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.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Sunday, April 04, 2010
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.
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.
---
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.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
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.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
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.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Dragon Age
If you're wondering why there's been a reprieve in my FF7 posts, it's because I've been playing a lot of Dragon Age recently. I don't have a lot of previous experience with Bioware games. Somehow I even let the entire Knights of the Old Republic craze pass me by. So I can't really tell you if Dragon Age lives up to all of Bioware's previous celebrated fare, but I can tell you that it's a fun, immersive, well-presented action RPG. Something like 24 hours in, I don't really know if I can call it a great game, but it's certainly very good.
Dragon Age has a dark fantasy setting, somewhat reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, the Elder Scrolls games, maybe a bit of Diablo, and probably a lot of people's D&D campaigns. You pick a race (human/elf/dwarf) and class (warrior/mage/rogue, these can be further specialized later), and then you play through one of a handful of different background areas until you reach the point in the plot where you get recruited by the Grey Wardens. In the story Grey Wardens are an ancient sect of warriors which has defended Ferelden--the world in which this is set--from a series of "blights": hordes of demons called darkspawn who pillage their way across the countryside. Alas, though, just as you're inducted into the Grey Wardens, just about all of them who aren't you are slaughtered in a battle against the darkspawn. So now it's up to you, and the handful of allies that you pick up along the way, to convince Ferelden's population of elves, dwarves, and magi to honor old treaties with the Grey Wardens and come fight for you. And oh yeah, a power hungry guy trying to usurp the throne has labeld you a traitor. So there's plenty to keep you occupied. As you'd expect from any well-made RPG of any kind these days, there are also plenty of sidequests and divergent storylines for you to choose from.
The gameplay consists of Action RPG elements similar to those of the Marvel Legends games as well as Final Fantasy XII (others, I'm sure, as well but those are the first two that came to my mind). There's one "main" protagonist, the character whom you customize the looks and abilities of at the start, but you can have up to four characters active in a party at any given time. You can only directly control one character simultaneously but you can switch which character this is at any time with L1 and L2. Additionally, you can also hold L2 to pause combat and bring up an abilities menu from which you can use L1 and L2 again to switch characters and give any character any command. Otherwise, the three characters who you aren't controlling act on their own through a series of Tactics, which can be chosen from a number of presets or customized. Unlike the incredibly agitating Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII, you can use any of the possible conditions for actions immediately (i.e. Self HP < style="font-style: italic;">Dragon Age has all the traditional RPG equipment slots (helmet, armor, rings, belt...) which you can equip with armor you can buy or find in the field. Each piece has different stat requirements for a character to be able to wear it based on whether it's light, medium, or heavy, and based on what tier it is. Speaking of, weapons and armor are separated into tiers--which the game is nice enough to color code in menus--that provide a general idea of their relative strength, but weapons and armor can also have any number of additional bonuses beyond their base attack/armor rating. Higher quality weapons also have slots for runes, that you find or buy separately and can slot into the weapon to further enhance it, kind of like how gems work for armor in World of Warcraft.
In between fightin' stuff and gettin' loot, there's a lot of time spent in towns speaking to the various denizens to advance the story and get more quests. In general, the voice acting is pretty good, and better than most games. In addition to talking to people, you can press X next to certain books, notes, statues, and a whole bunch of other stuff in the environment and get a 'codex' entry that you can read through in the menu. If you really get into the world and want to learn as much as possible about it, there's plenty to keep you busy. Personally, to this point I've found myself just sort of casually flipping through some of it.
That's pretty much all I have for now. I might revisit writing about the game later once I've completed it. Overall it's a lot of fun, although there are a few things about the system that I think could work better than they do.
Dragon Age has a dark fantasy setting, somewhat reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, the Elder Scrolls games, maybe a bit of Diablo, and probably a lot of people's D&D campaigns. You pick a race (human/elf/dwarf) and class (warrior/mage/rogue, these can be further specialized later), and then you play through one of a handful of different background areas until you reach the point in the plot where you get recruited by the Grey Wardens. In the story Grey Wardens are an ancient sect of warriors which has defended Ferelden--the world in which this is set--from a series of "blights": hordes of demons called darkspawn who pillage their way across the countryside. Alas, though, just as you're inducted into the Grey Wardens, just about all of them who aren't you are slaughtered in a battle against the darkspawn. So now it's up to you, and the handful of allies that you pick up along the way, to convince Ferelden's population of elves, dwarves, and magi to honor old treaties with the Grey Wardens and come fight for you. And oh yeah, a power hungry guy trying to usurp the throne has labeld you a traitor. So there's plenty to keep you occupied. As you'd expect from any well-made RPG of any kind these days, there are also plenty of sidequests and divergent storylines for you to choose from.
The gameplay consists of Action RPG elements similar to those of the Marvel Legends games as well as Final Fantasy XII (others, I'm sure, as well but those are the first two that came to my mind). There's one "main" protagonist, the character whom you customize the looks and abilities of at the start, but you can have up to four characters active in a party at any given time. You can only directly control one character simultaneously but you can switch which character this is at any time with L1 and L2. Additionally, you can also hold L2 to pause combat and bring up an abilities menu from which you can use L1 and L2 again to switch characters and give any character any command. Otherwise, the three characters who you aren't controlling act on their own through a series of Tactics, which can be chosen from a number of presets or customized. Unlike the incredibly agitating Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII, you can use any of the possible conditions for actions immediately (i.e. Self HP < style="font-style: italic;">Dragon Age has all the traditional RPG equipment slots (helmet, armor, rings, belt...) which you can equip with armor you can buy or find in the field. Each piece has different stat requirements for a character to be able to wear it based on whether it's light, medium, or heavy, and based on what tier it is. Speaking of, weapons and armor are separated into tiers--which the game is nice enough to color code in menus--that provide a general idea of their relative strength, but weapons and armor can also have any number of additional bonuses beyond their base attack/armor rating. Higher quality weapons also have slots for runes, that you find or buy separately and can slot into the weapon to further enhance it, kind of like how gems work for armor in World of Warcraft.
In between fightin' stuff and gettin' loot, there's a lot of time spent in towns speaking to the various denizens to advance the story and get more quests. In general, the voice acting is pretty good, and better than most games. In addition to talking to people, you can press X next to certain books, notes, statues, and a whole bunch of other stuff in the environment and get a 'codex' entry that you can read through in the menu. If you really get into the world and want to learn as much as possible about it, there's plenty to keep you busy. Personally, to this point I've found myself just sort of casually flipping through some of it.
That's pretty much all I have for now. I might revisit writing about the game later once I've completed it. Overall it's a lot of fun, although there are a few things about the system that I think could work better than they do.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Top 25-ish Movies of the Decade 2000-2009
This may not entirely sync up with how these movies are ordered on the individual yearly lists that I've made but, hey, people's opinion's can change, right? Furthermore, some of these movies I haven't seen all that recently and I'm going by vague memories of them. To expedite this, I think I'm only going to write a blurb on the movies that I haven't already written separate reviews for on here.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
But captain, to obey - just like that - for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do.
Guillermo Del Toro's haunting, darkly beautiful epic about a girl living in Franco's Spain who meets a faun in an underground fantasy world telling her that she's actually a princess. Is it real, or just her overactive imagination? We're left to come to our own conclusions about it. In a movie where our heroine has to contend with a faceless "pale man" with eyes in the palms of his hands who devours children, the most frightening monster in the movie is human--her father; a Captain in Franco's army. He's one of the most terrifying characters put on screen, even moreso, I think, than Christopher Waltz's nazi in this year's Inglourious Basterds.
2. Michael Clayton
I'm Shiva, the God of death.
T-3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fightin' for.
No, I don't really think all of them are equally as good--I think Fellowship is probably the best--but to keep this from being overly LotR heavy, I'll just nestle them all here. A lot of people who aren't into all the high fantasy of Tolkien's world mock the long run times and the suspension of disbelief required to get on board with the quest to destroy the ring ("Why don't they just ride one of those eagles and throw it in the volcano?"), but whatever, screw them. Peter Jackson and company did an amazing job with the titanic effort of putting together one a dense, complicated epic on screen such that it was beloved by newcomers and hardcore fans alike (the few people still bitching about Tom Bombadil being left out don't count).
4. Up In the Air
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
5. Juno
Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
6. No Country for Old Men
Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.
7. The Dark Knight
It's not about making money, it's about sending a message: Everything burns!
8. The Departed
I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.
9. Doubt
"Did you ever prove it?"
"To whom?"
"Anyone but yourself?"
10. Million Dollar Baby
Boxing is an unnatural act. 'Cos everything in it is backwards. You wanna move to the left, you don't step left, you push on the right toe. To move right, you use your left toe. Instead of running from the pain - like a sane person would do, you step into it.
Clint Eastwood's somber tale about the rise and fall of a female boxer under the tutelage of an old trainer, played by Eastwood himself, who eventually becomes a father figure for her. The ethics and implications of the decision he makes at the end of the movie could be discussed endlessly.
11. Slumdog Millionaire
It is written.
12. Lost in Translation
For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
Sophia Coppola's gorgeous movie about two people who randomly meet up in Japan at very different points in their lives. The perfect movie for someone like me who is fascinated by Japan but hasn't made it over there yet.
13. Good Night and Good Luck
We must not confuse dissent from disloyalty. We must remember always, that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.
14. Downfall
You must be on stage when the curtain falls.
At times a brutal movie to watch, Downfall or Der Untergang follows the last day's of Nazi Germany, when Hitler was relegated to an underground bunker as the last remnants of the German army fought and died in Berlin. Actor Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler is terrifyingly convincing, and the movie portrays him as a broken, pitiful creature, teetering on the edge of insanity as his Empire crumbles.
15. House of Flying Daggers
[...I guess I don't have a quote for this one. You've failed me, IMDB.]
Hero, also directed by Yimou Zhang, is two spaces down on the list, but Daggers is a better movie with a more intimate story, connecting a love triangle with a political intrigue story pitting a weak and corrupt Chinese government against a band of assassins. The visuals in Yimou's films are stunning. In this movie, the sequence in the bamboo forest is particularly beautiful.
16. There Will Be Blood
I am the Third Revelation!!
17. Hero
But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains.
Not quite as good as Daggers, but another visually arresting film by Yimou Zhang. What's particularly interesting is how each of the movie's conflicting flashbacks--it's structured much like to Rashomon--seems to have it's own color scheme. It also has a lot of the heady Eastern philosophy that I'm a complete sucker for. A major plot point involves two main characters interpreting what a single character of calligraphy means.
18. Crash
[I don't have anything here either.]
Paul Haggis's confrontation of racism, interleaving a number of different stories of people from varying backgrounds whose lives "crash" together. Wish I had more to say, but this is one of the movies on the list that I haven't seen in some time.
19. The Aviator
Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints...
Martin Scorsese's second appearance on the list for his biopic of Howard Hughes, simultaneously genius and insane. A great performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.
20. Inglourious Basterds
We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis.
21. Spirited Away
Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember.
