outside of Tifa's bar the morning after the Sector 1 reactor bombing. The whole sequence in the bar is probably a little long. It gives Tifa a chance to be introduced, but the flashback to Tifa and Cloud as kids sitting up on the watertower, or whatever that is, isn't really all that dramatic for the time spent setting it up, and there's a lot more of Cloud's incessant "I don't like people, just give me my money!" attitude than is really necessary throughout the whole scene. Up next, I'm off to try and blow up the Sector 5 reactor. Spoilers: this one doesn't go as smoothly. I'll see if I get around to playing some sort tomorrow.

They Were Mako Eyes

This is another new experiment I'm going to try out for this blog. As per normal, I'm not quite sure how well its going to work, nor how much I'm going to stick with it, but you have to start somewhere. What I'm starting this time is basically progressively blogging my thoughts as I replay through Final Fantasy VII, and maybe some other RPGs after that if it goes well. I've played all the way through FF7 maybe four times. Recently I've had the hankering to replay it, and I figure this would be a way to keep it interesting and maybe, just maybe, write something people would want to read in the process. Right now my plan is to basically write a blog entry for every couple-of-hours-long block of playtime that I get in. Final Fantasy VII is the first games in the FF series I was ever really exposed to, although I went back and played through VI (or III as it says on the US SNES cartridge) before actually beating FF7. Its a game that's near and dear to my heart, and while over time its flaws have started to become more apparent to me, and the graphics certainly haven't held up with age, its still a game that I absolutely adore. The opening CG is playing as I write this, so here we go...

Ponyo

Ponyo (***1/2)

Hayao Miyazaki is the greatest film animator of all time, and one of the greatest living directors of any kind, which is why Ponyo, which is a step or two below his absolute masterworks like and Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, is still pretty damn good. The story is very simplistic, essentially a more Japan-ified retelling of The Little Mermaid, and it doesn't really build up to anything particularly powerful, at least compared to the two aforementioned movies. The animation, as is always the case with Miyazaki, is nothing short of stunning, however, and would make the movie worth watching even if its plot was a complete waste of time, which its not. The experience of a Miyazaki movie isn't quite like the experience of any other movie, animated or otherwise. No other movies are quite as imaginative, quite as immersive, or quite as engaging.

At the film's outset, we meet Ponyo, who the humans in the movie apparently mistake for a goldfish, although its more like a little creature with a human face and a disorganized red blob of a body. She has a whole school full of siblings, who inexplicably are a lot smaller than her and can't talk. Her father is Fujimoto, sort of an underwater version of Howl from Howl's Moving Castle, with very bishounen looking red hair running in every which direction. From what we gather, he's sort of the guardian of the ocean and spends most of his time brewing tinctures and complaining about how much the humans pollute. Ponyo, curious of the surface world, uses the transparent dome on top of a jellyfish-type creature to float up to dry land. Not really thinking the whole plan through, Ponyo nearly dies, being unable to breathe the air, but is saved by Soskue, a human boy who lives by the water. Sosuke keeps her in a bucket, names her Ponyo (her given name is Brunhilda), and shows her off to the old folks at the retirement home where his mother works, all of which thinks she's beautiful (but somehow not particularly out of the ordinary), except for one woman who in an apparent bout of senility warns that Ponyo will bring "the tsunami."

Fujimoto eventually manages to recapture Ponyo and brings her back down underwater, but during her surface world excursion, she healed a cut on Sosuke's finger and by tasting human blood she gains the ability to become human. Its not something she can do all at once. Her transformation takes great effort and she often winds up in this weird in-between stage where she has three-pronged bird-like appendages for feet and hands and a froggish looking face. Fujimoto attempts to trap Ponyo/Brunhilda in a magical bubble to stop the transformation and to keep her from escaping again, but she does escape again, with the help of her tiny mini-Ponyo siblings. She inadvertently steals some of the power from her father's elixirs, and rides her way back to the surface with the help of magical waves that are , comprised of this weird fusion of water and giant fish. The waves get out of control, and lo and behold, the old woman was right, and there actually is a tsunami. In fact, the moon is actually getting pulled closer to the earth ala Majora's Mask, only without the big angry face.

The movie is a little vague as to whether anyone actually gets killed, or whether there's as much major damage as it seems there should be in the storm. We see a group of fishing boats, including the one that Sosuke's father works on, being saved by Ponyo's mother, which they refer to when they see as the "goddess of mercy." The fates of the people at the old folks home, which Sosuke's mother rushes to go check on in the midst of the storm, is revealed much later in the movie and doesn't even really happen on screen. In the meantime, we basically get a lot of sight gags with Sosuke and Ponyo as she tries to adjust herself to the surface world. Its not that these scenes aren't cute, because they are, and show the heart that Miyazaki pours into all of his movies, but it kind of drains the movie of its central conflict, which is that Ponyo's desire to live in the real world conflicts with the natural order of things. There's a "test" that Fujimoto puts Sosuke and Ponyo through at the film's climax, but it doesn't really build up to anything tremendously dramatic, and what exactly is resolved at the end is kind of murky.

Even with the weaknesses of the story, however, there's no question that the movie is still a tremendously worthwhile experience. There really isn't anything quite like the hand-drawn animation of a Miyazaki movie, and giving him the ocean as a backdrop is almost unfair. The actual, factual ocean is filled with all manner of weird creatures to begin with, and when you let Miyazaki work his imagination on creating more magical versions of them, the results are incredible. Joe Hihashi, who has worked with Miyazaki on a plethora of his movies as a composer, creates another beautiful score here. The English language cast (the movie is only dubbed in theaters) does a pretty good job, notably Liam Niessan, who lends his boisterous, commanding voice to the character of Fujimoto. I can't imagine many people who have seen a lot of Miyazaki's work declaring this their favorite, but I also can't imagine many people finding a way to genuinely dislike it. Hayao Miyazaki has a skill of bringing out the inner child in people that no other working director--regardless of what medium, be it animation or live-action--really has. Even in a movie where the plot is somewhat murky and disjointed, its a lot of fun to watch.

