Tron Legacy

Tron Legacy (**1/2)

As much of a dork as I am, I've never seen the original Tron, which posed a bit of an issue seeing Tron: Legacy, because, for a niche movie released 28 years ago, the sequel--built to be much more of blockbuster for a wider audience--does surprisingly little to really set things up for a new audience. I already knew the broad strokes of it, and there's a prologue which serves as a brief recap, but Legacy's plot is contingent upon exactly what the nature of "the grid" is and all the programs that dwell within it, and nothing contained within Legacy really spells this out well enough for me to determine whether it makes any sense. I suppose I could Wiki the first movie now, but again, the whole point is that this is a blockbuster holiday movie intended to make a bunch of money, not a straight to DVD release to placate the guy in the Tron suit that shows up on Jimmy Kimmell. The movie should stand on its own and I don't think it does. It's visually impressive and there's some fun sequences, but it's hard for the movie to really resonate with me much beyond that.

The movie starts out in 1989, with a CGI-assisted young Jeff Bridges playing Kevin Flynn, explaining what "The Grid" is to his son, Sam. Again, I'm assuming the specifics are explained much more thoroughly in the original, but I guess the gist of it is that it's a digital world that kind of mirrors are own existing within a computer. It's like the Matrix with more neon. Despite being digitized, humans within the world ("users") have to eat food and bleed when they get cut. Is this following Matrix rules too? Does "the mind make it real"? The movie never really says. Again, maybe this is something explained in the '82 version. Anyway, shortly after this scene takes place, Kevin mysteriously disappears, not telling anyone of his whereabouts.

After our opening prologue, we meet a grown up Sam Flynn, our protagonist. After Kevin vanished, Sam went to live with his grandparents, but they soon passed away, and Sam became the archetypal troubled, aimless youth, represented mostly by the fact that he drives a motorcycle really, really fast. Once every year, Sam makes a point to break into his father's old company, Encom, and cause some sort of shenanigans, as revenge for the company veering away from his father's altruistic vision. This was unquestionably the dumbest part of the movie for me, as the company's board of directors sits around a dark room with all black furniture (cause they're evil!) and talk about how their OS version 10 is exactly the same as OS version 9, but the dumb consumers will never know, mwahahahaha, only to be foiled by Sam ruining their tech demo by inserting a Youtube video his pug barking his mad hacking skills. The sequence ends with Sam eluding a pudgy security guard by performing a Batman-esque base jump off of the roof. The entire thing is just very silly.

The movie gets more interesting when the plot that everybody came to see starts in earnest, when Kevin's old business partner, comes to see Sam in his makeshift apartment in a warehouse down by the river (he's a very rebellious youth!) and tells him that he was mysteriously paged from his dad's old arcade. Sam goes to the arcade to investigate and manages to get himself sucked into The Grid by punching in a few UNIX commands on his dad's computer. Pretty much as soon as he reaches the other side, Sam gets rounded up alongside a bunch of programs and is forced to participate in "games" at the arena. These include fights to the death in the form of combatants flinging the disks everyone carries on their backs at each other and the motorcycles-that-make-trails-behind-them thing that was probably the most enduring thing from the first movie. Sam picks all this up surprisingly quickly and manages to survive, with some help.

At some point in time, Kevin created a computer program doppelganger of himself which he named Clu maintain The Grid and turn it into "the perfect system." Like Kevin in the 1989 scene, Clu looks exactly like a younger Jeff Bridges, and the realism they were able to achieve with this is undeniably impressive. Wouldn't you know it though, Clu ends up turning evil. Clu feels slighted after Kevin becomes fascinated with the spontaneous appearance of "Isos:" programs that seemingly came into being on their own; their code writing itself like genetic material. Clu considers the Isos, with their inherently unknowable nature, to be a contaminant in his perfect system and has them to be destroyed. This is another thing that doesn't fully make sense to me--either because I haven't seen the original movie or because it's not explained in either movie. The thing is, all of the programs that inhabit the world, even after Clu eradicates the Isos, seem to have their own distinct personalities anyway. Michael Sheen has a bit part as Zeus, who has a bit of a David Bowie thing going on and acts pretty much flamboyantly, stereotypically gay for the entirety of his time on screen. How did he come to be if he isn't an Iso? Did Kevin design a program to daintily prance around for some reason back in 1982? It's entirely possible that there are definitive answers to these questions, but they're not addressed in Legacy.

Sam has a run-in with Clu first, but eventually finds his real father, living a sort of exiled existence out of the reach of Clu's regime. Alongside him is Quorra, (played by the ridiculously attractive Olivia Wilde), a computer program for whom Kevin serves as a sort of mentor. The nature of Quorra isn't revealed until quite a while into the movie, although you can probably figure it out based on what I've already written. As the creator of the world, Kevin seems to have Keanau Reeves-esque power over the environment, but these seem to work intermittently as the plot demands. Kevin has pretty much adhered to a code of non-intervention, but Sam wants to get the hell out of The Grid as soon as possible and tries to escape, even though it would mean letting Clu escape into the real world as well, which he also apparently can and wants take over somehow and for some reason. And so the last act is a chase between Kevin, Sam, and Quorra and Clu's malevolent forces as to who can get to the gate between the flesh and blood world and the digital world first.

Tron: Legacy is pretty on the eyes for a while although, frankly, after two hours I was pretty much ready to be done with the whole neon blue and neon orange motif. It has some fun sequences, but the plot seems muddled and requires a surprisingly large amount of prior knowledge about a cult movie from 28 years ago. For a movie dealing entirely about a sentient beings living in a digital world, it doesn't really leave you with much to think about the way, say, Ghost in the Shell does, and while the action is fun at times, that in and of itself isn't enough for this movie to have much staying power. It's wasn't an unpleasant watch, but I can't really imagine wanting to watch it over and over again.

Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell (***)

"Memory cannot be defined but it defines mankind."
"I wonder where I'll go now. The net is vast and infinite."

Somehow I managed to go this long without seeing either of the Ghost in the Shell movies. so I used my newfound streaming Netflix account to check out the first one tonight. I've already seen a bunch of "Stand Alone Complex" on Adult Swim--not the whole run beginning to end, but a lot of it--so I was already pretty much aware of the characters and the basic themes going in. The show can sometimes be really dense and talky, and the dialogue can be really stiff and wooden sometimes, but it's still more than interesting enough to watch because of it its around a very cool cyberpunk setting and the ideas about humanity, personhood, and identity at it's center. I feel much the same way about the movie. A lot is jammed into less than 90 minutes, and at time it's a bit difficult to follow. It had to be damn near impossible to follow for most American audiences when it first released in 1995 if they didn't really know what to expect going in. There's a hollowness to a lot of the scenes and characters aren't developed much. And yet, it's still an easy work to admire because of the vision of a future where the line between human and machine is no longer clear that it creates. It reminds me in some ways of the Metal Gear Solid games, which deftly weave amazingly complex conspiracy plots and present a lot of interesting ideas (some of which, especially in MGS 2 and 4 are actually similar to the ideas of Ghost in the Shell) and yet also feature lines like "Snake, do you believe that love can blossom, even on the battlefield?!" It's not nearly to that extend here, it should be said, it's just a comparison.

At the film's start, Section 9 is investigating a series of ghost hacks of government officials. Alright, so right off there's some splainin' to do. The "ghost" in Ghost in the Shell is the mind, the soul, the consciousness. Whatever you want to call it, it's the intangible thing that makes a person and person. So a "ghost hack" is a hack of a person's mind, made possible by the fact that much of the human population is now living in partial or total cybernetic bodies. Section 9 is a police force that investigates crimes such as this. They communicate with each other through a neural link without speaking. They do their detective work by tapping their brains into computer systems. Section 9 is helmed by Chief Aramaki, who is developed more as a character in the show, but for purposes of the movie basically serves as the old intelligent dude who's been around the block before. The point woman on the ground is our protagonist, Motoko, or simply The Major, who has a fully cyborg body which the filmmakers have deemed we need to see in the nude about 6 times over the course of the 83 minute movie. Alongside on the team is Batou, the man closest to major, whose unchanging prosthetic eyes seem to complement his stoic military man personality. There's also Ishikawa, who we don't get to know much, and Togusa, who was chosen for the team for a diversity of opinion because he's still almost entirely human.

After a brief gunfight/chase sequence, the culprits of the ghost hacks are tracked down. The one who isn't killed in the firefight is brought in for questioning. In the interrogation room, the man, a garbage man by trade, has it explained to him that he himself has been hacked into, his mind planted with false memories of having a wife and kids that don't actually exist. A "simulated experience" it's called, one of the genuinely unsettling ideas in the Ghost in the Shell universe. The case starts to trouble Motoko, as she begins to question whether she can deem anything about her own life as a certainty since her body is no longer human. Section 9 realizes that the ghost hacks can be traced by to a master hacker, a Puppet Master. The turning point of the plot comes when Section 9 comes in possession of the cyborg body of an unknown woman who, seemingly unrelated, was struck by a car, and it eventually becomes clear that the very nature of the Puppet Master is as much a question as his identity. The whole thing makes for an interesting, if hard to follow on the first viewing detective story, though it's mere 83 minutes leaves you wanting a bit more. The same can be said with a lot of animated movies, I suppose.