One of the most imaginative movies of all time, directed by legendary animator Hayao Miyasaki. There simply isn't any other hand-drawn animation that matches the detail of Miyasaki's work, and there are few people who can create anything more completely and utterly original in any sort of format.
22. Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2
I'm a killer. A murdering bastard, you know that. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.
Roughly four hours of Quintin Tarantino following no rules whatsoever, except take what's cool and run with it, Kill Bill is a hodge-podge of everything that's influenced Tarantino's career, from grindhouse kung-fu revenge movies, to spaghetti westerns, to random theme songs from old TV shows. It's impossible not to have fun with it.
23. The Royal Tenenbaums
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?
Wes Anderson's best movie is probably Rushmore, but that was '98, I think. Tenenbaums, however, similarly shows Anderson's ability to combine a story with absurd characters and absurdist humor with genuinely emotional human drama. Anderson is definitely an acquired taste, but I for one have acquired it.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
But captain, to obey - just like that - for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do.
Guillermo Del Toro's haunting, darkly beautiful epic about a girl living in Franco's Spain who meets a faun in an underground fantasy world telling her that she's actually a princess. Is it real, or just her overactive imagination? We're left to come to our own conclusions about it. In a movie where our heroine has to contend with a faceless "pale man" with eyes in the palms of his hands who devours children, the most frightening monster in the movie is human--her father; a Captain in Franco's army. He's one of the most terrifying characters put on screen, even moreso, I think, than Christopher Waltz's nazi in this year's Inglourious Basterds.
2. Michael Clayton
I'm Shiva, the God of death.
T-3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fightin' for.
No, I don't really think all of them are equally as good--I think Fellowship is probably the best--but to keep this from being overly LotR heavy, I'll just nestle them all here. A lot of people who aren't into all the high fantasy of Tolkien's world mock the long run times and the suspension of disbelief required to get on board with the quest to destroy the ring ("Why don't they just ride one of those eagles and throw it in the volcano?"), but whatever, screw them. Peter Jackson and company did an amazing job with the titanic effort of putting together one a dense, complicated epic on screen such that it was beloved by newcomers and hardcore fans alike (the few people still bitching about Tom Bombadil being left out don't count).
4. Up In the Air
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
5. Juno
Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
6. No Country for Old Men
Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.
7. The Dark Knight
It's not about making money, it's about sending a message: Everything burns!
8. The Departed
I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.
9. Doubt
"Did you ever prove it?"
"To whom?"
"Anyone but yourself?"
10. Million Dollar Baby
Boxing is an unnatural act. 'Cos everything in it is backwards. You wanna move to the left, you don't step left, you push on the right toe. To move right, you use your left toe. Instead of running from the pain - like a sane person would do, you step into it.
Clint Eastwood's somber tale about the rise and fall of a female boxer under the tutelage of an old trainer, played by Eastwood himself, who eventually becomes a father figure for her. The ethics and implications of the decision he makes at the end of the movie could be discussed endlessly.
11. Slumdog Millionaire
It is written.
12. Lost in Translation
For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
Sophia Coppola's gorgeous movie about two people who randomly meet up in Japan at very different points in their lives. The perfect movie for someone like me who is fascinated by Japan but hasn't made it over there yet.
13. Good Night and Good Luck
We must not confuse dissent from disloyalty. We must remember always, that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.
14. Downfall
You must be on stage when the curtain falls.
At times a brutal movie to watch, Downfall or Der Untergang follows the last day's of Nazi Germany, when Hitler was relegated to an underground bunker as the last remnants of the German army fought and died in Berlin. Actor Bruno Ganz's performance as Hitler is terrifyingly convincing, and the movie portrays him as a broken, pitiful creature, teetering on the edge of insanity as his Empire crumbles.
15. House of Flying Daggers
[...I guess I don't have a quote for this one. You've failed me, IMDB.]
Hero, also directed by Yimou Zhang, is two spaces down on the list, but Daggers is a better movie with a more intimate story, connecting a love triangle with a political intrigue story pitting a weak and corrupt Chinese government against a band of assassins. The visuals in Yimou's films are stunning. In this movie, the sequence in the bamboo forest is particularly beautiful.
16. There Will Be Blood
I am the Third Revelation!!
17. Hero
But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains.
Not quite as good as Daggers, but another visually arresting film by Yimou Zhang. What's particularly interesting is how each of the movie's conflicting flashbacks--it's structured much like to Rashomon--seems to have it's own color scheme. It also has a lot of the heady Eastern philosophy that I'm a complete sucker for. A major plot point involves two main characters interpreting what a single character of calligraphy means.
18. Crash
[I don't have anything here either.]
Paul Haggis's confrontation of racism, interleaving a number of different stories of people from varying backgrounds whose lives "crash" together. Wish I had more to say, but this is one of the movies on the list that I haven't seen in some time.
19. The Aviator
Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints, Show me the blueprints...
Martin Scorsese's second appearance on the list for his biopic of Howard Hughes, simultaneously genius and insane. A great performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.
20. Inglourious Basterds
We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis.
21. Spirited Away
Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can't remember.
One of the most imaginative movies of all time, directed by legendary animator Hayao Miyasaki. There simply isn't any other hand-drawn animation that matches the detail of Miyasaki's work, and there are few people who can create anything more completely and utterly original in any sort of format.
22. Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2
I'm a killer. A murdering bastard, you know that. And there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard.
Roughly four hours of Quintin Tarantino following no rules whatsoever, except take what's cool and run with it, Kill Bill is a hodge-podge of everything that's influenced Tarantino's career, from grindhouse kung-fu revenge movies, to spaghetti westerns, to random theme songs from old TV shows. It's impossible not to have fun with it.
23. The Royal Tenenbaums
Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?
Wes Anderson's best movie is probably Rushmore, but that was '98, I think. Tenenbaums, however, similarly shows Anderson's ability to combine a story with absurd characters and absurdist humor with genuinely emotional human drama. Anderson is definitely an acquired taste, but I for one have acquired it.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Best Movies of 2009
Like with 2008, this might change a lot once I see more 2009 releases on DVD and whatnot over time. At least I have 10 I can put on here right away. I finally got my '08 list up to 10 movies with The Wrestler not too long ago.
1. Up in the Air -- Jason Reitman's brilliant look at a man who happily lives a life of solitude constantly flying around the country firing people for other companies who don't want to deal with it themselves. George Clooney perfectly embodies the role, and the excellent script does a lot to make his character of Ryan Bingnam and the other two main characters--a young woman fresh out of school who threatens Ryan's job and another nomadic airline traveler who Ryan thinks shares his desire for totally casual and fleeting relationships--completely believable people you can care about.
2. Inglorious Basterds -- Quentin Tarantino's World War II epic, light on historical accuracy, but big on style. It was billed as a blood-soaked revenge flick, and there's certainly some of that, but there's a lot more going on, including a fantastic performance by Christopher Waltz as a smug, arrogant, and terrifying SS officer. It shows Tarantino's love for movies, and gives a lot of nods to spaghetti westerns in particular.
3. District 9 (below Up in the Air review) -- A smart sci-fi movie filmed in shaky-cam documentary style chronicling the plight of aliens whose ship stalls out over Johannesburg, South Africa and end up being relegated to a slum. Simultaneously invents an alien culture, while also exploring the history of racial and crime issues that exist in South Africa today and throughout it's history.
4. Watchmen -- Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's masterpiece of a graphic novel. Gets a bit too actiony at times, and sometimes seems to almost forget that the original book was more of a deconstruction of the superhero genre than just merely a superhero story. Still, it does a great job of capturing the Dr. Strangelove--style cold war paranoia and cynicism that overshadows the book, and does a pretty good job of handling the myriad complex characters. Not a perfect adaptation, but a very, very good one.
5. Up -- Didn't get around to doing a standalone review for this, hence no link. Up is a brilliant follow up to Wall-E by Pixar about an old man who decides he's pretty much had enough with the urbanization around his tiny, quaint little house, and attaches about a million balloons to it and gets it airborne. The first 15 minutes or so are simple, mostly wordless, and absolutely heart-wrenching, as it chronicles how the old man and his wife met, got married, tried to start a family but never succeeded, and grew old, ending in his wife passing away. The remainder of the movie is much more of a light-hearted, adventurous kid's movie, as the old man and an unsuspecting boy scout who got inadvertently carried along on the old man's doorstep travel to South America and meet a deranged old explorer. It's still fun and charming, but even tough its first priority is to entertain kid's, I thought some of the stuff with the explorer's hyper-intelligent dogs flying old bi-planes was a little too preposterous to be in the same movie with such a human and emotional first act.
6. Coraline -- Adapted from a Neil Gaiman children's story, it's a great animated movie where the titular character moves to a run-down old house in Oregon and discovered that it contains a portal to an alternate world of doll-people. Ostensibly it's a movie meant to be appropriate for kids, but I found it legitimately pretty damn creepy. The stop-motion world has some great visuals and both the real world and the pseudo doll world have a darkly beautiful veneer to them. Some great, atmospheric music as well.
7. Ponyo -- Three animated movies in a row! Ponyo is the latest film from Hayao Miyasaki, the master animator who made one of my favorite moves Mononoke Hime, as well as Spirited Away. This movie is a definite step down from those two, with a plot that kind of sputters out towards the end, but it's another great showcase for his amazing, imaginative mind. Like all of the various spirits in the bathhouse in Spirited Away, some of the ocean creatures Miyasaki creates here--as always with hand-drawn animation of tremendous detail--are jaw-dropping.
8. Star Trek -- J. J. Abrams's lens flare-filled addition to the Star Trek franchise. It's somewhat dumbed down and more of a straight-action movie than what I think the spirit of Star Trek is really supposed to be. And furthermore, the more I think about it, the more I think the villain's motivation makes no sense. Still, it's an undeniably fun movie with a new cast that does a great job of embodying the core of all of the original characters. Karl Urban as McCoy is particularly fantastic. "Got numb tongue? I can fix that!"
9. Public Enemies -- Off the heels of his Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann tries his hand at a prohibition-era crime movie telling the story of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson and the rest of the great early bank robbers. I was incredibly excited at the prospect of a movie with both Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but really, Depp's performance is good, but nothing incredible, and Bale's character is very one-dimensional. Nevertheless, the movie tells a fascinating story of the golden age of bank robbery and the creation of the FBI, has a number of memorable, engaging action sequences and great, realistic visuals of 1920s Chicago.
10. Crazy Heart -- Kind of like the Country/Western version of The Wrestler. A somber, likable movie driven by an excellent, fully realized performance by Jeff Bridges. Features some great original music, all sung by Bridges himself, none of that "oh look, suddenly the main character has a totally different voice!" nonsense.
Close but no cigar:
11. Zombieland -- Coming towards the end here, so let's get right to the point on this one: It has Woody Harrelson. Riding a roller coaster. With a shotgun. Shooting zombies. I don't want to meet the person who doesn't want to see that.
