Star Trek

Star Trek (***1/2)

Reviving old franchises with new movies is very much in vogue right now, and so it likely didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone when it was announced that a new Star Trek movie was in the works featuring new actors stepping into the shoes of the original crew. Less predictable, perhaps, was the manner in which it would return. Not quire a full Batman Begins or Casino Royale style "reboot," the movie instead uses a time-travel plot device to keep the story in the same "universe" as the original series, while changing the circumstances by which the crew came together, and, in one case, actually having a character meet his older self. Directed by J. J. Abrams-- who has seemingly become a household name now with the massive successes of his brainchild "Lost", and another big event movie, Cloverfield--the movie sets aside a lot of the technobabble, space-archaeology, and long-winded philosophical and ethical debates that often seem to go hand-in-hand with the series. In their place, he sets up a much louder, more action-oriented, more confrontational, and more operatic movie than we're used to seeing under the Star Trek moniker. Still, the movie is aware of the history that its building on (or, I guess, rewriting in this case), and while I imagine many of the die-hards who have been dressing up as Spock at conventions for the last 20 years will be put off by the movie's more simplistic, less science-y veneer, I thought that it struck more or less the right balance, and I think most others will as well. Its certainly entertaining.

The movie opens aboard a Federation ship that James Kirk's father, George, is serving on. James Kirk's mother is elsewhere on the ship, busy giving birth to him, when a giant Romulan ship appears seemingly out of nowhere and opens fire. Romulan's demand that the ship's captain come aboard their ship via a transport shuttle, and so the elder Kirk is left in charge in his absence. The captain doesn't come back alive, and so George Kirk is left in command, and goes down with the ship, going a good enough job of stalling to allow the rest of the ship's passengers, including his wife and just-born son to escape. We flash forward a few years later, and see that James Tiberius Kirk was quite the rebellious child, as he goes joyriding in his step-fathers car in a scene that will probably go down as the only time in Star Trek history that the Beastie Boys have been featured. Eventually, as he reaches physical if perhaps not mental adulthood, Kirk meets Captain Pike, the soon to be helmsman of the newly completed Starship Enterprise, after getting into a barfight with a bunch of his cadets. We get the somewhat cliched "Yeah, you're a reckloose, but I know there's potential in you because I know who your father was" conversation, and Kirk eventually agrees to join Starfleet Acadamy. In the meantime, on Vulcan, a young Spock makes a similar decision to join Starfleet, declining an invitation into a prestigious vulcan science guild, mainly because he was tired of being chided about how being half-human made him somehow weaker. Throw in a Bones McCoy, an Uhura, and a Checkov along the way (it takes a little while longer for Scotty to show up) and voila, you have the original Enterprise crew.

How closely the new interpretations of these characters matches the original varies from actor to actor. Chris Pine gives Kirk some of that certain swagger and brashness that he had in the old series, but stops short of trying to emulate William Shatner's oft-parodied "I'm going to put emphasis on whatever the hell words I want to in a sentence and you can't stop me" manner of speaking. Zachary Quinto, probably best known as playing Sylar on "Heroes" looks a lot like a young Leonard Nimoy, but gives Spock a certain arrogance to his whole "everything I do is dictated by logic" routine that I don't think was there before. Karl Urban, on the other hand, pretty much just tries to be the living embodiment of DeForest Kelly's old Bones McCoy, playing up all of his mannerisms to the fullest, from his inquisitive raised eye-brows, to his seemingly constant manic, bug-eyed, "I'm one step away from flipping out" demeanor. I think its almost too much, and when McCoy intentionally drugs Kirk to sneak him aboard a mission that he's supposed to be banned from, the movie becomes as slapstick as Star Trek has ever been, but damn is it fun to watch. The movie's villian is Nero (Eric Bana): the Romulan captain of the ship from the beginning of the film, who comes back 25 years later after killing Kirk's father to again do battle with a ship that Kirk wasn't supposed to be captain of but eventually ends up being just that. Nero is really only developed enough to explain what his motivations are, and certainly will not ever be mentioned in the same sentence as the nigh-universally agreed upon ultimate Trek villan Khan (or should I say KHAAAAAAAN). Said motivations have to do with the future destruction of his home-world Romulus, the circumstances of with don't really make a whole lot of sense. Really, Nero's whole plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense either in that it doesn't really solve the initial problem of his planet going kaput, and I guess it just has to be assumed that he's really pissed off and too blinded by revenge to really think things out. Nero is somewhat intriguing in the beginning of the film when he's cloaked in mystery, but as is so often the case, he becomes less interesting of a villain as we see more of him, and there really isn't all that much interesting to see here.

A whole bunch of the old series' oft-used elements show up here, presumably mostly meant as homages; thrown in with a wink and a nod. Kirk messes around with a voluptuous green-skinned alien woman, a redshirt gets killed as part of a dangerous away team mission while all the major characters survive, McCoy has at least three variations of "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor!" that I counted, and Scotty even throws in an "I've given 'er all she's got Cap'n!" As I said earlier, though, a lot of the heady, long-winded asides that Star Trek has been known to delve in to, especially once it reached the "Next Generation" era, are pretty much absent here. I'm not necessarily sad that they're gone, as even though they were interesting when they were done well, they often detracted from the suspense of the main plot (would you be more interested in a climactic battle with the borg, or a meandering debate on how best to interpret the Prime Directive?) I think sometimes, though, J. J. Abram's vision goes too far in the other direction, mostly content to settle into the "a wizard did it!!" mentality, as ships are sucked into black holes and characters haphazardly jump around in space-time. Whereas George Lucas created Star Wars to basically be a tribute to old swashbuckling adventure movies that took the tried and true formula from said movies and put it in the setting of outer space, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek was always somewhat grounded in science, even if it was fictional science. I'm not sure that Abrams's pretty simplistic movie really holds true to that vision. With that said, if you don't own a mint-in-box Spock action figure that you bought at a Star Trek convention in 1983, you might not really give a damn about all that and just want to see an entertaining movie. The 2009 iteration of Star Trek--in all its loud, bombastic glory--is very much just that.

More pitching weirdness and the eternal struggle for the DH

In my last Cubs post, I mentioned how odd it was that Luis Vizciano, who the Cubs had signed to a $3.5 million deal in the offseason, was designated for assignment in order to call up Jeff Samardjia from AAA. The bullpen was going through quite a rough patch at that point--and really still hasn't perfromed as well as one would like--so its easy to see why Lou Pinella and Jim Hendry would want to make a change, but it certainly seemed like a drastic one, especially considering that the team supposedly signed Aaron Miles and let go of Mark DeRosa because of money issues. The difference between Miles and DeRosa, I believe, is only a few million dollars, and here we see the Cubs essentially paying Vizciano 3 1/2 million bucks to basically pitch for two weeks (two weeks in which, for the record, his ERA was 0.00, although I believe he let in some inherited runners). Letting go of DeRosa looks more and more confounding.

Vizciano was officially relased on Monday (bottom of this story), so he's not coming back. The thing is, since getting called up, Samardija has been knocked around quite a bit, and he has now been sent back down again in favor of Chad Fox. I don't think Vizciano was going to have a zero ERA all year. Throughout his career, he's been kind of an average reliever, probably a little better than what you'd consider "replacement level," so I wasn't expecting amazing things about him. However, I have sincere doubts that Chad Fox, who is now 38 and whose career was pretty much over due to a series of major injuries before he got an opportunity to come back with the Cubs, is going to be any better. I'm not sure if the Cubs badly overestimated how much Samardija was ready for the majors or what, but they really shouldn't have put themselves in a position where you're paying a guy $3.5 million to do nothing and then replacing him on the roster with an old, debilitated Chad Fox. Vizciano was never going to be a regular back-of-the-bullpen guy or anything, so maybe this isn't really a huge crisis, but it does look pretty silly on the Cubs' part.

Update: Since I first starting writing this on Thursday (its now Monday), Chad Fox has now been put on the DL with his career once again in jeopardy. In 2 appearances he had a 135.00 ERA. See why this was a bad idea?

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Meanwhile, something which has caused a major freakout amongst Cubs nation has been the injury to Carlos Zambrano, who is going to be out for at least a couple of weeks after pulling his hamstring running out a bunt. Zambrano was safe on the play, and even though he had to be pinch-run for, his run was one of 4 driven in on a tie-breaking Derrek Lee grand slam later that inning. The Cubs ended up winning the game 6-4. In spite of this, starting immediately after the game, a faction of Cubs fans started blaming Zambrano for getting hurt, dreaming up an unwritten rule of baseball that pitchers should never try to bunt for a hit because of the risk of injury. The whole idea of this is pretty bizarre to me. Of course, running out a bunt has the potential for injury, but so does a lot of stuff in baseball. If Zambrano would've swung away on that at-bat and hit a grounder that one of the opposing infielders had to make a diving play to keep in the infield and then throw to first from his knees, is he not supposed to run that out either? If he's in the field, and Derrek Lee has to dive to make a play on a sharply hit ball down the foul line, should Zambrano not run full-out to get over to cover first base?