Most of the English voice actors (the dub was what was on Netflix) are those who would go on to do the voices for the "Stand Alone Complex" series. One exception is Motoko, whose voice doesn't sound as good here, I don't think. As a whole, the voice acting is decent but seems kind of stiff. I think some of that is some of the dialogue they're working with, although I also think that more recent anime dubs are usually better crafted, "Stand Alone Complex" included. More interesting in the soundtrack, which compares a bit to the other big watershed movie for U.S anime fandom, Akira, in that it has an eastern influence. Wikipedia tells me that the main theme is actually based on a Shinto prayer.

Ghost in the Shell was about what I expected. It was enjoyable, if a bit too self-involved and stiff at times. As far as early breakthrough animes go, I much prefer Akira. Maybe that sounds inconsistent because I just chided Ghost in the Shell for being hard to follow, and Akira is by all rights far more incomprehensible at times, but there's something about the way Akira all comes together that I love. Even though it was made seven years earlier, the animation seems to have more richness and more life to it, and combined with one of the coolest soundtracks I've ever heard, the movie delivers more of a punch for me. I still think Ghost in the Shell is something of an important work, though, because of its philosophy and its ethics and its unprecedentedly lucid cyberpunk vision.

Smarter than the Aver-age Flying Cat

Lunar Silver Star Story Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-02:51

That's right kids, mixing it up a bit. This is a game that I've genuinely never played before, other than the first hour or so once. My initial thoughts about Lunar are, first of all, that it's a lot of fun, and secondly that it moves quickly. It's like a JRPG in the hurry-up offense. It has all the traditional elements of a JRPG, including a story, albeit a pretty simplistic one to this point, but doesn't really spend a lot of time dallying at all. A little under, I've been through the first three areas, and just felled the first boss: the weird gelatinous creature on the pirate ship. The game doesn't have any huge blocks of dialogue, the load times are minimal (given that it's a top down 2D game, this would seem to go without saying, but the load times on the PS1 Final Fantasy ports are putrid), and battles usually last less than a minute. When an RPG presents an interesting world to explore, it's fun to slow down and let yourself be immersed in it, but I'm finding this a nice change of pace after having played two FF games. Recall that in FF IX it took a good hour to really get into the game proper after a menagerie of cutscenes and battles of no real consequence.

Like pretty much every JRPG, Lunar is a coming of age story. Our protagonist is Alex, a teenager growing up in a quaint little town who, much like Link or Zidane or a thousand other RPG characters, is actually more than meets the eye. He has the same green eyes as Dyne: the legendary dragonmaster, Alex's hero. And so, after passing the trial of the legendary white dragon, awakened from his slumber, Alex sets off to find his destiny, accompanied with his loyal flying cat Nall, his friend of the fairer sex, Luna, with a renowned singing voice, and his loud, obnoxious, tubby friend, Ramus. Later you meet Nash, the requisite arrogant bastard character. Each character gets a little CGI cutscene to introduce them with some kind of dated looking, but still decent animation. The voice acting is hardly great, but given that this was made at around the same time as Symphony of the Night ("What is a man... a miserable little pile of secrets!!!") and Mega Man 8 ("But it cannot fall into Dr. Wah-wee's hands!"), it's hard to complain about. At times, there's actually voice acting over the regular top down pixelated graphics, which is just kind of bizarre more than anything and doesn't really add much. The game has a pretty good sense of humor, and some very Americanized humor. I'm not sure how much of that is the result of localization or if it was in the original Japanese. Talking to random people in towns will produce some pretty amusing little asides.

The battle system has some elements of Chrono Trigger (undoubtedly other games also, I just associate it with Chrono Trigger) in that enemies will move around during the battle and there are certain area-of-effect spells that will hit more enemies the more they're grouped. In Lunar, your characters also have to physically move to melee attack enemies, and can't fully traverse the screen in a single turn. This is a little bit frustrating, as it doesn't specifically define exactly how far you can move, and on a couple of occasions a character has basically burned a turn just moving toward an enemy that I thought he could get to. Additionally, if you tell a character to attack a nearby enemy that then dies at the hands of the character who went immediately before him, that character may select a much farther away enemy leading to the same result. Not really that big of a deal though. At the time, I don't have a lot of variety in abilities but that's slowly improving, especially now with the addition of Nash as a caster. In general, battle is usually fun and fast moving. It does seem a bit odd to me that it took this long to get to a genuine boss battle. Hoping the rate of those will pick up a bit.

Overall thus far, Lunar is a fun game that you can pick up and get into the meat of quickly, without a lot of stops and starts along the way. I don't know if it's really high art as much as some of the better Final Fantasys are. The story is very simplistic and there's a lot of just getting you from point A to point B without a lot of flavor added in. The humor is genuinely amusing though, and it holds your interest. More to come.

Machete

Machete (**1/2)

Knowing full well that it was cut from the same cloth as Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Kill Bill, and Grindhouse--where it was actually born as a fake trailer--I assumed I was somewhat prepared for the absurd, hyper-violent, self-aware, do-ridiculous-things-just-because-they're-ridiculous style of Machete. And, for the most part I was, but even I wasn't quite prepared to see Cheech Marin being crucified (no, really, he gets crucified) after a gunfight in a church played out with "Ave Maria" in the background, Robert DeNiro shooting a pregnant woman and smiling for his YouTube video, or whatever was up with the hell Lindsay Lohan's character. And then, of course, there's when Danny Trejo, in the titular role, overhears a doctor explain that the human body contains 60 feet of intestine, and then uses that information tactically in the next scene. Machete is the latest of Robert Rodriguez's Frankenstein's monsters, a blood-soaked revenge flick with a bunch of entangling alliances between our wayward ex-cop hero, an underground illegal immigration network, a Texas State Senator who may be the least preposterous character in the movie thanks to the Tea Party's existence, and a Mexican drug lord who, for no real reason, is played by Steven Segal. Provided it doesn't morally offend you, it's a mostly fun jaunt into the realm of self-aware action movie shtick, and really it's biggest flaw is that it occasionally seems to forget what it is and starts taking itself seriously for a few moments.

The movie dispenses with any notions of subtlety before the opening credits, as Machete (according to his government file that you see on screen at one point that's his actual given name) busts into the hideout of the Mexican druglord Torres, cuts up a few unsuspecting henchmen with a machete (if his parents named him leaf blower would he use a leaf blower?), and saves a naked girl, only to discover that the naked girl was with Torres all along. Enter Torres in traditional movie villain style, who executes Machete's wife with his katana (because everything's better with katanas, I guess) and leaves him for dead. Shocker: Machete doesn't actually die. Three years later, he's on the down-low in a border town in Texas, and gets approached by a mysterious man who offers him $150,000 to kill an anti-immigration state Senator (Robert DeNiro) because, he says, illegal immigration must continue unabated in order for the economy to thrive. To say things aren't what they seem here is to be putting it mildly. Somehow in a little under 2 hours Machete manages to get from here to a massive raid on the compound of a group of Texas vigilantes by a makeshift army of Mexican people driving chop-shop cars. Along the way, Machete meets Michelle Rodriguez, who is the unofficial head of "the network," an underground group helping illegals cross the border and get set up with jobs, and Jessica Alba, an ICE officer who learns about Machete's past and helps him advance the plot a few times. Whatever. Anybody walking into Machete looking for a brilliant, nuanced plot has made a horrible, horrible error. The movie's main strength--the reason to see it really--is it's individual gags, the best one probably being a sight gag where Machete knocks a guard's gun out of his hand, and repeatedly, tauntingly waves a weed-whacker at him as he tries to pick it up.

The only real problem with the movie, is that sometimes it doesn't seem to remember that it's a movie that was spawned from a fake trailer sandwiched in between two similarly ridiculous grindhouse action movies. At times with DeNiro's character (and I really can't street how bizarre it is seeing him in the movie) it seems like they're trying to make some sort of an actual commentary about the Tea Party movement or the anti-immigration fervor in the country in general. When Jessica Alba stands up on top of a car and gets a crowd of random people to rally around her with a cliche-riddled "we have to stand up for what's right!!" it's hard to tell if they're parodying other speeches from bad movies that took themselves way more seriously, or if they actually thought it was going to be a real emotional moment. Then there's the matter of Lindsay Lohan's character, the daughter of the man who, seemingly, offers Machete the money to kill the Senator, which is equally as bizarre as Lohan's actual life has been for the past few years. Her final scene, which involves her in a nun outfit, is one of the most surreal, confounding things I've ever seen, and not in a "oh yeah, they're just trying to be really ridiculous and over the top" kind of way like most of the rest of the movie, but in a "...what just happened?" sort of way. I think uncomfortable is the best way I can describe the whole thing.


As long as there are going to be actual movies with tag-lines like "Slow Justice is No Justice" there will always be a place for movies like Machete. While most Hollywood action movies will try and pretend that they're not as ridiculous as they are, movies like this embrace what they are at their core. They're violent, dumb, morally dubious, and a decent way to spend 2 hours and 10 bucks.

I Call Upon the Heart of the Cards

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
18:58-30:38

I managed to win the Treno card tournament, which I don't believe I did on my first playthrough, which won me a Rebirth Ring. I mostly ignored the card game in general the first time through, but I'm actually having fun with it. I honestly don't know if it nets me any more prizes in the form of items, I haven't checked any FAQs regarding that. Maybe if I beat the "card guru" who lives in Lindblum I get something. I'm finding Quina hilarious this time through too. I don't really think I did the first time and I'm not really sure why. The way (s)he constantly seems to keep showing up randomly wherever you travel even though (s)he seemingly has only the most mild passing interest for what you're trying to accomplish is just gold. When Quina randomly shows up in Treno and then gets discovered washed up on the beach and presumed dead by Lindblum soldiers are two the funniest moments in the game so far.