Movies I haven't seen yet that I suspect might crack this list: The Hurt Locker, Where the Wild Things Are, Avatar, A Single Man, Fantastic Mr. Fox
1. Up in the Air -- Jason Reitman's brilliant look at a man who happily lives a life of solitude constantly flying around the country firing people for other companies who don't want to deal with it themselves. George Clooney perfectly embodies the role, and the excellent script does a lot to make his character of Ryan Bingnam and the other two main characters--a young woman fresh out of school who threatens Ryan's job and another nomadic airline traveler who Ryan thinks shares his desire for totally casual and fleeting relationships--completely believable people you can care about.
2. Inglorious Basterds -- Quentin Tarantino's World War II epic, light on historical accuracy, but big on style. It was billed as a blood-soaked revenge flick, and there's certainly some of that, but there's a lot more going on, including a fantastic performance by Christopher Waltz as a smug, arrogant, and terrifying SS officer. It shows Tarantino's love for movies, and gives a lot of nods to spaghetti westerns in particular.
3. District 9 (below Up in the Air review) -- A smart sci-fi movie filmed in shaky-cam documentary style chronicling the plight of aliens whose ship stalls out over Johannesburg, South Africa and end up being relegated to a slum. Simultaneously invents an alien culture, while also exploring the history of racial and crime issues that exist in South Africa today and throughout it's history.
4. Watchmen -- Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's masterpiece of a graphic novel. Gets a bit too actiony at times, and sometimes seems to almost forget that the original book was more of a deconstruction of the superhero genre than just merely a superhero story. Still, it does a great job of capturing the Dr. Strangelove--style cold war paranoia and cynicism that overshadows the book, and does a pretty good job of handling the myriad complex characters. Not a perfect adaptation, but a very, very good one.
5. Up -- Didn't get around to doing a standalone review for this, hence no link. Up is a brilliant follow up to Wall-E by Pixar about an old man who decides he's pretty much had enough with the urbanization around his tiny, quaint little house, and attaches about a million balloons to it and gets it airborne. The first 15 minutes or so are simple, mostly wordless, and absolutely heart-wrenching, as it chronicles how the old man and his wife met, got married, tried to start a family but never succeeded, and grew old, ending in his wife passing away. The remainder of the movie is much more of a light-hearted, adventurous kid's movie, as the old man and an unsuspecting boy scout who got inadvertently carried along on the old man's doorstep travel to South America and meet a deranged old explorer. It's still fun and charming, but even tough its first priority is to entertain kid's, I thought some of the stuff with the explorer's hyper-intelligent dogs flying old bi-planes was a little too preposterous to be in the same movie with such a human and emotional first act.
6. Coraline -- Adapted from a Neil Gaiman children's story, it's a great animated movie where the titular character moves to a run-down old house in Oregon and discovered that it contains a portal to an alternate world of doll-people. Ostensibly it's a movie meant to be appropriate for kids, but I found it legitimately pretty damn creepy. The stop-motion world has some great visuals and both the real world and the pseudo doll world have a darkly beautiful veneer to them. Some great, atmospheric music as well.
7. Ponyo -- Three animated movies in a row! Ponyo is the latest film from Hayao Miyasaki, the master animator who made one of my favorite moves Mononoke Hime, as well as Spirited Away. This movie is a definite step down from those two, with a plot that kind of sputters out towards the end, but it's another great showcase for his amazing, imaginative mind. Like all of the various spirits in the bathhouse in Spirited Away, some of the ocean creatures Miyasaki creates here--as always with hand-drawn animation of tremendous detail--are jaw-dropping.
8. Star Trek -- J. J. Abrams's lens flare-filled addition to the Star Trek franchise. It's somewhat dumbed down and more of a straight-action movie than what I think the spirit of Star Trek is really supposed to be. And furthermore, the more I think about it, the more I think the villain's motivation makes no sense. Still, it's an undeniably fun movie with a new cast that does a great job of embodying the core of all of the original characters. Karl Urban as McCoy is particularly fantastic. "Got numb tongue? I can fix that!"
9. Public Enemies -- Off the heels of his Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann tries his hand at a prohibition-era crime movie telling the story of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson and the rest of the great early bank robbers. I was incredibly excited at the prospect of a movie with both Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but really, Depp's performance is good, but nothing incredible, and Bale's character is very one-dimensional. Nevertheless, the movie tells a fascinating story of the golden age of bank robbery and the creation of the FBI, has a number of memorable, engaging action sequences and great, realistic visuals of 1920s Chicago.
10. Crazy Heart -- Kind of like the Country/Western version of The Wrestler. A somber, likable movie driven by an excellent, fully realized performance by Jeff Bridges. Features some great original music, all sung by Bridges himself, none of that "oh look, suddenly the main character has a totally different voice!" nonsense.
Close but no cigar:
11. Zombieland -- Coming towards the end here, so let's get right to the point on this one: It has Woody Harrelson. Riding a roller coaster. With a shotgun. Shooting zombies. I don't want to meet the person who doesn't want to see that.
Movies I haven't seen yet that I suspect might crack this list: The Hurt Locker, Where the Wild Things Are, Avatar, A Single Man, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Friday, December 25, 2009
Up in the Air / District 9 / Extract
Up in the Air (****)
Jason Reitman's two previous movies, Thank You For Smoking and Juno, are both very good movies--In the case of Juno, I liked it enough to call it my favorite movie of '07 here--but pretty different ones. Smoking was a bitingly cynical look at the tobacco debate and the lobbying industry, while Juno was a warmer movie about growing up. According to IMDB, Reitman has actually been working on Up in the Air, based on a novel of the same name, since before either of the other two movies were made. I think he was well advised to wait before making this movie, firstly because there are elements from both of his previous two movies that can be seen at work in Up in the Air, and secondly because the movie is especially prescient during a time when the country is still trying to get out of the worst recession since the great depression. My initial impression is that it's a better movie than Juno, and it might be my favorite movie of 2009, which would make two Reitman movies at #1 on my list in a three year span.
Our protagonist is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who is a "transitional specialist" which, when you translate that, means his job is to travel around the country firing people when they don't want to deal with the unpleasantness of firings themselves. The job is dressed up somewhat. He's equipped with handy informational packets and he lets every soon to be ex-employee that he'll be in touch in the future (except he really won't), but when you strip down the corporate veneer of it, ultimately the reality is that he spends his time telling people that they have to pack up their stuff and get the hell out. The character of Ryan Bingham has some elements of Aaron Eckhart's character from Thank Your for Smoking in that he seems to be flourishing in a job in which he's routinely hated because of it, as well as the title character in Michael Clayton, not a Reitman movie but also a George Clooney role, in that he's sort of the corporate go-to guy for dirty work (in this case, it's really more just "unpleasant work", whereas in Clayton it was more like trying to make crimes go away). Being farmed out to whatever company happens to be laying people off at the time means Bingham spends most of his time flying around the country--up in the air. Many would find such a life stressful, but not Bingham. He fetishises his stockpile of frequent flyer miles--one of the biggest ever accumulated--and all of his preferred customer cards from every airline, rental car company, and hotel he's ever used, always made out of some very important looking material. He's not bothered by not being able to spend more time with his family because he doesn't have one, and doesn't plan on it. In his spare time he even gives motivation speeches selling this lifestyle on the basis that people are meant to be "movers." He calls it "What's in Your Backpack?" and asks his audience to imagine all the people and things in their lives weighing them down as they try and walk.
Things are going pretty well for Bingham at the outset of the movie. With the country mired in recession, his boss (Jason Bateman) excitedly declares "this is our time!" He even meets Alex (Vera Fermiga), a woman with a similar lifestyle of near-permanent travel and, seemingly, an apathy for anything more serious than a casual relationship. Bingham runs into a bit of an issue, though, when his company hires Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), an energetic and determined young woman fresh out of college, who tries to prove her worth by introducing the concept of firing people via webcam to eliminate travel costs. With his attachment-free, never-stand-still lifestyle threatened, Bingham tries to convince his boss that this is a bad idea and that the nature of their job necessitates face-to-face interaction. His boss is unconvinced, but to try and appease
Bingham, he tells him that while the new system is being set up, he can take Natalie to jobs across the country to show her the ropes of the job. Natalie is a quick study, and knows inside and out what psychology textbooks say people want to hear when they get fired. When things get heated, Bingham gently explains to her that when someone is fighting back tears opining that they're not going to have money for their house payments, pointing out that studies show that "career transitions" can have a positive mental effect probably isn't going to put them at ease. Reitman filmed a whole bunch of scenes of people reacting to the news that they've been fired. Some of them are shown in little clips in montages, others extend out a bit, including one with Reitman movie mainstay J.K. Simmons, who initially is an especially hard sell
Most of the middle part of the movie is Ryan and Natalie bouncing around the country, with Ryan stopping to hook up with Alex whenever possible. The end of the movie has two important scenes: one where Ryan shows up in the middle of Wisconsin for his sisters wedding and has to confront the rest of his family that he's ignored over the years in favor of work, and another where Ryan discovers something that creates a major obstacle to his ultra-casual, carefree relationship with Alex. The movie runs the gamut of emotions, from laugh-out-loud funny, to very somber. All of it feels is not only compelling but feels very genuine, which was one of the biggest strengths of Reitman's Juno. It never goes out of it's way to pull on your emotions one way or another, it flows naturally from the story. Up in the Air works on a lot of levels. It's a timely piece documenting the effects of a struggling economy, and also a character study of a man trying to live as a nomad in a society where most people tie themselves down. Jason Reitman has been three for three thus far in making his movies interesting and thought provoking. Hopefully he stays hot. This is one of the best movies of '09.
*****
A couple of other quickies:
District 9 (***1/2)
An interesting sci-fi movie from newcomer Neill Blomkamp, who got the gig from producer Peter Jackson after working with him on the Halo movie that never materialized. Filmed in the style of a documentary, the beginning of the movie sets up the premise of aliens living in a slum in South Africa after their ship traveled to earth, but then seems to run out of juice while some sort of a virus kills much of its crew, leaving it hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. The slum, bearing the titular name of "District 9", is controlled by an international corporation and guarded by PMCs, although at ground level, much of the influence within the slum is actually in the hands of Nigerian gangs, who make money off of scamming the aliens in various ways, and who are convinced they can gain the aliens' power through magical rituals. Our hero and protagonist, Wikus Van Der Merwe, generally wants to help the stranded "prawns", as they're nicknamed, but his higer-ups have ulterior motives, like trying to learn how humans can use the alien weapons, which is synchronized with their genetic structure and thus can't be fired by human hands.
When trying to lead a team sent in to relocate the aliens out of the slums to a new camp set up by the corporation, Wikus stumbles upon a vial of black fluid and when he gets exposed to it, it begins to transform him into a hybrid between human and prawn, turning him into a fugitive from his former employers, who want to use him as a medical experiment to try and unlock the prawns' bio-tech. There's a lot of big action set pieces at the end of the movie with the prawns and the PMCs, but it never feels gratuitous and doesn't overshadow the larger story. Because it takes place in South Africa, many see the movie as a metaphor for apartheid. It's certainly easy to see why, though there are many more movies who deal with issues of prejudice in a much more heavy-handed and forced way as District 9, and the smart writing and the knowledge of South African culture and demographics that the filmmakers show gives it a lot of credibility. Even if you don't care about any of the moral issues in it, it's a fun sci-fi movie.