The point is, the line drawn by fans here as when its not right to "try" on a play, is totally arbitrary. There are many valid criticisms of Zambrano, like his famous temper on the mound that once boiled over into a fist-fight with Michael Barrett, but one thing Zambrano's never been accused of, and for good reason, is not caring enough. This play should be no different. That he cares enough to try and leg out a well placed bunt-and succeed in doing so in an inning that eventually leads to a grand slam--should be celebrated, not criticized. You'll often hear it said that pitching is an inherently unnatural act for the human body. When you consider how many pitchers at some point need major surgery because of a ligiment tear in their elbow or something of that ilk, or see pitchers who get hurt and then lose about 5 miles off of their fastball when they come back and are never really the same pitcher, its easy to believe that statement.

Weirder still, is this Phil Rogers column using the Zambrano injury as evidence that the NL needs to adopt the DH. It seems like most everyone who follows baseball has strong opinions on the DH, one way or another. Either they advocate both leagues using it or both leagues not using it. Having one league use it and one league not seems to bother a lot of people. Personally, its never really bothered me. Its one of the things that makes baseball unique to other team sports, along with each ballpark having its own dimensions. Why should ballpark dimensions be different from place to place but not DH rules? If you believe the MLB needs to have "the standard set of rules that exists in the NFL, NBA and NHL," shouldn't the playing field dimensions always be the same? I like the fact that you can watch two different styles of play on any given night, especially in Chicago with both the Cubs and White Sox on local TV. Even if you're like Rogers, however, and really want the DH implemented, I'm not sure how the Zambrano injury really ties into that all that much. As I already wrote, pitchers can get hurt doing most anything on the field, as can any other player. I'm not sure how you can eliminate pitchers batting and say "Okay, now we've ensured that we've gotten rid of all the pitching injuries that weren't really supposed to have happened." And how about telling Micah Owings that pitchers shouldn't hit.

Curse of the Golden Flower

Curse of the Golden Flower (***)

I didn't know it until I read it yesterday, but it certainly didn't surprise me to learn that the Opening Ceremonies to last year's Beijing Olympics were directed by the same person who directed Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou. The ceremonies wowed people all over the world, as they were massive in scale and the planning and coordination that went into them seemed nearly impossible. Whereas America was content to honor Muhammad Ali and allow him to deliberately walk his way over and light the Olympic torch during the '96 games in Atlanta, Yimou had dudes running sideways along the top of the stadium while seemingly thousands of people played drums in sequence. Yimou's movies have a lot of scenes that evoke the same feeling. They pay homage to the long-running tradition of Chinese wire-fighting movies, where every character seems to have a God-like aura and basic of physics are pretty much a passing triviality. Yimou takes full advantage of modern day CGI technology to play up this concept as much as possible. There's no such thing as one archer shooting one arrow in a Zhang Yimou movie. Rather, there's going to be arrows being fired, they're going to be fired all at once from a seemingly endlessly sized army, moving in a robot-like unison, and about half of them will then be cleaved in two in a split second by one of the main characters waving his halberd around. The thing is, even with these orgies of visuals going on, Hero and House of Flying Daggers managed to be extremely good movies with very deep characters who form intimate relationships. Hero presents itself as a deceptively straight-forward martial arts movie and manages to tell a compelling mystery while exploring questions of morality and dispensing nuggets of zen-like philosophy. House of Flying Daggers told a classic tragic love story in a visually interesting way that still managed to remain deeply personal. Curse of the Golden Flower has many similar visuals as its predecessor, and in some scenes outdoes them in their technical impressiveness, but the underlying base of the film just isn't really all that interesting by comparison.

The movie takes place almost entirely within the confines of the Forbidden City during the Tang Dynasty, which I believe is named such due to the prevalence of artificially flavored orange drink in China at the time. The current emperor is Ping (Chow Yun-Fat), who at first glance seems to be, if nothing else, a strong and capable leader. Early on though, we begin to realize that Ping has some skeletons in his closet, although, based on what we see of the inner-workings of the Forbidden City in the movie, he probably doesn't actually have a closet, but rather organizes his clothes using some strange, giant device that requires about 50 servants to operate and maintain. Prince Jai, Ping's first born son and heir to the throne, has just returned from "the frontier" as the film begins, and, after an impromptu father-son sparring match, Ping seems pleased with his progress as a fighter and leader. The Emperor's second son, Prince Wan, meanwhile, has remained within the walls of the Forbidden City, and has apparently spent most of his time while his brother was away doing the horizontal monster mash. He's had a quasi-incestuous relationship with the woman who is not his birth mother, but is the current Emperess (Gong Li), and his now secretly involved with the daughter of the Imperial doctor. He seems to have somewhat of a rivalry with Jai for who should be the true heir to the throne. There is a third son as well, Yu, who seems quieter than his older siblings at first but not because, we learn later, he has no opinion on any of the goings on in his family.

Not long after all this is set up, we get the main hook of the story: Emperor Ping is secretly hiding a slow-acting poison in his wife's "medication" for anemia. He goes to great lengths to hide this, but not great enough, and the Empress's discovery of her husband's plot against her leads to a power struggle, and divided loyalties amongst the sons. The conflict comes to a head on the night of the start of the Chrysanthemum Festival, (they don't really explain the significance of this celebration) when the Forbidden City erupts in violence between the various factions loyal to different members of the royal family. These action scenes are quite amazing in their technical excellence, and at times rival some of the Lord of the Rings battles in their sheer size, and in the amount of what is going on in a single shot through the use of CGI. However, for all the care that went into making them, I thought there was a certain hollowness to them.

What bothers me most, I think, is just how much outward destruction is caused through the royal family's very insular conflict. In the various stages of the climactic battle, we see assassins perched on the ceiling swiftly cut through about a dozen unsuspecting soldiers using metal scythes connected to ropes that they throw, soldiers getting impaled as they try and breach a spiked wall that's been set up in the city courtyard, and basically get killed in all sorts of other creative ways. In one part in particular, I couldn't help but think of the Dynasty Warriors games, as Jai continuously slaughters a host of troops who have surrounded him and are attempting to capture him alive. Their tactic of just sort of gradually trying to inch toward him in lock step clearly doesn't work, but they just sort of mindlessly continue doing it, as if that's the only think they know how to do, like a particularly slow-witted AI controlled soldier in a video game.

After the battle is over, we see servants pour out from every direction, to roll out new carpets to replace the blood-soaked ones, and to put out new chrysanthemums, since a bunch of them got knocked over during the battle. None of the servants nor any of the soliders give any clear evidence that they really know the full extent of what's going on, or that they really care at all about the royal family's issues. The battle doesn't really seem to mean anything for them, except another hurdle that they're going to have to get over while they do their duty paying deference to their leaders and setting up for the festival. Its probably true that throughout much of Imperial China, and probably through out much of the history of any country led by divine royalty, that the actions and motivations of the royal family often weren't in the best interest of the "common-folk." I'm not saying that the movie isn't accurate in its depiction. But what bothered me is that there isn't really a voice for the common person in the movie. The only characters outside of the royal family who are developed at all, are the Imperial Doctor, his wife, and his daughter, and in their case its only because they all have a role in the subterfuge going on within the Emperor's family. All the other countless people within the walls of the Forbidden City just sort of run around as specks of CGI, their purpose being nothing except to be virtual stagehands, moving props around during battles the meanings of which are only significant to a few select people, and maybe get killed in the process. Even beyond the sort of moral hazard that this creates, the movie just has a clostrophobic feel to it. Some of the best scene in Yimou's pervious works were scenes like the bamboo forest chase in House of Flying Daggers. Here there's a similar scene after the Imperial Doctor is promoted to governor of an outlying province and ends up getting chased on horseback through a mountainous region. Its probably the most exciting scene in the movie, there's just not enough of it.

The power struggle for the throne and for the life of the Emperess was an interesting enough plot to hold my interest, but I just didn't feel that the sum total of the movie was as substantive as Yimou's other movies. Hero had a lot of the same CGI-driven battles, and in much the same way focused only on a few central characters while the commoners toiled around them, but I found Hero to be a much more thoughtful and more interesting movie. A cental part of Hero is a scroll of calligraphy Jet Li's character gives to the Emperor, (different Emperor, obviously) the character on which is one of 20 different ways to write the word "Sword." The Emperor studies it and has a revelation about what it represents and what sort of beliefs about the nature of combat Jet Li's character holds. To me, that was more interesting than anything said by Emperor Ping or any other character in Curse of the Golden Flower. There is a scene in Curse where the family is sitting around eating a meal ceremoniously, and Ping explains how the layout of the elaborate table and carpeting that they're sitting around represents the universe, which seems like its going to head down the same path as the calligraphy scene in Hero. It shows up again at the end of the film, but the symbolism there seems kind of obvious and not very deep by comparison. If I watch Curse more, I may notice things that I didn't initally that change my view of the movie, but my first impression was that it doesn't have quite the impact that either Hero or House of Flying Daggers has.