Dark Skies Over Wrigleyville

The Cubs are sitting at 60-57, now 6 full games behind the Cardinals in the NL Central. The biggest continued reason for optimism is that their remaining schedule pits them against a lot of bad teams and gives them a lot of home games. Problem is, the Cubs are currently in San Diego playing one of said bad teams and have lost the first two with the finale toady. The Cubs took a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the 9th on Friday, only to have Kevin Gregg first blow the save then give up a 3-run homer to take the loss. Afterward, Lou Pinella announced that Gregg would be replaced as closer by Carlos Marmol. I was advocating Marmol as closer on this blog at the beginning of the year, but that seems like a lonnnng time ago at this point? Would Marmol be any better than Kevin Gregg right now? Its hard to say. His ERA is almost a full run lower, but his WHIP is actually significantly higher. He still hasn't been able to find his control for any significant stretch of the season, with a cartoonish 52 walks in 56 1/3 innings (with 11 hit by pitches to go along with them!). Its possible that Angel Guzman would be a viable option, and he has the lowest ERA amongst Cubs bullpen pitchers who have been there for the whole season, though he gave up 2 runs himself in the 8th inning last night.

Really, though, this is a Cubs offense that's expected to put up more than 4 runs in 2 games-- even in a pitcher's park like Petco--which is what its done thus far in the current Padres series. Geovany Soto, Alfonso Soriano, and Ryan Theriot all have OPSes below the league average. Milton Bradley has actually managed to get his slightly above average, in large part by drawing a lot of walks, but still hasn't hit for much power, with 8 HRs and 30 RBI. Aramis Ramirez has continued to hit the ball well since returning from his shoulder injury, but recently had to get a cortisone injection for it and sit out for a few more games. The injury is still going to require off-season surgery, and it seems like any slight tweak at this point might lead to him being shut down for the year. Should that happen, its hard to imagine how the Cubs could recover from it. Jake Fox is the only player who has put up offensive numbers anywhere in the realm of Ramirez, and he's a liability defensively. Largely wasted has been a resurgent year for Derrek Lee. After a few years with a drop off in power numbers, Lee has already hit 24 this year, the most since his ridiculous year in 2005 in which he would've won MVP had the Cubs had a better record.

The most consistent aspect of the Cubs team this year, and the one thing that's prevented the season from going completely off the rails, has been their starting pitching. Recently though, injuries have put a strain on the starting pitching as well. Ted Lilly just came back from a knee injury on Monday and pitched well, though the effort was by the aforementioned 9th inning unpleasantness. Carlos Zambrano is on the DL for the second time this year with a back injury and, in the latest soap opera-like twist for a team that's already made itself really hard to like at times, evidently Zambrano hadn't been doing the abdominal exercises that were perscribed to him because of self-described laziness. This would seemingly be an addition to a pattern that was on display last year, when Zambrano had to come out of several games with cramps because, according to the training staff, he wasn't keeping himself hydrated enough. Zambrano was scratched from the last game he attempted to start before being placed on the DL about an hour before the game, forcing Sean Marshall to make an emergency start, in which he got rocked. Jeff Samardzjia made a spot start about a week or so ago, got similiarly rocked, and is now back in AAA. Tom Gorzellanny, acquired from the Pirates at the deadline, has made three starts since joining the team, and two of them have been good ones, but in the third he allowed 4 runs over 1 1/3 innings and was then taken out after getting hit in the foot with a line drive, although it seemed like the decision had as much to do with his ineffectiveness than his health. The bad starts have required more long relief appearances than the Cubs have needed at any other point in the season, and have subsequently led to a bunch of roster moves to keep fresh arms in the bullpen. Its more than a little frustrating to watch a team with a $100 million+ payroll having to dig deep for arms with such AAA imports as Esmailin Caridad and Justin Berg.

Multiple injuries to key players are going to be tough to bear for any team, but the Cubs' struggles throughout this season nevertheless remain an indictment of the offseason moves by Jim Hendry. The loss of Mark DeRosa continues to be a glaring one. I've written here before that the deal in some ways made sense in that DeRosa was coming off of a career year, and so theorectially trading him would lead to getting the absolute best value for him in return. An article at Fan Graphs recently made the case that it was, in fact, a good deal based on the performances of the three pitching prospects now in the Cubs system. Still, I think it can also be said that it was a bad deal because of the timing in which it occured, when the Cubs are clearly going "all in" in an attempt to win the championship in the next few years. Most of the Cubs' core is either on the decline or will soon be on the decline, and yet all of said players will likely still be in a Cub uniform for the duration of their contracts, which are long and backloaded and will be hard to get rid of. In the past few years, the Cubs' payroll has balooned, and Jim Hendry has signed a number of contracts which pretty clearly overpay players in future years when their production will be diminishing with the hopes of attracting enough top-level talent to assemble a team that can win in the here and now. The DeRosa move, while making some sense on its own merits, wouldn't seem to fit in with the overall direction of the team. In a veritable must-win year, the Cubs lost their best option to back up their best hitter, who has not had a track record of serious injuries such as the one earlier this year, but has been known to require a DL stint from time to time. Really more confounding than the DeRosa trade itself, is Hendry's follow-up move, the signing of Aaron Miles, a utility man who is in the same vein as DeRosa except for the fact that he can't hit. This year he's hitting a putrid .184, and while his career numbers aren't as bad as that, they're certainly nowhere near those of DeRosa, and they're certainly not worth the 2 year, 5 million dollar contract he recieved. If the Cubs don't make the playoffs this year (or if they do, but don't do anything once they're there, again) I'm not sure Hendry makes it out with his job, and I'm not sure that he deserves to.

Funny People

Funny People (***)

Judd Apatow's first two directorial efforts, and The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up are both amongst the most acclaimed comedies of the decade, and he's been involved with a whole potpourri of other popular comedies in recent years --Anchorman, Pineapple Express, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, etc., etc.--as a either writer or producer. As such, he's become something of a household name, or certainly more of one than most people who are involved in movies but are never actually in front of the camera. Evidently, with the success of Apatow's films, he's built up enough of a reputation to allow him to make a pretty unconventional comedy in Funny People. 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up are somewhat unconventional themselves, but not like Funny People is, a 2 hour and 20 minute comedy centered partly around death. A lot of people have complained about its length, and while I can say that my interest was maintained from start to finish, it certainly is true that the script is somewhat uneven, and at times it kind of feels like Apatow tried to take two or three different ideas for movies and throw them all together. I do appreciate that Apatow is trying to think outside of the box, even if it doesn't all work. I'd take a hundred movies like this over most of the paint-by-numbers mainstream comedies out there.