Extract (**1/2)
An entertaining, but somewhat disappointing movie from Mike Judge, (of Bevis and Butthead and Office Space fame) starring Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of an extract factory. Concerned that the passion has gone out of his marriage, and trying to deal with a lawsuit brought on by an employee who was injured in a region that you really don't want to be injured in, Joel takes a lot of bad advice from his bartender (Ben Affleck), who fancies himself as something of a wise shaman, but who is basically just an odd dude in possession of a lot of drugs. It has it's moments, but doesn't have anything anywhere near as the best scenes in Office Space and doesn't have any characters as memorable as Lumburgh or Milton. The funniest scenes are probably those involving David Koechner (Champ from Anchorman) as the quintessential neighbor who won't go away, in the proud tradition of Flanders from "Simpsons." Creating characters like him is what Judge is best at, he just does a lot more of it in Office Space than in Extract.
Jason Reitman's two previous movies, Thank You For Smoking and Juno, are both very good movies--In the case of Juno, I liked it enough to call it my favorite movie of '07 here--but pretty different ones. Smoking was a bitingly cynical look at the tobacco debate and the lobbying industry, while Juno was a warmer movie about growing up. According to IMDB, Reitman has actually been working on Up in the Air, based on a novel of the same name, since before either of the other two movies were made. I think he was well advised to wait before making this movie, firstly because there are elements from both of his previous two movies that can be seen at work in Up in the Air, and secondly because the movie is especially prescient during a time when the country is still trying to get out of the worst recession since the great depression. My initial impression is that it's a better movie than Juno, and it might be my favorite movie of 2009, which would make two Reitman movies at #1 on my list in a three year span.
Our protagonist is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who is a "transitional specialist" which, when you translate that, means his job is to travel around the country firing people when they don't want to deal with the unpleasantness of firings themselves. The job is dressed up somewhat. He's equipped with handy informational packets and he lets every soon to be ex-employee that he'll be in touch in the future (except he really won't), but when you strip down the corporate veneer of it, ultimately the reality is that he spends his time telling people that they have to pack up their stuff and get the hell out. The character of Ryan Bingham has some elements of Aaron Eckhart's character from Thank Your for Smoking in that he seems to be flourishing in a job in which he's routinely hated because of it, as well as the title character in Michael Clayton, not a Reitman movie but also a George Clooney role, in that he's sort of the corporate go-to guy for dirty work (in this case, it's really more just "unpleasant work", whereas in Clayton it was more like trying to make crimes go away). Being farmed out to whatever company happens to be laying people off at the time means Bingham spends most of his time flying around the country--up in the air. Many would find such a life stressful, but not Bingham. He fetishises his stockpile of frequent flyer miles--one of the biggest ever accumulated--and all of his preferred customer cards from every airline, rental car company, and hotel he's ever used, always made out of some very important looking material. He's not bothered by not being able to spend more time with his family because he doesn't have one, and doesn't plan on it. In his spare time he even gives motivation speeches selling this lifestyle on the basis that people are meant to be "movers." He calls it "What's in Your Backpack?" and asks his audience to imagine all the people and things in their lives weighing them down as they try and walk.
Things are going pretty well for Bingham at the outset of the movie. With the country mired in recession, his boss (Jason Bateman) excitedly declares "this is our time!" He even meets Alex (Vera Fermiga), a woman with a similar lifestyle of near-permanent travel and, seemingly, an apathy for anything more serious than a casual relationship. Bingham runs into a bit of an issue, though, when his company hires Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), an energetic and determined young woman fresh out of college, who tries to prove her worth by introducing the concept of firing people via webcam to eliminate travel costs. With his attachment-free, never-stand-still lifestyle threatened, Bingham tries to convince his boss that this is a bad idea and that the nature of their job necessitates face-to-face interaction. His boss is unconvinced, but to try and appease
Bingham, he tells him that while the new system is being set up, he can take Natalie to jobs across the country to show her the ropes of the job. Natalie is a quick study, and knows inside and out what psychology textbooks say people want to hear when they get fired. When things get heated, Bingham gently explains to her that when someone is fighting back tears opining that they're not going to have money for their house payments, pointing out that studies show that "career transitions" can have a positive mental effect probably isn't going to put them at ease. Reitman filmed a whole bunch of scenes of people reacting to the news that they've been fired. Some of them are shown in little clips in montages, others extend out a bit, including one with Reitman movie mainstay J.K. Simmons, who initially is an especially hard sell
Most of the middle part of the movie is Ryan and Natalie bouncing around the country, with Ryan stopping to hook up with Alex whenever possible. The end of the movie has two important scenes: one where Ryan shows up in the middle of Wisconsin for his sisters wedding and has to confront the rest of his family that he's ignored over the years in favor of work, and another where Ryan discovers something that creates a major obstacle to his ultra-casual, carefree relationship with Alex. The movie runs the gamut of emotions, from laugh-out-loud funny, to very somber. All of it feels is not only compelling but feels very genuine, which was one of the biggest strengths of Reitman's Juno. It never goes out of it's way to pull on your emotions one way or another, it flows naturally from the story. Up in the Air works on a lot of levels. It's a timely piece documenting the effects of a struggling economy, and also a character study of a man trying to live as a nomad in a society where most people tie themselves down. Jason Reitman has been three for three thus far in making his movies interesting and thought provoking. Hopefully he stays hot. This is one of the best movies of '09.
*****
A couple of other quickies:
District 9 (***1/2)
An interesting sci-fi movie from newcomer Neill Blomkamp, who got the gig from producer Peter Jackson after working with him on the Halo movie that never materialized. Filmed in the style of a documentary, the beginning of the movie sets up the premise of aliens living in a slum in South Africa after their ship traveled to earth, but then seems to run out of juice while some sort of a virus kills much of its crew, leaving it hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. The slum, bearing the titular name of "District 9", is controlled by an international corporation and guarded by PMCs, although at ground level, much of the influence within the slum is actually in the hands of Nigerian gangs, who make money off of scamming the aliens in various ways, and who are convinced they can gain the aliens' power through magical rituals. Our hero and protagonist, Wikus Van Der Merwe, generally wants to help the stranded "prawns", as they're nicknamed, but his higer-ups have ulterior motives, like trying to learn how humans can use the alien weapons, which is synchronized with their genetic structure and thus can't be fired by human hands.
When trying to lead a team sent in to relocate the aliens out of the slums to a new camp set up by the corporation, Wikus stumbles upon a vial of black fluid and when he gets exposed to it, it begins to transform him into a hybrid between human and prawn, turning him into a fugitive from his former employers, who want to use him as a medical experiment to try and unlock the prawns' bio-tech. There's a lot of big action set pieces at the end of the movie with the prawns and the PMCs, but it never feels gratuitous and doesn't overshadow the larger story. Because it takes place in South Africa, many see the movie as a metaphor for apartheid. It's certainly easy to see why, though there are many more movies who deal with issues of prejudice in a much more heavy-handed and forced way as District 9, and the smart writing and the knowledge of South African culture and demographics that the filmmakers show gives it a lot of credibility. Even if you don't care about any of the moral issues in it, it's a fun sci-fi movie.
Extract (**1/2)
An entertaining, but somewhat disappointing movie from Mike Judge, (of Bevis and Butthead and Office Space fame) starring Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of an extract factory. Concerned that the passion has gone out of his marriage, and trying to deal with a lawsuit brought on by an employee who was injured in a region that you really don't want to be injured in, Joel takes a lot of bad advice from his bartender (Ben Affleck), who fancies himself as something of a wise shaman, but who is basically just an odd dude in possession of a lot of drugs. It has it's moments, but doesn't have anything anywhere near as the best scenes in Office Space and doesn't have any characters as memorable as Lumburgh or Milton. The funniest scenes are probably those involving David Koechner (Champ from Anchorman) as the quintessential neighbor who won't go away, in the proud tradition of Flanders from "Simpsons." Creating characters like him is what Judge is best at, he just does a lot more of it in Office Space than in Extract.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Can Has Huge Materia?
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 21:26-27:23
Yeah, it's been a good chunk of time since I've posted. In the meantime, I've done the Corel, Ft. Condor, and Underwater Reactor huge materia quests, as well as the Wutai sidequest where Yuffie steals your materia (what a bitch). Wutai is a fun little distraction. I kind of wish there was more of it. I can go back later of course to do the quest to get the Leviathan materia. Running into the Turks on vacation is amusing, as is the confrontation with Don Coreno when he does his little bit where he asks you a question and then gets it turned around on him as he's hanging off a cliff.
Fort Condor is just completely obnoxious, another mini-game that I could completely do without. I've never actually won it without having to fight the boss, and I don't really care enough to try. The sub minigame after the underwater reactor is less annoying, but it's really damn easy. You don't really have to do much sub hunting. The red sub spawns right in front of you and usually you can catch up to it in a couple seconds and start mashing square. I actually got killed by the Carry Armor boss in the Underwater Reactor. That goofy-ass looking lanky robot is one of the tougher boss fights in the game. His lapis laser attack does something like 1500 damage to everybody, and he can keep a party member held in each arm to take them out of battle. So you have to destroy the arms fast. I managed to use Morph on the ghost ship enemy (and by the way, why are you fighting a floating pirate ship with a skeleton on it in a hallway anyway), so I have the Guide Book for the Underwater Materia later on.
On a related note, last weekend I went to the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert at the Rosemont theater. It was excellent. Nobuo Uematsu was in attendance and performed on an amazing rock version of "One Winged Angel" at the end of the concert. In terms of FF7, they also played Aerith's Theme and the Opening/Bombing Mission track. They're going to be back in Chicago again on August 1st, 2010 with the CSO. I looking forward to going again.
Playtime: 21:26-27:23
Yeah, it's been a good chunk of time since I've posted. In the meantime, I've done the Corel, Ft. Condor, and Underwater Reactor huge materia quests, as well as the Wutai sidequest where Yuffie steals your materia (what a bitch). Wutai is a fun little distraction. I kind of wish there was more of it. I can go back later of course to do the quest to get the Leviathan materia. Running into the Turks on vacation is amusing, as is the confrontation with Don Coreno when he does his little bit where he asks you a question and then gets it turned around on him as he's hanging off a cliff.
Fort Condor is just completely obnoxious, another mini-game that I could completely do without. I've never actually won it without having to fight the boss, and I don't really care enough to try. The sub minigame after the underwater reactor is less annoying, but it's really damn easy. You don't really have to do much sub hunting. The red sub spawns right in front of you and usually you can catch up to it in a couple seconds and start mashing square. I actually got killed by the Carry Armor boss in the Underwater Reactor. That goofy-ass looking lanky robot is one of the tougher boss fights in the game. His lapis laser attack does something like 1500 damage to everybody, and he can keep a party member held in each arm to take them out of battle. So you have to destroy the arms fast. I managed to use Morph on the ghost ship enemy (and by the way, why are you fighting a floating pirate ship with a skeleton on it in a hallway anyway), so I have the Guide Book for the Underwater Materia later on.