Curse of the Golden Flower is an entertaining movie. There are some beautiful and technically impressive shots, the story will hold your interest, and the music and cinematography similarly interesting. If I had to pick one film to represent Zhang Yimou's work, though, out of what I've seen, I likely wouldn't pick this one.

The Bradley Effect

If you had somewhere around 15 games in your "How long will it take Cubs fans to get pissed off at Milton Bradley?" pool, congratulations, because you win. Bradley is still nursing a groin injury that he suffered on April 12th against the Brewers. On April 22nd, he started in right field and by all accounts he seemed poised to jump back into the every day lineup, but went 0-for-4 with 3 Ks and wasn't running at full speed, and so he has again been relegated to the bench. He has been used sporadically as a pinch hitter, and in one such appearance he made physical contact with an umpire arguing balls and strikes and got hit with a two game suspension. For reasons unbeknownst to me and most everybody else, he has decided to appeal the suspension, even though he could easily have served the suspension while being out with a groin injury with no real added detriment to the team. While he's managed to draw some walks, he's just 1-for-21 hitting, so yes, he has less base hits than he has games suspended as a Cub. Meanwhile, Bradley's contentious relationship with the media, something he was known for in Texas, appears to have manifested itself in Chicago, as Bradley accused the media of taking his quotes out of context and turning the fans against him, even though he didn't really seem to have a specific example of this actually happening. As I'm finishing writing this, the Cubs are playing out in Arizona and Bradley is in the lineup again. We'll see if he stays there this time. 0-for-1 thus far.

The Cubs also recently brought up Jeff Samardjia from AAA and, somewhat curiously designed Luis Vizciano for assignment for the corresponding move. In truth, there weren't a lot of other attractive options. Angel Guzman is out of options, so he pretty much has to stay up, as does David Patton, who is a Rule 5 pick from the Rockies, which means that he goes back to Colorado if the Cubs don't keep him up. But not only had Vizciano not allowed an earned run yet, he was also just signed at the start of the season for $3.5 million. Its possible that Vizciano doesn't get picked up by another team (I want to say that you can pick up a guy that got DFAed for half of his salary, or something along those lines), accepts assignment to the minors, and eventually makes his way back to the Major League club, but as of right now, Vizciano essentially made $3.5 million dollars for pitching 2 weeks. The rightys in the bullpen have certainly been pretty shaky with the exeption of Carlos Marmol, but the biggest issue in the bullpen right now is Neal Cotts, the Cubs' sole lefty. They've been trying to bring him in situationally against leftys in close games, but he's had a ton of problems with walking people. Some people have suggested that Samardjia should go to the rotation so Sean Marshall can head to the bullpen and become a left-handed situational guy. This would seem to be a little extreme, if you ask me. Marshall has looked okay so far as a starter, with a decent-by-5th-starter-standards 4.91 ERA, and Samardjia got roughed up a little bit in his first appearance since getting called up. There doesn't seem to be many good options available though. It wasn't too long ago that the Cubs were carrying 3 leftys in the pen and couldn't find innings for all of them.

The Many Moods of Kosuke

The Cubs are currently 5-4, which may be somewhat underwhelming given their high expectations and the relative weakness of the rest of the NL Central, but, while some of the losses have been quite frustrating, none of them have really disturbed me all that greatly. The bullpen has had some early issues, which Kevin Gregg being less than lights out in the closer's role, and the hitting has been very up and down, but ultimately I haven't seen anything in the nine games played thus far that radically changes my outlook of the team. Geovany Soto has been banged up early on (maybe a product of playing in the World Baseball Classic) and is hitting just .071. You would certainly expect him to heat up. Milton Bradley is also battling a groin injury (of course, Bradley being achey at times during the year was something fully expected going in) and has hit just .056, though he has been able to draw some walks in key situations, and has had enough good ABs to say that he's been helping the club.

One very positive thing amongst the somewhat luc-warm start has been the play of Kosuke Fukudome. Kosuke already has 3 home runs on the year, including a three-run shot yesterday against the Cardinals which, at the time, gave them the lead, though they couldn't hold it. Fukudome wound up with only 10 home runs for all of last year. Of course, early in the season was when Fukudome was at his most brilliant last year, and he's output got progressively worse as the season went on. Will the same thing happen this year? Who knows. What we can do now, though the mighty power of Baseball Reference, is compare what Kosuke did at the start of last season to what he's done 9 games into this season. With a sample size of 9 games, who knows how much its really worth, but whatever, it'll be fun!

Through 9 games:

stat	2008	2009
Avg	.371	.375
OBP	.488	.487
Slg	.543	.781
OPS	1.031	1.268
HRs	1	3
RBIs	6	8
K	6	4

The power numbers are actually better, and the average and OBP are very close. Maybe, just maybe, that with Fukudome-san having a year to get acquainted with the increased travel in the MLB and playing outdoors (lots of domes in Japanese baseball, so I'm told), he'll be able to maintain this pace more consistently throughout the year. Maybe wishful thinking, but it doesn't seem impossible either.

Today the Cubs are playing the Cardinals with Carlos Zambrano on the mound against a 24 year old making his Major League debut. If they lose their third in a row today given these circumstances, I'll be a little bit more down on them than after any of the 4 losses to this point. Whatever happens though, its still very, very early yet.

Street Fighter IV

After being very underwhelmed by the whole experience of Prince of Persia, when I perused the shelves in Best Buy a few weeks ago, I decided to pick up a game where there wouldn't be a lot of mystery as to what I was going to get. As such, I ended up settling on Street Fighter IV. I'm not really what I would consider a veteran of tournament fighters, and the one series that I've gotten reasonably deeply into--Soul Calibur--differs quite a bit from Street Fighter. I did own and played a fair amount of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, though never really got particularly good at it. So basically, I'm going into Street Fighter IV mildly aware of the basics of the game, though certainly still at a novice level (this was confirmed a couple of weekends ago playing my friend who used to play SF Alpha 2 competitively, and getting pretty consistently owned).

The biggest and most immediately recognizable difference from the classic SF games is the use of fully 3D models for characters instead of 2D sprites. Its still a 2D fighter, but its now 2D fighting in a 3D environment. Despite the switch, the game still retains most of the same feel that the earlier 2D iterations of the series had. The visuals look detailed enough to warrant being on a next-generation system, while still retaining some of the exaggerated anime-ish quirks that have been a trademark of the series. Chun Li's kicks still inexplicably create neon blue trails of light, E. Honda's fists still fade into a Loony Toons-esque blur, etc. I always thought Street Fighter II had a better look and feel to it compared to its once direct competitor Mortal Kombat, which used sprites that were generated from captures of real people dressed up like the characters. While, understandably, the MK characters looked more like real people in still shots, I thought in the context of the game the MK graphics looked rigid and awkward, while SF's "cartoonyness" allowed it to be more fluid. But even in an era where 3D motion capture is commonplace in game development, I don't think these little flourishes of exaggeration feel out of place and still have a certain charm to them.

The core gameplay elements have remained pretty much true to what its always been, and veteran players will be able to recognize that a lot of the basic button combinations are still the same. A hadoken is still down, forward, punch, for example. Borrowing from the Alpha and MvC era games, the game gives each fighter an "EX gague" and a "Revenge gauge." The EX gague can be used to pull of "EX" versions of certain moves, which you can do by simply adding another punch or kick button at the end of the move. If it fills up all the way, you can try and pull off your Super Combo, where everything on screen turns into an orgasm of anime speed lines. Your Revenge Gauge is used for your Ultra Combo, which is generally an even more powerful version of the Super Combo, and is usually done with the same button combination, only with all three punch/kick buttons at the end. They also added a new charge-up move that you can use with each fighter for which you hold down medium punch and medium kick simultaneously. As the move is charging up you can absorb one hit from your opponent, and if you're able to get it off and land it, it'll do a big chunck of damage and stun your opponent.

As I said above, I'm not good at all against a veteran human opponent at this point, but against the computer I feel as if I'm slowly improving. It certainly isn't too difficult to start playing from scratch and have at least some base level of effectiveness against the CPU on low difficulty without hours and hours of effort. The game has the traditional tournament fighter training mode, wherein a dummy oppnent just kind of sits there as you beat the crap out of him. It also, however, has what it has a "Trial" mode which is basically a much more sophisticated version of the basic training mode idea. With each character you try and pass five separate levels, in which you first try and execute the character's basic movies, and then move on to pulling off sophisticated combos. You unlock artwork doing this, so you feel like you're accomplishing something as you're learning. I thought this was a great addition, and I'm not sure why they felt the need to bury it in the Challenge Mode menu alongside the not at all related Time Attack and Survival Modes.