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a character who is fictional, but who obviously is intended to be not at all dissimilar to Sandler himself. He's a forty-something comedian, who got his start doing stand-up but who has since hit the big time in Hollywood, starring in a bunch of movies. All of them are knock offs of formulaic Hollywood comedies--like Re-do, where Sandler/Simmons asks a wizard to make him younger and he ends up turning into a baby, and and another where he's an entrant in the 4th of July hot dog eating contest with his son in the crowd yelling, "Dad! This won't bring mom back!" to which he replies, amid hot dog chews, "I have no other choice!!" Its pretty clear that some of them are polite jabs at some of Sandler's actual mediocre, fairly milquetoast movies, like Big Daddy. As we're first introduced to him, he's meeting with his doctor who's telling him that he has a rare form of leukemia, and that its at an advanced enough stage such that his only chance may be experimental medicine. Suddenly realizing there may be a clock running on his life, Simmons shows up to a comedy club that he hasn't performed at in years and gives a somewhat, shall we say, abstract performance which the audience isn't quite sure what to make of. He's followed by Ira Wright, a struggling young comedian played by Seth Rogan. Ira isn't yet at the point where he actually gets paid to tell jokes, and so he spends his days working at the deli in a grocery store. He's a nervous wreck to begin with, and having to follow a legend and one of his idols in the form of George Simmons only makes things worse. It looks like his set is going to tank until he's able to recover by ad libbing jokes about how bad and uncomfortable Simmons' set was.

After the show, Ira returns to his makeshift place of living, that being a cot in his friend's apartment (Jason Schwartzman), who has made it being starring as a high school teacher in a fairly terrible NBC sitcom called "Yo, Teach!" Also living with him is Leo, played by the always funny Jonah Hill, who is himself a struggling young comedian who tries to attract people to his comedy site by making You Tube videos of him dancing with cats. Unexpectedly, Ira gets a call from George asking if he and/or Leo would want to write jokes for him and be something of an assistant. Ira basically pretends as though the "or your friend Leo" part doesn't exist--something with briefly becomes an issue later--and accepts the job himself. In his first 24 hours with George, Ira sees how George takes full advantage of his celebrity. The two of them perform at a corporate gig for Myspace (with a funny cameo by James Taylor), and they end up bringing back two random girls to George's place, both of which end up having sex with George. The next day, though, George comes down with a big container full of pills and confides in Ira that he's sick. There are a few very well done dramatic scenes by Apatow here, as George's health begins to spiral downwards, like when George is on stage singing a very sarcastic song about how the audience won't know what to do when he's gone and how he never liked them anyway, intercut with scenes of him vomiting in his bathroom facing his very actual, factual death. I never saw Punch Drunk Love, which is usually considered far and away Adam Sandler's best dramatic performance, and so to see him here doing something more involved than just making funny voices and getting into a fight with Bob Barker (not that that can't be entertaining) was something I much appreciated.

The thing is though, George gets diagnosed, gets worse, comes to terms with his mortality and becomes a pretty person because of it, and gets better all within the first half of the movie. I don't really think I'm spoiling anything here because they actually show the scene where the doctor that George and Ira think sounds like Alan Rickman from Die Hard tells them that the medication seems to have worked and that George may have beaten the disease. The second half of the movie turns into a love triangle situation, as George tries to win back Laura (Leslie Mann), a woman who he once upon a time was going to marry, but ended up cheating on. She's now married to a guy named Clark (Eric Bana) and has two daughters. George thinks that getting back together with Laura is sort of his ticket to true happiness, while Ira basically thinks he's going to end up destroying someone else's family and still be miserable. The whole thing is sort of tangentially related to the plot of the first half of the movie in that almost dying gives George a sort of revelation about what sort of person he is and what he wants out of life, but at times it also feels like a totally different movie. Its also not quite as funny. As George and Laura try and keep secret the fact that they're still sort of in love with each other secret from her husband Clark, there are a couple of scenes that devolve into just sort of slapstick weirdness that would probably fit into something like Anchorman, but not so much this movie, which is supposed to be funny but also dealing with serious things.

A couple of other scenes elsewhere are genuinely funny, but again don't seem to fit with what the tone of the movie is going for. There's a very funny cameo by Ray Ramano, but the circumstances of it are so preposterous that it's not that easy to accept it as being part of the same movie in which the main character is battling cancer. Funny People seemingly represents Judd Apatow, with a couple of films under his belt, trying to stretch the boundaries of what a mainstream comedy can do. He throws a lot of stuff at the wall, and a lot of it sticks, but it sort of sticks together and congeals such that you end up with a big mass of you're not sure what. Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen are tremendously entertaining in the leads, and they play off of each other's strengths tremendously well, but the movie is too scatterbrained to really be considered great. As I said at the beginning of this though, I appreciate Apatow trying to do something not quite like any other comedy that's out there. I'd take 100 of these before one of The Goods, although I do laugh every time I see the commercial where the old guy punches the Asian guy because Jeremy Piven made some reference to Pearl Harbor. I'm not really sure why.

Do I Make You Randy

The Cubs destroyed the Houston Astros today at Wrigley 12-0, and getting his 7th win of the year was starting pitcher Randy Wells. Wells was never really a top prospect, picked by the Cubs in the 38th round of the draft in 2002, and went to Toronto as a Rule 5 pick in 2008 before he was returned to the Cubs later that year. Next month he's going to be 27, so its taken him a while to get regular playing time in the majors. He came up early in the year when Carlos Zambrano was banged up and was pretty much just expected to be a brief fill-in guy for a couple of turns in the rotation. However, with Sean Marshall needing to stay in the bullpen, and with more recent injuries to Ryan Dempster and Ted Lilly, Wells has gotten a chance to stay around and prove himself, and he's done so spectacularly.