On a related note, last weekend I went to the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert at the Rosemont theater. It was excellent. Nobuo Uematsu was in attendance and performed on an amazing rock version of "One Winged Angel" at the end of the concert. In terms of FF7, they also played Aerith's Theme and the Opening/Bombing Mission track. They're going to be back in Chicago again on August 1st, 2010 with the CSO. I looking forward to going again.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Cowboy Bebop Session #4: Gateway Shuffle
Session 4: Gateway Shuffle
"You Know what they say, cowboy, 'easy come, easy go.'"
"They also say, 'no honor among thieves.'"
"Jet is she sayin' what I think she's sayin, 'cause if she is..."
"I don't know and I have no opinion."
"She's takin' a shower in our shower. That's not okay, right?"
"Don't know and have no opinion."
We open the episode with Faye stranded; out of gas orbiting Jupiter. Looking for someone to bail her out, she picks up the signal of a wrecked ship. Jet and Spike, meanwhile, are at work, staking out their next target at an upscale restaurant. Jet makes what I believe is one of the first references to the gate disaster that happens some years before the series begins, which killed a bunch of people. Jet puts on a pair of sunglasses with computerized spy lenses that let him zoom in on their target and match what he looks like to his real face. Apparently in the future changing your face is pretty easy, as we already saw Abdul-Hakim do it in Stray Dog Strut. There's kind of an interesting shot, briefly, where we see a reflection of Spike in Jet's lenses--his false eyes. Spike, as we learn later, has a false eye himself. The guy they're watching, Morgan, looks like something out of Lupin the Third, sporting a big pompadour. He orders the sea-rat sautee, drawing the ire of the eco-terrorists, the Space Warriors dining next to him. They don sea-rat masks and open fire on him and his lady friends. They call their leader "mom," just like the lackeys of Mom from Mom's Friendly Robot Company from Futurama (they seem to be almost as inept sometimes). Jet remembers that she has a huge bounty on her head and Spike manages to stop her at gunpoint while her minions pile into the elevator.
Back to Faye, who finds a man dying amid the debris of his ship. He hands her something and tells her to hand it over to the ISSP--the police. On board the Bebop, Jet and Spike have "Mom", aka "Twinkle" Maria Murdock tied up. Jet gives a bit more exposition about the group, and that there's a bit of an issue. For some reason the Ganymede police (fyi, Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter) dropped the bounty on her yesterday. Are Spike and Jet shit out of luck again? Returning again to Faye, who opens the case to find a tiny little device inside. "Bebop" is full of little, insignificant looking, things that end up serving as the MacGuffin for the episode. Last episode we had the poker chip, and later in the series a chess piece will be important. At the Space Warriors headquarters, we learn that the police have canceled the bounty on "Mom" at the demands of the remaining Space Warriors who seem to have an ace up their sleeves: they're going to release a virus on Ganymede. Faye manages to contact Spike and Jet. They decide to bail her out, but handcuff her aboard the ship. Spike pulls out the mystery device from a random pile of Faye's stuff. Maria Murdock sees it and seems to know what it is.
Jet contacts one of his old acquaintances in the police, who begrudgingly tells him that the reason they canceled the bounty because of the threat to release the virus. Spike tries to break whatever the device Faye has open, and eventually shoots it and manages to free the tiny diamond shape in the center of it from the rest of it. Jet enters and tells Spike that they have no choice but to let Murdock go. Murdock contacts the Ganymede government and is apparently unsatisfied with their concession to limit, but not prohibit, the harvesting of sea-rats. They're still going to release the virus. Ganymede tries to intercept the Space Warriors' ship, but they find a decoy instead, Spike manages to find the real ship in hyperspace, but not before they release the virus, which we now see turns humans back into monkeys. Spike takes off in his red ship to try and intercept the missile carrying the vitus. Faye, meanwhile, has broken out of her cuffs and is gassing up her own ship. The missile splits into three separate parts. Spike gets two of the three but can't get to the last one. Faye can, and agrees to destroy it... for a cut of the bounty. As the Joker would say, "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
"Mom's" plan is foiled. To make matters worse, the tiny little diamond vial--she stole it from Spike on her way off the Bebop--falls out of her pocket and smashes against the wall of the ship. It was a vial of the virus, giving the ending of the episode a nice little "Frankenstein destroyed by his own creation" sort of flavor. Once again, though, Spike and Jet come up empty as far as bounty is concerned. Quelle surprise. Faye says "we'll do better the next time," apparently naming herself a member of the Bebop crew. So the episode ends with three fourths of the eventual crew in place (or I guess four-fifths if you want to count Ein).
This is another episode that shows just how brilliantly written "Bebop" is. The entire Space Warriors plot is a lot to get through in 25 minutes, while there's simultaneously a subplot to bring Faye back together with Spike and Jet. Yet they manage to make it compelling, and to establish the Space Warriors as bizarrely fascinating villains in that time, while not having it feel rushed at all. Next up we start getting into the meat of the series and the first appearance of Vicious.
"You Know what they say, cowboy, 'easy come, easy go.'"
"They also say, 'no honor among thieves.'"
"Jet is she sayin' what I think she's sayin, 'cause if she is..."
"I don't know and I have no opinion."
"She's takin' a shower in our shower. That's not okay, right?"
"Don't know and have no opinion."
We open the episode with Faye stranded; out of gas orbiting Jupiter. Looking for someone to bail her out, she picks up the signal of a wrecked ship. Jet and Spike, meanwhile, are at work, staking out their next target at an upscale restaurant. Jet makes what I believe is one of the first references to the gate disaster that happens some years before the series begins, which killed a bunch of people. Jet puts on a pair of sunglasses with computerized spy lenses that let him zoom in on their target and match what he looks like to his real face. Apparently in the future changing your face is pretty easy, as we already saw Abdul-Hakim do it in Stray Dog Strut. There's kind of an interesting shot, briefly, where we see a reflection of Spike in Jet's lenses--his false eyes. Spike, as we learn later, has a false eye himself. The guy they're watching, Morgan, looks like something out of Lupin the Third, sporting a big pompadour. He orders the sea-rat sautee, drawing the ire of the eco-terrorists, the Space Warriors dining next to him. They don sea-rat masks and open fire on him and his lady friends. They call their leader "mom," just like the lackeys of Mom from Mom's Friendly Robot Company from Futurama (they seem to be almost as inept sometimes). Jet remembers that she has a huge bounty on her head and Spike manages to stop her at gunpoint while her minions pile into the elevator.
Back to Faye, who finds a man dying amid the debris of his ship. He hands her something and tells her to hand it over to the ISSP--the police. On board the Bebop, Jet and Spike have "Mom", aka "Twinkle" Maria Murdock tied up. Jet gives a bit more exposition about the group, and that there's a bit of an issue. For some reason the Ganymede police (fyi, Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter) dropped the bounty on her yesterday. Are Spike and Jet shit out of luck again? Returning again to Faye, who opens the case to find a tiny little device inside. "Bebop" is full of little, insignificant looking, things that end up serving as the MacGuffin for the episode. Last episode we had the poker chip, and later in the series a chess piece will be important. At the Space Warriors headquarters, we learn that the police have canceled the bounty on "Mom" at the demands of the remaining Space Warriors who seem to have an ace up their sleeves: they're going to release a virus on Ganymede. Faye manages to contact Spike and Jet. They decide to bail her out, but handcuff her aboard the ship. Spike pulls out the mystery device from a random pile of Faye's stuff. Maria Murdock sees it and seems to know what it is.
Jet contacts one of his old acquaintances in the police, who begrudgingly tells him that the reason they canceled the bounty because of the threat to release the virus. Spike tries to break whatever the device Faye has open, and eventually shoots it and manages to free the tiny diamond shape in the center of it from the rest of it. Jet enters and tells Spike that they have no choice but to let Murdock go. Murdock contacts the Ganymede government and is apparently unsatisfied with their concession to limit, but not prohibit, the harvesting of sea-rats. They're still going to release the virus. Ganymede tries to intercept the Space Warriors' ship, but they find a decoy instead, Spike manages to find the real ship in hyperspace, but not before they release the virus, which we now see turns humans back into monkeys. Spike takes off in his red ship to try and intercept the missile carrying the vitus. Faye, meanwhile, has broken out of her cuffs and is gassing up her own ship. The missile splits into three separate parts. Spike gets two of the three but can't get to the last one. Faye can, and agrees to destroy it... for a cut of the bounty. As the Joker would say, "If you're good at something, never do it for free."
"Mom's" plan is foiled. To make matters worse, the tiny little diamond vial--she stole it from Spike on her way off the Bebop--falls out of her pocket and smashes against the wall of the ship. It was a vial of the virus, giving the ending of the episode a nice little "Frankenstein destroyed by his own creation" sort of flavor. Once again, though, Spike and Jet come up empty as far as bounty is concerned. Quelle surprise. Faye says "we'll do better the next time," apparently naming herself a member of the Bebop crew. So the episode ends with three fourths of the eventual crew in place (or I guess four-fifths if you want to count Ein).
This is another episode that shows just how brilliantly written "Bebop" is. The entire Space Warriors plot is a lot to get through in 25 minutes, while there's simultaneously a subplot to bring Faye back together with Spike and Jet. Yet they manage to make it compelling, and to establish the Space Warriors as bizarrely fascinating villains in that time, while not having it feel rushed at all. Next up we start getting into the meat of the series and the first appearance of Vicious.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Please Insert Disc 2
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 18:24-21:26
One of the reasons why I think FF7 is one of the easier FF games is how easy they go on you with respect to status effects. Except for the two that effect your limit breaks, Fury and Sadness, all of the others only effect you for a single battle. Poison can be absolutely brutal in some of the SNES games, while here, I usually don't even bother to cure it since I can most assuredly end the fight before it kills the character and it'll then be gone. The start of disc 2 throws marlboros at you as one of the possibilities in random battles. They're the bane of every FF players' extistence, but they're really not all that difficult to deal with here compared to a lot of the other games. It also helps that I already have a Ribbon on one character at this point. While its nice not having to sift through menus after battles to try and find whatever cure item matches up with the status affliction you need to take off, I wish there was a bit more challenge in this regard.
A lot of the snow area at the start of disc 2 just annoys me. The snowboarding minigame is nigh impossible to control, long, frustrating, and just generally weird. It also makes me want to play Snowboard Kids on N64, a snowboarding game that's actually fun to play from the same era. The whole Great Glacier area where you have a map with different landmarks and spend a lot of time running along paths between them, is uninteresting and tedious to me. Then there's the whole "climb up the side of this mountain and stop at every overhang and mash square to warm yourself up again" thing. Fairly mind-numbing. The two-headed monster thing you fight at the end is genuinely a pretty tough fight though. It can mess you up pretty good with its final attack. I'm saved at the first save point down in the Great Crater, glad to be out of the snow, and anxious to get on with the main story again.
