Up in the Air (****)
Jason Reitman's two previous movies, Thank You For Smoking and Juno, are both very good movies--In the case of Juno, I liked it enough to call it my favorite movie of '07 here--but pretty different ones. Smoking was a bitingly cynical look at the tobacco debate and the lobbying industry, while Juno was a warmer movie about growing up. According to IMDB, Reitman has actually been working on Up in the Air, based on a novel of the same name, since before either of the other two movies were made. I think he was well advised to wait before making this movie, firstly because there are elements from both of his previous two movies that can be seen at work in Up in the Air, and secondly because the movie is especially prescient during a time when the country is still trying to get out of the worst recession since the great depression. My initial impression is that it's a better movie than Juno, and it might be my favorite movie of 2009, which would make two Reitman movies at #1 on my list in a three year span.
Our protagonist is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who is a "transitional specialist" which, when you translate that, means his job is to travel around the country firing people when they don't want to deal with the unpleasantness of firings themselves. The job is dressed up somewhat. He's equipped with handy informational packets and he lets every soon to be ex-employee that he'll be in touch in the future (except he really won't), but when you strip down the corporate veneer of it, ultimately the reality is that he spends his time telling people that they have to pack up their stuff and get the hell out. The character of Ryan Bingham has some elements of Aaron Eckhart's character from Thank Your for Smoking in that he seems to be flourishing in a job in which he's routinely hated because of it, as well as the title character in Michael Clayton, not a Reitman movie but also a George Clooney role, in that he's sort of the corporate go-to guy for dirty work (in this case, it's really more just "unpleasant work", whereas in Clayton it was more like trying to make crimes go away). Being farmed out to whatever company happens to be laying people off at the time means Bingham spends most of his time flying around the country--up in the air. Many would find such a life stressful, but not Bingham. He fetishises his stockpile of frequent flyer miles--one of the biggest ever accumulated--and all of his preferred customer cards from every airline, rental car company, and hotel he's ever used, always made out of some very important looking material. He's not bothered by not being able to spend more time with his family because he doesn't have one, and doesn't plan on it. In his spare time he even gives motivation speeches selling this lifestyle on the basis that people are meant to be "movers." He calls it "What's in Your Backpack?" and asks his audience to imagine all the people and things in their lives weighing them down as they try and walk.
Things are going pretty well for Bingham at the outset of the movie. With the country mired in recession, his boss (Jason Bateman) excitedly declares "this is our time!" He even meets Alex (Vera Fermiga), a woman with a similar lifestyle of near-permanent travel and, seemingly, an apathy for anything more serious than a casual relationship. Bingham runs into a bit of an issue, though, when his company hires Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), an energetic and determined young woman fresh out of college, who tries to prove her worth by introducing the concept of firing people via webcam to eliminate travel costs. With his attachment-free, never-stand-still lifestyle threatened, Bingham tries to convince his boss that this is a bad idea and that the nature of their job necessitates face-to-face interaction. His boss is unconvinced, but to try and appease
Bingham, he tells him that while the new system is being set up, he can take Natalie to jobs across the country to show her the ropes of the job. Natalie is a quick study, and knows inside and out what psychology textbooks say people want to hear when they get fired. When things get heated, Bingham gently explains to her that when someone is fighting back tears opining that they're not going to have money for their house payments, pointing out that studies show that "career transitions" can have a positive mental effect probably isn't going to put them at ease. Reitman filmed a whole bunch of scenes of people reacting to the news that they've been fired. Some of them are shown in little clips in montages, others extend out a bit, including one with Reitman movie mainstay J.K. Simmons, who initially is an especially hard sell
Most of the middle part of the movie is Ryan and Natalie bouncing around the country, with Ryan stopping to hook up with Alex whenever possible. The end of the movie has two important scenes: one where Ryan shows up in the middle of Wisconsin for his sisters wedding and has to confront the rest of his family that he's ignored over the years in favor of work, and another where Ryan discovers something that creates a major obstacle to his ultra-casual, carefree relationship with Alex. The movie runs the gamut of emotions, from laugh-out-loud funny, to very somber. All of it feels is not only compelling but feels very genuine, which was one of the biggest strengths of Reitman's Juno. It never goes out of it's way to pull on your emotions one way or another, it flows naturally from the story. Up in the Air works on a lot of levels. It's a timely piece documenting the effects of a struggling economy, and also a character study of a man trying to live as a nomad in a society where most people tie themselves down. Jason Reitman has been three for three thus far in making his movies interesting and thought provoking. Hopefully he stays hot. This is one of the best movies of '09.
*****
A couple of other quickies:
District 9 (***1/2)
An interesting sci-fi movie from newcomer Neill Blomkamp, who got the gig from producer Peter Jackson after working with him on the Halo movie that never materialized. Filmed in the style of a documentary, the beginning of the movie sets up the premise of aliens living in a slum in South Africa after their ship traveled to earth, but then seems to run out of juice while some sort of a virus kills much of its crew, leaving it hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. The slum, bearing the titular name of "District 9", is controlled by an international corporation and guarded by PMCs, although at ground level, much of the influence within the slum is actually in the hands of Nigerian gangs, who make money off of scamming the aliens in various ways, and who are convinced they can gain the aliens' power through magical rituals. Our hero and protagonist, Wikus Van Der Merwe, generally wants to help the stranded "prawns", as they're nicknamed, but his higer-ups have ulterior motives, like trying to learn how humans can use the alien weapons, which is synchronized with their genetic structure and thus can't be fired by human hands.
When trying to lead a team sent in to relocate the aliens out of the slums to a new camp set up by the corporation, Wikus stumbles upon a vial of black fluid and when he gets exposed to it, it begins to transform him into a hybrid between human and prawn, turning him into a fugitive from his former employers, who want to use him as a medical experiment to try and unlock the prawns' bio-tech. There's a lot of big action set pieces at the end of the movie with the prawns and the PMCs, but it never feels gratuitous and doesn't overshadow the larger story. Because it takes place in South Africa, many see the movie as a metaphor for apartheid. It's certainly easy to see why, though there are many more movies who deal with issues of prejudice in a much more heavy-handed and forced way as District 9, and the smart writing and the knowledge of South African culture and demographics that the filmmakers show gives it a lot of credibility. Even if you don't care about any of the moral issues in it, it's a fun sci-fi movie.
Extract (**1/2)
An entertaining, but somewhat disappointing movie from Mike Judge, (of Bevis and Butthead and Office Space fame) starring Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of an extract factory. Concerned that the passion has gone out of his marriage, and trying to deal with a lawsuit brought on by an employee who was injured in a region that you really don't want to be injured in, Joel takes a lot of bad advice from his bartender (Ben Affleck), who fancies himself as something of a wise shaman, but who is basically just an odd dude in possession of a lot of drugs. It has it's moments, but doesn't have anything anywhere near as the best scenes in Office Space and doesn't have any characters as memorable as Lumburgh or Milton. The funniest scenes are probably those involving David Koechner (Champ from Anchorman) as the quintessential neighbor who won't go away, in the proud tradition of Flanders from "Simpsons." Creating characters like him is what Judge is best at, he just does a lot more of it in Office Space than in Extract.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Can Has Huge Materia?
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 21:26-27:23
Yeah, it's been a good chunk of time since I've posted. In the meantime, I've done the Corel, Ft. Condor, and Underwater Reactor huge materia quests, as well as the Wutai sidequest where Yuffie steals your materia (what a bitch). Wutai is a fun little distraction. I kind of wish there was more of it. I can go back later of course to do the quest to get the Leviathan materia. Running into the Turks on vacation is amusing, as is the confrontation with Don Coreno when he does his little bit where he asks you a question and then gets it turned around on him as he's hanging off a cliff.
Fort Condor is just completely obnoxious, another mini-game that I could completely do without. I've never actually won it without having to fight the boss, and I don't really care enough to try. The sub minigame after the underwater reactor is less annoying, but it's really damn easy. You don't really have to do much sub hunting. The red sub spawns right in front of you and usually you can catch up to it in a couple seconds and start mashing square. I actually got killed by the Carry Armor boss in the Underwater Reactor. That goofy-ass looking lanky robot is one of the tougher boss fights in the game. His lapis laser attack does something like 1500 damage to everybody, and he can keep a party member held in each arm to take them out of battle. So you have to destroy the arms fast. I managed to use Morph on the ghost ship enemy (and by the way, why are you fighting a floating pirate ship with a skeleton on it in a hallway anyway), so I have the Guide Book for the Underwater Materia later on.
On a related note, last weekend I went to the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert at the Rosemont theater. It was excellent. Nobuo Uematsu was in attendance and performed on an amazing rock version of "One Winged Angel" at the end of the concert. In terms of FF7, they also played Aerith's Theme and the Opening/Bombing Mission track. They're going to be back in Chicago again on August 1st, 2010 with the CSO. I looking forward to going again.
Playtime: 21:26-27:23
Yeah, it's been a good chunk of time since I've posted. In the meantime, I've done the Corel, Ft. Condor, and Underwater Reactor huge materia quests, as well as the Wutai sidequest where Yuffie steals your materia (what a bitch). Wutai is a fun little distraction. I kind of wish there was more of it. I can go back later of course to do the quest to get the Leviathan materia. Running into the Turks on vacation is amusing, as is the confrontation with Don Coreno when he does his little bit where he asks you a question and then gets it turned around on him as he's hanging off a cliff.
Fort Condor is just completely obnoxious, another mini-game that I could completely do without. I've never actually won it without having to fight the boss, and I don't really care enough to try. The sub minigame after the underwater reactor is less annoying, but it's really damn easy. You don't really have to do much sub hunting. The red sub spawns right in front of you and usually you can catch up to it in a couple seconds and start mashing square. I actually got killed by the Carry Armor boss in the Underwater Reactor. That goofy-ass looking lanky robot is one of the tougher boss fights in the game. His lapis laser attack does something like 1500 damage to everybody, and he can keep a party member held in each arm to take them out of battle. So you have to destroy the arms fast. I managed to use Morph on the ghost ship enemy (and by the way, why are you fighting a floating pirate ship with a skeleton on it in a hallway anyway), so I have the Guide Book for the Underwater Materia later on.
On a related note, last weekend I went to the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert at the Rosemont theater. It was excellent. Nobuo Uematsu was in attendance and performed on an amazing rock version of "One Winged Angel" at the end of the concert. In terms of FF7, they also played Aerith's Theme and the Opening/Bombing Mission track. They're going to be back in Chicago again on August 1st, 2010 with the CSO. I looking forward to going again.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Cowboy Bebop Session #4: Gateway Shuffle
Session 4: Gateway Shuffle
"You Know what they say, cowboy, 'easy come, easy go.'"
"They also say, 'no honor among thieves.'"
"Jet is she sayin' what I think she's sayin, 'cause if she is..."
"I don't know and I have no opinion."
"She's takin' a shower in our shower. That's not okay, right?"
"Don't know and have no opinion."
We open the episode with Faye stranded; out of gas orbiting Jupiter. Looking for someone to bail her out, she picks up the signal of a wrecked ship. Jet and Spike, meanwhile, are at work, staking out their next target at an upscale restaurant. Jet makes what I believe is one of the first references to the gate disaster that happens some years before the series begins, which killed a bunch of people. Jet puts on a pair of sunglasses with computerized spy lenses that let him zoom in on their target and match what he looks like to his real face. Apparently in the future changing your face is pretty easy, as we already saw Abdul-Hakim do it in Stray Dog Strut. There's kind of an interesting shot, briefly, where we see a reflection of Spike in Jet's lenses--his false eyes. Spike, as we learn later, has a false eye himself. The guy they're watching, Morgan, looks like something out of Lupin the Third, sporting a big pompadour. He orders the sea-rat sautee, drawing the ire of the eco-terrorists, the Space Warriors dining next to him. They don sea-rat masks and open fire on him and his lady friends. They call their leader "mom," just like the lackeys of Mom from Mom's Friendly Robot Company from Futurama (they seem to be almost as inept sometimes). Jet remembers that she has a huge bounty on her head and Spike manages to stop her at gunpoint while her minions pile into the elevator.
Back to Faye, who finds a man dying amid the debris of his ship. He hands her something and tells her to hand it over to the ISSP--the police. On board the Bebop, Jet and Spike have "Mom", aka "Twinkle" Maria Murdock tied up. Jet gives a bit more exposition about the group, and that there's a bit of an issue. For some reason the Ganymede police (fyi, Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter) dropped the bounty on her yesterday. Are Spike and Jet shit out of luck again? Returning again to Faye, who opens the case to find a tiny little device inside. "Bebop" is full of little, insignificant looking, things that end up serving as the MacGuffin for the episode. Last episode we had the poker chip, and later in the series a chess piece will be important. At the Space Warriors headquarters, we learn that the police have canceled the bounty on "Mom" at the demands of the remaining Space Warriors who seem to have an ace up their sleeves: they're going to release a virus on Ganymede. Faye manages to contact Spike and Jet. They decide to bail her out, but handcuff her aboard the ship. Spike pulls out the mystery device from a random pile of Faye's stuff. Maria Murdock sees it and seems to know what it is.