Today was Wells' 15th start and he's now 7-4 with a 2.84 ERA. With 95 IP, he's just outside of being qualified for rate stats for pitchers (the rule is that you need 1 IP for each game that your team has played), but if he had a few more innings, it would put him firmly in the top 10 in the NL. With 60 Ks, he hasn't been a lights out pitcher, but he's also only walked 21. He's generally able to keep his pitch count down and go pretty deep into games. Today he threw 110 pitches and lasted 8 innings. Hitters can definitely make contact off of him, but to this point he's mostly managed to keep the ball in the park and keep himself out of giving up big innings. So, with Wells' performance as good as its been, the question becomes, could Randy Wells win the NL Rookie of the Year? Geovany Soto deservedly won it in 2008, setting up the potential for back-to-back awards for Cubs players--and Cubs players who took a little while to get up to the Majors (Soto was 25).

It's seemingly a pretty down year for position player rookies in the N.L. St. Louis Caridinal outfielder Colby Rasmus, has been up for the whole year and has hit 11 homers, but hasn't hit much for average. Former Cub Casey McGehee is hitting .312 in 60 games for the Brewers, but his performance hasn't really jumped out as being amazing, and he would probably be further hurt by the fact that the Brewers aren't that good right now and might be fading in the divisional race. Wells might have stronger competition from his fellow pitchers. J.A. Happ started in the bullpen but has moved into the rotation for a good Phillies team, and has posted a 7-1 record with a 3.13 ERA. Then there's the 22-year old Tommy Hanson of the Braves, who has only been with the major league club since the start of June, but has gone 5-1 with a 2.95 ERA in 9 starts. The Braves aren't that good of a team, but if Hanson continues to pitch well he might have a little bit of an advantage in that he seems to be a little bit more of a genuine prospect who's expected to become a top pitcher, rather than someone of the journeyman underdog ilk like Wells. If Wells is pitching meaningful games for the Cubs in August and September though--and at this point it certainly seems like he will--Wells should get a good deal of national attention. At any rate it should be interesting.

Are you ready for some simulated electronic football

I'm only 24 years old, and so I'm firmly within the range of the Information Age generation, or whatever the hell you want to call people who have lived most of their lives with the internet existing. Combine that with the fact that I was a CS major in college, and in theory I should be pretty up on technology and used to the pace at which its currently advancing. All that said, every once in a while I do still get a "holy crap, this is like some Jetson's type shit here!" moment, and I had one of those moments playing NCAA Football 10, which I just picked up. Its the first sports game I've bought in roughly five years, and the first football game I've owned since NCAA 2004. While its certainly been tweaked and refined, the actual gameplay is roughly the same as it has been at its core. That's not really what I find so impressive about it. Rather, what I find so amazing is how throughly it incorporates online content into the game.

Any time you're browsing through menus, rather than actually being in-game, the game will play the latest actual Sportscenter update from ESPN Radio and on the bottom of your screen, you get an actual news and scores ticker. When you start a new exhibition game when the weather settings pop up, they default to the actually time of day, and actual temperature and conditions of your real-life location, based on weather.com. All of these little tidbits are cool, but the centerpiece of the online content is the new Teambuilder feature. Up to this point, create-a-team modes in spots games--if they even existed--have been pretty crude and rudimentary. You could pick from a few generic logos, pick your team colors, create a roster, etc. It never ended up being all that satisfying though. It never completely felt like a "real" team the same way all of the default teams that came packaged with the game did. With the new Teambuilder feature, all of that is now online. Teams are made on EA's website, and can then be searched for by anyone else with the game on their console. You're given 12 slots to download teams initially, and can buy more with micro-transactions (Side note: some of the micro-transactions in the game are pretty silly, like buying a new "pipeline" state for recruits for your Dynasty team. Are there really people willing to spend actual money to make recruiting easier for their fake football team?), so you have plenty of room to mess around and try out teams that people have made.

Obviously, a big way this is going to be used is to circumvent the rule that actual player names can't be used in NCAA games, but there's a whole plethora of teams you can find. Searching for teams in Bloomington, Illinois brings up a couple of different iterations of my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan, a Division III team that's never going to actually exist as a default, on the disc team in any game. But with the Teambuilder function, they exist with all of their actual logos and a field reasonably close looking to their actual one. Hat tip to EA for coming up with a very cool idea and implementing it well.

Perfect Game

Again, not a Cubs post, but I feel like I should acknowledge Mark Buehrle's perfect game which happened yesterday against the Tampa Bay Rays. It was the 18th perfect game in the long history of Major League Baseball, and the first since Randy Johnson's in 2004. It was the second no-hitter of his career, the first being in 2007 against the Rangers. That game itself was also a perfect game. As I recall, the only batter to reach was Sammy Sosa on a walk, and he later got picked off of 1st. As always, Buehrle worked incredibly fast. He threw 116 pitches, and the Sox scored 5 runs in their halves of innings, and yet the game lasted all of 2 hours and 3 minutes.

This perfect game in particular is an impressive feat and sort of a strange event for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Buehrle is a guy who pitches to contact, and the White Sox defense has been pretty bad this year. Yesterday he struck out 6, and so 21 outs were left up to the defense. The play that will be remembered for a long time is the play that saved the no hitter in the 9th: Dwayne Wise scaling the outfield wall in left-center and just barely hanging on to the ball to rob Gabe Kapler of a home run. Wise had just entered the game as a defensive replacement in center, subbing in for Carlos Quentin and moving Scott Podsednik over to left. Podsednik, who isn't as fast as he used to be due to injury and who often takes bad routes to balls, most certainly doesn't make the catch. Its very much possible that Brain Anderson wouldn't have either, who was recently sent down when Quentin was activated from the DL. A lot of people, myself included, were pretty confused when Wise was kept on the roster over Anderson. Anderson has had a pretty tumultuous MLB career with the Sox, having not turned in to the top-level prospect he was once projected as, but he certainly is a better player than Dwane Wise, who has spent most of his career in the minors and is currently hitting under the Mendoza line. At least for a day though, the White Sox looked like geniuses, as a career minor league, below replacement-level player saved the 18th perfect game in Major League history. Sometimes baseball is weird like that.