In general, I like most of the characters, and lot of the inter-party banter that goes on, but the whole plot of the game, such as it is, just seems like kind of a mess. So much of it just kind of seems like a random confluence of events loosely pieced together. After heading back to Alexandria for Garnet's coronation, kind of a pivotal moment for the history of the country and for Zidane and Garnet as characters, and then as a party you just kind of up and decide that you want to go to Treno to enter a card tournament. Then you have to rush back from Treno because Kuja is attacking Alexandria, and all of a sudden, before we've really gotten to know much about Kuja--other than his kind of general dickishness--all of a sudden Garland interjects himself into the story with no real introduction. After you destroy the entity controlling the Iifa Tree, all the mist disappears from the world, and despite mist powering a bunch of the world's technology and despite it having existed for decades, no one seems to really be all that freaked out by it's sudden disappearance. The whole story seems to have sort of a haphazardness to it. The story of FF VII is really set from the same cloth in the sense that the gist of it is "you're the good guys, stop the bad guy from destroying the world," and while it has some asides thrown in with shenanigans involing mind control and false memories, the core of it is really only marginally more complex than IX's. VII's whole story seems to develop much more naturally, though, and seems to rely less on random coincidences to give everyone and everything a place in the story and tie everything together.

One other thing I kinda like, quickly, is the "chocograph" sidequests, where you can find items on the world map and dig 'em up with your chocobo. Unless you're really dying to skip the couple of random battles you'll run into walking to wherever you're going, riding chocobos is kind of pointless in most newer FFs. In FFVII they got around this by adding chocobo breeding/racing, but that just gets to be so much of a chore. This is a much simpler distraction.

Less Pew, Pew, More Stab, Stab

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
10:13-18:58

Earlier, I praised FF9 for having distinct classes like the Final Fantasy I-VI (although even VI drifted away from this), instead of characters that were essentially identical until you started setting up their materia/junctioning/whatever, at which point you could basically make them into whatever you wanted. In IX, the character's class actually dictates how you can play them. You can't just mash Attack and have any kind of success if you don't have all melee characters in the party. The one problem with this, though, is that sometimes the story will dictate a certain combination of characters for your party which can be pretty annoying. Right now I'm going through the stuff on the Outer Continent (yeah, it's been a while since I've posted last), and for a pretty decent chunk of time my party has been Zidane/Vivi/Garnet/Eiko. Having two white mage/summoner class characters in the party at the same time is just goofy. It's fine for boss battles because you can have one heal or buff and the other summon on a given turn, but for random battles, summoning is usually just overkill and a waste of MP and time (luckily the summoning cinematics are pretty short in the this game), and if you don't have to heal you end up basically wasting a turn doing something like 68 damage hitting the giant troll with your little mage staff. Kind of makes battles drag on for unnecessarily long.

I had vague memories of going into the Iifa Tree from the first playthrough--mostly the screen just before the boss battle where there's like a cascading waterfall of mako... wait this isn't FF7, but it's basically still mako, isn't it? It's green glowly life-essence type stuff. I completely forgot about that boss battle though. I actually died once against him because it took me like three castings of it to realize that casting Fire triggers a counter attack that rapes you. When you cast it, a message comes up that says something like "The fire has started." Before he actually uses the counter-attack it's not really apparent whether that's good or bad. I'm still not quite sure what it's supposed to be, other than some really pissed off tree creature producing mist inside of a giant regular tree. I also forgot about completely absurd Armarant looks. When you go into the one-on-one battle between him and Zidane is pretty much the only time you get a clear shot of his face. Otherwise, he just kind of looks like a giant red mass with a body attached to it.

Inception

Inception (****)

Inception is part Dark City, part Matrix, part Ocean's Eleven, part Sandman. It's also not quite like any of these, because it's not quite like anything else whatsoever. It's visual effects are impressive enough to at least put it on par with most of the big summer releases opening around it, but it has none of the convention, the cliche, the gimmickry, the timidity of the average cookie-cutter blockbuster. On some level, it fits snugly in the category of heist movie, but there's no bank--not a physical one anyway, and there's so much going on than merely the execution of the grand scheme. Christopher Nolan reaffirms what he pretty much already established with both of his Batman films, that he can create a grandiose effects movie with mass appeal and still make it fiercely original and thought-provoking.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb and he's an Extractor. What the hell is an Extractor? An extractor essentially hacks into people's dreams, during which a person's mind is vulnerable we're told, and steals people's ideas on behalf of a client (like a rival businessman). How do you steal an idea? Well, you literally pick it up and run with it. In the dream worlds of Inception, ideas are actual tangible things, perhaps written on a sheet of paper and locked away in a safe. Problem is, dreams are also populated with elements of a person's subconscious, and when they detect a foreign presence in a dream they'll attack it, like how white blood cells attack a foreign substance in a person's bloodstream. The techniques to do this were developed in a secret military program, we're told, but apparently it's existence has leaked out in certain circles, and some people have actually been trained to fight extraction, which basically militarizes the projections in their subconscious. What might normally be an old girlfriend strolling down the street becomes a commando with an assault rifle. If you die in the dream, you just wake up (not following Matrix rules here), most of the time at least, but you still feel the effects of however you got killed and there's no guarantee that you die quickly. The machine that does this is suitcase sized device with a big red button in the middle. Nolan, wisely, doesn't really try and explain the specifics of how it's supposed to work. They're not really important, and would only serve to bog the movie down in exposition that wouldn't really be believable anyway.

Cobb is a widower, and hasn't been able to see the two children that he had with his wife (or set foot in America for that matter) because he's a suspect in his wife's death. As to the circumstances of her death and whether or not he's guilty, that's something the movie reveals bit and bit and would be too spoilerish for a review. Cobb is working in Japan when he gets offered a chance at the proverbial One Last Big Job from Saito, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe, last seen in a Christopher Nolan movie playing Ra's Al-Ghul), who has high-level connections that can get Cobb back into America. The catch is that Saito isn't asking for Extraction, he's asking for Inception (hey, that's the name of the movie!). Inception is the antithesis of Extraction--planting an idea in someone's mind. The problem is that it's hard to convince a person's subconscious that it's their own idea. If it doesn't feel like something they would naturally think up, the idea won't take hold in the person's mind. What does Saito want to plant? He wants to convince Fisher, (Cillian Murphey, the other former Batman Begins villain) the heir to a rival energy business, to break up his father's company, essentially scuttling his billion-dollar inheritance. So yeah... that's gonna be tough.

To pull off either Extraction or Inception, you also need a Chemist and an Architect (is someone hard at work creating an RPG system based on this right now?) The Chemist will induce sleep deep enough to not be easily disrupted through a series of drug compounds, and the Architect will construct the landscape of the dream. The Architect can change up the landscape on the fly with a thought, but again, if the target figures out that there's shenanigans going on in their dream, the jig is up. For an Architect, Cobb recruits Ariadne (Ellen Paige), a student of his father's (Michael Caine), who is as much a stranger to the whole Extraction/Inception concept as we are, and thus mostly serves as our point-of-view character. In spite of being a fish-out-of-water though, she's smart enough to realize that Cobb has some serious demons in his closet and at several points confronts him about them, worried that they'll endanger the mission.

A good chuck of the second half of the movie, is just the execution of the big Inception plan. While at times it turns into very formulaic gunplay/car chase stuff, Nolan manages to keep the energy going such that it doesn't at any point feel pointless. And certain elements are anything but formulaic, as when Josh Hartnett's character has to fight in a hallway in which the gravity is constantly shifting making the whole room rotate on an axis. Things get a bit hard to keep up with as the movie approaches it's climax, as eventually there are four distinct groups of character(s) in four separate imagined places. The confusion that arises is slight though, and I have little doubt that Nolan crossed his Ts and dotted his Is in his writing and that it'll make sense upon repeat viewings. A lot of people seem confused by the movie's ending and I'm not sure why. It's ambiguous, but I thought it was clearly deliberately so, and I'd frankly defy anyone to devise a better way for the movie to end.

Nolan has simultaneously created a popcorn movie and a thinking man's movie, something which you could say he already did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but Inception frankly surpasses them on both levels, and keep in mind that Dark Knight was my favorite movie of 2008 and that I'm border-lined unhealthily obsessed with all things Batman. The movie has spawned discussion everywhere. I've seen several blog entries, for example, arguing that the movie is actually a grand metaphor for filmmaking--that it's basically Nolan's 8 1/2. I'm sure over time wholly different interpretations with at least equal merit will arise. And yet, if you just want to enjoy it as one of the most ambitiously warped heist movies of all time, you can and have a hell of a time with it. A great movie.