The game brings back most of the old mainstays of the Street Fighter series, and introduces some new ones as well. They range from Abel, a very serious looking mixed martial artist, to El Fuerte, a completely off the wall masked luchador character who, in his opening cutscene, explains that he aspires to become a chef and that he's joining the tournament to get recipies from the other fighters. Another new character, Rufus, as an obese, loudmouthed American (is it just me, or does it seem like there's some no too subtle social commentary about Americans in the Street Fighter games) is also supposed to be funny, but if you ask me, he's more annoying than anything else. Having read through some of the official strategy guide and elsewhere, it doesn't seem like any of the new characters are all that effective at a high level, but their move sets are often pretty unique (El Fuerte has one sprint that he goes into where he performs six different moves coming out of it based on the attack button that's pressed after its started) and should serve to keep the game fresh over a long period of time.

After Prince of Persia, I basically just wanted a game where I knew going in exactly what it was going to basically consist of. Street Fighter 4, indeed, sticks to the basic formula that its been doing for well over a decade now, but adds enough new elements and polishes up the look enough to justify it being on PS3 and X-Box 360. If you love tournament fighters, well, you probably already know about SF4, but if you don't, you should run out and pick it up.

Early Returns

The first two Cubs games of '09 are in the books, and they'll finish out their first series tonight at Minute Maid Park in Houston. After winning the opener 4-2, the Cubs lost last night 3-2 in 10 innings. Starters Carlos Zambrano and Ryan Dempster both looked very good for their parts, the difference being that Dempster simply got more fun support. Even if Dempster regresses a little bit from his career year last year, there's no reason to believe that this rotation won't be right near the top of the NL. Kosuke Fukudome went 0-for-4 with a strikeout and grounded into a double play in the opener, and really didn't do anything to instill confidence that his 2009 season will be more like his first half of '08 than the second. Aramis Ramirez also evoked some bad memories last night, getting thrown out with relative ease by Carlos Lee playing a ball off the wall on a hit that Aramis tried to stretch from a single to a double. Ramirez has made some pretty awful baserunning decisions in the past, but hopefully that was more a result of the somewhat odd layout of the Minute Maid Park outfield and not part of a continuing pattern.

Two games does not make a season, but just because I talked about it in my last post, I suppose I'll mention what Kevin Gregg and Carlos Marmol have done. Marmol pitched the 8th inning in the opener, and allowed just a walk which he left stranded. Gregg came in to save the game and allowed a couple of baserunner, one of which came around to score before nailing down the save. Gregg then pitched the 10th last night after Neil Cotts put two men on with no one out, and failed to get out of the job, giving up the game winning hit to Jeff Keppinger. Listening to the radio this morning, people seem to already be wringing their hands in concern over this. I'm on record as saying that I think Marmol is the better pitcher, but two games is just a wee bit too small of a time frame to be evaluating whether a change should be made. Same goes for anything that people might be concerned about, frankly. Consider that the defending champion Phillies, fielding much the same team that they won with last year, are 0-2 in their opening series against the Braves, and are losing 9-3 in the finale as I write this. Really the only reason why I am writing this is because I don't have any movies to write about at the moment. Baseball season is a loooong season.

In Closing

The Cubs are winding down Spring Training, and will start the season proper next Monday night in Houston. Nothing terribly eventful has happened in Spring Training, which is a good thing, because really the most eventually thing you can imagine happening is someone important getting hurt. There was a bit of news earlier in the week, though, and somewhat surprising news at that, in the form of Kevin Gregg being named close by Lou Pinella. It was a decision, apparently, based largely off of their performances during Spring Training. Spring Training doesn't give you a really good sample of a player's ability to begin with, both in terms of playing time, and the quality of players they're facing, and Marmol's spring was truncated this year because he played for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic. He did blow a save in the World Baseball Classic against a team of almost entirely minor leaguers in the form of the Netherlands, but that was a) one game and b) party due to bad defense. For what its worth, their spring training stats were as follows (source: mlb.com):

	IP	ERA	H	BB	K
Kevin Gregg	9.1	0.00	4	2	13
Carlos Marmol	9.0	4.00	6	1*	12

*Also had 5 HBPs.

Gregg's stats are certainly impressive, and better than Marmol's, but again, I think its undeniable that Spring Training stats have an inherent unreliability, and personally, I would've made it Marmol's job to lose. Obviously, Pinella is seeing guys work out every day, not just playing in exhibition games, but just looking at what the two did during games, I certainly don't think Marmol did anything that would make you suggest that he was going to be much less effective this year than last year, when he most certainly was playing at a closer type level, even wtih a few big hiccups along the way. Basically, if you ask me, Marmol should be the closer for two reasons:

1. I'm still pretty sure that Marmol is the better pitcher. In his career as a reliever, Marmol's ERA is 2.39 (baseball-reference.com). Kevin Gregg's best full year in the majors was last year with the Marlins, where he posted an ERA of 3.41, and its 3.90 in his career as a reliever. Marmol is also way harder to hit against for both righties and lefties. Gregg's K/BB ratio is better, and Marmol has certainly shown some control issues, but I don't think its really a big enough issue to matter in the face of how much harder it is for opponents to hit off of Marmol.

Really though, even if Gregg starts as the closer, it doesn't mean that he has to stay the closer. And even if he struggles and Lou decides to keep him as closer throughout the regular season for some reason, in theory, the Cubs should be better than the rest of the division to the point where it really shouldn't matter. What matters is whether the Cubs have someone who can be lights out to finish off a playoff game come October (provider the Cubs actually have a lead late in a playoff game this year... rrrr...). That brings me to point 2.

2. Its very much possible that Marmol will have more wear put on him as a set-up man than as a closer. Usually, the set-up man is thought of as the guy who pitches the 8th inning before the closer is going to come in to pitch the 9th. However, there were times last year, when Marmol would be brought in a jam in the 7th, have to work out of it, then continue on to pitch the 8th, sometimes batting in between that time. If you sift through his game log, you'll find a bunch of instances of Marmol throwing 30+ pitches, a couple instances of him throwing 40+ pitches, and on top of that, a bunch of instances of him throwing on back to back days. Dan Bernstein, a radio show host for 670 The Score here in the Chicagoland area, has taken to calling Marmol Lou Pinella's "blankie," because sometimes he seems to be what Pinella uses to make himself feel safe again in whatever tense situation arises, regardless of what sort of rest Marmol has had. Carlos Marmol made the All-Star team last year because he was absolutely lights out for much of the first half, but by the time the All-Star game rolled around, his ERA had ballooned into the fours and looked very un-All-Star like. It took some time for Carlos to seemingly get himself right again. A lot of people suspected this to be due to overuse at the time, and if Pinella uses Marmol in a similar fashion in this year, it'll make a lot of people, including me, nervous again.

Carlos Marmol is 26, and there's no reason why he shouldn't get even better than he is now in the next couple of years and become a perennial All-Star contender. But he's a hard-throwing power pitcher, and, while he hasn't shown himself to be injury prone to this point, all you have to do is look at the rise and fall of a pitcher like Eric Gagne to want to be weary of how much abuse you put on the arm of a pitcher like Marmol. The Cubs are trying to win now, and they should use Marmol to try and win now, but they should do it within reason, with the knowledge that he should be able to help the Cubs now AND in the years to come.

Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises (***1/2)

Based on its opening scene, Eastern Promises seems like a pretty standard mobster movie. We see a guy in a barber's chair getting a shave and a haircut, as another man enters and closes the blinds. The customer soon realizes that the barber's friendly chit-chat was a ruse for his guard to be let down, and before he can get up out of his chair, the barber holds him down as man who recently entered quickly slits his throat with business-like efficiency. This scene is merely the hook though, and the rest of the movie is less of a series of whackings and shifting alliances that a lot of crime dramas often turn in to, and more of an exploration of what happens when the world of the mafia--the Russian mafia in this case--starts to collide with the world at large. Like, A History of Violence, the movie David Cronenberg directed before he directed this one, its done in a much quieter and more matter-of-fact style than a lot of other crime movies of the same ilk. There's nothing as operatic as the baptism scene in The Godfather, and the body count is less than most mob movies in general, but, in a way, the stark reality of the movie's style makes the violence that is on screen that much more brutal.