Debating Nothing

I'll make another full Cubs post at some point in the near future, but for now I feel the need to rant about something which comes up every baseball season and is starting to crop up again now that we're through the All-Star break and down the backstretch. There's a whole lot of conventional wisdom held by sports fans, and a lot of sports commentators as well, that's just completely odd. For example, turn on any sports radio station at pretty much any time, and regardless of what sport is being talked about, at some point you'll probably hear someone saying, "Look at their home record! You can't win in this league if you can't win on your own park/field/court!" Oft times later in the same conversation you'll hear "Look at their road record! Sure they can win at home, but if they can't win on the road, how good are they really?" Look, a team only ever plays home games or road games and they count exactly the same in the standings. Ideally you want to win every game. If your team is either like 8-16 at home or 8-16 on the road, chances are your team is bad, not because of some mythical importance in winning one of those subcategories of games, but because if your record is that bad in the one case then it has to be 16-8 in the other just to get you back to .500. That's just how math works. Obviously winning on the road is harder because of the nation of playing on the road, but winning is always going to make your team's situation somewhat better and losing is always going to make it somewhat worse. That's the nature of playing a sport with a league schedule.

But the debate that I'm talking about is a different one, and one that's exclusive to baseball, though it bothers me for exactly the same reason. Every once in a while, when a team is trailing in both their division and in the wild card by a roughly equal number of games, you'll start hearing people give their opinions on whether they should "focus-on" winning the division or the wild-card. Obviously, its a legitimate debate to ask whether or not the team is more likely to win either the division or the wild-card. They may have to jump over more teams one way or the other, one might feel that the current leader in either the team's division or its league's wild card race is overachieving, etc., etc. But framing the discussion that way isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when people are lamenting their team's situation in a pennant race and say either, "I tell you what, I think these boys have to keep their eyes on the big prize! They can't just settle for the wild card, they have to keep focusing on winning the division!" or "I tell you what, I think this division is probably out of reach, I think they just have to do everything they can to focus in on getting in by way of the wild card." This isn't just a phenomenon of talk radio, or a random group of people standing around the proverbial water cooler, but you'll actually hear it asked of players in locker room interviews whether their team is "focused" on winning either the division or the wild-card.

Here's my question: how the hell does a baseball team focus on winning only one or the other?? If this was people watching competitive Starcraft or something, and they were advocating that a guy focus only on taking out the base of what they considered to be the weaker player, that would make perfect sense to me. In baseball, I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. In the MLB you have a set schedule. You can't call up the team leading your division and say "Guess what? We're gonna play you 10 times in a row so we can instantly gain 10 games on you in the standings and talk over the division!" Nor does a team have separate win and loss records for purposes of the division and wild card standings that are somehow calculated differently. You can't "win" a game for purposes of competing in the division and somehow "lose" the same game for purposes of the wild card. Like the home-road debate, people are completely overcomplicating the simple truth, that winning will always put your team in a situation better than before the game, and losing will always put them in a worse situation. Whether you want to try and win the division or the wild card, the way you get there is exactly the same: you win more than the other teams. I dunno, its just something I've always found incredibly bizarre.

Public Enemies

Public Enemies (***1/2)

A few years removed from his modern day crime dramas Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann decides to take a stab at a prohibition-era gangster movie with Public Enemies, bringing along a powerful tandem of lead actors in the form of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. The film looks a little bit more like a traditional movie than Collateral--which was shot mostly on hand-held digital cameras at night on location in LA, without a lot of the usual preparation that goes into shots using traditional film, like setting up lighting. Nevertheless, there are some shots that aren't entirely dissimilar from the style that Mann established in Collateral, with a lot of close-up, shaky, hand-held camera shots that frantically track characters, and an overall sense of being directly in the middle of what's taking place.

Johnny Depp is our protagonist playing John Dillinger, the most notorious amongst a loose alliance of bank robbers that included other legends of crime like George "Baby Face" Nelson. He seems to fancy himself in some ways as a Robin Hood type of figure. We see him cleaning out a bank vault, but then on the way out making a point to hand back the money customers and tellers have nervously pulled out of their pockets in anticipation of him demanding it. He's not against "the people", just the banks. At the same time though, he doesn't seem to see what he does as some sort of crusade against the evils of social stratification, but rather just sort of what he does to "live in the moment." Confronted with the reality that there's a nationwide manhunt for him which will certainly eventually catch up to him, Dillinger simply says "We're having too much fun today to be thinking about tomorrow." At a party, he becomes infatuated with a woman named Billie Frechette, and when he meets her again as she's working at a coat check, he roughs up a guy impatiently waiting for his coat, and tells her to leave with him because "You're with me now," and people who are with John Dillinger don't work at coat checks. As free-wheeling as he is, though, he's also not a psychopath, which puts him at odds with his frequent cohort Baby Face Nelson, who during one bank robbery starts firing randomly at onlookers as they're making their way to their getaway car.

After we're sufficiently introduced to Dillinger and his gang, we're introduced to their counterparts on the other side of the law. Christian Bale is Melvin Pervis, a federal agent who we first meet in the woods as he pursues--and eventually calmly guns down with a rifle--"Pretty Boy" Floyd, another notorious fugitive. Pervis becomes the poster boy for J. Edgar Hoover, who you might know from history either as the dude who created the FBI, or the dude who liked to cross-dress a lot. Evidently, here in 1933, Congress isn't quite sold on the whole idea of the FBI as a crime fighting organization, chastises Hoover during a hearing, and refuses to increase his funding. Hoover, nevertheless, uses what resources he has to set up a massive manhunt for Dillinger & co. with Pervis as point man. Christian Bale always has a tremendous, commanding presence about him which goes a long way, but even still, his character isn't really all that interesting here, especially compared to what the movie does with Dillinger. Other than one scene towards the movie's conclusion where he makes a decision regarding the morality of the FBI's tactics, basically the whole of Bale's character is that he's a guy who really, really wants to catch John Dillinger.

Watching the FBI investigation itself unfold though is a lot of fun though. I'm banking under the assumption that the movie and the book upon which its based did their homework, and that the equipment and tactics used are fairly accurate to what was used in reality. A lot of it seems to basically mirror the tactics that are used today, only utilizing cruder, older technology. The resulting effect makes it look like a weird steampunk version of Enemy of the State or something. The FBI puts a wiretap on the phone's of Dillinger and his girlfriend, but since its 1933 all the conversations are recorded onto phonographs. All of it is done in a room which is completely dark, except for the lights on the massive banks of phone line connections, making it look kind of like the room that controls the superlaser on the Death Star.