Jet contacts one of his old acquaintances in the police, who begrudgingly tells him that the reason they canceled the bounty because of the threat to release the virus. Spike tries to break whatever the device Faye has open, and eventually shoots it and manages to free the tiny diamond shape in the center of it from the rest of it. Jet enters and tells Spike that they have no choice but to let Murdock go. Murdock contacts the Ganymede government and is apparently unsatisfied with their concession to limit, but not prohibit, the harvesting of sea-rats. They're still going to release the virus. Ganymede tries to intercept the Space Warriors' ship, but they find a decoy instead, Spike manages to find the real ship in hyperspace, but not before they release the virus, which we now see turns humans back into monkeys. Spike takes off in his red ship to try and intercept the missile carrying the vitus. Faye, meanwhile, has broken out of her cuffs and is gassing up her own ship. The missile splits into three separate parts. Spike gets two of the three but can't get to the last one. Faye can, and agrees to destroy it... for a cut of the bounty. As the Joker would say, "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
"Mom's" plan is foiled. To make matters worse, the tiny little diamond vial--she stole it from Spike on her way off the Bebop--falls out of her pocket and smashes against the wall of the ship. It was a vial of the virus, giving the ending of the episode a nice little "Frankenstein destroyed by his own creation" sort of flavor. Once again, though, Spike and Jet come up empty as far as bounty is concerned. Quelle surprise. Faye says "we'll do better the next time," apparently naming herself a member of the Bebop crew. So the episode ends with three fourths of the eventual crew in place (or I guess four-fifths if you want to count Ein).
This is another episode that shows just how brilliantly written "Bebop" is. The entire Space Warriors plot is a lot to get through in 25 minutes, while there's simultaneously a subplot to bring Faye back together with Spike and Jet. Yet they manage to make it compelling, and to establish the Space Warriors as bizarrely fascinating villains in that time, while not having it feel rushed at all. Next up we start getting into the meat of the series and the first appearance of Vicious.
"You Know what they say, cowboy, 'easy come, easy go.'"
"They also say, 'no honor among thieves.'"
"Jet is she sayin' what I think she's sayin, 'cause if she is..."
"I don't know and I have no opinion."
"She's takin' a shower in our shower. That's not okay, right?"
"Don't know and have no opinion."
We open the episode with Faye stranded; out of gas orbiting Jupiter. Looking for someone to bail her out, she picks up the signal of a wrecked ship. Jet and Spike, meanwhile, are at work, staking out their next target at an upscale restaurant. Jet makes what I believe is one of the first references to the gate disaster that happens some years before the series begins, which killed a bunch of people. Jet puts on a pair of sunglasses with computerized spy lenses that let him zoom in on their target and match what he looks like to his real face. Apparently in the future changing your face is pretty easy, as we already saw Abdul-Hakim do it in Stray Dog Strut. There's kind of an interesting shot, briefly, where we see a reflection of Spike in Jet's lenses--his false eyes. Spike, as we learn later, has a false eye himself. The guy they're watching, Morgan, looks like something out of Lupin the Third, sporting a big pompadour. He orders the sea-rat sautee, drawing the ire of the eco-terrorists, the Space Warriors dining next to him. They don sea-rat masks and open fire on him and his lady friends. They call their leader "mom," just like the lackeys of Mom from Mom's Friendly Robot Company from Futurama (they seem to be almost as inept sometimes). Jet remembers that she has a huge bounty on her head and Spike manages to stop her at gunpoint while her minions pile into the elevator.
Back to Faye, who finds a man dying amid the debris of his ship. He hands her something and tells her to hand it over to the ISSP--the police. On board the Bebop, Jet and Spike have "Mom", aka "Twinkle" Maria Murdock tied up. Jet gives a bit more exposition about the group, and that there's a bit of an issue. For some reason the Ganymede police (fyi, Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter) dropped the bounty on her yesterday. Are Spike and Jet shit out of luck again? Returning again to Faye, who opens the case to find a tiny little device inside. "Bebop" is full of little, insignificant looking, things that end up serving as the MacGuffin for the episode. Last episode we had the poker chip, and later in the series a chess piece will be important. At the Space Warriors headquarters, we learn that the police have canceled the bounty on "Mom" at the demands of the remaining Space Warriors who seem to have an ace up their sleeves: they're going to release a virus on Ganymede. Faye manages to contact Spike and Jet. They decide to bail her out, but handcuff her aboard the ship. Spike pulls out the mystery device from a random pile of Faye's stuff. Maria Murdock sees it and seems to know what it is.
Jet contacts one of his old acquaintances in the police, who begrudgingly tells him that the reason they canceled the bounty because of the threat to release the virus. Spike tries to break whatever the device Faye has open, and eventually shoots it and manages to free the tiny diamond shape in the center of it from the rest of it. Jet enters and tells Spike that they have no choice but to let Murdock go. Murdock contacts the Ganymede government and is apparently unsatisfied with their concession to limit, but not prohibit, the harvesting of sea-rats. They're still going to release the virus. Ganymede tries to intercept the Space Warriors' ship, but they find a decoy instead, Spike manages to find the real ship in hyperspace, but not before they release the virus, which we now see turns humans back into monkeys. Spike takes off in his red ship to try and intercept the missile carrying the vitus. Faye, meanwhile, has broken out of her cuffs and is gassing up her own ship. The missile splits into three separate parts. Spike gets two of the three but can't get to the last one. Faye can, and agrees to destroy it... for a cut of the bounty. As the Joker would say, "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
"Mom's" plan is foiled. To make matters worse, the tiny little diamond vial--she stole it from Spike on her way off the Bebop--falls out of her pocket and smashes against the wall of the ship. It was a vial of the virus, giving the ending of the episode a nice little "Frankenstein destroyed by his own creation" sort of flavor. Once again, though, Spike and Jet come up empty as far as bounty is concerned. Quelle surprise. Faye says "we'll do better the next time," apparently naming herself a member of the Bebop crew. So the episode ends with three fourths of the eventual crew in place (or I guess four-fifths if you want to count Ein).
This is another episode that shows just how brilliantly written "Bebop" is. The entire Space Warriors plot is a lot to get through in 25 minutes, while there's simultaneously a subplot to bring Faye back together with Spike and Jet. Yet they manage to make it compelling, and to establish the Space Warriors as bizarrely fascinating villains in that time, while not having it feel rushed at all. Next up we start getting into the meat of the series and the first appearance of Vicious.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Please Insert Disc 2
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 18:24-21:26
One of the reasons why I think FF7 is one of the easier FF games is how easy they go on you with respect to status effects. Except for the two that effect your limit breaks, Fury and Sadness, all of the others only effect you for a single battle. Poison can be absolutely brutal in some of the SNES games, while here, I usually don't even bother to cure it since I can most assuredly end the fight before it kills the character and it'll then be gone. The start of disc 2 throws marlboros at you as one of the possibilities in random battles. They're the bane of every FF players' extistence, but they're really not all that difficult to deal with here compared to a lot of the other games. It also helps that I already have a Ribbon on one character at this point. While its nice not having to sift through menus after battles to try and find whatever cure item matches up with the status affliction you need to take off, I wish there was a bit more challenge in this regard.
A lot of the snow area at the start of disc 2 just annoys me. The snowboarding minigame is nigh impossible to control, long, frustrating, and just generally weird. It also makes me want to play Snowboard Kids on N64, a snowboarding game that's actually fun to play from the same era. The whole Great Glacier area where you have a map with different landmarks and spend a lot of time running along paths between them, is uninteresting and tedious to me. Then there's the whole "climb up the side of this mountain and stop at every overhang and mash square to warm yourself up again" thing. Fairly mind-numbing. The two-headed monster thing you fight at the end is genuinely a pretty tough fight though. It can mess you up pretty good with its final attack. I'm saved at the first save point down in the Great Crater, glad to be out of the snow, and anxious to get on with the main story again.
Playtime 18:24-21:26
One of the reasons why I think FF7 is one of the easier FF games is how easy they go on you with respect to status effects. Except for the two that effect your limit breaks, Fury and Sadness, all of the others only effect you for a single battle. Poison can be absolutely brutal in some of the SNES games, while here, I usually don't even bother to cure it since I can most assuredly end the fight before it kills the character and it'll then be gone. The start of disc 2 throws marlboros at you as one of the possibilities in random battles. They're the bane of every FF players' extistence, but they're really not all that difficult to deal with here compared to a lot of the other games. It also helps that I already have a Ribbon on one character at this point. While its nice not having to sift through menus after battles to try and find whatever cure item matches up with the status affliction you need to take off, I wish there was a bit more challenge in this regard.
A lot of the snow area at the start of disc 2 just annoys me. The snowboarding minigame is nigh impossible to control, long, frustrating, and just generally weird. It also makes me want to play Snowboard Kids on N64, a snowboarding game that's actually fun to play from the same era. The whole Great Glacier area where you have a map with different landmarks and spend a lot of time running along paths between them, is uninteresting and tedious to me. Then there's the whole "climb up the side of this mountain and stop at every overhang and mash square to warm yourself up again" thing. Fairly mind-numbing. The two-headed monster thing you fight at the end is genuinely a pretty tough fight though. It can mess you up pretty good with its final attack. I'm saved at the first save point down in the Great Crater, glad to be out of the snow, and anxious to get on with the main story again.
The Wrestler
The Wrestler (***1/2)
The three films that Darren Aronofsky has directed previously, in order: are Pi, about a mathematician who becomes convinced that he's discovered the key to all patterns in nature and goes insane, Requiem for a Dream, about four people who all abuse drugs and consequently pretty much go insane, and The Fountain, which I haven't seen yet, but which I think involves time travel and probably at some point, somebody going insane. As such, his newest film, The Wrestler, a character-driven piece about a washed up profession wrestler with no real heady philosophy or psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, might seem a bit out of place. When you really think about it though, professional wrestling is perhaps not that much less strange a concept than chaos theory or the fountain of youth. On any given day all over the world there are wrestling shows going on where real people sustain real injuries, hit each other with real blunt objects, take steroids to bulk up and then take pain killers to recover, all so they can fight in matches with predetermined outcomes. There was a time in my testosterone-filled tween-age years when I was really into wrestling, and while I can't get the same sort of enjoyment out of the whole spectacle now, I have to admit that every once in a while when I catch it on TV I'll still stop on it for a while and observe it with some level of curiosity. Its kind of this weird form of performance art that's never going to look perfectly real because, well, its scripted, and the script is usually pretty obvious, and yet every night an audience which is perfectly aware that its scripted will come out and get incredibly in to the whole thing. It really is a pretty weird phenomenon, especially the (real) blood-soaked "extreme" brand that is by-and-large what's depicted in the movie.
The Wrestler takes us into the life of Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Robinson is his stage last name, not his given one, which he seems to despite for reasons that aren't fully articulated. He was once at the top of the wrestling world, as shown in a fleeting montage of memorabilia during the opening credits. 20 years later, the spotlight has long passed him by, but he's still wrestling in little indie circuits where he fights in high school gymnasiums and hotel lobbies to get paid in a little roll of cash at the end of the night. He still has a decent amount of prestige amongst the small clique of other wrestlers relegated to small-time gigs, who shake his hand and tell him how much they respect him backstage before going out to the ring and staple gunning staples into his chest. Outside of his professional life, though, he's pretty much alone in the world. On weekdays he works doing grunt work at a grocery store and gets mocked by his boss ("What you want more hours? Did they raise the price of tights?"), and his college-aged daughter despises him for his not much caring about her when she was growing up. Perhaps his closest friends are the kids roaming about the trailer park that he lives in, who he can occasionally convince to play his original Nintendo, though while they're playing they ask if Randy knows about the new Call of Duty game. The money Randy doesn't spend on rent and steroids seems mostly to go towards beer at his favorite strip club, where he always goes to see Cassidy (Marissa Tomei), an aging single mom still working as a stripper to provide for her son. Business is hard to come by for Cassidy, surrounded by much younger women (there's something of a suspension of disbelief required here, because Marissa Tomei still looks pretty damn attractive), and she sort of flirts with a pseudo-relationship with Randy, being a fellow relic of a bygone era still lingering around.
After a particularly brutal match, Randy passes out and wakes up in the hospital. He had a heart attack and almost died, his doctor explains, and if he continues to wrestle he probably is going to die. This presents for Randy both a long-term problem, because he really doesn't know what to do with his life, if not wrestle, and a short-term problem because Randy was set for a historic rematch against "The Ayatollah", a "heel" (a.k.a. villain) that he had a big rivalry with in his glory days. Randy tries to move on in his life by working more hours at the supermarket, trying to make amends with his daughter, and trying to start a real relationship going beyond strip club employee/strip club patron with Cassidy. He has some successes in this efforts, but also failures, sometimes spectacular ones. Eventually, he finds himself being drawn again to the only thing he's really known, wrestling, even being fully aware that it might kill him. Lest you question the realism of this, consider that WWE wrestler "Umaga" just died at the age of 36.
Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and got nominated at the Oscars for Best Actor, and he is indeed excellent. I don't know if he exactly has any soliloquies that are going to be remembered for decades or anything. His character is pretty quiet, and its a pretty quiet movie in general. He nevertheless does a fantastic job of embodying the character. The wrestling scenes look genuine, the toll his character takes is palpable, and he does an excellent job of wearing the emotional and physical strain of the character on his face. Marissa Tomei and Even Rachel Wood, Randy's daughter, are both good in their roles as well. The movie's ending is ambiguous and somewhat unsatisfying. It dodges the chance for a cheesy, feel good ending along the lines of the end of Rocky, which is of course a good thing. Part of me wanted more closure for Randy, though. I'm certainly not against ambiguous endings, some of my favorite movies have them. Is Randy capable of changing, or is his fate to keep wresting and isolating people until it kills him? The movie shows us some hints that both may be true. I wanted to see if we could get a definitive answer.
Even with the ending exactly as it is, Aranovski's film works as a compelling human drama. It also works as a sort of pseudo-documentary--and maybe a criticism, or condemnation--of the wrestling industry. The Wrestler's writer, Robert Siegel, obviously knows the sport (or the performance, whatever you want to call it) well; all the pagentry of it, as well as the underside of it. Randy's adversary, The Ayatollah is played by the old WCW wrestler the cat, and without digging through IMDB to be sure, I imagine several of the other actors were real wrestlers as well. As I said at the top of this, wrestling is an odd phenomenon, and The Wrestler is an excellent portrait of a man who's been beaten up for the sake of it, in more ways than one. It so happens that Randy is a fictional character, but any wrestling aficionado likely knows at least several actual wrestlers with almost the same life track.
The three films that Darren Aronofsky has directed previously, in order: are Pi, about a mathematician who becomes convinced that he's discovered the key to all patterns in nature and goes insane, Requiem for a Dream, about four people who all abuse drugs and consequently pretty much go insane, and The Fountain, which I haven't seen yet, but which I think involves time travel and probably at some point, somebody going insane. As such, his newest film, The Wrestler, a character-driven piece about a washed up profession wrestler with no real heady philosophy or psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, might seem a bit out of place. When you really think about it though, professional wrestling is perhaps not that much less strange a concept than chaos theory or the fountain of youth. On any given day all over the world there are wrestling shows going on where real people sustain real injuries, hit each other with real blunt objects, take steroids to bulk up and then take pain killers to recover, all so they can fight in matches with predetermined outcomes. There was a time in my testosterone-filled tween-age years when I was really into wrestling, and while I can't get the same sort of enjoyment out of the whole spectacle now, I have to admit that every once in a while when I catch it on TV I'll still stop on it for a while and observe it with some level of curiosity. Its kind of this weird form of performance art that's never going to look perfectly real because, well, its scripted, and the script is usually pretty obvious, and yet every night an audience which is perfectly aware that its scripted will come out and get incredibly in to the whole thing. It really is a pretty weird phenomenon, especially the (real) blood-soaked "extreme" brand that is by-and-large what's depicted in the movie.
The Wrestler takes us into the life of Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Robinson is his stage last name, not his given one, which he seems to despite for reasons that aren't fully articulated. He was once at the top of the wrestling world, as shown in a fleeting montage of memorabilia during the opening credits. 20 years later, the spotlight has long passed him by, but he's still wrestling in little indie circuits where he fights in high school gymnasiums and hotel lobbies to get paid in a little roll of cash at the end of the night. He still has a decent amount of prestige amongst the small clique of other wrestlers relegated to small-time gigs, who shake his hand and tell him how much they respect him backstage before going out to the ring and staple gunning staples into his chest. Outside of his professional life, though, he's pretty much alone in the world. On weekdays he works doing grunt work at a grocery store and gets mocked by his boss ("What you want more hours? Did they raise the price of tights?"), and his college-aged daughter despises him for his not much caring about her when she was growing up. Perhaps his closest friends are the kids roaming about the trailer park that he lives in, who he can occasionally convince to play his original Nintendo, though while they're playing they ask if Randy knows about the new Call of Duty game. The money Randy doesn't spend on rent and steroids seems mostly to go towards beer at his favorite strip club, where he always goes to see Cassidy (Marissa Tomei), an aging single mom still working as a stripper to provide for her son. Business is hard to come by for Cassidy, surrounded by much younger women (there's something of a suspension of disbelief required here, because Marissa Tomei still looks pretty damn attractive), and she sort of flirts with a pseudo-relationship with Randy, being a fellow relic of a bygone era still lingering around.
After a particularly brutal match, Randy passes out and wakes up in the hospital. He had a heart attack and almost died, his doctor explains, and if he continues to wrestle he probably is going to die. This presents for Randy both a long-term problem, because he really doesn't know what to do with his life, if not wrestle, and a short-term problem because Randy was set for a historic rematch against "The Ayatollah", a "heel" (a.k.a. villain) that he had a big rivalry with in his glory days. Randy tries to move on in his life by working more hours at the supermarket, trying to make amends with his daughter, and trying to start a real relationship going beyond strip club employee/strip club patron with Cassidy. He has some successes in this efforts, but also failures, sometimes spectacular ones. Eventually, he finds himself being drawn again to the only thing he's really known, wrestling, even being fully aware that it might kill him. Lest you question the realism of this, consider that WWE wrestler "Umaga" just died at the age of 36.
Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and got nominated at the Oscars for Best Actor, and he is indeed excellent. I don't know if he exactly has any soliloquies that are going to be remembered for decades or anything. His character is pretty quiet, and its a pretty quiet movie in general. He nevertheless does a fantastic job of embodying the character. The wrestling scenes look genuine, the toll his character takes is palpable, and he does an excellent job of wearing the emotional and physical strain of the character on his face. Marissa Tomei and Even Rachel Wood, Randy's daughter, are both good in their roles as well. The movie's ending is ambiguous and somewhat unsatisfying. It dodges the chance for a cheesy, feel good ending along the lines of the end of Rocky, which is of course a good thing. Part of me wanted more closure for Randy, though. I'm certainly not against ambiguous endings, some of my favorite movies have them. Is Randy capable of changing, or is his fate to keep wresting and isolating people until it kills him? The movie shows us some hints that both may be true. I wanted to see if we could get a definitive answer.
Even with the ending exactly as it is, Aranovski's film works as a compelling human drama. It also works as a sort of pseudo-documentary--and maybe a criticism, or condemnation--of the wrestling industry. The Wrestler's writer, Robert Siegel, obviously knows the sport (or the performance, whatever you want to call it) well; all the pagentry of it, as well as the underside of it. Randy's adversary, The Ayatollah is played by the old WCW wrestler the cat, and without digging through IMDB to be sure, I imagine several of the other actors were real wrestlers as well. As I said at the top of this, wrestling is an odd phenomenon, and The Wrestler is an excellent portrait of a man who's been beaten up for the sake of it, in more ways than one. It so happens that Randy is a fictional character, but any wrestling aficionado likely knows at least several actual wrestlers with almost the same life track.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Why Does That Wall Hate Me?
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 16:38-18:24
The "Demon Wall" boss appears in at least one other game that I'm aware of, that being FF4, and you get it again here at the end of the Temple of the Ancients. The FF4 boss is much more sadistic, and you pretty much have to throw the kitchen sink at it and down it in a couple of turns or else your whole party gets crushed to death. FF7's version can hit you pretty hard, but you have much more time to deal with it. Really, the entire Temple of the Ancients was a lot easier than I remembered. Granted, I'm probably a little bit overleveled right now. The end of disc 1 throws a ton of goodies your way. In the big clock area of the temple you can pick up a Ribbon, essentially negating status effects for one of your characters. After fighting Sephiroth's big-ass dragon friend that is inexplicably hanging out at the center of the temple, you get the first Bahamut materia. And on your way into the Sleeping Forest, you get the Kajata summon, the big plus of which is the fact that it's considered Fire, Ice, and Lightning elemental, so equipping it to your armor linked with elemental grants you immunity from all of those. I put both the Ribbon and the Kajata-Elemental combo on Cloud, so right now he's immune to all status effects, and all three of the most common elemental attacks. Not too shabby.
The whole sequence with Cait Sith going into the temple to get the black materia is just sort of weird. I'm not sure if it was intended to be funny, but it is. When he's skipping down the hallway in slow-motion, falls, gets up, and does his little jig for no reason I laugh every time. I'm a bit perplexed by Aeris's whole explanation about having to solve a series of "puzzles" to get the black materia. I don't know if this is a weird translation or if there was some sort of a minigame that you did with Cait Sith that they decided to scrap, but it basically seems like he just kind of runs up and grabs it (and does a jig). There's no puzzles involved. Kind of odd. The little excavation minigame is a cool idea as well, although I think it would make a lot more sense if it were a bigger area. You can deploy up to 5 of the diggers, but its hard to really find space for more than two together on either the upper or lower level. Not really that much to it ultimately.
Anyway, the City of the Ancients is next, and the end of disc 1. Bad things are going to happen to Aries.
Playtime 16:38-18:24
The "Demon Wall" boss appears in at least one other game that I'm aware of, that being FF4, and you get it again here at the end of the Temple of the Ancients. The FF4 boss is much more sadistic, and you pretty much have to throw the kitchen sink at it and down it in a couple of turns or else your whole party gets crushed to death. FF7's version can hit you pretty hard, but you have much more time to deal with it. Really, the entire Temple of the Ancients was a lot easier than I remembered. Granted, I'm probably a little bit overleveled right now. The end of disc 1 throws a ton of goodies your way. In the big clock area of the temple you can pick up a Ribbon, essentially negating status effects for one of your characters. After fighting Sephiroth's big-ass dragon friend that is inexplicably hanging out at the center of the temple, you get the first Bahamut materia. And on your way into the Sleeping Forest, you get the Kajata summon, the big plus of which is the fact that it's considered Fire, Ice, and Lightning elemental, so equipping it to your armor linked with elemental grants you immunity from all of those. I put both the Ribbon and the Kajata-Elemental combo on Cloud, so right now he's immune to all status effects, and all three of the most common elemental attacks. Not too shabby.
The whole sequence with Cait Sith going into the temple to get the black materia is just sort of weird. I'm not sure if it was intended to be funny, but it is. When he's skipping down the hallway in slow-motion, falls, gets up, and does his little jig for no reason I laugh every time. I'm a bit perplexed by Aeris's whole explanation about having to solve a series of "puzzles" to get the black materia. I don't know if this is a weird translation or if there was some sort of a minigame that you did with Cait Sith that they decided to scrap, but it basically seems like he just kind of runs up and grabs it (and does a jig). There's no puzzles involved. Kind of odd. The little excavation minigame is a cool idea as well, although I think it would make a lot more sense if it were a bigger area. You can deploy up to 5 of the diggers, but its hard to really find space for more than two together on either the upper or lower level. Not really that much to it ultimately.
Anyway, the City of the Ancients is next, and the end of disc 1. Bad things are going to happen to Aries.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds (****)
I see those red squiggly you-misspelled-something wrong lines underneath the title, so I guess I wrote the title as it was supposed to be. Judging by the intentionally misspelled title, one would perhaps assume that Inglourious Basterds would be nothing more than another vehicle for Quentin Tarantino to go nuts with random B-movie references and winks at the audience, as has been his recent formula with Kill Bill and his half of Grindhouse. In truth, it does have its fair share of nods to past movies and stylization in it, and it takes more liberties with history and convention than just about any other World War II movie ever made, but the crux of the movie isn't really haphazard craziness at all. It has its share of the violence and debauchery that Tarantino is pretty much synonymous with, but it also has some excellent performances, a tight, suspenseful plot with some poignant moments, and some great visuals. At times--like when Eli Roth, playing "The Bear Jew"--is beating a guy to death with a baseball bat, the movie seems to border on becoming an exploitation picture, but always manages to pull itself back again and throw something different and slightly more profound at us. This is the most thoughtful movie Tarantino has put out in a while, and I think it might be his best outside of Pulp Fiction.