Our protagonist is Anna (Naomi Watts), who works in a maternity ward in a London hospital. A young pregnant girl is brought to her hospital after collapsing and hemorrhaging blood at a pharmacy. The baby is saved, but the mother dies, leaving no form of identification, except a handwritten diary written in Russian. Knowing that, without having any sort of immediate family member, the baby will be relegated to the slow-moving bureaucracy of the adoption system, Anna takes it upon herself to search the diary for clues. Anna, it so happens, is of Russian descent, and takes the diary back home and shows it to her uncle. After he seems unwilling at first to translate it, Anna finds her way to a restaurant owned by Semyon, who at first glance appears to be nothing more than a simple, kind-hearted, elderly man. Semyon agrees to translate the diary, but seems to have oddly specific terms for how exactly the logistics of it are to work out, and seems to be somewhat angry when Anna returns to him without the actual diary but rather with photocopies of it. Of course, as we the viewer learn quickly, he's not as all as he appears to be, and the restaurant is a front for Semyon's crime family--part of the "Vory v Zakone", which the special features tell me translates to roughly something like "Thieves in law."

Anna's uncle apparently gains a sudden curiosity, finds the original diary in Anna's room, and begins to read it. Upon discovering that the details of it are quite disturbing, and that the Vory v Zakone are involved, he frantically tells Anna to drop the issue. However, as Anna begins to understand the nature of Semyon and his associates, she reads between the lines of her conversations with him and comes to the conclusion that the baby's life is threatened so long as they hold the diary. Thus, Anna, her uncle, and her mother reluctantly become further involved in the matter, and attempt to make a deal with Semyon's people, despite her uncle's warning that these really aren't the types of people that anyone should make deals with.

While this is going on, we also meet Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen, who also teamed up with Cronenberg in History of Violence and clearly has a good working relationship going with him. He portrays Nikolai as a cold, unfeeling, sinister mob enforcer, and for much of the movie that's because that's exactly what he would seem to be, although there's a key revelation towards the movie's conclusion which completely changes his character. Nikolai is trying to break into Semyon's crime family, and certainly seems to have both the requisite skills and disposition for it, as we see him in an early seen casually snipping off the fingers of a frozen corpse to prevent anyone from getting fingerprints off of it. As he proves his loyalty, Nikolai follows around Kirill, Semyon's son, whose biggest interest seems to be drinking heavily, and who seems to alternate between liking Nikolai and wanting him to suceed and resenting him for being the "new guy" in between bouts of drunkeness.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the movie--and one of the reasons why its worthwhile to watch a movie about the Russian mafia even if you've seen dozens of movies about the Italian mafia, or Irish mafia, or the Yakuza, or whatever--is its exploration into the practice of tattooing. There's such a thing as a "prison tattoo" in American culture, and if you've ever watched a Japanese Yakuza movie you know they're big on tatooing as well, but Russian tattoos have a certain intricasy that exists nowhere else. Supposedly, if you're in the know, you can essentially a Russian mobster's life story based on what tattoos he has. One of the more interesting scenes has Nikolai basically being studied head to toe in a shadowy room by a group of elderly mobsters to determine if he's truly worth of getting the Vory v Zakone stars tattooed onto him. Its clear watching the movie that a tremendous amount of study and labor was put into making Nikolai's tattoos completely accurate to real life. According to the special features, Viggo Mortensen went to Russia and did a great deal of research on his own in this regard.

As the movie heads towards its climax, more and more of the diary's contents are revealed, and why Semyon and his son Kirill don't want it out in the open. At the same time, the fallout from death we see at the beginning of the movie leads to a bloody conflict between rival mobsters complete with the deception and entangling alliances that you'd expect from any good organized crime movie. As I said though, Cronenberg's stark realism gives the movie a slightly different tone than a lot of such movies, and makes the death seem much less like simple Grand Theft Auto-esque exploitation and much more hard-hitting and disturbing. At times, I think there's perhaps too much of his quiet, minimalist style, to the point where we don't learn enough about the characters. The movie's plot is certainly complete. But I think there's more that could have been delved into regarding the standoffish relationship between Nikolai and Kirill, or the tense moments when Anna confronts Nikolai about the violent realities of what he does, only to have him reply "I am merely driver. I go left I go right. I go straight." The movie is pretty short at just over an hour and a half, and I felt it could've held my interest for much longer. IMDB tells me that there might be a sequel in the works with Cronenberg and Mortensen both returning. Normally, this wouldn't seem like the sort of movie that would have a sequel, or that could benefit from one. But I think there's a lot left unexplored about Mortensen's character, and especially about what you learn about the true nature of his character by the end of the movie that could be built on. I'd certainly be interested in seeing the sequel if it happened.

Prince of Persia, aka Collect a bunch of orbs with no risk of dying

I never got around to playing any of the Prince of Persia games from the last console generation, and so when I was at Best Buy and saw the new, re-launched Prince of Persia, which introduces a new main character and is independent of the previous series, I decided to pick it up. It seemed more interesting than most anything else on the shelf, and it had gotten a fair amount of acclaim. Suffice to say, I found the game incredibly disappointing. The game is nothing short of gorgeous to look at, and its clear that a lot of effort was put into its production, but its not enough in my mind to make up for the fact that the actual core gameplay just isn't really all that fun.

The premise of the game is this: you're a lone miscreant who's out in the desert looking for your donkey when you run into Elika, a mysterious woman who worships the God Ormazd, from whom she is granted magical powers. She enlists your help in restoring the ancient city which she was once the princess of, which is now deserted of people and has been covered in black goo that vaguely resembles the stuff the Venom suit was made out of in Spiderman by the evil God Ahriman. It's a pretty simple, by-the-numbers video game plot. In an attempt to make the characters more endearing, your character and Elika have a bunch of back-and-forth banter throughout the game, which I think is supposed to be witty, but is moreso just annoying, not to meniton that some of the stuff they say seems completely anacronistic to ancient Persia. At any point when you're standing still outside of combat, you can hit L2 to talk to Elika to get more of her backstory. The game pushes this constantly, and actually awards you trophies for your Playstation account if you talk to her often enough. For me though, the prospect of an intangible virtual trophy isn't nearly enough incentive to hear Elika recant uninteresting tales of her childhood growing up in the royal palace, or hear the latest round of the two characters's never ceasing argument about whether they were brought together by fate or coincidence.

This is, of course, a video game and not a movie, and so all of this would be easily forgivable if it was fun to play. I guess it did hold my interest enough for me to beat the game, but I beat it with a constant feeling of tedium, never really excited to see the next area or fight the next boss. Here's the basic layout of how the gameplay works: You pick an area on your map of where you want to go, and through a bunch of acrobatics you dodge all the evil black goo and get to the "Fertile Ground," which is guarded by one of four of Ahriman's servants, who you each fight six separate times in battles which are slightly different each time, but not by much. After that, the lead is healed, all the black goo disappears and you go acrobating your way around the area again to hunt for "light seeds," which are used to open up new areas.

The biggest problem with the whole game is that its just way too easy. Any time you "die", Elika will just magic you back to life, and after your character says some ridiculous one-liner, you're good to go again. If you die from a fall, you're put back on the last piece of solid ground you were on. If you die in combat, you don't even have to leave and re-enter combat; the enemy simply gets a little bit of its health bar back. Its understandable that the game gives you an infinite number of lives, because some of the big chains of moves that you have to put together to climb up to an area at some point can be tricky to find out at first, but there has to be more of a penalty for dying than there is. You don't really feel like there's any pressure to get something right at any point, and its very rare that you'll need more than a couple chances to get through any given area.

Combat is a little bit tougher to get through than the climbing/jumping sections, but not really in a good way. It feels very "rock-paper-scissorsy." After fighting the first couple forms of each enemy in which you can pretty much do whatever you want, the enemies start to transfer between different "states", at which point only one of your types of attacks (each face button is a different attack) will hurt it. Really, all you need to do to beat any given battle is to deflect the enemy's attack at the right time and then immediately counter by spamming whatever button corresponds to the "state" until the enemy gets its composure back and you have to hit the block button again. They try and make it more interesting by having certain events happen if you have the enemy up against a wall or on the edge of the platform you're on, and every once in a while you'll lock swords or something and have to mash Square to break out of it. Even these get extremely repitative though, and happen often enough to the point where the combat feels even more scripted and simplisitc. Really the only reason why combat can be a little bit difficult is because of how much life enemies have, and if you botch blocking once it may take a while to get back into a rhythm. But that's all it really is is repeating the same rhythm of moves over and over again. In the pause menu there's a big tree of combo moves you can do, but I never bothered to figure them out because they were never once necessary. Just spamming one attack would generally get the job done.