There are some great looking exterior shots as well, as set pieces of old Chicago are woven seamlessly into Michael Mann's frantic, always in motion shots. One that particularly stands out in my memory is a drive-by shot of the Art Institute. The atmosphere for the entire film is great. I'm convinced that the tommy gun is the ultimate crime movie weapon. They're obnoixiously big and loud and its hard not to look like you're completely bad news while you're carrying one. There's a scene where the FBI tracks down Dillinger and Nelson to a backwoods safehouse in Wisconsin which leads to a middle of the night gunfight which at times is lit pretty much entirely by the flashes created by the machine gun fine being exchanged. It contains no music and absolutely none is necessary for it to be thrilling.

Some might find the actual plot of Public Enemies to be a little bit simplistic and predictable, and indeed I don't think anyone will walk out of the theatre saying "Wow, I didn't see that coming" in regards to the ending or any other point of the movie. And while I imagine that the movie gets the broad strokes of the real-life story of John Dillinger correct, there are times when it seems embellished to the point of it threatening your suspension of disbelief, as when Dillinger just sort of moseys into the crime unit that's in charge of investigating him, and no one seems to notice who he is, even as he asks what the score of the Cubs game is. Nevertheless, Michael Mann manages to put a tremendous amount of energy into scenes like the nighttime gun fight described above, and there's more than enough inherent drama in the escalating duel between the FBI in its birth pangs and the most wanted bank robbers at the end of what the film's opening title card calls the "golden age of bank robbery" to draw you in and keep you drawn in.

RedRum Beer

In the debut installment of my ultra-novice beer blogging, we looked at an India Pale Ale. This time around, we're going to look at two different varieties of red beers.

The style guideline for Irish Red Ale (thanks to my friend for linking me to it) says that it should be easy drinking with "an initial sweetness and a roasted dryness in the finish." The reddish color is achieved by roasted barley. Irish red ales are "malt-focused", and usually don't have a noticeable aroma of hops, although several recipes I've found have called for the addition of Kent Goldings hops. A brief Googling turned up this site with three distinct Irish red recipes, and indeed all of them call for roasted barely. The other components seem to vary somewhat. One of them calls for adding honey, another adds chocolate.

2. Killian's Irish Red

Image source (via Google Images)

Killian's Irish Red, named for George Killian Lett, who founded the brewery that crated the originally recipe in Ireland in 1864. It was originally an Irish Red Ale, but is now brewed in America by Coors and is now considered an American style amber lager. The transition was done to give it a broader appeal, and making it a lager took out some of the fullness of it, and reading around on stuff like beer-advocate.com it seems as though people who are big beer aficionados have quite a disliking for it for that reason. This is apparently not unprecedented, though, as makes a note that beers classified as such can be brewed as lagers. Personally, I've always really liked drinking Killian's. I don't doubt that there are better red ales out there which are truer to the whole tradition of the style, but I certainly think Killian's is a good beer and its readily available. I know there's several bars I've been to that have had it available on tap, and if you want to buy a 6 pack of it you can buy it pretty much anywhere.

3. Berghoff Famous Red Ale

This was on tap at an Irish pub in Downer's Grove which I decided to try on a whim. I ended up liking it enough such that I ordered it again the week after when I was there again. The name comes from the historic Berghoff restaurant in Chicago which is now closed, but there's still a line of beers being produced with the Berghoff name, now brewed in Wisconsin. According to Rate Beer's entry for it, its brewed with "Brewer's Two-Row Malt, Caramel 40 Malt, Carapils Malt and domestic hops" and its classified as an American Pale Ale. Two-Row Malt is used as a base for American style beers, Caramel malt--so named for its crystallized sugar--gives (appropriately enough) a caramel flavor and adds to the redness of the color, and carapils are used in pale ales to "balance body and flavor" without adding color. Reviewers on Rate Beer seemed to largely hate this, one review describing it as tasting "metallic." I think it does have a bit of a harshness to it, but I think metallic is a bit of a strong word. It certainly wasn't harsh enough to not make me want to drink it twice.

I've had a number of other red ales in addition to these. I think I've had enough of them to say that really like it as a style, seeing as I really like what are considered some of the "bad" entries of the style by those who study this stuff closely. Perhaps I'll post about more varieties down the road.



Sources: Wikipedia - Killian's, BJCP Style Guidelines, Real Beer.com, Rate Beer - Berghoff, and anything else I linked to above but maybe didn't put down here

The Confounding Collapse of the Cubs (alliteration is fun!)

It's been a long time since I blogged about the Cubs, partly because I've been busy with other stuff, and partly because doing so would just be too damn painful. The team that seemed pretty much poised to dominate a weak division again at the start of the year has been stuck in a malaise, with almost no offensive output to speak of. Currently, the team is a game under .500, sitting at 34-35, putting them tied for 3rd in the division, 3.5 out of 1st. No one else has really asserted themselves as a leader in the division--and really the entire NL has just been sort of a big blob except for the Dodgers, who are sitting pretty with a big lead in the NL West at 47-26--and so the Cubs certainly still have plenty of time to get themselves right and take over first, but that doesn't really make the baseball that's been on display in recent weeks any less frustrating to think about.

There's been no singular reason for the team's poor play, but first and foremost among any reasons you want to throw out has to be the injury to Aramis Ramirez. The Cubs haven't really been able to find a good replacement at all for him at 3rd base, not only to replace his offense but also his defense. Much of the playing time at 3rd has been given to Mike Fontenot, who hasn't been a complete wreck defensively, but certainly hasn't stood out as being excellent either. This would be fine if he were able to put out some decent numbers offensively, but as of my writing this, he's hitting .222 with a .670 OPS. Recently, some time at 3rd has been given to call-up Jake Fox, who has hit the ball well thus far, but who is even more of a liablilty defensively. Fox was absolutely tearing the cover off of the ball at AAA, but he's just now getting to the majors at 26 because he's never proven that can can play a good corner outfield at the major league level, let alone at the hot corner. The Cubs's struggles at 3rd base once again raises the spectre of the off season trading of Mark DeRosa for questionable pitching prospects. Last year was a career year for DeRosa and, as I've written before, the Cubs were probably using a mentality of "buy low-sell high", banking on the fact that DeRosa's 2008 numbers were probably a one time thing (although, judging by what he's done so far with Cleveland, maybe not). But even still, even a Mark DeRosa who produces anywhere close to his 2008 output would be a tremendous safety net for what has been the most severe injury for the Cubs this year (severe both in terms of its effect on the player physically, and its effect on the team).