As has become a trademark of QT, Basterds is separated into several chapters--five, I believe, in this case--separated by title cards. The first is "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France", not coincidentally similar to the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, and not just because of the strands of Ennio Morricone music that pop up throughout this chapter and the rest of the film. The scene involves Nazi Col. Hans Landa--known to some as "The Jew Hunter"--arriving unannounced with a group of troops at a poor dairy farmer's home. Landa is played by Christopher Waltz, a German actor who speaks German, English, and French in the film and has a terrifying, commanding presence throughout regardless of what language he speaks. He won Best Actor at Cannes, where the film debuted, and if he doesn't get nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, it'll be because of the sort of movie that this is and not because of any fault in his performance. Landa suspects that the farmer is keeping a Jewish family in hiding. He is, although we're not shown this explicitly until a while into the scene. It reminds me a lot of the opening scene of another Sergio Leone movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where Lee Van Cleef as the villain, Angel Eyes, comes to visit a terrified man and his family and sits down and helps himself to some salad before getting down to business. Given Tarantino's love for Leone's movies, I'm sure that's what he modeled it after. The scene is slow-developing and is built around a long conversation, but is nonetheless incredibly tense. Part of this is a result of Tarantino's direction: though the characters are just sitting around a table talking, QT moves his camera around, cutting between the character's faces as they study each other while the other is talking and then, only towards the scenes conclusion, panning down to show the family laying prone hiding just underneath the floorboards. But a big part of what makes it worse is also Christopher Waltz, whose performance creates one of the most remarkable cold-hearted bastards in any movie I've seen. I suppose he's a bit like the evil Spanish military man in Pan's Labyrinth, but he's less outwardly angry. Oft-times he's smiling and acting jovial, but at the same time manages to make it known that his character can and will kill anyone in the next instant if need be.
Chapter two bears the same name as the movie itself, and introduces us to the titular "Basterds" and their commander, Lt. Aldo Raine. If you've seen the trailer, then you've already seen his speech to his unit where he explains that they're going to be dropped into France and that they'll "be doin' one thing, and one thing only: killin' Nazis." Aldo harks from Tennessee, and Brad Pitt plays him with a heavy drawl as he delivers most of the movie's funniest lines. His performance doesn't have the same impact Waltz's does simply because his character isn't as serious, but its good in its own right. The basterds quickly make a name for themselves with their somewhat questionable tactics, like collecting the scalps of the Nazis they kill. Word of their exploits gets back even to Hitler itself, who is quite upset about the whole thing; especially that some of the German soldiers even think that one of them is "a golem." A soldier is called in to recant the tale of the Basterds ambushing his squadron, which ends with Raine carving a swastika into his forehead.
The third chapter introduces our last main character--who in many ways is the films purest hero, since the Basterds would most certainly have to fall into the anti-hero realm--Shosanna, a Jewish woman living in Paris under a false identity. She's the proprietor of a movie house, and one night when she's changing the marquis, she piques the interest of a German soldier walking the streets. Turns out, the soldier is a hero of Germany, having killed a bunch of Americans from a sniper's post in battle, and is going to be the subject of a new Joeseph Gobbels propaganda film. The soldier persuades Gobbels to debut the film at Shosanna's theater, and all of a sudden she has to find herself maintaining her cover while dealing with Gobbels and Landa, who is working security for the premiere. The premiere is to be attended by all of the Nazi high command, and the Allies devise Operation Keno: a plan to have the Basterds blow up the theater. Shosanna has no knowledge of this plan, but she's pretty much had her fill of Nazis, and she devises her own plan to burn the theater down using a bunch of old, highly flammable film reels. And so, as happened in Pulp Fiction, the previously unrelated storylines begin to gradually intertwine.
I've heard some people declare this film "insensitive," and I'm not sure why. Despite how the film is depicted in the trailer, this isn't Kill Bill: World War II edition. The Basterds are brutal, violent, anti-heros, but the violence on screen is very brief. The Basterds don't even do that much actual fighting in the film. There's a couple of violent images, but it never feels crazy, over-the-top sadistic. The movie also pretty much throws away actual WWII history to invent its own, but it doesn't really change the entire idea of what was going on. The Nazis are still the bad guys, the Allies are still the good guys. I don't know what there is to find insensitive about a movie that's obviously trying merely to entertain and not to teach anyone about any actual World War II events.
More than anything, the movie is a reminder of what a genius Tarantino is at dialogue. Even though this is a war movie, so much of it plays out through conversation, and none of it is boring. There's an extended scene that only towards its conclusion becomes relevant to the main plot, where a bunch of people are sitting around a table in a tavern playing a game where they try and guess which famous person somebody wrote on a card they have stuck to their foreheads. Tarantino manages to make it absolutely fascinating. Every once in a while you'll hear somebody call Tarantino a hack, on the basis that his best movie, Pulp Fiction, was co-written with someone else, and that he's been milking Fiction's success ever since. There's no other writing credits to be seen here, and while its not on the same level as Pulp Fiction, which is thus far his best movie, it is nevertheless really damn good.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Keep Going? Off course!
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 13:16-16:38
"I'm number 13. Am I going to go mad too?"
One thing about replaying RPGs that you already know really well is that sometimes you get ahead of the game. In the section where you return to the Gold Saucer to get the Keystone, immediately after getting it I went right to the hotel since I knew that's where you end up eventually. There have been a couple of instances where I've done stuff like that thus far. Before this brief unpleasantness was the actual getting of the Keystone, which involves you running through the Battle Square. For the most part, Final Fantasy VII's translation is actually very good, although here there's one typo that never fails to make me laugh, after you've completed a round of the Battle Square and you're asked "Keep Going?" with the choice of "No way!" or "Off course!"
I ended up spending some time grinding in the Shinra Mansion and in the mountains, then doubling back and opening the safe in the mansion. Evidently, this was about as strong as I've been fighting him because I really didn't have a tremendous amount of trouble with him and beat him fairly easily. Doing so got me the Cosmo Memory limit break for later in the game, the Odin summon and, most significantly, Vincent as a playable character. I haven't played a minute of the games that Square has spun off of FF7 like Dirge of Cerberus, and whatever the recent one on PSP is called. Based on what I've heard, especially with Dirge of Cerberus, I'm not really missing that much, at least in terms of gameplay. I don't really know how much further backstory Vincent gets in either one. In Final Fantasy VII proper, you learn that he was with the Turks and you learn through him that Lucretia is Sephiroth's birth mother, but you don't get a lot of details to fill in the broad strokes. I kind of like his whole vampire schtick though. Its a bit over the top when you find him in his coffin and the lid flies off as you approach it, but I think it works in a weird way.
I like Cid as a character too. For right now he's a bit of a comic relief character more than anything, with his whole "sit down and drink your goddamn tea!!" routine. I find it interesting that in the world of FF7, where technology has advanced at least to where we are, and in some ways a bit further, that they haven't made it into space yet. I'm not sure if there's a commentary in there or not, but I find it interesting. Maybe because the Shinra and Midgar don't have their own version of the USSR as a rival they haven't been compelled to put forth more effort towards it. I am a bit confused as to why Rufus shows up wanting to buy the Tiny Bronco. There are at least three different scenes where you see a Shinra helicopter in fight, and all of a sudden they need Cid's little prop jet? Whatever, I'm not gonna lose sleep over it.
I was somewhat taken aback when I ended up with Tifa as my Gondola ride partner. I wasn't really trying to get her, and my understanding was always that Aries was sort of the "default" option, and that Tifa, Yuffie, and Barrett (lol) are all progressively harder to get from there. I don't quite remember all of the criteria used to determine who you get, but in general I didn't really make a point to give douchy responses to Aries and nice answers to Tifa when prompted. Maybe the amount of time they're in the party factors in as well or something. Not really sure. Storywise, I think it makes the most sense for it to be Aries. Obviously, at the end of Disc 1, Aries is going to be at the bottom of a lake, and the gondola ride--if its with her--is one of the last scenes where she's in focus.
Right now I have Cloud at level 35, which should be more than sufficient for me to just go ahead and mow through the rest of the disc without anymore going out of the way specifically to level. That may happen anyway though, as the opening part of the Temple of the Ancients that looks like an MC Escher painting always gives my a bit of a headache, and I might find myself in a bunch of random battles as I struggle to not get lost. I'm going to do my best to not get crazy over-leveled such that every battle is trivial, but I do want to try and milk Aries for just about all she's worth before she's kaput. I'm not going to spend the time to get her all the way to her Great Gospel limit, but as of right now she's still on her Level 1s, and I want to get her more than that.
Playtime 13:16-16:38
"I'm number 13. Am I going to go mad too?"
One thing about replaying RPGs that you already know really well is that sometimes you get ahead of the game. In the section where you return to the Gold Saucer to get the Keystone, immediately after getting it I went right to the hotel since I knew that's where you end up eventually. There have been a couple of instances where I've done stuff like that thus far. Before this brief unpleasantness was the actual getting of the Keystone, which involves you running through the Battle Square. For the most part, Final Fantasy VII's translation is actually very good, although here there's one typo that never fails to make me laugh, after you've completed a round of the Battle Square and you're asked "Keep Going?" with the choice of "No way!" or "Off course!"
I ended up spending some time grinding in the Shinra Mansion and in the mountains, then doubling back and opening the safe in the mansion. Evidently, this was about as strong as I've been fighting him because I really didn't have a tremendous amount of trouble with him and beat him fairly easily. Doing so got me the Cosmo Memory limit break for later in the game, the Odin summon and, most significantly, Vincent as a playable character. I haven't played a minute of the games that Square has spun off of FF7 like Dirge of Cerberus, and whatever the recent one on PSP is called. Based on what I've heard, especially with Dirge of Cerberus, I'm not really missing that much, at least in terms of gameplay. I don't really know how much further backstory Vincent gets in either one. In Final Fantasy VII proper, you learn that he was with the Turks and you learn through him that Lucretia is Sephiroth's birth mother, but you don't get a lot of details to fill in the broad strokes. I kind of like his whole vampire schtick though. Its a bit over the top when you find him in his coffin and the lid flies off as you approach it, but I think it works in a weird way.
I like Cid as a character too. For right now he's a bit of a comic relief character more than anything, with his whole "sit down and drink your goddamn tea!!" routine. I find it interesting that in the world of FF7, where technology has advanced at least to where we are, and in some ways a bit further, that they haven't made it into space yet. I'm not sure if there's a commentary in there or not, but I find it interesting. Maybe because the Shinra and Midgar don't have their own version of the USSR as a rival they haven't been compelled to put forth more effort towards it. I am a bit confused as to why Rufus shows up wanting to buy the Tiny Bronco. There are at least three different scenes where you see a Shinra helicopter in fight, and all of a sudden they need Cid's little prop jet? Whatever, I'm not gonna lose sleep over it.
I was somewhat taken aback when I ended up with Tifa as my Gondola ride partner. I wasn't really trying to get her, and my understanding was always that Aries was sort of the "default" option, and that Tifa, Yuffie, and Barrett (lol) are all progressively harder to get from there. I don't quite remember all of the criteria used to determine who you get, but in general I didn't really make a point to give douchy responses to Aries and nice answers to Tifa when prompted. Maybe the amount of time they're in the party factors in as well or something. Not really sure. Storywise, I think it makes the most sense for it to be Aries. Obviously, at the end of Disc 1, Aries is going to be at the bottom of a lake, and the gondola ride--if its with her--is one of the last scenes where she's in focus.
Right now I have Cloud at level 35, which should be more than sufficient for me to just go ahead and mow through the rest of the disc without anymore going out of the way specifically to level. That may happen anyway though, as the opening part of the Temple of the Ancients that looks like an MC Escher painting always gives my a bit of a headache, and I might find myself in a bunch of random battles as I struggle to not get lost. I'm going to do my best to not get crazy over-leveled such that every battle is trivial, but I do want to try and milk Aries for just about all she's worth before she's kaput. I'm not going to spend the time to get her all the way to her Great Gospel limit, but as of right now she's still on her Level 1s, and I want to get her more than that.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Great Warrior, Seto
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 10:58-13:16
Played through the whole Cosmo Canyon sequence, from Bundenhagen's whole Powerpoint presentation about how the planet's going to die, to fighting through the Gi Cave. Cosmo Canyon is probably the coolest single locale in the game, with some of the coolest music to boot. I don't think anywhere else in the game has the same sort of character that it does, with the hut-like buildings set into the mountain and the whole tribal feel of it. I've never been one to think it absolutely critical that Square come out with a remake of FF7, but I think Cosmo Canyon is one area that would be very cool to see in a game without pre-rendered painted backgrounds where they could open it up more and let you explore a bit more.
I went through the Gi Cave with Red XIII and Tifa. Among the loot you can pick up there, is your first piece of Added Effect materia, which is very cool, but wow is it a pretty annoying little area. The big spiders that you run into at the five-way tunnel area towards the end especially hit hard. Its not that long, but there's no save point in the middle, which means you might be a bit depleted in MP by the time you get to the boss, which makes it a bit annoying. Got through with no serious disasters, though. Also what the hell is the deal with the face in the stone wall that comes alive just before you fight the boss? Kinda confounding and kinda creepy. The reveal of Red XIII's father, Seto, looking over the cliff with a bunch of arrows still protruding from him, is kinda cool, although when he literally cries big crystallized tears at the end, that was a bit much, I think. There's a lot of points in this game that are kind of short on subtlety. I'm still not sure I get the whole explanation for why Red XIII couldn't know until now that his father was actually a hero and not a jackass that abandoned his mother. Bundenhagen says his his mother told him to keep the cave sealed, which I guess makes sense since its still roaming with vengeful spirits, but I don't see how that requires making Red grow up hating his father. Whatever. Its a pretext for a little mini coming-of-age story for Red to grow his character a bit, and to give you an excuse to fight some more before getting on with the main plot.