Playtime 18:24-21:26
One of the reasons why I think FF7 is one of the easier FF games is how easy they go on you with respect to status effects. Except for the two that effect your limit breaks, Fury and Sadness, all of the others only effect you for a single battle. Poison can be absolutely brutal in some of the SNES games, while here, I usually don't even bother to cure it since I can most assuredly end the fight before it kills the character and it'll then be gone. The start of disc 2 throws marlboros at you as one of the possibilities in random battles. They're the bane of every FF players' extistence, but they're really not all that difficult to deal with here compared to a lot of the other games. It also helps that I already have a Ribbon on one character at this point. While its nice not having to sift through menus after battles to try and find whatever cure item matches up with the status affliction you need to take off, I wish there was a bit more challenge in this regard.
A lot of the snow area at the start of disc 2 just annoys me. The snowboarding minigame is nigh impossible to control, long, frustrating, and just generally weird. It also makes me want to play Snowboard Kids on N64, a snowboarding game that's actually fun to play from the same era. The whole Great Glacier area where you have a map with different landmarks and spend a lot of time running along paths between them, is uninteresting and tedious to me. Then there's the whole "climb up the side of this mountain and stop at every overhang and mash square to warm yourself up again" thing. Fairly mind-numbing. The two-headed monster thing you fight at the end is genuinely a pretty tough fight though. It can mess you up pretty good with its final attack. I'm saved at the first save point down in the Great Crater, glad to be out of the snow, and anxious to get on with the main story again.
The Wrestler
The Wrestler (***1/2)
The three films that Darren Aronofsky has directed previously, in order: are Pi, about a mathematician who becomes convinced that he's discovered the key to all patterns in nature and goes insane, Requiem for a Dream, about four people who all abuse drugs and consequently pretty much go insane, and The Fountain, which I haven't seen yet, but which I think involves time travel and probably at some point, somebody going insane. As such, his newest film, The Wrestler, a character-driven piece about a washed up profession wrestler with no real heady philosophy or psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, might seem a bit out of place. When you really think about it though, professional wrestling is perhaps not that much less strange a concept than chaos theory or the fountain of youth. On any given day all over the world there are wrestling shows going on where real people sustain real injuries, hit each other with real blunt objects, take steroids to bulk up and then take pain killers to recover, all so they can fight in matches with predetermined outcomes. There was a time in my testosterone-filled tween-age years when I was really into wrestling, and while I can't get the same sort of enjoyment out of the whole spectacle now, I have to admit that every once in a while when I catch it on TV I'll still stop on it for a while and observe it with some level of curiosity. Its kind of this weird form of performance art that's never going to look perfectly real because, well, its scripted, and the script is usually pretty obvious, and yet every night an audience which is perfectly aware that its scripted will come out and get incredibly in to the whole thing. It really is a pretty weird phenomenon, especially the (real) blood-soaked "extreme" brand that is by-and-large what's depicted in the movie.
The Wrestler takes us into the life of Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Robinson is his stage last name, not his given one, which he seems to despite for reasons that aren't fully articulated. He was once at the top of the wrestling world, as shown in a fleeting montage of memorabilia during the opening credits. 20 years later, the spotlight has long passed him by, but he's still wrestling in little indie circuits where he fights in high school gymnasiums and hotel lobbies to get paid in a little roll of cash at the end of the night. He still has a decent amount of prestige amongst the small clique of other wrestlers relegated to small-time gigs, who shake his hand and tell him how much they respect him backstage before going out to the ring and staple gunning staples into his chest. Outside of his professional life, though, he's pretty much alone in the world. On weekdays he works doing grunt work at a grocery store and gets mocked by his boss ("What you want more hours? Did they raise the price of tights?"), and his college-aged daughter despises him for his not much caring about her when she was growing up. Perhaps his closest friends are the kids roaming about the trailer park that he lives in, who he can occasionally convince to play his original Nintendo, though while they're playing they ask if Randy knows about the new Call of Duty game. The money Randy doesn't spend on rent and steroids seems mostly to go towards beer at his favorite strip club, where he always goes to see Cassidy (Marissa Tomei), an aging single mom still working as a stripper to provide for her son. Business is hard to come by for Cassidy, surrounded by much younger women (there's something of a suspension of disbelief required here, because Marissa Tomei still looks pretty damn attractive), and she sort of flirts with a pseudo-relationship with Randy, being a fellow relic of a bygone era still lingering around.
After a particularly brutal match, Randy passes out and wakes up in the hospital. He had a heart attack and almost died, his doctor explains, and if he continues to wrestle he probably is going to die. This presents for Randy both a long-term problem, because he really doesn't know what to do with his life, if not wrestle, and a short-term problem because Randy was set for a historic rematch against "The Ayatollah", a "heel" (a.k.a. villain) that he had a big rivalry with in his glory days. Randy tries to move on in his life by working more hours at the supermarket, trying to make amends with his daughter, and trying to start a real relationship going beyond strip club employee/strip club patron with Cassidy. He has some successes in this efforts, but also failures, sometimes spectacular ones. Eventually, he finds himself being drawn again to the only thing he's really known, wrestling, even being fully aware that it might kill him. Lest you question the realism of this, consider that WWE wrestler "Umaga" just died at the age of 36.
Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and got nominated at the Oscars for Best Actor, and he is indeed excellent. I don't know if he exactly has any soliloquies that are going to be remembered for decades or anything. His character is pretty quiet, and its a pretty quiet movie in general. He nevertheless does a fantastic job of embodying the character. The wrestling scenes look genuine, the toll his character takes is palpable, and he does an excellent job of wearing the emotional and physical strain of the character on his face. Marissa Tomei and Even Rachel Wood, Randy's daughter, are both good in their roles as well. The movie's ending is ambiguous and somewhat unsatisfying. It dodges the chance for a cheesy, feel good ending along the lines of the end of Rocky, which is of course a good thing. Part of me wanted more closure for Randy, though. I'm certainly not against ambiguous endings, some of my favorite movies have them. Is Randy capable of changing, or is his fate to keep wresting and isolating people until it kills him? The movie shows us some hints that both may be true. I wanted to see if we could get a definitive answer.
Even with the ending exactly as it is, Aranovski's film works as a compelling human drama. It also works as a sort of pseudo-documentary--and maybe a criticism, or condemnation--of the wrestling industry. The Wrestler's writer, Robert Siegel, obviously knows the sport (or the performance, whatever you want to call it) well; all the pagentry of it, as well as the underside of it. Randy's adversary, The Ayatollah is played by the old WCW wrestler the cat, and without digging through IMDB to be sure, I imagine several of the other actors were real wrestlers as well. As I said at the top of this, wrestling is an odd phenomenon, and The Wrestler is an excellent portrait of a man who's been beaten up for the sake of it, in more ways than one. It so happens that Randy is a fictional character, but any wrestling aficionado likely knows at least several actual wrestlers with almost the same life track.
The three films that Darren Aronofsky has directed previously, in order: are Pi, about a mathematician who becomes convinced that he's discovered the key to all patterns in nature and goes insane, Requiem for a Dream, about four people who all abuse drugs and consequently pretty much go insane, and The Fountain, which I haven't seen yet, but which I think involves time travel and probably at some point, somebody going insane. As such, his newest film, The Wrestler, a character-driven piece about a washed up profession wrestler with no real heady philosophy or psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, might seem a bit out of place. When you really think about it though, professional wrestling is perhaps not that much less strange a concept than chaos theory or the fountain of youth. On any given day all over the world there are wrestling shows going on where real people sustain real injuries, hit each other with real blunt objects, take steroids to bulk up and then take pain killers to recover, all so they can fight in matches with predetermined outcomes. There was a time in my testosterone-filled tween-age years when I was really into wrestling, and while I can't get the same sort of enjoyment out of the whole spectacle now, I have to admit that every once in a while when I catch it on TV I'll still stop on it for a while and observe it with some level of curiosity. Its kind of this weird form of performance art that's never going to look perfectly real because, well, its scripted, and the script is usually pretty obvious, and yet every night an audience which is perfectly aware that its scripted will come out and get incredibly in to the whole thing. It really is a pretty weird phenomenon, especially the (real) blood-soaked "extreme" brand that is by-and-large what's depicted in the movie.
The Wrestler takes us into the life of Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Robinson is his stage last name, not his given one, which he seems to despite for reasons that aren't fully articulated. He was once at the top of the wrestling world, as shown in a fleeting montage of memorabilia during the opening credits. 20 years later, the spotlight has long passed him by, but he's still wrestling in little indie circuits where he fights in high school gymnasiums and hotel lobbies to get paid in a little roll of cash at the end of the night. He still has a decent amount of prestige amongst the small clique of other wrestlers relegated to small-time gigs, who shake his hand and tell him how much they respect him backstage before going out to the ring and staple gunning staples into his chest. Outside of his professional life, though, he's pretty much alone in the world. On weekdays he works doing grunt work at a grocery store and gets mocked by his boss ("What you want more hours? Did they raise the price of tights?"), and his college-aged daughter despises him for his not much caring about her when she was growing up. Perhaps his closest friends are the kids roaming about the trailer park that he lives in, who he can occasionally convince to play his original Nintendo, though while they're playing they ask if Randy knows about the new Call of Duty game. The money Randy doesn't spend on rent and steroids seems mostly to go towards beer at his favorite strip club, where he always goes to see Cassidy (Marissa Tomei), an aging single mom still working as a stripper to provide for her son. Business is hard to come by for Cassidy, surrounded by much younger women (there's something of a suspension of disbelief required here, because Marissa Tomei still looks pretty damn attractive), and she sort of flirts with a pseudo-relationship with Randy, being a fellow relic of a bygone era still lingering around.
After a particularly brutal match, Randy passes out and wakes up in the hospital. He had a heart attack and almost died, his doctor explains, and if he continues to wrestle he probably is going to die. This presents for Randy both a long-term problem, because he really doesn't know what to do with his life, if not wrestle, and a short-term problem because Randy was set for a historic rematch against "The Ayatollah", a "heel" (a.k.a. villain) that he had a big rivalry with in his glory days. Randy tries to move on in his life by working more hours at the supermarket, trying to make amends with his daughter, and trying to start a real relationship going beyond strip club employee/strip club patron with Cassidy. He has some successes in this efforts, but also failures, sometimes spectacular ones. Eventually, he finds himself being drawn again to the only thing he's really known, wrestling, even being fully aware that it might kill him. Lest you question the realism of this, consider that WWE wrestler "Umaga" just died at the age of 36.
Mickey Rourke won the Golden Globe and got nominated at the Oscars for Best Actor, and he is indeed excellent. I don't know if he exactly has any soliloquies that are going to be remembered for decades or anything. His character is pretty quiet, and its a pretty quiet movie in general. He nevertheless does a fantastic job of embodying the character. The wrestling scenes look genuine, the toll his character takes is palpable, and he does an excellent job of wearing the emotional and physical strain of the character on his face. Marissa Tomei and Even Rachel Wood, Randy's daughter, are both good in their roles as well. The movie's ending is ambiguous and somewhat unsatisfying. It dodges the chance for a cheesy, feel good ending along the lines of the end of Rocky, which is of course a good thing. Part of me wanted more closure for Randy, though. I'm certainly not against ambiguous endings, some of my favorite movies have them. Is Randy capable of changing, or is his fate to keep wresting and isolating people until it kills him? The movie shows us some hints that both may be true. I wanted to see if we could get a definitive answer.