The lack of a good 3rd baseman has been the least of the Cubs's problems, however, and while injuries are always a risk that has to be considered, some of the other issues with the Cubs have been hard to explain. Alfonso Soriano--who, for all his faults, is usually good to be penciled in for an average of at least .280 for so with a bunch of home runs--is currently hitting a meager .229. After hitting .284 in April, his average has gone way downhill from there, and is currenly a sub-Mendoza line .195 in June (as usual, I'm getting my stats from Baseball Reference). Milton Bradley, who has improved to an extent, and is at least managing to stay on the field for the most part, is nevertheless hitting just .238 on the year with anemic power numbers of 5 HRs and 16 RBIs. And last year's Rookie of the Year Geovany Soto, is hitting .231 with 6 HRs and 21 RBIs, and has garnered attention this year more for looking like he got kinda fat, and for having tested positive for pot during the World Baseball Classic than anything else this year. Add all of these disappointing performances up, and here's what you get statistically for the Cubs through 69 games. Compare that to what they did over the same period last year:

2008: .247 Avg., .324 OBP, .400 Slg., .724 OPS, 292 runs
2009: .283 Avg., .361 OBP, .442 Slg., .804 OPS, 380 runs

Its not even particularly close. Aramis Ramirez has been the team's best power hitter in recent years, and there's reason to believe that things will get better when he returns (that is if he can return this year in a healthy enough state to be effective), but clearly a lot more has to change than just Ramirez's absense.

The bullpen has still had issues as well, notably Carlos Marmol, who has still proved difficult to get hits off of, but who has seemingly lost all of his control, walking a staggering 35 guys in 34 innings pitched. What's kept the team from spiraling into a complete nose dive has been the starting pitching, which has been solid all year. Carlos Zambrano, Ted Lilly, and Ryan Dempster all have ERAs under 4.00, and Randy Wells, who pretty much came from out of nowhere, and who was originally meant as just a brief fill-in guy during Zambrano's DL stint, has an ERA under 3.00 in 8 starts. I think the Cubs' rotation is one of the best in the NL, but who knows if its going to hold up at this level, so it would certainly behoove the Cubs to get the problems elsewhere on the team sorted out sooner rather than later. An added wrinkle is the that the Tribune Company's sale of the team is going along at a sluggish pace, and current frontrunner to buy the team, Tom Rickkets is having trouble raising capital for it. As such, many have speculated that the Cubs might not have much wiggle room to add salary at the trade deadline. And so it becomes doubly important for the Cubs to try and work out their struggles from within.

New Feature... BEER!

I haven't blogged about the Cubs in a while. I'm going to try making a post in the near future, but I'm really not looking forward to it. Cubs baseball has been something of a trainwreck for a while now. In the meantime, let's metaphorically drown our sorrows by blogging about beer. I've thought about doing this for a while, because I like trying out new beers and I've been curious as to just how big a list it would be if I compiled all the beers I've sampled. At some point though, it occured to me that I basically don't know much of anything about beer. I know what I like, and what I don't like, but I don't really know anything about brewing, nor what exactly the different varieties of beer actually entrail, nor how beer is generally described by people who know what they're talking about. So I figure the best approach to this would be to basically try learning as I go, so that's what I'm going to do. As I find beers to write about, I'll try and scour the interwebs for what more seasoned drinkers have said about it, and find a little information about the style of beer and how its brewed. I'll add my own thoughts as best I can as we go along. But a lot of it isn't going to be my own thoughts whatsoever, so I'm going to try to remember linking to all the sources I'm getting this stuff from.

Let's start off with an India Pale Ale:

1. Lagunitas IPA

(Image source, via Google Images)

IPA, if you're not privvy to beer related acronyms, stands for India Pale Ale. Seeing as this is the first post on the subject, lets keep it simple from the outset and take this one step at a time. First things first,

What's an ale?

Ales are brewed with "top-fermenting" yeast, meaning that it rises to the top of whatever its being fermented in. Lagers, conversely, use "bottom-fermenting' yeast, which sinks to the bottom. Ales take less time to brew than lagers and tend to be sweeter. They're usually fermented in a range between 60 and 75 degrees fahrenheit.

Okay, so what the hell is a pale ale?

Getting the obvious part out of the way, pale ales are pale in color. Evidently, there's actually a scale for judging the color of a beer, with the very generic name "Standard Reference Method." Evidently, Pale Ales are usually 8 to 14 degrees SRM. They came into existence in the 18th century in England after brewers there began incorporating coke into the brewing process (presumably that's coke as in the byproduct of smelting, not cocaine). The usage of coke allowed a more controlled burn during the "kilning" process--drying wet grain by way of an oven--which allowed for the brewing of a paler colored beer. The darker colors of beers that were traditionally brewed at the time came as a result of the grain literally being scorced in the oven where it was kilning. Before this, it wasn't possible to brew beer with this sort of a color. About.com desribes the traditional British Pale Ale as having "a malty profile and just enough woody or lightly floral hops for balancing" Over time, other styles of pale ale have been producted elsewhere, in places such as the US, France, and Germany.

So lets put it all together now... what the hell is an India Pale Ale

India Pale Ale's are named such because they were often exported to India from London in the early days of Pale Ale brewing in London. As innovations made it possible for the beer to survive the trip there--such as the use of hops, which are natural preservatives--a large market opened up for them and the denizens of British-controlled India developed quite a taste for them. IPAs usually have a high alcohol content, from 5.5% to 7% in most modern versions, while sometimes over 8% in the old batches brewed in the 1700s. IPAs generally make use of carapil and crystal malts (see here for a description of these) and are described by the North American Brewer's Association's website as "possess[ing] a nose of perfumey alcohol, fruitiness, and malt, although newer versions frequently overshadow the malt with strong hops." The types of hops used vary from British and American styles. The American style calls for hops which project a citrus flavor, which I think I detected drinking the Lagunitas, although really what do I really know at this juncture. I've been drinking beer for a long time, but this is the first time I've thought about it nearly this much.