The Realm of Endless Rain

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
04:48-10:13

Maybe Burmecians just have different opinion on nice weather, but personally I think that if your homeland is known as the "Realm of Endless Rain", it's time to get a new homeland. I dunno, maybe Burmecians would all want to live in Seattle if they existed in real world America. On the way there, I stopped off in the swamp, I picked up Quina, probably the oddest character since VI since Gogo, except that you get Quina way earlier in the game in IX and seems like an actual main character and not an afterthought "bonus character." I really have no idea what drug-induced haze inspired he/she/it as a character. The Eat ability is one of the more annoying Blue Magic systems. Obviously E. Skill materia was a lot easier in VII where you just had to get hit with whatever ability it was. Here, it seems like the enemy has to be at a fairly low percentage for it to be successful. There's some pretty cool Blue Magic abilities in the game though, like Pumpkin Head, which was the first one I picked up, and which deals damage equal to whatever the difference between your current and max HP is. Steiner has the same thing in his Sword Art abilities only it's called Minus Strike. Kind of an interesting high risk/high reward thing.

The Trance system kind of annoys me as well. It takes much longer for your trance bar to fill up than your limit bar took to fill up in VII, which I don't necessarily think is a problem except that, unlike in VII, if you get someone's trance to full in a battle but then it doesn't get around to that character's turn again it doesn't carry over until the next battle. Seems kind of lame that you can spend all that time getting it filled and then not getting to use it (that sentence sounds vaguely dirty). I'm also completely confused by the "Trouble" status effect, which doesn't exist in any other Final Fantasy that I remember, is the only status effect that doesn't go away automatically after battle [update: this actually isn't true at all. I guess I was just lucky up until this point.] (remember back in the day when you actually had to be sure to carry around all the various status healing items?), and can only be healed with an "Anointment" and not a Remedy. Just a completely bizarre addition to the game in my opinion.

FF has had some pretty ridiculous costumes throughout it's history, but whatever the hell Kuja's wearing has to be right near the top. I think IX also has to represent the height of the ultra-effeminate male in FF. Sure it continued a big in X and XII with Tidus, Seymour (speaking of weird outfits...) and Vahn, but there you had Auron and his five o'clock shadow and Basch with the big-ass scar on his face to mitigate that somewhat. I'm glad that as you get to this point in the game though, you have an actual villain on screen, instead of just autonomous black mage puppets and the unsubstantiated hunch that Queen Brahne might be kind of up to something evil. I suppose you could say that in VII you don't see Sephiroth until you reach Kalm Town, and then only in flashback until you acutally encounter him for the first time on the boat leaving Junon Town. In VII though, I think there was enough sufficient dickishness from President Shinra and his lackys to provide enough conflict for the first few hours of the game. As I said in my first post, I think IX gets off to a bit too lackadaisical of a start.

I guess I complained a lot in this post, but I really am enjoying this playthrough. I've completely forgotten huge swaths of the game since the first time I played it, and I'm having fun rediscovering it. The environments are unquestionably one of the game's big strengths. I talked about Lindblum last time, and Burmecia is pretty spectacular as well, even if it does look like it'd be really depressing to live there. Moving on to Clerya next, which is one place that I do remember well and remember being a really cool concept for an RPG town.

RPG Music Part II: Town Themes

This is going to be kind of a broad category that will basically encompass any kind of a theme that plays where you're in an area with people whom you're not trying to kill. This is going to be pretty Mitsuda heavy, I think. He has a knack for making music that evokes a certain tranquility.

II. Town Themes

Arni Village (Chrono Cross)



I feel like this should be in one of those Corona commercials with the people sitting on the beach.

Peaceful Days (Chrono Trigger)



Mitsuda again, with SNES technology this time, with a peaceful, somber melody.

Termina (Chrono Cross)



Cross again, but this time a livelier piece for a livelier town.

Mushroom Kingdom (Super Mario RPG)



Just fun to hum along to.

Lon Lon Ranch (The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time)



It sounds kind of weird on the 64 hardware, but I like the melody and the lazy, western sounding guitar accompaniment.

A Brief Interlude: My Favorite RPG Music

I mention the soundtracks a lot in my FF posts, and it occurs to me that through the magic of embedding it would be pretty easy to throw together a post dedicated to some of my favorite tracks. This is going to be very Square heavy, if not Square exclusive (there might be a Zelda or two thrown in, which I'm considering an RPG series for purposes of this), because my RPG experience is very Square heavy. I don't think there's any question that Uematsu's music in the FF series and Mitsuda's music in the Chrono series are both central to why both series are so beloved (okay, I guess people are a bit up in the air about Chrono Cross), and I don't think it's merely the popularity of the FF series that's led to a world tour of concerts of FF music with prestigious orchestras. That a lot of Uematsu and Mitsuda's stuff was done on pretty primitive music hardware and still sounds good also says a whole lot.

I. Main Themes/Overtures

The Prelude (Entire FF Series)



The sort of strange, ethereal harp music is a perfect way for you to be greeted as you turn your system on. Instantly recognizable, but something you never get sick of.

Prologue (Final Fantasy IV and others)



A nice, epic sounding overture. A pretty early example of how the soundtrack gave the FF series a cinematic quality.

Terra's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)



Amazing. The opening credit's sequence with the mechas stomping their way to Narshe in the show with this playing the background was all you needed to draw you into the game.

Main Theme (Final Fantasy VII)



Pretty sure I already professed by love for this in my Final Fantasy posts. It's used mainly as a theme for the world map in the game, but listening to it it's almost sort of it's own mini self-contained story, starting off kind of somber, building up in intensity, turning dark and ominous, and then there's sort of a cathartic release at the end. This sounds incredible with a live orchestra.

Zanarkand (Final Fantasy X)



I wasn't quite sure what to make of this when I first played Final Fantasy X because the simple piano melody sounded like so much of a departure from what Uematsu did in other games, but I grew to like it. I think it suits Final Fantasy X, which I think is a really enjoyable game, even though it seems to get a pretty bad rap sometimes. The difficulty left something to be desired, but I thought it was as well produced and well conceived as any other game in the series.

Scars of Time (Chrono Cross)



Gorgeous. The kind of Eastern feel to it reminds me a bit of Joe Hisaishi's scores for Miyasaki movies.

This is the Age of Steam

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 01:51-04:48

One thing that I really like about FF IX is that they brought back the concept of distinct classes. In VII you can use materia to kind of mold each character into whatever you want, but independent of that everyone is pretty much identical in battle. And magic actually matters. After a while in VII, with a couple of rare exceptions, you're usually just as effective just kind of pounding away with physical attacks with maybe the occasional summon thrown in. In IX, your mages actually have to cast spells on pretty much every turn if they're going to be effective. I like the ability system for the most part as well. While you can't really get as creative as with materia, it is kind of nice to not have to micromanage it as much, and since abilities are tied to items, it gives you incentive to horde as much equipment as possible, even if you might not actually get a stat increase from what you pick up. I like the synthesis system as well, another easily understandable but engaging game mechanic.

Five hours into the game, it's occurred to me that I've retained pretty much none of the game's plot points from the first time I played it. Every locale I've been to thus far, though, has had me saying "Oh yeah, I kinda remember this." From the first time I played it, I always though the game's environments--a combination of the painted backgrounds Square relied on in VII and VIII--along with some more advanced honest-to-goodness real-time rendered scenery (allowing the camera to shift)--were one of it's strongest points. Especially after having reached Lindblum, my second playthrough has confirmed that I knew what I was talking about, and I know that some of the cooler areas are still to come. I love the steampunk-esque veneer that's built over the world's medieval fantasy base, and the sprawling city of Lindblum, with it's air trams and city gates that open with big clock tower style gears, is a great display of this.

More to come.

Are You a Bad Enough Dude to Kidnap and/or Rescue the Princess?

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-01:51

I have to say that Final Fantasy IX doesn't really do as good a job selling itself in it's opening minutes as VII did. At the outset of VII, you weren't really sure who you were or what the hell you were doing, but within minutes you were jumping off a train and stabbing dudes in the face on the way to blowing up a reactor. In the opening moments of IX you get a compelling mystery as you see a cloaked figure on a raft violently tossing and turning in a storm on the sea. We cut away from this though, and join up with Zidane and his band of rogues, setting up their plot to kidnap the princess. This is as good a place as any for a fantasy story to start, but it's way too slow developing to serve as a way to draw the player in. Before we get to the actual kidnapping, we cut away for some brief misadventures with Vivi, who I really like as a character, but Vivi getting harassed by an ill-tempered "rat kid" trying to get into a concert isn't really the best way to keep me glued to the action in the first hour of the game.

The concert itself leads to a scene that evokes the beloved opera scene from VI, but that scene was roughly halfway through the game, once you had familiarized yourself with all the characters and the game's basic premise. VI started off a lot like VII did, by throwing you right into actual battles as you controlled a hypnotized Terra as she's led into Narshe to raise hell and steal the frozen esper. In IX, there are a few "battles" to familiarize yourself with the system, but they're either stage acting during the play or sparring amongst Zidane's crew. There's not much immediate conflict. VIII had kind of a similar problem, as, if I recall correctly, before you set off to find your first GF in that cave, you had to kind of wonder around the Garden for a while, but VIII at least at the fairly epic Liberi Fatali CGI at the beginning. Where I am now, 1:51 into the game, there's not really any sense of the larger story at all yet. Thus far, the plot points have been "Garnet gets kidnapped" and "Garnet gets rescued" and that's about it. I'm not saying that I found the first two hours totally unenjoyable, because I didn't, but I think it could've been set up better.