A lot of the environments are great to look at, as are the bright, cell-shaded characters, but the game still feels dead at times. There are literally no other characters you meet, except yourself, Elika, the main bosses and another key player or two in the story. I realize that the premise of the game is that you're restoring a long abandoned city, but would it have hurt that much to through in one wandering hermit or something to break up the monotony? Many of the areas quite similar as well. After the initial few, you can complete areas in pretty much any order, which I guess works to make the game less linear, but it also prevents the game from having any real progression that makes you anxious to keep getting farther in, and makes reaching each new area seem like an acomplishment. The final battle, if it can be called as much, is tremendously unsatisfying, as is the ending which would seem to literally erase pretty much everything you accomplished while playing the game. Maybe this isn't actually the case, and it will be elaborated on further in the sequel, but, frankly, unless the gameplay is totally different, I don't see myself playing the sequel. A huge disappointment.

Watchmen

Watchmen (***1/2)

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The Superman exists, and he's American.

Like many others who have read the graphic novel, I followed the news and trailers leading up to the release of Watchmen with some excitement, but also a great deal of anxiety. I'm not as militant as Alan Moore himself is in that I certainly never thought that the very idea of an adaptation of Watchmen was somehow unnatural, but I was certainly skeptical as to how well the book could be transferred to another medium given its structure and the fact that its just really, really densely packed. The choice of Zach Snyder to direct seemed questionable. Snyder had made a name for himself directing 300, also a graphic novel adaptation, but a much different one for which filming some badass looking slow-motion fight scenes against some pretty CGI backgrounds was enough to get the gist of it. Having now seen the movie, I think Snyder, as well as the writers (one of whom is David Hayter -- Solid Snake!) deserve a lot of credit for putting together what is probably the best adaptation one could probably realistically hope for. It isn't perfect, but it manages to stay true to the spirit of the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's work, and manages to include quite a bit of the details packed into the 12 chapter story into the 2 1/2 hour movie. I'm curious as to how well I'd be able to pick up on every detail had I not first read the book. A friend of mine who saw it without having read the novel loved the movie and had no problems following it, but I've read the reactions of a number of critics who seemed confused amidst the various jumps in time and the asides meant to develop the characters which aren't directly related to the main conspiracy story. Then again, many of the same critics didn't really seem to buy into the whole concept of the movie at all, and they may not have been on the edge of their seats putting every effort into following everything that's going on. Watchmen is certainly a story that not absolutely everyone is going to find accessible and engaging to them.

The movie starts out with the hook: The Comedian--a former masked vigilante, first with the Minutemen in the 1940s, then with their successors the Watchmen in the 1960s, and who then worked as an agent of the U.S. Government after vigilantes were outlawed--is thrown out of the window of his studio apartment by an unknown assailant. After this introductory scene, we get the opening credits, which believe it or not are one of the coolest things in the movie and are almost like a tiny movie in and of themselves. There's a lot of history in the world of Watchmen that occurs before we're introduced to it in its alternate version of 1985: Nixon has been elected to five terms, two teams of masked heroes have come and gone, and the world's first honest to goodness "superhero" has appeared, and America is now using him as the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War. Many of the details of these events are mentioned only in passing in the book, or relegated to one of the afterward sections of each chapter, which masquerade as newspapers, magazines, and other documents that "exist" within the world of the story. The credits are a way of quickly giving a novice audience the gist of some of these details in a quick way that doesn't hold up the story, and I don't think it could've been done better than the way it was. With Dylan's "The Times They Are-a Changin'" playing, we're shown a series of vignettes of famous moments that have been altered from our own in Watchmen's reality: the famous embrace from the ticker-tape parade at the end of World War II is now a lesbian kiss, the assassin on the grassy knoll who killed JFK is the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan is already standing on the moon when Neil Armstrong takes his first steps. They're scenes that are simple with a strange power to them. Its almost worth seeing the movie simply for this.

As the movie progresses, it follows along the track of Rorschach's investigation of the Comedian's death, which he is convinced is part of a larger plot against all former costumed heroes, but stops for pauses along the way to fill in some of the asides involving the individual characters that popped up throughout the graphic novel. Some of them are a bit rushed and compressed from what they were in the comic, but its certainly mostly there, and with a run time of over 2 1/2 hours, they probably included just about all that they reasonably could. Rorscach's psycho-ananlysis, The Comedian's assault on the original Silk Spectre and her daughter's confuntation of her mother regarding it, Dr. Manhattan's time-jumping story of his transformation ("A circulatory system is seen out near the security fence..."), and Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian during their stint in 'Nam are all there. I've read some reviews complaining that these asides are too distracting from the main story. I disagree. The main story is okay for for what it is, but its ultimately just sort of a "who-dunnit" detective story as the conspiracy is unraveled. All the flashbacks are what make Watchmen what it is, and at its heart, more than anything, its a deconstruction of the comic book superhero mythos. Dr. Manhattan has Superman like powers, but instead of being infatuated with humanity like Clark Kent, because of how he now sees the world, Dr. Manhattan can no longer relate to it. Whereas some superhero characters like Peter Parker are constantly trying to balance their normal lives with their life as a masked hero, Rorschach is trying to use his vigilante persona to repress and destroy who he used to be, to the point where he considers his mask his real face. Whereas the Justice League is generally unquestioned as a force for good, the Watchmen are seen in their world as an inherently fascist idea, existing underground, occasionally rising from the depths only to suppress the "normal" people. Its an attempt to challenge the established idea of a comic book hero.

I've also seen the movie dismissed as too nihilistic. Its certainly one of the bloodiest, grittiest, darkest, and cynical comic book movies ever made, but I don't think its nihilistic. I suspect the biggest reason why its been labeled as such is because of how it ends, and the decision Ozymandias makes, which he believes has to be done to "save" the world. But the movie certainly doesn't endorse what he does, and another main character actually dies in protest of it. If you really want to come away with a central message of the movie, I don't think you should look to Ozymandias's decision, but reather an epiphany that Dr. Manhattan comes to at the end of the film, having spent most of the film before hand speaking more nihilistically than anyone ("A living human body and a dead human body have the same number of particles. Structually, there is no difference.") For as much as the movie walks you into the abyss, I think it walks you back out at the end. There is a lot of death along the way, but consider Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a movie with many of the same themes of Red Scare-era paranoia, which ends with literally the world being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. I don't think Dr. Strangelove is nihilistic either. I think it shows how nihilistic thinking in some of its characters leads to very bad things happening, to send a message to the real life powers that be to hopefully dissuade them from that sort of thinking.

The cast of Watchmen is mostly comprised of relatively unknowns, but they do a very good job with the material. Particularily, Jackie Earle Haley impressed me as Rorschach. While I thought his raspy Batman-esque voice was perhaps a little much (I never really imagined Rorschach talking like that. I imagine that he perhaps imagines himself talking in that voice), but once he's unmasked, he plays his character with a fearsome energy, constantly keeping this pierecing gaze on his face. The actress who plays the second Silk Spectre was a little off, I think, but in many ways she had the hardest sell, having to convince the audience that she was the lover of a giant, naked, blue CGI dude. I think the comic will always be the definitive Watchmen experience and that being a comic is the best medium for it, but there is a certain undeniable excitement in seeing what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created on a static page on a big theathre in motion. Its one thing to see Rorschach's mask in a still imagine, its another thing to see it constantly shift around, something which could only be described to us in the book. Watching the Watchmen is certainly a tremendously worthwhile experience.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (***1/2)

Somehow I managed to avoid ever seeing Butch Cassiday despite how well known it is, so when it was on TCM last month I DVR'd it and just got around to watching it last night. Having now seen it, its certainly easy to see why the film has garnered the acclaim that it has and why its still remained popular, though I have to say that the movie didn't completely blow me away either. The biggest reason why the movie has the following that it does is that its two title roles are played by absolute legends in the forms of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Indeed, their buddy cop movie-esque banter throughout the movie is its strongest suit. The repore of the two fantastic actors goes a long way in terms of the movie's sheer entertainment value, but I'm not sure its enough to propel it to the status of, say, the 150th greatest movie of all time.

In the simplest sense, the movie tells the (at least partially) true story of Butch and Sundance, leaders of the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, who narrowly escape capture and become fugitives after a train robbery that the law apparently saw coming and dispatched a posse to intercept them there. Butch and Sundance flee into the wilderness and, after several attempt to throw their pursuers off their trail fail miserably, they deduce that they're being followed by a sort of all-star team of the west's best lawmen and trackers. This all leads up to the famous waterfall scene, where Butch and Sundance opt to take their chances jumping rather than try and survive a gunfight in which they'd be outnumbered and surrounded. They manage to make it back to the home of Etta Place, who is Sundance's lover, although really the most extended period we see Etta with either of the two by themselves is when she's out bike riding wtih Butch in the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" scene. This is as good a time as any to point out that I really, really, don't like that song, although the rest of Burt Bacharach's score is actually pretty good.