I'm currently saved just outside of Nibelheim with Cloud at level 27.
Playtime 10:58-13:16
Played through the whole Cosmo Canyon sequence, from Bundenhagen's whole Powerpoint presentation about how the planet's going to die, to fighting through the Gi Cave. Cosmo Canyon is probably the coolest single locale in the game, with some of the coolest music to boot. I don't think anywhere else in the game has the same sort of character that it does, with the hut-like buildings set into the mountain and the whole tribal feel of it. I've never been one to think it absolutely critical that Square come out with a remake of FF7, but I think Cosmo Canyon is one area that would be very cool to see in a game without pre-rendered painted backgrounds where they could open it up more and let you explore a bit more.
I went through the Gi Cave with Red XIII and Tifa. Among the loot you can pick up there, is your first piece of Added Effect materia, which is very cool, but wow is it a pretty annoying little area. The big spiders that you run into at the five-way tunnel area towards the end especially hit hard. Its not that long, but there's no save point in the middle, which means you might be a bit depleted in MP by the time you get to the boss, which makes it a bit annoying. Got through with no serious disasters, though. Also what the hell is the deal with the face in the stone wall that comes alive just before you fight the boss? Kinda confounding and kinda creepy. The reveal of Red XIII's father, Seto, looking over the cliff with a bunch of arrows still protruding from him, is kinda cool, although when he literally cries big crystallized tears at the end, that was a bit much, I think. There's a lot of points in this game that are kind of short on subtlety. I'm still not sure I get the whole explanation for why Red XIII couldn't know until now that his father was actually a hero and not a jackass that abandoned his mother. Bundenhagen says his his mother told him to keep the cave sealed, which I guess makes sense since its still roaming with vengeful spirits, but I don't see how that requires making Red grow up hating his father. Whatever. Its a pretext for a little mini coming-of-age story for Red to grow his character a bit, and to give you an excuse to fight some more before getting on with the main plot.
I'm currently saved just outside of Nibelheim with Cloud at level 27.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
2009 Cubs: Autopsy Report
Its been quite a while since I've written about the Cubs, but what has there been to write about really? My last post was in mid-August, when the season was on the precipice of falling apart, and after that point the Cubs season seemed to slip into a sort of catatonia, which the monumental tailspin that was looking possible as the Milton Bradley fiasco heated up not coming to pass, but with the team also never seriously threatening to get back into the race. Bradley--who, with two full years left on his deal, is perhaps now destined to go down as one of the worst signings in Chicago sports history--was eventually suspended for his behavior and his vague accusations of racism coming from Cubs fans. A few other players were shut down with injuries that they likely could've played through were the team still playing meaningful baseball. Even still, the openings left by these players were filled out for the remainder of the year mostly by "quadruple-A" type players who have been lingering around in Iowa for a while. As such, it was hard to even drum up any excitement for next year watching the team in September, as there wasn't really any sort of crop of prospects chomping at the bit for big-league at bats.
The team eventually finished the year 83-78, which actually gives them their first streak of three years with a winning record since the early '70s, more an indictment of how inept the team was for much of its history than anything else. A just over .500 record and missing the playoffs is plainly unacceptable, given the money that was spent on building the roster, and given that in many ways the Cubs' front office completely hedged their bets on winning either last year or this year. Now, the Cubs have a lot of players locked into expensive, long-term deals who probably aren't going to get any better or, in some cases, may not even play in a Cub uniform again. The team's new ownership isn't expected to be able to add much to the already massive payroll, as it tries to deal with paying off some of the debt from the purchase, and looks at options to renovate the stadium. In order to keep the team competitive in the coming years, its going to take some creative moves with limited resources, and I'm not sure that Jim Hendry--who as of right now is still going to be the team's GM next year--is up to that task.
No player better exemplifies the failed expectations of the team as a whole moreso than Milton Bradley, the team's biggest free agent signing of the off-season. Bradley, oft-injured throughout his career managed to get on the field for 124 games, but hit for an OPS barely above the league average, and manged just 40 RBIs despite batting mostly in the middle of the order (he moved to the #2 spot late in the year, and seemed to fare a bit better there). Other free agents from last year that were discussed as other options for a left-handed power bat were Adam Dunn (38 HRs, 105 RBIs with the Nationals) and Raul Ibanez (34 HRs, 93 RBIs with the Phillies). Both of them are also true left-handed hitters, as opposed to Bradley, a switch-hitter who is actually a worse hitter from the left side, despite being brought in to be an RBI producer against right-handed pitching. Beyond his bad production, his the effect of his constant negative attitude and oft-times laziness on the field can't be discounted. Normally I stray away from stuff like "clubhouse presence", which is unquantifiable, and which I'm not really in a position to know anything about except secondhand from columnists and reporters who sometimes don't seem to know what they're talking about either in spite of their greater access. With Bradley, though, it was stark enough and obvious enough to seem to be a significant distraction for the team. Bradley still has two years left on his deal, and now face a situation in which they seemingly have to trade him, even though its difficult to see how. The Giants expressed some tepid interest immediately after the season, but nothing concrete has come from it up to this point. Any trade made would most certainly involve the Cubs eating the bulk of the salary.
There were many, many, other problems besides Bradley, however. Alfonso Soriano, another owner of a huge contract, had his worst year in a Cubs uniform, hitting a meager .241 with 20 HRs and missing a big chunk of the back end of the year with an injury. He'll be 34 next year, an age at which hitters often start to see a marked decline in their hitting. Was this year a fluke, or has that already started with Soriano? After winning NL Rookie of the Year last year, Geovany Soto hit a putrid .218 and ended up splitting playing time with journeyman Koyie Hill at the end of the year. Kosuke Fukudome had a marginally better year than 2008 at the plate, but still only hit .259 with 11 HRs. Finally, there's Aaron Miles, who made a couple of million dollars this year to fill in for Mark DeRosa after he was traded. He played below replacement level and, pathetically, hit 5 RBIs all year. A couple of days ago, the Cubs signed Rudy Jaramillo, the former Ranger's hitting coach, who has a ton of respect around the league. Its certainly plausible that he could correct some flaws that have crept into the batting stances of some or all of the above players, but really the lineup as a whole has to be dramatically better and, as I mentioned earlier, financial constraints are probably going to limit how different the lineup can really look next year. One name that's popped up as a possible target for the Cubs is Mike Cameron, who at 36 still has decent pop in his bat and still plays a good defensive center field. Without a real possibility of signing an absolute top-tier free agent, Cameron would probably be a good addition.
The best component of the team throughout the year was its starting pitching. Even though four of its five main starters (Ryan Dempster, Ted Lilly, Carlos Zambrano, and Rich Harden) spent part of the year banged up, and the fifth (Randy Wells) started the year in AAA, the starting pitching was remarkably consistent. Even Rich Harden, who had a ton of issues with high pitch counts in his starts, managed a 9-9 record and a slightly above-average ERA. Cubs starters averaged about 5.97 innings per start, with a 3.71 ERA. In other words, they basically averaged a quality start. The bullpen wasn't horrible either, but had a higher ERA of 4.11 and its back end of Carlos Marmol and Kevin Gregg both went through significant periods where they struggled mightily closing out games. Marmol clearly regressed from where he was in 2008, still proving hard to hit, but giving up 24 more walks in 13 fewer innings. Gregg was passable for much of the year and managed to amass 23 saves, but collapsed in the 2nd half of the year and finished with a 4.72 ERA. One thing that can be said about the bullpen is that--in a year in which there weren't many true prospects ready to come up in the Cubs's system--it did provide a couple of possible bright spots. 25 year olds Esmailin Caridid and Justin Berg both got to pitch some down the stretch and put up good numbers, albeit in very small sample sizes. You can find an infinite number of relievers who started out their careers with a good dozen or so innings and turned out to be nothing, but I'm straining to come up with something positive to write here.
Basically, it seems to me that if the Cubs are going to be any good in 2010, a couple of players have to have a year that comes completely out of nowhere. They kind of got that guy this year in Randy Wells. They may have to somehow find a couple more guys like that next year who excel beyond what they were projected to be, because there isn't much to be done by way of free agency, and the team as constructed seems to be slipping into a malaise of mediocrity. Uh... go Cubs go?
The team eventually finished the year 83-78, which actually gives them their first streak of three years with a winning record since the early '70s, more an indictment of how inept the team was for much of its history than anything else. A just over .500 record and missing the playoffs is plainly unacceptable, given the money that was spent on building the roster, and given that in many ways the Cubs' front office completely hedged their bets on winning either last year or this year. Now, the Cubs have a lot of players locked into expensive, long-term deals who probably aren't going to get any better or, in some cases, may not even play in a Cub uniform again. The team's new ownership isn't expected to be able to add much to the already massive payroll, as it tries to deal with paying off some of the debt from the purchase, and looks at options to renovate the stadium. In order to keep the team competitive in the coming years, its going to take some creative moves with limited resources, and I'm not sure that Jim Hendry--who as of right now is still going to be the team's GM next year--is up to that task.
No player better exemplifies the failed expectations of the team as a whole moreso than Milton Bradley, the team's biggest free agent signing of the off-season. Bradley, oft-injured throughout his career managed to get on the field for 124 games, but hit for an OPS barely above the league average, and manged just 40 RBIs despite batting mostly in the middle of the order (he moved to the #2 spot late in the year, and seemed to fare a bit better there). Other free agents from last year that were discussed as other options for a left-handed power bat were Adam Dunn (38 HRs, 105 RBIs with the Nationals) and Raul Ibanez (34 HRs, 93 RBIs with the Phillies). Both of them are also true left-handed hitters, as opposed to Bradley, a switch-hitter who is actually a worse hitter from the left side, despite being brought in to be an RBI producer against right-handed pitching. Beyond his bad production, his the effect of his constant negative attitude and oft-times laziness on the field can't be discounted. Normally I stray away from stuff like "clubhouse presence", which is unquantifiable, and which I'm not really in a position to know anything about except secondhand from columnists and reporters who sometimes don't seem to know what they're talking about either in spite of their greater access. With Bradley, though, it was stark enough and obvious enough to seem to be a significant distraction for the team. Bradley still has two years left on his deal, and now face a situation in which they seemingly have to trade him, even though its difficult to see how. The Giants expressed some tepid interest immediately after the season, but nothing concrete has come from it up to this point. Any trade made would most certainly involve the Cubs eating the bulk of the salary.
There were many, many, other problems besides Bradley, however. Alfonso Soriano, another owner of a huge contract, had his worst year in a Cubs uniform, hitting a meager .241 with 20 HRs and missing a big chunk of the back end of the year with an injury. He'll be 34 next year, an age at which hitters often start to see a marked decline in their hitting. Was this year a fluke, or has that already started with Soriano? After winning NL Rookie of the Year last year, Geovany Soto hit a putrid .218 and ended up splitting playing time with journeyman Koyie Hill at the end of the year. Kosuke Fukudome had a marginally better year than 2008 at the plate, but still only hit .259 with 11 HRs. Finally, there's Aaron Miles, who made a couple of million dollars this year to fill in for Mark DeRosa after he was traded. He played below replacement level and, pathetically, hit 5 RBIs all year. A couple of days ago, the Cubs signed Rudy Jaramillo, the former Ranger's hitting coach, who has a ton of respect around the league. Its certainly plausible that he could correct some flaws that have crept into the batting stances of some or all of the above players, but really the lineup as a whole has to be dramatically better and, as I mentioned earlier, financial constraints are probably going to limit how different the lineup can really look next year. One name that's popped up as a possible target for the Cubs is Mike Cameron, who at 36 still has decent pop in his bat and still plays a good defensive center field. Without a real possibility of signing an absolute top-tier free agent, Cameron would probably be a good addition.
The best component of the team throughout the year was its starting pitching. Even though four of its five main starters (Ryan Dempster, Ted Lilly, Carlos Zambrano, and Rich Harden) spent part of the year banged up, and the fifth (Randy Wells) started the year in AAA, the starting pitching was remarkably consistent. Even Rich Harden, who had a ton of issues with high pitch counts in his starts, managed a 9-9 record and a slightly above-average ERA. Cubs starters averaged about 5.97 innings per start, with a 3.71 ERA. In other words, they basically averaged a quality start. The bullpen wasn't horrible either, but had a higher ERA of 4.11 and its back end of Carlos Marmol and Kevin Gregg both went through significant periods where they struggled mightily closing out games. Marmol clearly regressed from where he was in 2008, still proving hard to hit, but giving up 24 more walks in 13 fewer innings. Gregg was passable for much of the year and managed to amass 23 saves, but collapsed in the 2nd half of the year and finished with a 4.72 ERA. One thing that can be said about the bullpen is that--in a year in which there weren't many true prospects ready to come up in the Cubs's system--it did provide a couple of possible bright spots. 25 year olds Esmailin Caridid and Justin Berg both got to pitch some down the stretch and put up good numbers, albeit in very small sample sizes. You can find an infinite number of relievers who started out their careers with a good dozen or so innings and turned out to be nothing, but I'm straining to come up with something positive to write here.