I do think the "Active Time Events," that you can activate with Select to watch a cutscene, were a pretty inspired idea. I like the idea of giving the player control over how much or how little of the minutia (didn't think I'd pull out a word like minutia, did you?) of everything that's going on with every character. I also really like IX's world map music. Doesn't quite have the sweeping movie score style epicness that VII's did, but it's nice. I just got out to the world map now after running out of the Evil Forest (not one of Square's most inspired place names) before it turned to stone. More to come.

Fuck it, I'm Just Gonna Beat It

Final Fantasy Playthrough
'Till the End

Yeah, I couldn't bring myself to be an absolute completionist on this. This had already taken forever, and I wanted to expedite this and get it out of the way, because I just purchased Final Fantasy IX off of the Playstation Store, which I think I'm going to blog about next. I think that'll probably prove more interesting, as I've never owned it before this, and only beaten it once on a friend's copy some years ago. I really only have very vague memories as to the specifics of the story and, well, most of the gameplay for that matter, so my writing on that will probably be a lot different than this, which was me playing a game that was old hat. As I started to say in the last post, I don't really think there's enough of a bridge to get you to where you can realistically fight Ruby and Emerald Weapon (which were tacked on for the American release of the game, which I'm sure is mostly to blame for this) from where you can beat Ultimate Weapon. The Ancient Forest gives you a few new high-level enemies to fight, but for the most part, if you're going to get everything you need for those two fights, like your Final Attack-Phoenix combination and maybe your W-Summon/Mime, it's really just a complete grind to do.

Being at around level 65 with a lot of good materia (no W-Summon, KotR, or Mime though), the final battles were a bit of a joke, though I managed to beat the game with something of a dramatic flair anyway, as immediately after Sephiroth used "Heartless Angel" to bring everyone to 1 HP, then used Omnislash to kill Sephiroth without having healed anyone in between. Poetic, I know. The game ends exactly where it began, which Aries's face surrounded in a field of stars, as she summons Holy to destroy Meteor. I kind of like that they ended it there and didn't feel the need to continue on with an extended coda, where there's like a "Where Are They Now??" segment for each of the main characters. In fact, were it not for Advent Children, however many years later, you can make the argument that the humans don't even survive the events of the ending. As Bugenhagen said when you took him to the City of the Ancients, it was going to be up to the planet as to whether or not humankind was going to be saved. The quick after-the-credits sequence with Red XIII leading his kids to see the wreckage of the old Shinra complex, now covered in thick plant-life could be interpreted as evidence that the planet said "You know what? You guys still suck, humans. It's the firey-tailed furries that shall inherit the earth!!" But then Square realized that "everybody's dead!" doesn't make for a lucrative sequel and went ahead and made Advent Children. A lot of people seem to be in love with it, and while it was kind of fun from a purely fan-service perspective, as a movie it didn't really do much for me. I haven't played any of the prequel stuff either. Maybe I will eventually, but for right now, as far as I'm concerned, Final Fantasy VII is still a self-contained thing.

Next up: Final Fantasy IX!

Why Save the World When You Can Breed Chocobos

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 28:56-36:41

I played through the Midgar sequence ending in the boss fight with Hojo, thus ending disc 2, and of course declined to go right into saving the world in favor of doing more sidequests. Obviously, the nature of video games is such that suspension of disbelief is much more difficult than with movies, but there's something particularly amusing about the idea of flying your airship to the edge of a big hole in the earth that you're going to have to descend to the bottom of within a week in order to save the earth, only to decide to up and fly away to instead race some chocobos at an amusement park. I do, of course, appreciate that there's a lot more to do above and beyond the main storyline, although one thing I will say is that there's not really enough new areas where you can just level up and get more GP (chocobo breeding is expensive) without it being complete mind-numbing tedium. Once you kill Ultimate Weapon--which is one of the last things I did before writing this--you can access the Ancient Forest which helps, but other than that you pretty much have to go to the Sunken Gelnika or otherwise retread areas you've already visited as part of the main story, unless I'm really forgetting something.

I've made a couple of attempts at going for Omnislash and/or W-Summon at the Battle Arena, which is genuinely challenging. The most expensive thing I was able to commandeer was the "Stardust" at 8,000 BP, which if I was online at the time I wouldn't have bought because it's just a one use item that casts Comet 2. Somewhat confoundingly, it's more expensive than Speed Source Materia at 4,000, and Preemptive Materia at 1,000. I did get the Speed Shoes for winning 8 battles at least once, which are kind of awesome in and of themselves (automatic haste). To win all 8 battles with any sort of consistency, you're pretty much required to be at a high level with excellent materia, and even still you need a lot of luck. Going into it with a Ribbon can help tremendously, but of course one of the penalties is "accessory broken," which I got after the first round on more than one occasion. One of the possible 2nd round fight is a group of five little insect creatures which can all put you in berserk, so if your Ribbon is broken after the first fight, that pretty much screws you right there, unless you're overpowered enough to be able to muscle through the next 7 fights without ever having to heal. One of the possible first round fights is also a group with two little caterpillar enemies, who will always use Silk on you on their first turn, which slows you down and which your Ribbon doesn't protect against. Having a leveled-up Counter Attack helps, so does sticking an Added Effect-Hades pair on your weapon, as very few of the Battle Square enemies seem to be immune to much. Materia equipped Really, to get through all 8 battles, at least at level 58 which is where I have Cloud at, you need a pretty perfect confluence of events to happen. I suppose having First Attack materia would mitigate against some of this, but I don't have that at the moment, nor do I remember off hand how you get it. May have to check a FAQ after this.

I've been doing some chocobo breeding as well. Right now I have two that can win in the ultra prestigious Class C--where you can win such fabulous prizes as Potions--but that's it. I'm not sure if I'm going to bother getting a gold chocobo. I don't even remember all the details of how to get one, except that you have to steal the nut to breed one from the goblins on one of the isolated islands on the map. Gonna play that one by ear.

Square-Enix's Plot to Destroy America

"What the... no countdown? It doesn't seem the same without it!"

"We ain't no Ancients if that's what ya mean."

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 27:23-28:56

Hey, remember when I used to update this? After a long hiatus, I started up my playthrough again, starting with the last Huge Materia quest in that takes place (echo effect) in spaaaaaace. Granted, over the course of the story, the whole party sees all manner of strange stuff, but it's still a bit bizarre and rather amusing that no one in the party other than Cid really seems to care that they're the first people in outer space. Cid is pressed up against the wall peering out the porthole, arms clutched around it like he's trying to capture all of space in his hands, while everyone else just sort of sits motionless, wondering when they're going to be done with the whole thing. After the Huge Materia quests, the next plot point is going back to visit Bugenhagen, who tells you to take him to the City of the Ancients, where he conveniently finds writing scribbled by a scientist (who writes in riddles?) about where to find the Key to the Ancients. I guess they don't quite show how deep the pool is or if it feeds into flowing water or something during the cutscene at the end of disc 1, but it's a bit perplexing why Cloud is so dead certain that they're completely fucked when Bugenhagen explains that Aries's White Materia is the Holy power that can save the planet. Having just made it back from outer fucking space on a spaceship that was on an irreversible collision course with a giant meteor, does fishing something out of a big pool of water seem that impossible?

Before returning with the Key of the Ancients though, I've stopped off for a few more diversions first. I went to see Lucretia behind the waterfall, which is kind of a fun scene culminating in Vincent telling her the white lie that Sephiroth is dead. I also did the pagoda sequence in Wutai to get Yuffie's final limit break. I dunno if it's supposed to be a direct homage, but the whole "fight one guy with a different style on each level of a pagoda" thing is the same premise as Game of Death, the movie Bruce Lee was making when he died. Sadly, unlike Game of Death the final battle here does not involve a vampire Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It never really occurred to before that Wutai could be seen as a commentary on post-war Japan. I mean, granted, it's obvious that Wutai's culture is supposed to be like the in-game equivalent of an Asian culture set aside from a largely Westernized world, but I think you could make the comparison more specific than that. There's a lot of ranting amidst the Wutaians about how after they lost the war, the country was opened up to a bunch of outsider touristy types who started messing up the place. At the end of the pagoda sequence, Yuffie's father tells her to steal the party's materia after their quest is over. Does Square-Enix have a secret plot to steal America's materia? I think it would irresponsible not to speculate.

Right now I'm saved in the Sunken Gelinka, where I'll get what is pretty much free XP from The Turks in a battle that has a really bad AI glitch, but then I'll have to fight some stuff that can probably actually kill me.

Shorties

What say we try and get caught up

Death at a Funeral (***)

I never saw the original Frank Oz-directed, British version of this movie, which is probably a good thing since, other than the cast, they seem to be nearly identical, right down to the same actor playing the father's diminutive long-time "friend." So I can't really compare this to the original, but I can tell you that I found this version to be pretty funny, though some parts are most certainly funnier than others. Chris Rock is Aaron, our protagonist, a son burying his father--who stipulated in his will that his funeral take place at home--and is struggling to deal with both the logistics and financial reality of the funeral, while trying to deal with the various warring factions of his family. He mostly serves as the straight man, and mostly does a pretty good job of it. Martin Lawrence plays his brother, Ryan, a wealthy and popular writer (well, he claims he got hit hard by the recession) who moved out to New York and lives a playboy's lifestyle. His character's just really not that funny in the grand scheme of the movie. Most of the bits centered around him involve him creepily hitting on an 18 year old and kind of fall flat. Luke Wilson, perhaps snake-bitten by those God-awful AT&T commercials, isn't all that funny either as Derek, the ex of Elaine (Zoe Saldana), who spends the duration of the funeral ineptly trying to win her back.