Even with the ending exactly as it is, Aranovski's film works as a compelling human drama. It also works as a sort of pseudo-documentary--and maybe a criticism, or condemnation--of the wrestling industry. The Wrestler's writer, Robert Siegel, obviously knows the sport (or the performance, whatever you want to call it) well; all the pagentry of it, as well as the underside of it. Randy's adversary, The Ayatollah is played by the old WCW wrestler the cat, and without digging through IMDB to be sure, I imagine several of the other actors were real wrestlers as well. As I said at the top of this, wrestling is an odd phenomenon, and The Wrestler is an excellent portrait of a man who's been beaten up for the sake of it, in more ways than one. It so happens that Randy is a fictional character, but any wrestling aficionado likely knows at least several actual wrestlers with almost the same life track.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Why Does That Wall Hate Me?
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 16:38-18:24
The "Demon Wall" boss appears in at least one other game that I'm aware of, that being FF4, and you get it again here at the end of the Temple of the Ancients. The FF4 boss is much more sadistic, and you pretty much have to throw the kitchen sink at it and down it in a couple of turns or else your whole party gets crushed to death. FF7's version can hit you pretty hard, but you have much more time to deal with it. Really, the entire Temple of the Ancients was a lot easier than I remembered. Granted, I'm probably a little bit overleveled right now. The end of disc 1 throws a ton of goodies your way. In the big clock area of the temple you can pick up a Ribbon, essentially negating status effects for one of your characters. After fighting Sephiroth's big-ass dragon friend that is inexplicably hanging out at the center of the temple, you get the first Bahamut materia. And on your way into the Sleeping Forest, you get the Kajata summon, the big plus of which is the fact that it's considered Fire, Ice, and Lightning elemental, so equipping it to your armor linked with elemental grants you immunity from all of those. I put both the Ribbon and the Kajata-Elemental combo on Cloud, so right now he's immune to all status effects, and all three of the most common elemental attacks. Not too shabby.
The whole sequence with Cait Sith going into the temple to get the black materia is just sort of weird. I'm not sure if it was intended to be funny, but it is. When he's skipping down the hallway in slow-motion, falls, gets up, and does his little jig for no reason I laugh every time. I'm a bit perplexed by Aeris's whole explanation about having to solve a series of "puzzles" to get the black materia. I don't know if this is a weird translation or if there was some sort of a minigame that you did with Cait Sith that they decided to scrap, but it basically seems like he just kind of runs up and grabs it (and does a jig). There's no puzzles involved. Kind of odd. The little excavation minigame is a cool idea as well, although I think it would make a lot more sense if it were a bigger area. You can deploy up to 5 of the diggers, but its hard to really find space for more than two together on either the upper or lower level. Not really that much to it ultimately.
Anyway, the City of the Ancients is next, and the end of disc 1. Bad things are going to happen to Aries.
Playtime 16:38-18:24
The "Demon Wall" boss appears in at least one other game that I'm aware of, that being FF4, and you get it again here at the end of the Temple of the Ancients. The FF4 boss is much more sadistic, and you pretty much have to throw the kitchen sink at it and down it in a couple of turns or else your whole party gets crushed to death. FF7's version can hit you pretty hard, but you have much more time to deal with it. Really, the entire Temple of the Ancients was a lot easier than I remembered. Granted, I'm probably a little bit overleveled right now. The end of disc 1 throws a ton of goodies your way. In the big clock area of the temple you can pick up a Ribbon, essentially negating status effects for one of your characters. After fighting Sephiroth's big-ass dragon friend that is inexplicably hanging out at the center of the temple, you get the first Bahamut materia. And on your way into the Sleeping Forest, you get the Kajata summon, the big plus of which is the fact that it's considered Fire, Ice, and Lightning elemental, so equipping it to your armor linked with elemental grants you immunity from all of those. I put both the Ribbon and the Kajata-Elemental combo on Cloud, so right now he's immune to all status effects, and all three of the most common elemental attacks. Not too shabby.
The whole sequence with Cait Sith going into the temple to get the black materia is just sort of weird. I'm not sure if it was intended to be funny, but it is. When he's skipping down the hallway in slow-motion, falls, gets up, and does his little jig for no reason I laugh every time. I'm a bit perplexed by Aeris's whole explanation about having to solve a series of "puzzles" to get the black materia. I don't know if this is a weird translation or if there was some sort of a minigame that you did with Cait Sith that they decided to scrap, but it basically seems like he just kind of runs up and grabs it (and does a jig). There's no puzzles involved. Kind of odd. The little excavation minigame is a cool idea as well, although I think it would make a lot more sense if it were a bigger area. You can deploy up to 5 of the diggers, but its hard to really find space for more than two together on either the upper or lower level. Not really that much to it ultimately.
Anyway, the City of the Ancients is next, and the end of disc 1. Bad things are going to happen to Aries.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds (****)
I see those red squiggly you-misspelled-something wrong lines underneath the title, so I guess I wrote the title as it was supposed to be. Judging by the intentionally misspelled title, one would perhaps assume that Inglourious Basterds would be nothing more than another vehicle for Quentin Tarantino to go nuts with random B-movie references and winks at the audience, as has been his recent formula with Kill Bill and his half of Grindhouse. In truth, it does have its fair share of nods to past movies and stylization in it, and it takes more liberties with history and convention than just about any other World War II movie ever made, but the crux of the movie isn't really haphazard craziness at all. It has its share of the violence and debauchery that Tarantino is pretty much synonymous with, but it also has some excellent performances, a tight, suspenseful plot with some poignant moments, and some great visuals. At times--like when Eli Roth, playing "The Bear Jew"--is beating a guy to death with a baseball bat, the movie seems to border on becoming an exploitation picture, but always manages to pull itself back again and throw something different and slightly more profound at us. This is the most thoughtful movie Tarantino has put out in a while, and I think it might be his best outside of Pulp Fiction.
As has become a trademark of QT, Basterds is separated into several chapters--five, I believe, in this case--separated by title cards. The first is "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France", not coincidentally similar to the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, and not just because of the strands of Ennio Morricone music that pop up throughout this chapter and the rest of the film. The scene involves Nazi Col. Hans Landa--known to some as "The Jew Hunter"--arriving unannounced with a group of troops at a poor dairy farmer's home. Landa is played by Christopher Waltz, a German actor who speaks German, English, and French in the film and has a terrifying, commanding presence throughout regardless of what language he speaks. He won Best Actor at Cannes, where the film debuted, and if he doesn't get nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, it'll be because of the sort of movie that this is and not because of any fault in his performance. Landa suspects that the farmer is keeping a Jewish family in hiding. He is, although we're not shown this explicitly until a while into the scene. It reminds me a lot of the opening scene of another Sergio Leone movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where Lee Van Cleef as the villain, Angel Eyes, comes to visit a terrified man and his family and sits down and helps himself to some salad before getting down to business. Given Tarantino's love for Leone's movies, I'm sure that's what he modeled it after. The scene is slow-developing and is built around a long conversation, but is nonetheless incredibly tense. Part of this is a result of Tarantino's direction: though the characters are just sitting around a table talking, QT moves his camera around, cutting between the character's faces as they study each other while the other is talking and then, only towards the scenes conclusion, panning down to show the family laying prone hiding just underneath the floorboards. But a big part of what makes it worse is also Christopher Waltz, whose performance creates one of the most remarkable cold-hearted bastards in any movie I've seen. I suppose he's a bit like the evil Spanish military man in Pan's Labyrinth, but he's less outwardly angry. Oft-times he's smiling and acting jovial, but at the same time manages to make it known that his character can and will kill anyone in the next instant if need be.
Chapter two bears the same name as the movie itself, and introduces us to the titular "Basterds" and their commander, Lt. Aldo Raine. If you've seen the trailer, then you've already seen his speech to his unit where he explains that they're going to be dropped into France and that they'll "be doin' one thing, and one thing only: killin' Nazis." Aldo harks from Tennessee, and Brad Pitt plays him with a heavy drawl as he delivers most of the movie's funniest lines. His performance doesn't have the same impact Waltz's does simply because his character isn't as serious, but its good in its own right. The basterds quickly make a name for themselves with their somewhat questionable tactics, like collecting the scalps of the Nazis they kill. Word of their exploits gets back even to Hitler itself, who is quite upset about the whole thing; especially that some of the German soldiers even think that one of them is "a golem." A soldier is called in to recant the tale of the Basterds ambushing his squadron, which ends with Raine carving a swastika into his forehead.
The third chapter introduces our last main character--who in many ways is the films purest hero, since the Basterds would most certainly have to fall into the anti-hero realm--Shosanna, a Jewish woman living in Paris under a false identity. She's the proprietor of a movie house, and one night when she's changing the marquis, she piques the interest of a German soldier walking the streets. Turns out, the soldier is a hero of Germany, having killed a bunch of Americans from a sniper's post in battle, and is going to be the subject of a new Joeseph Gobbels propaganda film. The soldier persuades Gobbels to debut the film at Shosanna's theater, and all of a sudden she has to find herself maintaining her cover while dealing with Gobbels and Landa, who is working security for the premiere. The premiere is to be attended by all of the Nazi high command, and the Allies devise Operation Keno: a plan to have the Basterds blow up the theater. Shosanna has no knowledge of this plan, but she's pretty much had her fill of Nazis, and she devises her own plan to burn the theater down using a bunch of old, highly flammable film reels. And so, as happened in Pulp Fiction, the previously unrelated storylines begin to gradually intertwine.
I've heard some people declare this film "insensitive," and I'm not sure why. Despite how the film is depicted in the trailer, this isn't Kill Bill: World War II edition. The Basterds are brutal, violent, anti-heros, but the violence on screen is very brief. The Basterds don't even do that much actual fighting in the film. There's a couple of violent images, but it never feels crazy, over-the-top sadistic. The movie also pretty much throws away actual WWII history to invent its own, but it doesn't really change the entire idea of what was going on. The Nazis are still the bad guys, the Allies are still the good guys. I don't know what there is to find insensitive about a movie that's obviously trying merely to entertain and not to teach anyone about any actual World War II events.
More than anything, the movie is a reminder of what a genius Tarantino is at dialogue. Even though this is a war movie, so much of it plays out through conversation, and none of it is boring. There's an extended scene that only towards its conclusion becomes relevant to the main plot, where a bunch of people are sitting around a table in a tavern playing a game where they try and guess which famous person somebody wrote on a card they have stuck to their foreheads. Tarantino manages to make it absolutely fascinating. Every once in a while you'll hear somebody call Tarantino a hack, on the basis that his best movie, Pulp Fiction, was co-written with someone else, and that he's been milking Fiction's success ever since. There's no other writing credits to be seen here, and while its not on the same level as Pulp Fiction, which is thus far his best movie, it is nevertheless really damn good.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Keep Going? Off course!