Basically, it seems to me that if the Cubs are going to be any good in 2010, a couple of players have to have a year that comes completely out of nowhere. They kind of got that guy this year in Randy Wells. They may have to somehow find a couple more guys like that next year who excel beyond what they were projected to be, because there isn't much to be done by way of free agency, and the team as constructed seems to be slipping into a malaise of mediocrity. Uh... go Cubs go?
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Cowboy Bebop Session #3: Honky-Tonk Women
Session 3: Honky-Tonk Women
In appearance and attitude, Faye Valentine represents the classic noir style femme fatale character. Perhaps take out the parts where she's kept in suspended animation for a few decades and where she's, you know, in outer-space (and I guess the purple hair as well), and she'd fit right into a Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane story. She's as alluring as she is strong-willed, and seems to personify trouble. Later on in the series, she'll actually more play the role of the redeemer character--another archetype for female characters used in a lot of films in the noir period--the character who tries to save the protagonist from being destroyed by the true femme fatale character. That all comes later though. We see her from the ground up, starting with her big white boots, as she walks into a shop on Mars, apparently getting tailed by three guys. She pulls a sub-machine gun out of a grocery bag and opens fire. "The first rule of combat is to shoot them before they shoot you," she explains. She doesn't get shot, but she gets caught as a bunch more people show up. We get our title card, and the next time we see Faye, she's back out in space on a floating casino in handcuffs. She's speaking to a man who refers to her as "Lady Luck", "Poker Alice", and the "Queen of Hearts" (red!). He apparently offers her an ultimatum to keep her from being turned over to the police--the details of which we're not privvy to at the moment--and with a flick of his wrist produces an Ace of Hearts (also red!)
Spike and Jet are also in the casino, on an elevator talking about a dream that Jet had. They hit the casino floor, and after a brief stop off with the three old codgers who we first saw in Asteroid Blues and who will pop up from time to time throughout the series, we see Faye again, now dealing at a blackjack table. She produces a blackjack hand with the Queen of Diamonds and the Ace of Hearts, two red cards. Spike starts playing at her table, and starts winning. We get something of a dream sequence as Spike gazes at her and we flip between a bunch of quick shots of slot reels and roulette wheels spinning. We then flashback to Faye's meeting with the mysterious well-dressed man. He explains that all she has to do is wait for her "target" to arrive, who will lose all of his chips and give his last one to her as a tip, which she is to deliver to this man. Spike ends up losing everything he's won except his last chip, and decides to "keep it as a souvenir." Thinking him to be the target going back on the deal, Faye runs off after him. The actual target, not sure what just happens, runs off as well. While leaving, Spike turns around to see someone winning a slots jackpot, and runs into the target, causing both of them to drop their chips. They end up picking up each other's chips. Faye finds Spike and tells him that he's ruining the deal. Spike reveals that he noticed she was cheating the entire game, and swallows his (or actually the target's chip). Spike gets into a tussle with a bunch of security guards, much to the chagrin of Jet, while Faye remotely activates her ship. The casino execs put a price on Faye's head, as Faye gets captured by Spike and Jet on her way out and they lock her up in the Bebop's bathroom.
Jet analyzes Spike's chip and finds that there's a chip (the computer kind) hidden within the chip (the poker kind). This leads us in to another exciting episode of "Big Shots: The Bounty Hunters!" Faye managed to get herself on the show. Faye contacts Gordon--the head casino guy--with some sort of transmitter disguised as a lip gloss container and tells him that her captors have the chip. Spike and Jet decide that they're doing to turn in Faye for the 6 million wulong reward, which Faye decides is somewhat low-balling her worth. Gordon contacts Jet, and Jet reveals that he knows the chip-within-a-chip is a sort of master decryption key that the police misplaced some time ago and have been looking for ever since. Spike gets into a space suit, with boots that can apparently latch onto the side of a ship at the push of a button, and in a cool little sequence floats his way over to the ship with the casino brass. The deal is that Spike is going to flip them the chip at the same time they're going to flip a briefcase full of 30 million wulongs to Spike. Unsurprisingly, this is not actually how they're planning on having it go down in reality. A casino lackey opens fire on Spike, but mistimes it so his shots hit a rotating mechanism going around the outside of the ship. By the time its rotated past them again, Spike is gone floating upwards again. Faye meanwhile has picked her locks and escapes in her ship. Spike catches the chip, while Faye snatches the briefcase with a detachable claw. Team Casino opens file on Faye, but come closer to shooting Spike than her ship and end up getting blown up with one of their own missiles. At the end of the episode, Spike and Jet are walking into the casino again, musing that all the chip is good for now is one bet. Its another ending where the Bebop crew are surviving, but not thriving, such is their plight. Spike turns around watches Faye zoom off in the distance, looking from far away a bit like a shooting star.
The main purpose of this episode is to introduce Faye as the female lead of the series, but its a fun episode on its own merits. The shootout in space is a creative twist on your standard wild west-style showdown. Up next, we meet the eco-terrorists led by a crazy woman who reminds me vaguely of Mom from Futurama in Gateway Shuffle.
In appearance and attitude, Faye Valentine represents the classic noir style femme fatale character. Perhaps take out the parts where she's kept in suspended animation for a few decades and where she's, you know, in outer-space (and I guess the purple hair as well), and she'd fit right into a Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane story. She's as alluring as she is strong-willed, and seems to personify trouble. Later on in the series, she'll actually more play the role of the redeemer character--another archetype for female characters used in a lot of films in the noir period--the character who tries to save the protagonist from being destroyed by the true femme fatale character. That all comes later though. We see her from the ground up, starting with her big white boots, as she walks into a shop on Mars, apparently getting tailed by three guys. She pulls a sub-machine gun out of a grocery bag and opens fire. "The first rule of combat is to shoot them before they shoot you," she explains. She doesn't get shot, but she gets caught as a bunch more people show up. We get our title card, and the next time we see Faye, she's back out in space on a floating casino in handcuffs. She's speaking to a man who refers to her as "Lady Luck", "Poker Alice", and the "Queen of Hearts" (red!). He apparently offers her an ultimatum to keep her from being turned over to the police--the details of which we're not privvy to at the moment--and with a flick of his wrist produces an Ace of Hearts (also red!)
Spike and Jet are also in the casino, on an elevator talking about a dream that Jet had. They hit the casino floor, and after a brief stop off with the three old codgers who we first saw in Asteroid Blues and who will pop up from time to time throughout the series, we see Faye again, now dealing at a blackjack table. She produces a blackjack hand with the Queen of Diamonds and the Ace of Hearts, two red cards. Spike starts playing at her table, and starts winning. We get something of a dream sequence as Spike gazes at her and we flip between a bunch of quick shots of slot reels and roulette wheels spinning. We then flashback to Faye's meeting with the mysterious well-dressed man. He explains that all she has to do is wait for her "target" to arrive, who will lose all of his chips and give his last one to her as a tip, which she is to deliver to this man. Spike ends up losing everything he's won except his last chip, and decides to "keep it as a souvenir." Thinking him to be the target going back on the deal, Faye runs off after him. The actual target, not sure what just happens, runs off as well. While leaving, Spike turns around to see someone winning a slots jackpot, and runs into the target, causing both of them to drop their chips. They end up picking up each other's chips. Faye finds Spike and tells him that he's ruining the deal. Spike reveals that he noticed she was cheating the entire game, and swallows his (or actually the target's chip). Spike gets into a tussle with a bunch of security guards, much to the chagrin of Jet, while Faye remotely activates her ship. The casino execs put a price on Faye's head, as Faye gets captured by Spike and Jet on her way out and they lock her up in the Bebop's bathroom.
Jet analyzes Spike's chip and finds that there's a chip (the computer kind) hidden within the chip (the poker kind). This leads us in to another exciting episode of "Big Shots: The Bounty Hunters!" Faye managed to get herself on the show. Faye contacts Gordon--the head casino guy--with some sort of transmitter disguised as a lip gloss container and tells him that her captors have the chip. Spike and Jet decide that they're doing to turn in Faye for the 6 million wulong reward, which Faye decides is somewhat low-balling her worth. Gordon contacts Jet, and Jet reveals that he knows the chip-within-a-chip is a sort of master decryption key that the police misplaced some time ago and have been looking for ever since. Spike gets into a space suit, with boots that can apparently latch onto the side of a ship at the push of a button, and in a cool little sequence floats his way over to the ship with the casino brass. The deal is that Spike is going to flip them the chip at the same time they're going to flip a briefcase full of 30 million wulongs to Spike. Unsurprisingly, this is not actually how they're planning on having it go down in reality. A casino lackey opens fire on Spike, but mistimes it so his shots hit a rotating mechanism going around the outside of the ship. By the time its rotated past them again, Spike is gone floating upwards again. Faye meanwhile has picked her locks and escapes in her ship. Spike catches the chip, while Faye snatches the briefcase with a detachable claw. Team Casino opens file on Faye, but come closer to shooting Spike than her ship and end up getting blown up with one of their own missiles. At the end of the episode, Spike and Jet are walking into the casino again, musing that all the chip is good for now is one bet. Its another ending where the Bebop crew are surviving, but not thriving, such is their plight. Spike turns around watches Faye zoom off in the distance, looking from far away a bit like a shooting star.
The main purpose of this episode is to introduce Faye as the female lead of the series, but its a fun episode on its own merits. The shootout in space is a creative twist on your standard wild west-style showdown. Up next, we meet the eco-terrorists led by a crazy woman who reminds me vaguely of Mom from Futurama in Gateway Shuffle.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Cowboy Bebop Session #2: Stray Dog Strut
Session #2: Stray Dog Strut
A guy in a bathroom stall is unwrapping bandages that were over his face. He's sporting a big afro and some gawdy jewelry. Three guys with guns position themselves in front of the stall door and tell "Abdul-Hakim" to come out. Almost in one fluid motion, Abdul-Hakim knocks all three of them out and calmly walks away carrying a briefcase. Seeing as he's a tall black guy who knows martial arts, I think Abdul-Hakim may be a nod to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who studied martial arts, and was the veritable "final boss" at the end of the pagoda that Bruce Lee was fighting his way through in Game of Death, the movie he was filming when he died. Also he was a vampire. Seriously, its sort of awesome. And actually, going to the IMDB page, his character's name was Hakim, so that would seem to increase the chance that I actually know what I'm talking about. We get our title screen--"Stray Dog Strut"--and then see the Bebop cruising through the gates on its way to Mars.
Aboard the Bebop, Spike kicks the TV, which is coming in as white noise--weirdly still a problem in the future--and gets it to work, and we get our first glimpse at Big Shots: The Bounty Hunters. I'm convinced that this needs to be made into an actual show. I never make a point to watch "America's Most Wanted" with John Walsh, though I do hear that that show has had a lot of success over the years in terms of getting people to give valuable information to the police that eventually lead to the capture of some high profile suspects. Now, if it was a black guy and a ditsy blonde girl inexplicably wearing cheesy cowboy outfits and telling me how to "wrassle up some criminals" I know I'd totally watch that show. I think the execs at Fox have some retooling to do. Anyway, the Big Shots hosts tell us that Abdul Hakim is a notorious criminal and in his latest caper he stole an experimental lab animal. Conveniently, as the show's ending, Spike gets a videophone call from "Doc", who had his lab busted up by Hakim, and who has a description of his face post-plastic surgery (hence the bandages). The game is afoot.
Back on Mars, Hakim ducks into a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese bar (literally ducks in, as he's taller than door) and asks for some lao chu. The drink is red, maybe fitting in with the whole red motif I mentioned in the previous Bebop post, or maybe just coincidentally. A scruffy looking guy runs into him at the far and tries to apologize, and is somewhat miffed when his apology is met with silence. Abdul-Hakim grabs a cockroach crawling across the table, drops it in his drink, and shoves it down the guy's throat. During the tussle, a man with glasses manages to sneak in, grab the briefcase, and run off with it. He hops on the back of the trunk, opens up the case, and is surprisingly met with a growling noise. Elsewhere, two guys in white coats are driving another truck, discussing how Hakim took out three of their associates and how Hakim has no idea how much "that thing" he's carrying is worth. Spike talks to the proprietor of a weapon's shop who talks like he should be in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and who tells him he'll find what he's looking for at a pet store. The spectacled man is trying to sell whatever's in the briefcase to the somewhat eccentric pet store owner, when he sees Spike, in an amusing moment, watching him through the other side of a fish tank. Spike takes him to be Abdul-Hakim with another new face. The store owner opens the case and produces... a pembroke welsh corgi! Spike leaves as the guy attempts to talk the pet store owner into giving him more than the 2 wulongs she says the dog is worth. Abdul-Hakim shows up and puts a gun to his back and asks for it back. Quite a commotion breaks out, and Spike sees Hakim come running out as he's walking away dejected. Suddenly he's interested again. The two guys in white coats follow in their truck as well.