At any rate, Butch, Sundance, and Etta decide to travel south to Bolivia, where Butch--being the self-described brains of the operation--assures that it will be smooth sailing. There are some funny scenes where they realized that they forgot to learn Spanish at any point, and eventually end up robbing a bank while looking off of a notecard to tell the employees what to do. They run into much bigger problems, though, when they think that their old enemies from America have caught up to them, and they make brand new ones as word of the "banditos gringos" starts to spread around. They make an effort to go straight, but it seems as they're fated to remain the outlaws they've always been, and the movie ends with them still fighting, guns blazing.

If there's anything the movie is trying to be more than just a crime/cat-and-mouse chase movie, it seems like its trying to be a commentary on the end of the old west. There's a scene in which Butch and Sundance enlist the help of an old friend who's now working as a sherrif who tells him essentially that the era of the wild west outlaw is over, and that they're either going to die in a shootout or end of rotting in jail. I think the fact that we never really see the posse that's pursing Butch and Sundance for most of the movie up close and none of its members are developed as characters--despite Butch and Sundance explaining how formidable they are--adds to this motif. In a way, they're not really trying to outrun a pack of people, but they're trying to outrun the inevitable incursion of progress that's going to stifle the lawlessness of the frontier west. When they're forced to jump down the waterfall, they're literally being pushed aside by the new era. They eventually escape to Bolivia, but as we see from a montage sequence that separates the American part of the movie from its final act in Bolivia, they spend much of their treck down to South America intermingling with society-types at various gatherings. So, even though they physically escaped capture, they would seem to have lost some of their identity.

A lot can be discussed about how the movie plays off this idea of the end of the old west, and I'm sure on repeat viewings there would be more that would come up, but I can't see the movie being as endlessly watchable as a movie like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That movie can be dissected literally almost shot-for-shot, and can be looked at from an endless amount of angles, from the operatic duel of its three principal characters to its condemnation of the brutality in the Civil War. Really the best things going for Butch Cassidy are its cinematogrophy, and the amazing repore of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, two greatly talented and charismatic actors who play off each other extremely well. These things make for a movie that's well worth watching, but as far as the greatest westerns of all time are concerned, I don't know that I put it up as high as some others might.

The Stuff on the Side of the Page

You may or may not have noticed the two sets of blog links in the right-hand margin of the page. If you have, you may be wondering what the hell they are since I haven't really made mention of them or why they're there. So... how about I do that right now:

Blogs of people I know:

1. Here She Be -- The Battlements: The blog of a friend from college who's an aspiring writer and current English major. He's also something of an aspiring artist and will link to stuff on his Deviant Art page from time to time. His postings will range from anything from poetry, to sections of a novel he's working on, to philosophy essays. If at any point you're tired of the myriad spelling and grammatical errors that most certainly litter all of my posts, you can check out his blog, as he's a much better writer.

2. Fortune Cookie Muse: Another writing blog from another college acquaintance. Admittedly, I don't read it regularly, but she was nice enough to link to this blog, so I figure I should return the favor.

3. We Built Another World: The blog of another friend who went to work for a consulting firm in Washington D.C. First and foremost, his blog gets like 80 awesome points for being named after a Wolf Parade song. Secondly, he stumbles upon a lot of cool grassroots initiative stuff like this: http://depave.org/blog/.

4. Screaming Lemur: Another blog of a friend who shares a lot of common interests like movies and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. As you can tell, he also reads a helluva lot more than I do. This blog may be on a bit of a hiatus right now, as he just joined the Navy as an officer, and is going through whatever the hell their equivalent of boot camp is called. I can't remember.

Blogs I read but have no affiliation with:

1. Balloon Juice: A political blog run by a guy named John Cole, who is a self-described "recovering Republican." Its written with the perfect combination of informed analysis and soul-crushing cynicism. If you ever want to simultaneously laugh while feeling like your brain going to explode, read his posts labeled "Clown Shoes," which are examples of far right-wingers being completely insane.

2. Calculated Risk: This is a financial blog. Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn't be caught dead reading a financial blog, as I never found the world of high finance or really any subject in the realm of economics the least bit interesting. These, however, are not normal times, and I like to keep myself informed as to exactly how close we are as to being completely and utterly screwed. Reading Calculated Risk makes that pretty easy to do. Some of the commenters that post there regularly are also absolutely hilarious and give themselves usernames like "The Notorious A.I.G" and "Market Call of Cthulu." That's just inspired.

3. Glenn Greenwald: Another political blog and, I think, a very important one. His writing is much dryer than the "we're all screwed anyway, so lets make fun of everyone on the way down" sort of style of Balloon Juice, but I think everyone could learn a lot from reading his blog on any given day. There are a lot of tremendously important stories that, for one reason or another, a lot of people in traditional media completely ignore. Greenwald pursues these stories relentlessly, and explains in easy to understand terms why they're important and what the consequences of them being ignored are. Two examples that are clear immediately if you dig through his old posts a little bit are the wiretapping of U.S. citizens as authorized by the FISA bill under the Bush Administration, and the detaining of people without trial at Guantanamo Bay. The only downside to reading his blog is that it'll make you way angrier at pretty much everyone holding public office than you ever would be otherwise. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

4. Polite Dissent: I just love the concept of this guy's blog. He's a real-life licensed doctor, but most of what he posts about is comic books and episodes of House. If you're reading a comic that just came out and there's a long narration by some character with a bunch of medical terminology and you're wondering if what they're talking about has any bearing whatsoever on real life, chances are its discussed here. He also publishes a medical review of every House episode that examines in depth the entire process the cast uses to arrive at a diagnosis. His reviews are up and down from episode-to-episode, but in general he likes the show a lot and considers it to be the most accurate medical show on television (which is still pretty far from being totally accurate).

5. Funnybook Bablyon: A comic book-centered blog that I stumbled upon at some point. I liked it first and foremost because it provided excellent annotations for the recent Batman R.I.P and Final Crisis series, which were both incredibly dense and pretty damn confusing for someone who doesn't have everything there is to know about the DC Universe committed to memory.

6. Todd Alcott: The blog of a professional screenwriter who's been lucky enough to have worked in Hollywood a few times in the past. His devotes most of his blog to analyzing movies that he's recently watched, either because he just felt like watching them, or because he's doing some sort of a broader analysis on a particular set of movies. Recently he just did a big series of posts on various superhero movies. He also personally knows James Urbaniak, also known as the voice of Dr. Thaddius Venture, and he posts ridiculously in-depth analysis of episodes of The Venture Brothers, which he clearly has a great fondness for, outside of the fact that he's acquainted with one of the voice talents.

That's all I've got for now. I'm sure I'll add more in the future, at which point I'll update this.

Burn After Reading

This is probably going to be pretty short because its been a while now since I watched it and its not that fresh in my mind anymore, but here goes.

Burn After Reading (***)

After watching Burn After Reading on DVD, I watched a little big of the "making of..." featurette included in the Special Features which included Joel and Ethan Coen being asked how the origin of the movie came about. The Coens explained that it arose from having a bunch of separate ideas for characters specifically tailored to actors that they liked, and then they built the rest of the story to tie together these parts. Hearing this was unsurprising, firstly because the actors do clearly seem to have a lot of fun in their roles and do seem to be excellent matches for most of them, but also unsurprising because the story feels extremely haphazard and rough around the edges. It is intended to feel somewhat, because its an ensemble movie that turns into this big, interconnected comedy of errors in which no one character really knows the full extent of what's going on. But in other movies of this ilk, take for example Guy Ritchie's Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the movie eventually brings all of the separate storylines together at a climax where it becomes clear how everything ties in and all of the stories come to a satisfying resolution. In Burn After Reading, there definitely is a converging of storylines, and there certainly is some sense of closure to some of them--notably for one character who doesn't make it out alive--but it nevertheless doesn't feel complete at the end. The payoff, when you look back at the whole movie from its ending, isn't quite satisfactory, and though the movie tries to be clever through its various twists and turns and intertwined relationships, it doesn't have the same wit that the Coen brothers' previous forays into comedy like The Big Lebowski have in droves.

Like I said, it's been a little while now since I watched this, but from what I remember, the gist of the story goes something like this. Osbourne Cox (John Malcovich) is an easily agitated CIA Agent, who gets called into a meeting in which he finds out that he's been "reassigned" from his current job. His superiors assure him that this isn't the same as him getting fired and that they have another position lined up for him, but this is cold comfort to Osbourne, who decides he's going to leave his job on his own terms and quits. With a lot of free time now on his hands, Osbourne decides his going to write memoirs of his time in the CIA and try and get a book deal out of it. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who obviously doesn't have a lot of confidence in his ability to write an entire book, this a fairly absurd idea. Actually, Katie dislikes being with Osbourne for more than just his memoirs and is planning to divorce him, which is probably for the best because she's already secretly banging another married man, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Harry, in turn, also ends up banging Linda Litzke, a woman who seems to be going through a bit of a mid-life crisis which manifests itself through her planning a bunch of plastic surgeries and trying a bunch of online dating services.