Much, much funnier are Norman (Tracy Morgan) and Uncle Russell (a perpetually scowling Danny Glover), who pretty much steal the movie. Glover plays Uncle Russell as the grumpy old man archetype turned up to 11, spending the whole of the movie verbally and physically abusing Norman, who has the unfortunate task of having to look after him despite merely being a family friend. Tracy Morgan is... well... Tracy Morgan, showing off his unmatched comedic timing acting like the funniest possible type of complete crazy person. Also funny is the escalating comedy of errors involving various family members trying to detain the little person who was... involved with their father and is now trying to blackmail the family for what he believes is owed to him. The sight gag it all culminates in is somewhat predictable though.

Overall, Death at a Funeral is a well-executed, raunchy, dark comedy.

Sherlock Holmes (***)

Guy Ritchie, who has made a career to this point making British underground movies tries his hand at a crime story of a more classical nature in the form of the latest adaptation of the quintessential detective character, and the results are mostly enjoyable. Bearing only a passing resemblance to a lot of the very gentlemanly interpretations of Holmes, like the movies starring Peter Cushing in the 60s and 70s, Ritchie's film has a bit more of an edge, not skirting around Holmes' drug addiction, and playing up his somewhat anti-social behavior. Robert Downey Jr. brings his usual quirkiness to the role, at times making it seem like his character from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang has been sent back to Victorian England. Jude Law's Watson is good as well, and the two playing off of each other produces a nice House-Wilson vibe, Gregory House, of course, being basically the modernized, medical equivalent of the Holmes archetype.

Mark Strong plays the villain, a cult-leader who has been murdering the cult's enemies by seemingly magical means, and whose ultimate plot is to kill all the non-cult-friendly members of parliament through a very steampunk-looking device that will flood the parliament chamber with deadly gas. As such, it leads to the old cliched ticking time-bomb scenario, but the detective story that leads up to it is intriguing enough and feels worthy of the Holmes tradition. The movie does an effective job of tying everything up, while teasing a much more iconic Holmes foe for a potential sequel. Rachel McAdams shows up as a old flame of Holmes', but doesn't really end up having much that's all that memorable. Despite not being used to this sort of big-budget, big-hype fare, Ritchie is able to inject a lot of his signature hard-nosed style into the film. Particularly cool are the fight sequences, in we first see Holmes planning out precisely how and why he's going to attack his target in slow-motion, blow-by-blow, then we rewind to see it happen all at once in real time. Compared to how slow-motion is used routinely in action movies nowadays, it feels much less empty and much more purposeful.

Holmes is enjoyable, and if a sequel is to be made (may have already been greenlit for all I know, haven't been seeking out news for it) I would have high hopes for it.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (***1/2)

As if Wes Anderson's movies weren't already quirky and surrealist enough, Anderson tries his hand at stop-motion animation in his adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. I don't have the slightest clue as to how close the movie is to the book in either plot or feel, but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. George Clooney plays a fox who promises his wife, voiced by Merryl Streep, to give up his career of chicken snatching when they settle down and have a kid, who turns out to have the voice of Jason Schwartzman. Eventually, though, he falls back on his old habits, and pulls off his greatest caper ever, which causes three of the angriest farmers in the land to come after him and drive him and the neighboring animals deep into the sewers. Thus, Mr. Fox has to hatch a plan for them to escape, which involves, among other things, a badger demolitions expert voiced by Bill Murray. Funnnnn times.

Avatar (***)

Yep, finally got around to seeing it, though I'm not going to waste a lot of ink on it (pretend this is ink). I agree pretty much exactly with what the general consensus seems to be, that being that it's visually stunning, but the plot is derivative and forgettable.

The Old Familiar Sting

Note: I started this before the announcement that Zambrano is moving to the bullpen and finishes it afterward, so this might be kinda weird.

The Cubs are off to an uninspiring 5-9 start, and currently down 0-2 in a 4 game series against the Mets, having previously lost 2 of 3 at home to the absolutely putrid Astros (they have a .249 on base percentage for the year). As a general rule, 14 games isn't really enough time to say with any sort of certainty how good a team is, but the ways in which they've lost make the beginning of 2010 feel like an extension of the worst parts of 2010, and seem to validate the most pessimistic assessments of what the Cubs would be from before the season. Even with Ted Lilly still rehabbing in the minors, their rotation has been pretty good thus far, as it was in 2009 when it led MLB in quality starts. But the offense has been mediocre overall and non-existent lately, with 1 total run scored thus far in the Mets series, and the bullpen has been horrendous.

Take out opening day, when Carlos Zambrano got rocked in Atlanta, and The Cubs' rotation has been solid thus far, posting a starter's ERA of 3.49. Even Carlos Silva--having come into the season recovering from injury, seemingly not in the best of shape, and having been cast off from Seattle in exchange for Milton Bradley--has had two really good starts (update: actually has had a 3rd good one while I've been writing this), giving up just 1 ER over 13 IP. The bullpen, however, has an ERA of 6.15, with a combined W-L record of 1-6. The best reliever to this point, has probably been Sean Marshall, who's done a bit of everything, having appeared in close & late situations, and having done some long relief as well. Carlos Marmol has been okay, but does have 1 blown save. John Grobow, originally penciled in as the set-up man, has struggled mightily, and the once highly-touted Jeff Samardzjia looks like he probably shouldn't be in the majors. This is a problem, seeing as he's 25 now, not getting any younger and hasn't yet distinguished himself as a major league pitcher at all. He hasn't really been able to develop any good pitches to complement his fastball.

It was just announced today that Lou Pinella is moving Zambrano to the bullpen to be an 8th inning guy. For all the reasons above, the Cubs definitely need to get some help from somewhere, but this still seems like a dumb and somewhat panicky move to me. While he's off to a somewhat crappy start, he's still obviously a well-above average starter, if perhaps not an elite one. By moving him to the bullpen--if this is a permanent move--you're limiting him to maybe 80-ish innings instead of 200+ were he to be healthy the entire year. Relievers simply aren't as valuable for a team because they aren't out there as much in total. This also, obviously, weakens the rotation a bit. The way it's started out, that wouldn't seem to be a huge issue, but Carlos Silva is not going to have starts as good as these all year, nor is Tom Gorzelanny going to go without allowing an earned run as he did in his first start. Ted Lilly will figure to be good, as he has been ever since he's been with the Cubs (he turned out to be a really good signing--Jim Hendry has his moments), but never quite know for sure what a guy is going to give you coming off of injury. Really, I think the best hope for the Cubs bullpen is for someone to simply come out of nowhere and play above their level. Right now it doesn't seem like that's going to be any of the 3 rookies currently in the Cubs bullpen. Theoretically, it could be prospect Andrew Cashner, who might be called up in the not-too-distant future.

The Cubs offense has, shall we say, sputtered out of the gate. As I'm writing this, the Cubs have plated 9 against the Mets in Game 3 of the series, but they had a combined 3 in the 3 games prior to that. Marlon Byrd has produced nicely thus far and has hit 3 HRs. Derrek Lee has 3 long balls as well, but hasn't hit for average much in recent games. Struggling the most offensively right now is Aramis Ramirez, who right at this moment is hitting .131 (0-for-6 in this Mets game), seems to be consistently getting behind in the count, and simply doesn't look right in his at-bats. Alphonso Soriano has had some awful ABs as well in the early going, although he's come around a bit, at least hitting the ball. Defensively he's misplayed several playable balls, and Lou Pinella has taken to switching in Tyler Colvin in late innings (or Fukudome, if he didn't start). Which is fine, I guess, but it takes away a possible pinch-hitting option if you need one, and obviously a guy making about $20 million a year should ideally be able to play 9 innings. Maybe the most encouraging thing as far as Cubs hitters goes, is the fact that Starlon Castro is currently hitting close to .400 for the Tennessee Smokies. As I wrote in my previous Cubs post, if he gets called up and is good enough to stay as a regular starter, that completely changes the calculus of the lineup, as it gets rid of the Fontenot/Baker platoon at 2nd. Not that they're both terrible, because they're not, but neither of them really screams starter on a playoff team.

We're less than 10% of the way through the season at the moment, but it's hard not to look at the current weaknesses of the team and see how this team can contend throughout the year. Moving Zambrano to the bullpen is certainly a dramatic move and will certainly shake things up. Personally I think it looks awful on paper, but baseball is weird and weird things happen. If they can consistently get starters going 6+IP only allowing a couple of runs--as they have been--Zambrano turns out to be a good set-up man, Marmol converts a good percentage of his saves, and they can muster up outs from somewhere for the rest of what they need, they'll be in position to win most games if they can plate a few runs. We'll see.