Hakim runs after the dog while Spike runs after Hakim. In a great rule of threes bit, the chase brings them in the path of a crowd of people watching two guys play a game of Go. The corgi ducks under the table on which they're playing, Hakim swiftly jumps over it, and Spike, uncaring, just crashing through it, sending pieces flying. Then the two guys in white coats show up and stop in their tracks as the Go crowd just scowl at them, crouched over the ruins of their board. Spike catches up with Hakim and they have themselves a bit of a spar, seemingly being roughly equal in skill. The corgi thinks, "to hell with this" and jumps down onto a passing barge. Spike and Hakim both jump down after it. Spike ends up falling in the river, but comes up with the dog. Spike brings the dog back to Jet, who confirms that its just a regular corgi and nothing else, but seems to take a liking to it--moreso than Spike, who is just annoyed by the whole concept of pets. The dog's owner, however, is worth a fortune, says Jet, and he has a plan.
The two guys in white coats, meanwhile, are back in the truck, with some of their also white coat-wearing brethren, still trying to track down what they now describe as a "data dog." Spike takes Ein for a stroll down the street, as Hakim tries unsuccessfully to postpone a meeting with the guy he's supposed to meet up with when he has the dog. Hakim gets stopped by an old man sitting on the sidewalk who says he can tell that he's looking for something, and insists that Pico, his tiny little bird, can help him find it. Begrudgingly, Hakim hears what he has to say. The men in white coats decide they need to turn on the dog whistle, which Ein (they haven't named him in the epsiode yet, but I'm just going to say it. Tired of writing "the corgi") and about a hundred other dogs hear, causing them to start yapping and following the truck. The fortune teller tells Hakim that Pico has picked the moving card and that what he's looking for is about to move, and then says its here just as the big cluster of dogs run down the street being Hakim. This is the second time in as many episodes that a character has gone to a sort of mystic or a spiritual guide for answers and they've pointed them in the correct direction (in "Asteroid Blues", the old Native American mystic tells Spike where to find the "red-eyed coyote). Of course, in Hakim's case, he likely would've figured it out anyway when he heard a cacophony of yapping dogs, but I find it interesting nevertheless. The dog catchers try and launch a net to catch Ein and manage to catch every dog except him. Hakim steals a car from a newly wedded couple, almost runs down Spike, and picks up Ein. Spike gets into his red ship (pretty sure it has a name that I can't recall right now) and pursues Hakim. Ein bites Hakim and jumps out of his car, causing Hakim to lose control. Spike goes after the tumbling Ein ("this is why I hate pets!") and manages to catch him safely on the wing of the ship. Hakim and the dog catchers both go spilling off the side of the road and into the water. Spike brings back Ein to the Bebop and still hasn't warmed up to him, suggesting, maybe only half jokingly, that they just salt him and eat him.
This is more of a lighthearted, comedy-of-errors sort of episode, and there's not that much to discuss in terms of the overarching themes of the show. Its one of my favorite episodes though, with a bunch of genuinely funny bits and an amusing story that manages to throw in a pretty bulky cast of characters and still come to a resolution in just over 20 minutes. Except for maybe "Venture Bros." (new episodes start up again Sunday!), I'm not sure if I know of another half hour show that does that as well as "Bebop." Up next, we meet Faye in what she describes in the episode preview as "a stardust session played in an off-key melody."
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Zombieland
Zombieland (***)
The concept of the zombie movie is so ubiquitous at this point that the movies don't even require a set up anymore. In Zombieland, the actual origins of the zombie outbreak are pretty much skipped. Its assumed that once you see your first couple of examples of rotting, shuffling, living dead chasing terrified people around that you can get the gist of it from there, and it can jump ahead to a time when most of the unlucky citizenry has been killed or infected, and only a few hardy survivors are left. One such survivor is Columbus (all of the principal characters use cities as their aliases so they don't get too attached to each other by using their real names), in his previous life a loner who spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft and subsisting mostly on Mountain Dew Code Red. He's our protagonist and our narrator, played by Jesse Eisenberg, recently in Adventureland, which I didn't see. Eisenberg plays his character when the same sort of nervous, awkward, deadpan expressions that Michael Cera has made a name for himself with. At times its actually too much like Michael Cera, to the point that it kind of seems like he's doing an impression of him. Anyway, Columbus has managed to survive this long, as he reminds us of throughout the movie, because he lives by a set of rules of his own devising. He always "double taps" to make sure a zombie's really dead, he's leery of bathrooms (you're never more vulnerable than when you're on the toilet), and he always checks the back seat upon getting into a car.
Out on the road one day, Columbus encounters Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson, who pretty much makes the movie with his good ol' boy redneck shtick. Tallahassee's rules are somewhat less complicated: basically, kill as many zombies as possible with whatever gets the job done. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade with a big cow-catcher sort of thing on the front and a Dale Earnhardt style "3" painted on the side. He seems to be holding up pretty well in post-zombie America, except that he has a craving for twinkies that never seems to be satisfied. Tallahassee freaks out after he and Columbus stumble upon a Hostess truck that ran off the road, only to find that its full of nothing but Sno-balls (Tallahassee hates coconut). Venturing into a supermarket to search for twinkies, Tallahassee and Columbus run into Wichita and Little Rock, who scam them and end up stealing Tallahassee's Caddy. Eventually, though, Columbus and Tallahassee catch back up with them and eventually work out an uneasy truce. Thus, the four of them journey on through "Zombieland" together. Between this and the Left 4 Dead games, 4 seems to be the official size of a zombie survival group.
That's about all there is to say about the plot really. The movie is 79 minutes of tongue in cheek zombie madness, made by and for people who love the genre. In the middle there's a pretty good chunk where there actually aren't any zombies for a while, but it leads to a hilarious cameo by a man we'll only call "BM" for now. As I said, Woody Harrelson's performance is far and away the best part of the movie, as he keeps up his "I don't care 'bout nothin' but killin' zombies and NASCAR" bit as he finds himself in increasingly absurd situations. By the end of the movie, he's riding a roller coaster while fighting off zombies trying to climb up the track with a shotgun. Jessee Eisenberg as Columbus and Wichita and Little Rock aren't nearly as memorable but all have their moments. The writing is clever, and manages to make the movie funny, while not seeming too much like the horror-comedies that have come before it, like Shawn of the Dead. Zombieland is a fun 79 minutes of zombie killing.
The concept of the zombie movie is so ubiquitous at this point that the movies don't even require a set up anymore. In Zombieland, the actual origins of the zombie outbreak are pretty much skipped. Its assumed that once you see your first couple of examples of rotting, shuffling, living dead chasing terrified people around that you can get the gist of it from there, and it can jump ahead to a time when most of the unlucky citizenry has been killed or infected, and only a few hardy survivors are left. One such survivor is Columbus (all of the principal characters use cities as their aliases so they don't get too attached to each other by using their real names), in his previous life a loner who spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft and subsisting mostly on Mountain Dew Code Red. He's our protagonist and our narrator, played by Jesse Eisenberg, recently in Adventureland, which I didn't see. Eisenberg plays his character when the same sort of nervous, awkward, deadpan expressions that Michael Cera has made a name for himself with. At times its actually too much like Michael Cera, to the point that it kind of seems like he's doing an impression of him. Anyway, Columbus has managed to survive this long, as he reminds us of throughout the movie, because he lives by a set of rules of his own devising. He always "double taps" to make sure a zombie's really dead, he's leery of bathrooms (you're never more vulnerable than when you're on the toilet), and he always checks the back seat upon getting into a car.
Out on the road one day, Columbus encounters Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson, who pretty much makes the movie with his good ol' boy redneck shtick. Tallahassee's rules are somewhat less complicated: basically, kill as many zombies as possible with whatever gets the job done. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade with a big cow-catcher sort of thing on the front and a Dale Earnhardt style "3" painted on the side. He seems to be holding up pretty well in post-zombie America, except that he has a craving for twinkies that never seems to be satisfied. Tallahassee freaks out after he and Columbus stumble upon a Hostess truck that ran off the road, only to find that its full of nothing but Sno-balls (Tallahassee hates coconut). Venturing into a supermarket to search for twinkies, Tallahassee and Columbus run into Wichita and Little Rock, who scam them and end up stealing Tallahassee's Caddy. Eventually, though, Columbus and Tallahassee catch back up with them and eventually work out an uneasy truce. Thus, the four of them journey on through "Zombieland" together. Between this and the Left 4 Dead games, 4 seems to be the official size of a zombie survival group.
That's about all there is to say about the plot really. The movie is 79 minutes of tongue in cheek zombie madness, made by and for people who love the genre. In the middle there's a pretty good chunk where there actually aren't any zombies for a while, but it leads to a hilarious cameo by a man we'll only call "BM" for now. As I said, Woody Harrelson's performance is far and away the best part of the movie, as he keeps up his "I don't care 'bout nothin' but killin' zombies and NASCAR" bit as he finds himself in increasingly absurd situations. By the end of the movie, he's riding a roller coaster while fighting off zombies trying to climb up the track with a shotgun. Jessee Eisenberg as Columbus and Wichita and Little Rock aren't nearly as memorable but all have their moments. The writing is clever, and manages to make the movie funny, while not seeming too much like the horror-comedies that have come before it, like Shawn of the Dead. Zombieland is a fun 79 minutes of zombie killing.
Concerning Cats with Megaphones
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 08:02-10:58
"We'll cross the ocean to the new continent.... even if we are wearing Shinra uniforms."
Nearest I can tell pretty much everyone hates Cait Sith. While I certainly don't make a point of using him regularly in my party (whoever decided that his Slots limit break should have a chance of killing the entire party is a douchebag), but he makes me laugh sometimes. I love his goofy little jigs and just the absurdity of the whole character. Its a cat with a megaphone telling a giant, fat, frankly somewhat retarded looking moogle what do to. And since you find out later that Reeves is telepathically linked to Cait Sith, I guess there's some type of weird multi-tiered mind control thing going on, since presumably Reeves is controlling the cat which is controlling the moogle.
I made two attempts at the Speed Squre game at the Gold Saucer and failed both times, slightly less miserably the second time. God, that's incredibly frustrating. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put a shooting minigame into a game that uses the PS1 D-Pad, but suffice to say it wasn't a good idea. After the Gold Saucer you get thrown down into the desert prison and have to find and confront Dyne, Barrett's also-gun-armed and now somewhat crazy in the head acquaintance. The flashback to Barrett and Dyne trying to dodge Shinra gunfire is kind of awful. I realize that circa 1997 there was only so much you could do with 3D, but if you look at Scarlet during the cutscene, she's not even holding a gun. She's literally "firing" her empty arm at them. That bugs the hell out of me every time I see it.
I'm starting to gain levels some of my basic materia (All, Fire, Ice, Lightning), and I have mostly weapons with double growth slots equipped right now (you find a big string of them going along at this point in the game). I really like materia as a magic system. It can be frustrating at times, and having to swap around materia as you swap around your party members gets tedious. Its much less frustrating though, than the bizarrely concived Junction/Draw system they implemented a game later in FF8. It wasn't in any way intuitive at all to learn, although at the same time, once you got late into the game and had a stockpile of good magic, it was easy to completely break the game. With the push of a button you could, say, bring your characters HP from something like 2,000 to the max of 9,999. Materia isn't at all volatile like that, but its also pretty customizable. With some tweaking, you can come up with some interesting combinations, especially with Elemental and Added Effect materias. I also like that most materia will buff and/or debuff some of your stats, somewhat making up for the fact that unlike the earlier FF games, all of the characters aren't all that dissimilar to begin with, as opposed to a game like FF4 where you sure as hell weren't ever going to get anywhere mashing Attack with your caster class characters.
Right now Cloud's at level 21, and I'm saved outside of the Gold Saucer doing a few random battles before taking my sweet-ass buggy down south. Its not too long before I get to Nibelheim. I don't remember what level you have to be at to feasibly beat the boss you need to get past to get Vincent. I'm probably going to try it on the first time I get to Nibelheim regardless, so it could get ugly.
Playtime 08:02-10:58
"We'll cross the ocean to the new continent.... even if we are wearing Shinra uniforms."
Nearest I can tell pretty much everyone hates Cait Sith. While I certainly don't make a point of using him regularly in my party (whoever decided that his Slots limit break should have a chance of killing the entire party is a douchebag), but he makes me laugh sometimes. I love his goofy little jigs and just the absurdity of the whole character. Its a cat with a megaphone telling a giant, fat, frankly somewhat retarded looking moogle what do to. And since you find out later that Reeves is telepathically linked to Cait Sith, I guess there's some type of weird multi-tiered mind control thing going on, since presumably Reeves is controlling the cat which is controlling the moogle.