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 13:16-16:38
"I'm number 13. Am I going to go mad too?"
One thing about replaying RPGs that you already know really well is that sometimes you get ahead of the game. In the section where you return to the Gold Saucer to get the Keystone, immediately after getting it I went right to the hotel since I knew that's where you end up eventually. There have been a couple of instances where I've done stuff like that thus far. Before this brief unpleasantness was the actual getting of the Keystone, which involves you running through the Battle Square. For the most part, Final Fantasy VII's translation is actually very good, although here there's one typo that never fails to make me laugh, after you've completed a round of the Battle Square and you're asked "Keep Going?" with the choice of "No way!" or "Off course!"
I ended up spending some time grinding in the Shinra Mansion and in the mountains, then doubling back and opening the safe in the mansion. Evidently, this was about as strong as I've been fighting him because I really didn't have a tremendous amount of trouble with him and beat him fairly easily. Doing so got me the Cosmo Memory limit break for later in the game, the Odin summon and, most significantly, Vincent as a playable character. I haven't played a minute of the games that Square has spun off of FF7 like Dirge of Cerberus, and whatever the recent one on PSP is called. Based on what I've heard, especially with Dirge of Cerberus, I'm not really missing that much, at least in terms of gameplay. I don't really know how much further backstory Vincent gets in either one. In Final Fantasy VII proper, you learn that he was with the Turks and you learn through him that Lucretia is Sephiroth's birth mother, but you don't get a lot of details to fill in the broad strokes. I kind of like his whole vampire schtick though. Its a bit over the top when you find him in his coffin and the lid flies off as you approach it, but I think it works in a weird way.
I like Cid as a character too. For right now he's a bit of a comic relief character more than anything, with his whole "sit down and drink your goddamn tea!!" routine. I find it interesting that in the world of FF7, where technology has advanced at least to where we are, and in some ways a bit further, that they haven't made it into space yet. I'm not sure if there's a commentary in there or not, but I find it interesting. Maybe because the Shinra and Midgar don't have their own version of the USSR as a rival they haven't been compelled to put forth more effort towards it. I am a bit confused as to why Rufus shows up wanting to buy the Tiny Bronco. There are at least three different scenes where you see a Shinra helicopter in fight, and all of a sudden they need Cid's little prop jet? Whatever, I'm not gonna lose sleep over it.
I was somewhat taken aback when I ended up with Tifa as my Gondola ride partner. I wasn't really trying to get her, and my understanding was always that Aries was sort of the "default" option, and that Tifa, Yuffie, and Barrett (lol) are all progressively harder to get from there. I don't quite remember all of the criteria used to determine who you get, but in general I didn't really make a point to give douchy responses to Aries and nice answers to Tifa when prompted. Maybe the amount of time they're in the party factors in as well or something. Not really sure. Storywise, I think it makes the most sense for it to be Aries. Obviously, at the end of Disc 1, Aries is going to be at the bottom of a lake, and the gondola ride--if its with her--is one of the last scenes where she's in focus.
Right now I have Cloud at level 35, which should be more than sufficient for me to just go ahead and mow through the rest of the disc without anymore going out of the way specifically to level. That may happen anyway though, as the opening part of the Temple of the Ancients that looks like an MC Escher painting always gives my a bit of a headache, and I might find myself in a bunch of random battles as I struggle to not get lost. I'm going to do my best to not get crazy over-leveled such that every battle is trivial, but I do want to try and milk Aries for just about all she's worth before she's kaput. I'm not going to spend the time to get her all the way to her Great Gospel limit, but as of right now she's still on her Level 1s, and I want to get her more than that.
Playtime 13:16-16:38
"I'm number 13. Am I going to go mad too?"
One thing about replaying RPGs that you already know really well is that sometimes you get ahead of the game. In the section where you return to the Gold Saucer to get the Keystone, immediately after getting it I went right to the hotel since I knew that's where you end up eventually. There have been a couple of instances where I've done stuff like that thus far. Before this brief unpleasantness was the actual getting of the Keystone, which involves you running through the Battle Square. For the most part, Final Fantasy VII's translation is actually very good, although here there's one typo that never fails to make me laugh, after you've completed a round of the Battle Square and you're asked "Keep Going?" with the choice of "No way!" or "Off course!"
I ended up spending some time grinding in the Shinra Mansion and in the mountains, then doubling back and opening the safe in the mansion. Evidently, this was about as strong as I've been fighting him because I really didn't have a tremendous amount of trouble with him and beat him fairly easily. Doing so got me the Cosmo Memory limit break for later in the game, the Odin summon and, most significantly, Vincent as a playable character. I haven't played a minute of the games that Square has spun off of FF7 like Dirge of Cerberus, and whatever the recent one on PSP is called. Based on what I've heard, especially with Dirge of Cerberus, I'm not really missing that much, at least in terms of gameplay. I don't really know how much further backstory Vincent gets in either one. In Final Fantasy VII proper, you learn that he was with the Turks and you learn through him that Lucretia is Sephiroth's birth mother, but you don't get a lot of details to fill in the broad strokes. I kind of like his whole vampire schtick though. Its a bit over the top when you find him in his coffin and the lid flies off as you approach it, but I think it works in a weird way.
I like Cid as a character too. For right now he's a bit of a comic relief character more than anything, with his whole "sit down and drink your goddamn tea!!" routine. I find it interesting that in the world of FF7, where technology has advanced at least to where we are, and in some ways a bit further, that they haven't made it into space yet. I'm not sure if there's a commentary in there or not, but I find it interesting. Maybe because the Shinra and Midgar don't have their own version of the USSR as a rival they haven't been compelled to put forth more effort towards it. I am a bit confused as to why Rufus shows up wanting to buy the Tiny Bronco. There are at least three different scenes where you see a Shinra helicopter in fight, and all of a sudden they need Cid's little prop jet? Whatever, I'm not gonna lose sleep over it.
I was somewhat taken aback when I ended up with Tifa as my Gondola ride partner. I wasn't really trying to get her, and my understanding was always that Aries was sort of the "default" option, and that Tifa, Yuffie, and Barrett (lol) are all progressively harder to get from there. I don't quite remember all of the criteria used to determine who you get, but in general I didn't really make a point to give douchy responses to Aries and nice answers to Tifa when prompted. Maybe the amount of time they're in the party factors in as well or something. Not really sure. Storywise, I think it makes the most sense for it to be Aries. Obviously, at the end of Disc 1, Aries is going to be at the bottom of a lake, and the gondola ride--if its with her--is one of the last scenes where she's in focus.
Right now I have Cloud at level 35, which should be more than sufficient for me to just go ahead and mow through the rest of the disc without anymore going out of the way specifically to level. That may happen anyway though, as the opening part of the Temple of the Ancients that looks like an MC Escher painting always gives my a bit of a headache, and I might find myself in a bunch of random battles as I struggle to not get lost. I'm going to do my best to not get crazy over-leveled such that every battle is trivial, but I do want to try and milk Aries for just about all she's worth before she's kaput. I'm not going to spend the time to get her all the way to her Great Gospel limit, but as of right now she's still on her Level 1s, and I want to get her more than that.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Great Warrior, Seto
Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 10:58-13:16
Played through the whole Cosmo Canyon sequence, from Bundenhagen's whole Powerpoint presentation about how the planet's going to die, to fighting through the Gi Cave. Cosmo Canyon is probably the coolest single locale in the game, with some of the coolest music to boot. I don't think anywhere else in the game has the same sort of character that it does, with the hut-like buildings set into the mountain and the whole tribal feel of it. I've never been one to think it absolutely critical that Square come out with a remake of FF7, but I think Cosmo Canyon is one area that would be very cool to see in a game without pre-rendered painted backgrounds where they could open it up more and let you explore a bit more.
I went through the Gi Cave with Red XIII and Tifa. Among the loot you can pick up there, is your first piece of Added Effect materia, which is very cool, but wow is it a pretty annoying little area. The big spiders that you run into at the five-way tunnel area towards the end especially hit hard. Its not that long, but there's no save point in the middle, which means you might be a bit depleted in MP by the time you get to the boss, which makes it a bit annoying. Got through with no serious disasters, though. Also what the hell is the deal with the face in the stone wall that comes alive just before you fight the boss? Kinda confounding and kinda creepy. The reveal of Red XIII's father, Seto, looking over the cliff with a bunch of arrows still protruding from him, is kinda cool, although when he literally cries big crystallized tears at the end, that was a bit much, I think. There's a lot of points in this game that are kind of short on subtlety. I'm still not sure I get the whole explanation for why Red XIII couldn't know until now that his father was actually a hero and not a jackass that abandoned his mother. Bundenhagen says his his mother told him to keep the cave sealed, which I guess makes sense since its still roaming with vengeful spirits, but I don't see how that requires making Red grow up hating his father. Whatever. Its a pretext for a little mini coming-of-age story for Red to grow his character a bit, and to give you an excuse to fight some more before getting on with the main plot.
I'm currently saved just outside of Nibelheim with Cloud at level 27.
Playtime 10:58-13:16
Played through the whole Cosmo Canyon sequence, from Bundenhagen's whole Powerpoint presentation about how the planet's going to die, to fighting through the Gi Cave. Cosmo Canyon is probably the coolest single locale in the game, with some of the coolest music to boot. I don't think anywhere else in the game has the same sort of character that it does, with the hut-like buildings set into the mountain and the whole tribal feel of it. I've never been one to think it absolutely critical that Square come out with a remake of FF7, but I think Cosmo Canyon is one area that would be very cool to see in a game without pre-rendered painted backgrounds where they could open it up more and let you explore a bit more.
I went through the Gi Cave with Red XIII and Tifa. Among the loot you can pick up there, is your first piece of Added Effect materia, which is very cool, but wow is it a pretty annoying little area. The big spiders that you run into at the five-way tunnel area towards the end especially hit hard. Its not that long, but there's no save point in the middle, which means you might be a bit depleted in MP by the time you get to the boss, which makes it a bit annoying. Got through with no serious disasters, though. Also what the hell is the deal with the face in the stone wall that comes alive just before you fight the boss? Kinda confounding and kinda creepy. The reveal of Red XIII's father, Seto, looking over the cliff with a bunch of arrows still protruding from him, is kinda cool, although when he literally cries big crystallized tears at the end, that was a bit much, I think. There's a lot of points in this game that are kind of short on subtlety. I'm still not sure I get the whole explanation for why Red XIII couldn't know until now that his father was actually a hero and not a jackass that abandoned his mother. Bundenhagen says his his mother told him to keep the cave sealed, which I guess makes sense since its still roaming with vengeful spirits, but I don't see how that requires making Red grow up hating his father. Whatever. Its a pretext for a little mini coming-of-age story for Red to grow his character a bit, and to give you an excuse to fight some more before getting on with the main plot.
I'm currently saved just outside of Nibelheim with Cloud at level 27.
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