Getting that out of the way, lets see what people who presumably know way more than I do are saying about the Lagunitas IPA. Its sitting on a B+ overall rating on Beer Advocate and an 87 on Rate Beer. Reading individual reviews, they seem to be kind of all over the place, but if there's any consensus it seems to be that the beer has a pleasant earthy, "grassy", aroma to it, and that its very drinkable, alhtough perhaps not as flavorful as it could be. I suppose I can be confident enough in my beer-tasting palette to at least agree with the basic premise this. I'm not really one who likes to try and project some sort of aura of rugged masculinity by embibing in the strongest, heaviest beers possible. To use another term that I just learned, I'm prone to "sessinonable" beers, that are more about taste than hitting you heavy with a ton of alchohol. Lagunitas is 5.7% alchohol by volume, which is at the lower end of the range for IPAs, but IPAs are still high compared to most other pale ales. With Lagunitas, I didn't get much of a harshness from it. It was definitely a very drinkable, "sessionable' beer. I liked the taste of it, I don't know if I loved it. Its something that I would drink again and certainly wouldn't refuse if it was offered to me, but perhaps wouldn't go far out of my way to get my hands on it. I don't think I've tried enough IPAs yet to really determine if that's because I'mw just not hugely crazy about IPAs as a style, or because I didn't like Lagunita's particular take on it. Perhaps that will change in the future. We'll see.

For the next addition of this, I think I'm going to write about a beer that I've been drinking for some time now, and is probably more well known than Lagunitas: Killians Irish Red.

Sources:

Wikipedia (articles: Ale, Pale Ale, India Pale Ale, Standard Reference Method)
beer.about.com
North American Brewer's Association

Wall-E

Wall-E (****)

Despite how much many of them seem to be universally loved, for the most part I've avoided the big animated movies that have come out of Pixar and Dreamworks in recent years. I don't really know why. I certainly can't say that I consider them beneath me, being "kid's stuff", because I spent a significant portion of my Memorial Day watching the Teen Titans marathon on Boomerang. But all the praise for Wall-E, from every age group, was too difficult to ignore, and I finally got around to watching it a couple of weeks ago. It really is one of the best American animated movies I've ever seen, and certainly one of the smartest, and not in a "how many pop culture references can we find a way for the furry animal characters to say" sort of way. It doesn't try and present itself on two different levels, one for kids and one for adults--like if a cartoon walrus puts on a pair of dark sunglasses and a baseball cap and starts rapping so all the adults can say "Oh I get it, he's like the black guy of the animal world! I can suddenly identify with these made up cartoon animals!". It just is what it is, and its something that anyone can appreciate.

A big thing that separates Wall-E from what's become the prototypical CGI animated movie is that it doesn't feel like it has to move at a mile-a-minute pace. For quite a while, the title character is the only character on screen. Wall-E--who looks a little bit like the R.O.B. robot that Nintendo created back in the '80s and brought back in viritual form for the last Smash Bros. game--has been tasked with cleaning up the massive piles of garbage which have littered the entire earth. While the work is done, all of humanity (I think? Maybe it was just all of America) is living aboard a giant mothership adrift in space on what is supposed to be a five year "cruise." The project is much more work than they estimated, however, and over time most of Wall-E's robotic companions have broken down, leaving him alone to endlessly build towers out of little cubes of garbage. Wall-E has enough of a human personality to get bored and lonely, and so he spends his downtime collecting random trinkets that he deems worthy to not be lumped in with the rest of the trash in an old cooler and watches VHS tapes of old musicals. Except for the lyrics of said musicals, and a still-working video billboard in which the President at the time of everyone's exodus from Earth, played by a real-life, in the flesh Fred Willard, explains how super great and awesome everything is going to be during their short jaunt into outer space, there's no spoken dialogue whatsover for probably the first third of the movie. Its quite an unusual move for a such a big, Hollywood, family movie, but the filmmaker's realized that it was simply unnecessary. The story is told simply and clearly through the movie's visuals, and we become indered to Wall-E through all of his various little mannerisms. Words would have just cluttered up the brilliant simplicity of the whole thing.

The main plot gets into motion when Wall-E's solitude is broken up one day when a much sleeker looknig robot with a female voice rockets down to earth. Her name is Eva, and she's searching for plant-life for reasons initially unbeknownst to us and to Wall-E. Initially she is focused only on her directive, and actually tries on a couple of occasions to blow up Wall-E with the obnoxiously powerful laser gun she's equipped with for some reason. Wall-E, however, wins her over eventually by sheltering her in his big tank-like home during a sandstorm, and dancing around to the tune of old musicals using a trashcan lid as a top hat. Eventually, Eva's mission takes them to the mothership of the starfleet drifting out in space, where the social commentary becomes even less subtle. Apparently hundreds of years with nothing to do except shop for whatever the myriad video screens abord the ship tell them to has caused humankind to degenerate into pudgy fatsos who ride on hoverchairs everywhere and whose muscles are too atrophied for them to walk anywhere. We meet the captain of the fatsos, voiced by Jeff Garlin, who doesn't seem to actually know much about being a captain, because most everything on the ship is completely autonomous. He hasn't completely lost the human spirit though, and evenutally finds himself in a 2001-esque rebellion against the ship's computers.

Even after we get to this point of the plot though, the movie isn't all this overt. Its not as silent as the opening of the film, but we get a lot of funny, yet weirdly poigniant moments, like a scene in which Wall-E has to catch up to Eva floating through space, so he shoots a fire extinguisher to propel him in the opposite direction, and we watch him glide around as little specks of foam drift away. There are a lot of moments like that, and its because of moments like that that the movie sets itself apart from most other animated movies. Its heartfelt, without seeming like a Hallmark card. The characters can express themselves without bursting into spontaneous singing and dancing with Randy Newman lyrics. A tremendously fun movie.