I made two attempts at the Speed Squre game at the Gold Saucer and failed both times, slightly less miserably the second time. God, that's incredibly frustrating. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put a shooting minigame into a game that uses the PS1 D-Pad, but suffice to say it wasn't a good idea. After the Gold Saucer you get thrown down into the desert prison and have to find and confront Dyne, Barrett's also-gun-armed and now somewhat crazy in the head acquaintance. The flashback to Barrett and Dyne trying to dodge Shinra gunfire is kind of awful. I realize that circa 1997 there was only so much you could do with 3D, but if you look at Scarlet during the cutscene, she's not even holding a gun. She's literally "firing" her empty arm at them. That bugs the hell out of me every time I see it.
I'm starting to gain levels some of my basic materia (All, Fire, Ice, Lightning), and I have mostly weapons with double growth slots equipped right now (you find a big string of them going along at this point in the game). I really like materia as a magic system. It can be frustrating at times, and having to swap around materia as you swap around your party members gets tedious. Its much less frustrating though, than the bizarrely concived Junction/Draw system they implemented a game later in FF8. It wasn't in any way intuitive at all to learn, although at the same time, once you got late into the game and had a stockpile of good magic, it was easy to completely break the game. With the push of a button you could, say, bring your characters HP from something like 2,000 to the max of 9,999. Materia isn't at all volatile like that, but its also pretty customizable. With some tweaking, you can come up with some interesting combinations, especially with Elemental and Added Effect materias. I also like that most materia will buff and/or debuff some of your stats, somewhat making up for the fact that unlike the earlier FF games, all of the characters aren't all that dissimilar to begin with, as opposed to a game like FF4 where you sure as hell weren't ever going to get anywhere mashing Attack with your caster class characters.
Right now Cloud's at level 21, and I'm saved outside of the Gold Saucer doing a few random battles before taking my sweet-ass buggy down south. Its not too long before I get to Nibelheim. I don't remember what level you have to be at to feasibly beat the boss you need to get past to get Vincent. I'm probably going to try it on the first time I get to Nibelheim regardless, so it could get ugly.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Cowboy Bebop Session #1: Asteroid Blues
I'm going to keep going with my FF7 posts, but I've developed a hankering to re-watch "Cowboy Bebop", far and away my favorite anime, and indeed one of my favorite TV series regardless of its country of origin or whether its animated or live action. The show has a certain brilliance in a way that it melds a bunch of different genres and themes, yet also exudes a style all its own. Its not like Kill Bill, which is almost just four hours worth of Tarantino coming up with random B-movie references (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I really like Kill Bill as well). The movie builds off of a lot of other things: film noir, westerns, science fiction, martial marts movies; but in the end it isn't a hodgepodge collection of all of these things. The sum total of it is something more. As egotistical as the tag line--which you see in some of the background of the bumps coming in out of the commercial break and elsewhere--may sound its kind of true: "The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called 'Cowboy Bebop.'"Basically my plan is to just start watching and write down my thoughts as I go. Some of it may pertain to what I'm watching at that exact moment, other times it may be larger themes of the whole series. At any rate, let's start with episode 1.
Session #1: Asteroid Blues
The series shows its noir influence from the very outset. The scene that serves as our introduction is a rainy alleyway. Everything is a muted blue color, almost making it look like a sepia tone. Our first glimpse of Spike is of him standing, nursing a half-smoked cigarette, with his head down and his eyes obscured in shadow. We hear a very melancholy sounding music box playing. Music boxes are a pretty widely used storytelling device, I think. The first thing that comes to mind for me is A Few Dollars More, where you'd hear the same sort of music box tune every time there would be a flashback of Indio, the villain, and his ex-lover. I don't know if the usage in "Bebop" is a direct homage or if Dollars inspired it, but I know that Shinichiro Watanabe, Bebop's director, and the rest of those involved with the series know their Man with No Name movies, because there's a more obvious The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reference later in this episode. Spike drops a rose in a puddle as he walks away. The red in the rose stands out against the bluish-black background. We start to see quick cuts of Spike in a bloody shootout with a group of gunmen who we don't know anything about right now. Again, the color red stands out in the washed out looking scene. I think the color red is tremendously important in the series. Already, I can think of a bunch more places that it comes up. The music box tune comes to a stop, and we cut to the series's standard opening, complete with its theme song, "Tank", which I have nothing to say about other than its one of the coolest damn openings ever.
After the opening, we get the title screen and see that we're watching "Asteroid Blues" and get treated to, appropriately enough, blues music on a harmonica. We meet Spike and Jet, cruising through space on their way to Earth, and, inbetween Spike complaining about the lack of beef in Jet's bell peppers and beef dinner, we deduce that they're bounty hunters. Jet has their next target lined up, who's hiding out in Tijuana. In the future, its hard out here for a bounty hunter, and Spike and Jet are broke, as they are pretty much perpetually throughout the series. Jet and Spike, as we'll pick up on throughout the series, started out on opposite sides of the law and kind of met in the middle. Jet was an ex-cop, Spike is a ex-crime syndicate member, and now they're both bounty hunters. They're both sort of half "flawed": One of Jet's arms is prosthetic, and, we find out much later, one of Spike's eyes is fake as well.
Down on the surface, in a dusty old bar in TJ, Asimov walks in, looking a bit like Antonio Banderas in Desperado, with his pregnant lady friend, the femme fatale of the episode. Asimov follows the bartender in the back and is trying to sell him some "red eye" or "bloody eye" (again, the color red shows up), evidently the street drug of choice in the future, which you spray directly into your eyes. Asimov's whole vision turns red, and the drug seems to give him superhuman reflexes as he literally dodges bullets when a gang of men start shooting up the bar. Spike, meanwhile, having landed, is consulting a Native American mystic regarding Asimov's whereabouts. The mystic is a character who sort of bookends the series. He's here at the beginning, shows up again in the middle, and is there again at its very end. He tells spike that the "red-eyed coyote" will appear north of town, and then: "death." Spike, nonchalantly, says "he was killed once before, by a woman." As Spike turns to leave, says somewhat ominously, "Wakan Tanka, guide his spirit," and we get a close-up show of him blowing away a lump of sand from the palm of his hand. We're far removed from the unpleasantness at the series's end, but even here Spike seems to be a character whose fate has been sealed.
Jet, meanwhile, visits the now-destroyed bar, and gets some information out of two guys who show up mentioning that they need to get the bloody eye back. Spike, landing to get gas, happens to run into Asimov in passing in the bathroom, and then--much more literally--runs into his lady friend, and gets caught stealing a hot and a bunch of her other groceries. Evidently she finds a certain charm in this, and they speak flirtatiously for a bit as Spike gasses up. Eventually, Spike reveals that he's a bounty hunter. Turns out, Asimov was right behind Spike listening in, and almost chokes him to death but stops at the behest of the woman. They get in their ship and fly away and the girl tells Spike as he's laying on the sidewalk, "Adios, cowboy." Jet finds Spike, still laying on the ground, passed out, and after Spike comes to announces that the job's not worth it, but Spike knows that Asimov is going to Mars after he sells his bloody eye, and he stole a sample of it during their tussle. Spike, in disguise, sets up a deal to buy bloody eye from Asimov, and Asimov tries to pull out the vial of it that he no longer has. Spike pulls off the goofy sombrero he's wearing, reveals the vial he has, and asks Asimov, "Do you know how much you're worth?" He's wearing a poncho that looks a lot like Blondie's from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and that's what Blondie asks of Tuco in the movie. Spike and Jet are a lot like detective characters in a noir crime story, but they're also not at all unlike gunslingers in a spaghetti western movie. The episode "Cowboy Funk" much later on in the series, will pit Spike against a literal cowboy, and gives us more of the spaghetti western influence on the series, complete with music that sounds a lot like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.
Spike and Asimov have another tussle, but their interrupted by more gangsters trying to gun down Asimov. In the chaos, his girlfriend is nicked by a bullet and we she that she's the one carrying the big stockpile of bloody eye because the vials all come spilling out onto the ground. Asimov is furious that she almost lost them, and, looking into his eyes, the girl realizes that he doesn't really care about her at all, just the drugs. With a somber jazz saxophone tune playing, Asimov, drugged up to all hell, flies up off planet and into space, tailed by Spike. With a blockade of police ships looming ahead, the girl decides enough is enough, and shoots Asimov as Spike, his ship now side-by-side with theirs, watches, horrified. Before she dies, she tells Spike again "Adios." Their ship gets riddled full of bullet holes, and the girl drifts out into space, leaving a trail of red eye vials. At the end of the episode, Spike and Jet are again aboard the Bebop, Jet again making up some "bell peppers and beef." They're back to where they were at the start of the episode. C'est la vie.
The episode first and foremost introduces us first and foremost to two of our main characters, Spike and Jet, the original Bebop crew. Jet is more of a wiser, calculating man, Spike is more wreckless and impatient, yet also has this dark, somber aura about him. It also establishes the noir overtones that are going to pervade the series. It tells a self-contained story where the protagonists track down the antagonist they're seeking, and make it out of a fight with him alive, but the resolution is anything but happy. Spike, already having been "killed by a woman once," here watches as a woman dies needlessly, her only crime seemingly being hooking up with the wrong guy. Their brief flirtation suggests that maybe, had she escaped and fled with Spike, maybe she could've been happy, but in a noir story, characters always seem bound by their fate, and dreams can never really manifest themselves into reality.
The next episode is a much more light hearted one, and one of my favorites--Stray Dog Strut--where everyone's favorite Pembroke Welsh Corgi makes his first appearance.
The Man in the Black Cape
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 06:00-08:02
"Am I... human?"
"He continued to read, as if he was possessed by something, and not once did the light in the basement go out."
"I challenged Sephiroth and lived. Why didn't he kill me?"
I completely forgot about all the silly minigames in Junon Town. First, there's having to do CPR on Priscilla, a girl whose entire purpose in the game seems to go no farther than to exist you can save her and get the Shiva materia as a reward. Then there's the part where you have to have the dolphin boost you up to the top of the high voltage tower, which I never seem to get right the first twelve times. Then there's the marching scene, where you basically just have to march in line (I won 6 potions, I don't know if that's good or not, nor remember what I usually get). Now I'm saved on my way to the docks to do drill for Rufus's send off.
Before getting to Junon was the big flashback to Nibelheim with Sephiroth going insane and burning the town. I'm still not entirely sure I get the entirety of the story with Jenova, and the Cetra, and how Sephiroth came to be. You get bits and pieces of it here. The Cetra were the original inhabitants of the planet, but came from elsewhere. Mako is like the physical manifestation of the Cetra's wisdom. Jenova is something that fell from the skies during the time of the ancients and sat in the ground for about 2,000 years before it was pulled out by the Shinra. I know on Disc 2 there's an optional scene where you can find a recording that Professor Galt made going into some of this. Going to have to do that and pay attention. I'm sure there's more explained in the game than I can really recall right now, but even so, I don't think they do as good a job painting the complete picture that they could have. Some of the telling of the background feels incomplete.
Cloud's at level 17 right now as I'm sitting in Junon. I got my first two summoning materias in the form of Shiva and Choco/Mog (the animation for which never fails to make me laugh). Now that I'm starting to accrue some materia, at some point in the near future I'm going to make a post talking about the system, which I think is one of the best magic systems in the series.
Playtime: 06:00-08:02
"Am I... human?"
"He continued to read, as if he was possessed by something, and not once did the light in the basement go out."
"I challenged Sephiroth and lived. Why didn't he kill me?"
I completely forgot about all the silly minigames in Junon Town. First, there's having to do CPR on Priscilla, a girl whose entire purpose in the game seems to go no farther than to exist you can save her and get the Shiva materia as a reward. Then there's the part where you have to have the dolphin boost you up to the top of the high voltage tower, which I never seem to get right the first twelve times. Then there's the marching scene, where you basically just have to march in line (I won 6 potions, I don't know if that's good or not, nor remember what I usually get). Now I'm saved on my way to the docks to do drill for Rufus's send off.
Before getting to Junon was the big flashback to Nibelheim with Sephiroth going insane and burning the town. I'm still not entirely sure I get the entirety of the story with Jenova, and the Cetra, and how Sephiroth came to be. You get bits and pieces of it here. The Cetra were the original inhabitants of the planet, but came from elsewhere. Mako is like the physical manifestation of the Cetra's wisdom. Jenova is something that fell from the skies during the time of the ancients and sat in the ground for about 2,000 years before it was pulled out by the Shinra. I know on Disc 2 there's an optional scene where you can find a recording that Professor Galt made going into some of this. Going to have to do that and pay attention. I'm sure there's more explained in the game than I can really recall right now, but even so, I don't think they do as good a job painting the complete picture that they could have. Some of the telling of the background feels incomplete.
Cloud's at level 17 right now as I'm sitting in Junon. I got my first two summoning materias in the form of Shiva and Choco/Mog (the animation for which never fails to make me laugh). Now that I'm starting to accrue some materia, at some point in the near future I'm going to make a post talking about the system, which I think is one of the best magic systems in the series.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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.
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