Thing is, plastic surgery costs money, of which Linda isn't swimming in from her salary as a personal trainer. As such, she is immediately interested when her co-worker, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), finds a CD with what he describes as "Some serious CIA shit with like... numbers..." in one of the locker rooms. In actuality, the CD is stuff Katie pulled off of her husband's computer. The "CIA shit" is fairly harmless information from Osbourne's memoirs, and the "numbers" are from his tax statements, information which a lawyer suggest she obtain before filing divorce papers. This never occurs to Chad and Linda, who attempt first to extort a random out of Osbourne Cox, then, when that doesn't work, try to sell the disc to the Russians, who they apparently still consider America's number one enemy. The CIA eventually gets wind of this attempted espionage, but doesn't really find out much about the whole situation, except who's sleeping with who.

Brad Pitt's character is easily the funniest part of the movie, and I'd say the movie is almost worth seeing just for his performance, even if the movie as a whole is kind of a mess. His chracter is kind of a spazz, and Pitt spends most of the movie in bicycle shorts dancing to music on his iPod or drinking out of a water bottle in the most effeminate way possible. The thing is, his character is completely ridiculous compared to the other main characters involved in the love triange (or love whatever the polygon would be for the total amount of people involved) part of the storyline. He seems more like a character that would be alongside Walter or "The Jesus" from The Big Lebowski, but the rest of the movie doesn't have the surreal quality that Lebowski has that allows you to believe that its taking place a world where those characters can exist. Which brings me back to where I started this. The movie has a lot of clever ideas, but they're clever ideas that seem to be pasted together with that crappy glue stick they give you in second grade art class that doesn't hold anything for more than about 20 seconds. Its not a terrible movie, but with what the Coen brothers have done in the past both dramatically and comedically, I expected something more polished.

I guess that didn't end up being all that short.

It's gettin' to be about that time, eh chaps?

Baseball season can't get here soon enough. Watching the Cubs get swept 3-0 in the NLDS at the hands of the Dodgers, making a 97-win regular season all for naught, was kind of like getting kicked in the nuts in super slow-motion. Neither a respectable, but not particularly memorable, 9-7 Bears season nor the possibly playoff bound, but still terrible outside of Derrick Rose Bulls have done much to take the sting away. Now here we are and February and, well, that sting is still going to be there for a while. Spring training games just started on Wednesday and we're still a good 7 weeks away from the regular season starting. And to be frank, its hard to imagine the regular season being all that satisfying an experience either. The Cubs won the NL Central pretty comfortably last year, are returning rougly the same team as last year, and the rest of an already pretty bad division would seem to have gotten substantially worse. As such, the Cubs winning the division this year wouldn't be a huge deal at all, and not winning it would represent a monumental collapse. The only thing that's going to remove the sting of getting swept in back-to-back NLDS series is going to be getting back to the playoffs and getting to the World Series. Even still, there's always a degree of excitment that comes with baseball starting up again, so let's talk about it.

Probably thanks in part to the recession, it was a pretty quiet off-season around the league with the exception of the Yankees, who threw massive piles of money at Mark Texiera and C.C. Sabathia. The Cubs are returning a roster that's largely the same at its core but its been tweaked a little bit. The two most significant losses are Mark DeRosa and Kerry Wood. Seeing Wood go is kind of bittersweet because, even with all of his injury issues he's been a member of the Cubs for a decade, and he seemed like a genuinely good guy. Although, I have to say, going to mlb.com and seeing a news story that Wood's back was bothering him and knowing that I didn't have to worry about it was something I can get used to. It seems like Carlos Marmol will be handed the reigns of the closer's job, although Kevin Gregg was brought in as well from Florida and could probably do an adequate job in a pinch. Provided Marmol doesn't have a huge breakdown (and the prospect of that is always going to scare the hell out of me so long as Lou's having him throw 40+ pitch outings and come right back the next day), the loss of Wood shouldn't be hugely crushing.

The DeRosa loss might be a bit more significant. DeRosa was brought in two years ago as a super-sub type of guy, and indeed, he's played admirably all over the field with the Cubs. Last year, though, DeRosa did more than just field a bunch of positions, he put together a career year at the plate, hitting 21 home runs and driving in 87. It would seem that, in dealing DeRosa to the Indians for pitching prospects, that the Cubs figure that DeRosa is not going to repeat that performance again (he did just turn 34), and decided to "sell high" if you will. Still, it is a little disconcerting that, to replace DeRosa, the Cubs went out and got Aaron Miles. Miles is a switch-hitter and the Cubs made it a goal to get less righty heavy after getting shut down by the right-hand dominated Dodgers pitching staff in the NLDS last year. The thing is, compared to DeRosa, even if he starts to decline, Miles isn't really all that good. He put together a .317 average last year with the Cardinals, but even still he had an OPS of .753 which was good for an OPS+ of 99 (an OPS+ of 100 represents an average hitter). The Cubs do have the left-handed Mike Fontenot, who isn't really that great either, but he's younger than Miles and I'm not convinced he'd be all that worse. The Cubs saved a little bit of money trading DeRosa and getting Miles but not all that much. I think the gap in production between DeRosa and Miles is probably wider than the gap in cost. So I think the Miles signing was somewhat dubious.

Maybe the biggest signing of the offseason for the Cubs was Milton Bradley. The reaction to the signing was immediately polarizing amongst fans, as the Cubs gave a pretty lucrative 3 year deal to a guy with undeniable hitting prowess but also with equally undeniable injury problems. Last year, Bradley had a fantastic .436 OBP with 22 HRs and 77 RBIs for the Indians in 126 games, but was used almost entirely as a DH, something which obviously isn't an option for the Cubs. You have to go all the way back to 2004 to find the last time Bradley was able to play in as many games as he did in 2008, when he appeared in 141 with the Dodgers. If he could stay healthy, the switch-hitting Bradley would likely be a huge upgade over Kosuke Fukudome, should he struggle as he did in the 2nd half of '08, but that's an enormous if. Bradley didn't exactly restore confidence in his health by leaving a spring training game with a quad injury after taking a walk in his first at-bat. It seems like the injury is pretty minor, but its hard to imagine a more ominous sign than that. The Cubs also said goodbye to backup catcher Henry Blanco and brought back Paul Bako, who caught alongside Michael Barrett for the Cubs in the '03 and '04 seasons. I don't really understand why they did this, as Blanco is the exact same age, is a slightly better hitter who every once in a while would inexplicably go on a tear offensively, and seemed to do an excellent job of handling the pitching staff. Bako, again, makes them more left-handed, but we're talking about the backup catcher here. Presumably Bako isn't going to be the first option brought in as a pinch-hitter against rightys. I dunno, this move really isn't a big deal, but I always had an irrational love for ol' Hank White.

In terms of the rotation, the Cubs re-signed Ryan Dempster who had a career year last year. He probably isn't going to repeat quite the success that he had last year, and honestly the Cubs probably paid him more than he's worth, but he seems like a genuinely good guy and he's fun to watch pitch. The Cubs also brought in Aaron Heilman from the Mets, who has split time between being a starter and a long reliever throughout his career. Heilman's numbers aren't stellar at all, but he gives them some pitching depth, which is good because its already being said that Rich Harden is going to be good for maybe 20 starts this year. The Cubs also have Sean Marshall still in their back pocket, but they haven't shown a willingness to put him in the rotation and keep him there yet, and he's going to be 26 next year. At this point you have to believe that the Cubs aren't counting on Marshall's upside being all that much more that what he's shown to this point.

Some of the moves by the Cubs are head-scratchers to an extend, but none of them seem egrigiously bad at this point. The Cubs were looking for fill-in guys, and while I'm not convinced that this group of guys is the absolute best to fill those roles, I think for the most part they'll do an adequate job, and the Cubs have a lot to fall back on this year as well. I think they may have overreacted a bit with just how crucial it was that they got more left-handed at the plate, to the point where they brought in guys like Aaron Miles who clearly weren't the best overall hitters out there, but who knows. If the Cubs run into the Dodgers again in the playoffs, which is certainly possible, those leftys may look like Godsends.

Nothing earth-shattering has happened in Spring Training thus far. Carlos Zambrano went 3 IP without allowing a run in his first start. Hopefully that suggests that he'll get off to a good start again in '09 as he did in '08, breaking a streak of a bunch of bad Aprils from years prior, but who knows. As I said, there's only so much you can read into Spring Training games. Micah Hoffpauir has been getting some ABs, and has hit a couple of home runs already. He'll probably make the roster and, hopefully, will hit a couple of those as a pinch hitter later on in the regular season.

That's all I've got for now.