Rites of Spring Part II

Part II: Pitching

Cubs starting pitching was actually pretty good last year, and was more than anything what prevented the season from going completely off the rails last year. They actually led the league in quality starts (at least 6 IP, no more than 3 ER) in spite of everyone except Randy Wells missing time on the DL. Carlos Zambrano was managed to finish at a decent 3.77 ERA, but was inconsistent overall and finished with just 9 wins. Clearly the Cubs are going to want more out of him as the ace of the staff. Supposedly, like Geovany Soto, he's gotten himself in much better shape during the off-season, although his temperament on the mound is going to continue to be called into question. The Cubs' lowest ERA belonged, surprisingly, to Randy Wells at 3.05. Obviously, it would be fantastic if he were to repeat that, but nobody is predicting as much. The Cubs cut ties with the sometimes spectacular but often hurt and/or ineffective Rich Harden in the off-season, and Ted Lilly will begin the season on the DL, so on opening day the rest of the rotation will be made up of Ryan Dempster, Tom Gorzelanny, and Carlos Silva. The Cubs have said consistently that Lilly should be ready to return some time in mid-April. Given their history with pitching injuries, it's hard not to take any sort of injury prognostications from the Cubs with a grain of salt, but it does seem as though Lilly has had no real setbacks.

Carlos Silva beat out Sean Marshall and Jeff Samardzija for the 5th starter spot with a good spring. Good spring or no, the idea of Silva in the rotation terrifies me somewhat. At the time he was traded for Bradley's contract, the conventional wisdom seemed to be that the Cubs weren't going to do much of anything with him, except maybe bury him in long relief. Really he was always just a means to get rid of Bradley which was an absolute must. Silva is coming off of a year in which he made just 8 appearances due to a major injury, and even in the year before that he was totally ineffective with an ERA above 6. Theoretically though, he'll only be in the rotation for a few weeks, unless he earns a permanent spot there or unless Gorzelanny is worse than he is.

The bullpen looks like the team's biggest question mark right now. Kevin Gregg is gone, and so the the closer job will belong to Carlos Marmol from the outset. His issues have been well documented. When he can keep the ball in the strike zone, he's nigh unhittable, but at times that seems impossible for him to do. Even still, Marmol has established himself as at least a good bullpen arm, if not a consistently great one. After the closer's spot, things get a lot murkier. Right now, it seems like the set-up man is going to be John Grabow, who had end of '09 with the Cubs after coming over from the Pirates. Nothing about him really exudes set-up man on a contending team though. The set-up man was intended to be Angel Guzman, who is now going to be out for the year with another major arm injury, something which has plagued him throughout his career. On opening day, the Cubs will have three rookies in the bullpen: Justin Berg, Esmailin Caridid, and James Russell. Caridad and Berg were both up for short stints in 2009, and were pretty good for whatever that small sample size is worth. Caridad also pitched 12 games this spring without allowing an earned run. Russell hasn't thrown a pitch in the majors whatsoever. Maybe everything will come together and they'll have really good years, but it certainly seems like the Cubs may have to throw together some money within their tight budget constraints to get an extra veteran arm if they manage to stay in contention come July.

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The 2010 Cubs have a lot of question marks, and it seems like they're right on the precipice of their main bats simply being too old for them to really be considered a championship contender. Still, some of those same main pieces had awful years last year, even accounting for some decline due to age, and the law of averages would suggest that there might be something of a bounce back this year. The Cubs are also in a weak division, with the Astros and Pirates solidly in rebuilding mode (although I guess the Pirates didn't really have anything built up beforehand), the Reds and Brewers probably decent but not playoff worthy, and the Cardinals a clear favorite, but far from perfect. The season starts tomorrow at 3:00 against the Braves.

Rites of Spring

I haven't found myself too motivated to update this thing lately. In my drafts is a half-finished Crazy Heart review that I'm not sure is ever going to be actually finished. For the record, I agree with what seems to be the consensus about it: Pretty good movie, the best part of which is Jeff Bridges' performance. I'm still going to finish my Cowboy Bebop posts, but haven't found the time to watch episodes for it, and I'm still going to finish my FF7 posts, but I've been off playing other stuff. So, with opening day just around the corner this coming Monday, here's a Cubs preview post to attempt to break out of this blogging malaise. Really, I'd be lying if I said I was that optimistic about the prospects of the Cubs' season, but it's nevertheless hard not to get excited for the return of baseball in general.

PART I: OFFENSE

Most computer projections that I've seen (i.e. PECOTA, CHONE) have the Cubs projected at somewhere around 78 wins for 2010. As much as I hate to admit it, in a lot of ways, this makes perfect sense. The Cubs managed just 83 wins last year and are returning pretty much the same club as last year, except that will be a year older on a team that's already relatively long in the tooth. With the Cubs finally pretty much hitting the apex of what they can reasonably spend as a team (the payroll has more than doubled over the last decade), and with the team bogged down with a lot of expensive, backloaded contracts, the team wasn't a huge player in free agency in the off-season. Their biggest acquisition was Marlon Byrd, who will come in to play CF, shifting Fukudome back to right. Byrd has been brought in to replace Milton Bradley, who the Cubs traded to Seattle in exchange for Carlos Silva, probably the best result possible amidst a lot of bad options for getting rid of Bradley. Silva's contract is really bad too, but on balance, they actually save a bit of money in the deal. Bradley will start the year as the Mariners' clean-up hitter. Good luck with that, Seattle. Setting aside the fact that he's not crazy, Bryd's arrival in Chicago isn't all-together dissimilar to Bradley's. Like Bradley, Byrd comes to Chicago coming off of career-high power numbers (20 HRs, 89 RBIs) playing for the Rangers. For the whole of his career tough, Byrd has been a roughly average player (99 OPS+). He's a pretty capable defensive player, though, which should shore up what is at times a brutal looking Cubs outfield, and he's played all three outfield positions during his career.

Most of the buzz around the Cubs during spring training was focused around Starlin Castro, who's just barely 20 years old and is now the Cubs top hitting prospect and pretty high up on many people's lists of the best prospects in baseball. Castro had a very good spring hitting the ball, but will nevertheless start the year in the minors. Were he able to come up at some point this year and play at a high level as a shortstop, though, that would change the calculus of the Cubs lineup quite a bit. Castro at SS would shift Ryan Theriot to 2nd, which is his natural position. It would also bump out of the lineup what the Cubs currently have at second base, that being a fairly uninspiring platoon of Mike Fontenot and Jeff Baker. Baker actually had a really good second half of 2009 after coming over to the Cubs from Colorado, with rate stats of .305/.362/.448/.810, but there's nothing to really suggest that he would put up numbers anywhere close to that over a full season. He's had a really lackluster spring as well, which might further the case for him coming back down to earth this year.

Another Rookie is going to make the opening day roster though, Tyler Colvin, who played a little bit with the major league team last year. Colvin is a former 1st round draft pick of the Cubs, and the fact that he's actually making it to the majors already puts him ahead of where other recent Cub 1st round picks have gotten, although there is some question about how big his upside is. As documented at Fan Graphs recently, Colvin's on-base percentage hasn't been that good thus far, and there are questions about his plate discipline. The biggest reason he's making the team is that he's had a very good spring. Colvin making the roster means that Micah Hoffpauir will be left off, something I'm not really that sad about. Hoffpauir is something of a liability defensively. He was on the team last year mostly to provide an offensive spark off the bench, similar to how veteran pinch-hitter Daryle Ward was used while he was a Cub, but he didn't turn out to be that successful at it. Also joining the outfield is Xavier Nady, who is coming off of Tommy John's surgery. Snagging pitchers coming off of major surgery for cheap is something that Jim Hendry has had a penchant for throughout his tenure. Sometimes it's worked (Ryan Dempster), other times it hasn't (Wade Miller). We'll see how it works out with a position player. Nady had a really good 2008, hitting almost 100 RBIs while splitting time between Pittsburgh and the Yankees. The biggest issue at this point is that he can't throw with anywhere near full strength right now, so he might be relegated to pinch-hitting for the near future (he's been playing DH in the Cactus League).

Ultimately though, it's hard to see any of the Cubs' new faces mattering as much as whether or not the old faces can turn it around. Alfonso Soriano plainly can't be the starting left fielder and put up the putrid numbers he did last year (.241/.303/.423/.726). The fact that his knee was reportedly still gimpy when he showed up for camp this spring isn't a promising sign, and neither is the fact that he's going to be 34 this year. Geovany Soto also had an awful year hitting, a night-and-day difference from his fantastic rookie campaign. He lost a ton of weight in the offseason, to the point where reporters at the Cubs Convention in January said that they almost couldn't recognize him. Hopefully he can translate being in better shape into more success in the batter's box. Sabermetric disciples have also cited his BABIP last year (batting average of balls in play), as evidence that some of it was just simply really bad luck. Another injury to Aramis Ramirez would also seemingly de-rail the Cubs' season. They added Chad Tracy to their bench, which would hopefully help to stop the Cubs from having to put out a really cartoonish lineup where somebody like Bobby Scales is starting at 3rd, but it's still hard to imagine the lineup having much pop without Ramirez in the heart of the order.

Still to come: Part II -- Pitching

As usual, stats are from Baseball Reference unless otherwise noted.

Shutter Island

Shutter Island (***)

You've probably heard by now that Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island has a big twist at the end, and indeed it does. I'm not going to reveal what it is, but I will say that it's genuinely unexpected, and it has a certain novelty to it, but it stretches the plausibility of what is, up until that point, a pretty engrossing story weaved by the master director and, at the end of the day, I'm not sure the ending being what it is makes it a better movie. I can think of several other movies of recent vintage with similar sleights of hand at work where the big reveal was much more impactful. Here, even though the ending genuinely did catch me off guard my thought afterward was something like, "...Huh. Okay." Though I legitimately didn't see it coming, it didn't really heighten my appreciation for the movie. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start from the beginning.

Our story is set in 1954 and our protagonist is Teddy Daniels. He's a U.S. Marshal who's been sent to the titular island on a case with a partner he's never worked with before named Chuck. Shutter Island houses a facility for the criminally insane, and not much else, save for the dock that gets you there and a bunch of jagged, foreboding cliffs. The two Marshals are investigating the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando, which occurred under curious circumstances. The facility's chief doctor, Dr. Cawley--played excellently by Ben Kingsley--says "it's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls". Ben Kingsley's performance might be the best part of the movie. When we're first introduced to him, he seems to exude the same sinister aura that the entire aura around him does, and then at the end, when something different is required from him, he shifts his performance in a way that sells the turn in the story moreso than the rest of the movie does (more on that later). He's perfectly cordial with the detectives, but at the same time he seems to want to impede their investigation if they start asking too many questions not directly related to Rachel's disappearance. Teddy's mistrust for him is heightening by the company he keeps, another doctor on staff who is a German immigrant. Teddy was a soldier in World War II where liberated a death camp, the images of which still haunt him. As such, Teddy is not much of a fan of zee Germans.

Teddy and Chuck's investigation doesn't turn up any solid clues as to how or why Rachel disappeared, but seems to open up whole other questions. Teddy finds a note in her room reading "Who is 67?" and after learning that Shutter Island houses 66 patients, he becomes convinced that the facility is hiding secrets, not the least of which is an extra patient. The investigation of Rachel's disappearance leads nowhere promising, but a massive storm hits the island, preventing the two detectives from returning to the mainland. While he's holed up within the very gothic hospital grounds, Teddy begins to see visions--of his days in the war; of his dead wife, who was killed in an apartment fire set by an arsonist; of the hideously scarred arsonist himself, who Teddy tells us was transferred to Shutter Island from prison. Is the stress of the investigation along with the massive storm battering the island getting to Teddy? Is there something supernatural at work on the island? For most of the movie, we can only speculate. The island is very much in the tradition of gothic "haunted house" locales. Bundle up Arkham Asylum, the House of Usher, whatever the house in The Haunting was called, and a bunch of other stuff, and channel it through the directorial eye of Martin Scorsese and you get Shutter Island. Scorsese paints the island as a living, breathing, 0therworldly entity unto itself, and milks this effect for all it's worth. No better example of the effect Scorsese is going for is the score, which, at times, isn't so much music at it is a series of guttural bellows in the form of extremely low-pitched string chords which almost seem to shake the theater.

Scorsese clearly loves constructing a Hitchcock-esque suspense setting, and for the most part it worked for me. I was genuinely creeped out, and genuinely engrossed by the island and all its myriad secrets, which is why I almost found that the ending, which paints the entire rest of the film in a very different light, almost undermines what Scorsese spends two hours building. A plot of a detective trekking through a mysterious haunted house is pretty derivative, but if there's anything that could make derivative interesting, it's Scorsese working with actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley. Shutter Island is based on a book with the same name, and maybe the ending is handled differently there as it seems to have garnered a fair amount of praise form what I gather Googling it, but here it just seems to muddle an enjoyable movie. Even now as I write this, I'm still very confused as to how some early scenes make sense after the different light cast on the overall story by the ending. In some movies with surprise endings, you immediately want to watch it again and hunt for clues; find what you missed the first time knowing now what you're looking for. With Shutter Island I don't feel that way, rather I feel myself sort of wishing that the scenes were exactly what they appeared to be before everything is shaken up at the very end.

Even with the frustration I have looking back on the movie, I can't say I was ever bored or disinterested for the two hours I was in the theater, hence the review is still ultimately positive. Even working with a somewhat convoluted and confusingly put together script, Scorsese reminds us why he's one of the best directors of all time, even as he steps a bit outside of his normal fare into the realm of supernatural dream sequences and horror movie set pieces. There are a lot of visuals in the film that are still vivid in my head a week afterward, even if the surrounding story didn't quite hold together for me.

Cowboy Bebop Session #5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

After somewhat of a hiatus, I'm back...

I'm just watching a bad dream I never woke up from.

Session 5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

The first image we see coming out of the opening is a man pricking his thumb and signing a letter in blood, continuing with the whole red/blood color theme the series has going. We're at some sort of a meeting of two crime lords (seemingly) forming an alliance. There's an interesting shot where they shake hands, one wearing an all suit, the other wearing all white, with one half of the room bathed in light coming in from the window and the other half obscured in shadow. It creates a yin-yang sort of effect. A few seconds later (I have it paused at 02:12 right now), we get a shot angled from above where we see the bright light outside, while columns in front of the window cast bar shaped shadows on the floor. This is sort of chiaroscuro effect is something you see a lot in noir movies. It's often said to be a metaphor for characters being imprisoned by something--visually their "behind bars." We learn that the man in the black suit is a member of the Red Dragon clan (color theme!). As he watches the other gang faction speed away, suddenly their ship explodes and he turns around to see himself with a sword at his neck. We get our first shot of Vicious walking in from behind, his massive bird squwaking on his shoulder. As Vicious kills the man in the black suit, we cut to a shot of the bird's big blood red eye, then to blood spilling on the floor. With his last words, the man in black insists, "if Spike were here, you would never have done this," and after Vicious smirks we cut to a shot, I guess from somewhere else in the room of a sculpture on the wall with two cherubs. This shot is in the same sort of washed out bluish-gray light as the very first flashback scene back in "Asteroid Blues." Feathers slowly descend across the shot. Then we get the title screen.

On board the Bebop, Spike is lobbying Jet, trying to convince him to pursue a bounty on the head of the Red Dragon clan leader who we just saw get killed. Mao Yenrai is his name, we learn. Faye enters and interrupts their argument, a distraction that Spike uses to leave by himself. Jet is not happy and leaves the room. Faye gets a message about "something big" that's meant for Jet. While doing this, she picks up a ace of spades on the ground from a deck that Spike was shuffling. Not the first time we've seen poker cards. Following the lead, Faye runs off and ends up at an opera. She ends up in Mao Yenrai's box with a gun at her back. Elsewhere, Spike visits a surly convenience store owner who is convinced that he died three years ago. She has a framed photo of Yenrai behind the counter. Spike asks what happened to him. We don't hang around for the answer. Switching back to Faye, she realizes that whoever has her captured at the moment has Mao's body propped up in one of the seats of the opera box. Vicious enters and tells Faye his name. Halfway point break.

Back at the convenience store, the owner, Annie is a bit drunk and telling Spike not to get involved with Vicious while opining about Mao's death. The next scene is Spike back aboard the Bebop, but in between is a are two completely silent shots, one of a stained glass window depicting a heavenly looking scene in a darkened room, followed by the shadow of Vicious bird obscuring the purple-ish light from the window on the floor. On the Bebop, as Spike is getting his various weaponry ready, Jet reveals that he knows Mao is already dead and that Spike would be walking into a trap if he were to go after his bounty. Spike says that he knows but that he "has a debt to pay off." Trying to convince Spike not to go, Jet very vaguely alludes to how he lost his arm by "being too gung-ho." At the end of the series, there will be another scene aboard the Bebop where Spike tells Faye how he lost one of his eyes. That scene will end the same way, with Spike running off to deal with elements of his past. A message comes in from Faye, handcuffed to a pole, announcing that she "kinda got herself caught."

As we switch scenes again, Spike approaches a giant cathedral under cloudy skies, tinted with an eerie purple hue. In between shots of Spike walking in and Vicious crouched down waiting with his big sword in hand, we get glimpses around the cathedral, including several of the stained glass windows from before. Spike gets into a gunfight with Vicious's men. In the commotion, Faye gets away and flees out of the church. Vicious eventually gets Spike pinned down to the ground, and while telling him that he looks like a ravenous beast, we cut to a low-angle shot of a cross somewhere in the cathedral, buried in shadows. Anime directors seem to love throwing in Christian symbolism. Maybe the most well known example is Evangelion, which is steeped with it. Spike shoots Vicious in the shoulder, who simultaneously stabs him in the shoulder. Vicious recovers and throws Spike out of the big circular window. As Spike falls, we continuously see an extreme close up of his fake eye--his red eye--intercut with scenes from his past, some of which we saw at the very beginning of "Asteroid Blues." We see our first real glimpses of Julia, which always seem to be encased in a golden color scheme, contrasting the washed out blue-gray of the rest of Spike's memories. We also at one point see the same shot of the cross again. Spike thinks he hears Julia singing. He wakes up and sees Faye. He insults her singing and Faye slaps him and storms out of the room. In the commotion, Spike ends up with a poker card on his forehead. He picks it up. It's the ace of spades.

As I said, anime directors seem to love throwing in Christian symbolism, sometimes for seemingly no real reason and maybe the use of the symbolism here begins and ends with that. The intercutting of religious symbols with violence, though, is also something that Francis Ford Coppola used to great effect in his crime epics, the Godfather films, notably the baptism scene at the climax of the first film, and the scene where Vito is climbing rooftops to kill the Black Hand as there's some sort of a religious festival going on in the streets. Godfather III (mehhh...) also has an extended opera scene at the end, where a guy ends up getting poisoned and slumps over dead in an opera box. Maybe that inspired the opera scene in this episode, I dunno.