2009 Cubs: Autopsy Report

Its been quite a while since I've written about the Cubs, but what has there been to write about really? My last post was in mid-August, when the season was on the precipice of falling apart, and after that point the Cubs season seemed to slip into a sort of catatonia, which the monumental tailspin that was looking possible as the Milton Bradley fiasco heated up not coming to pass, but with the team also never seriously threatening to get back into the race. Bradley--who, with two full years left on his deal, is perhaps now destined to go down as one of the worst signings in Chicago sports history--was eventually suspended for his behavior and his vague accusations of racism coming from Cubs fans. A few other players were shut down with injuries that they likely could've played through were the team still playing meaningful baseball. Even still, the openings left by these players were filled out for the remainder of the year mostly by "quadruple-A" type players who have been lingering around in Iowa for a while. As such, it was hard to even drum up any excitement for next year watching the team in September, as there wasn't really any sort of crop of prospects chomping at the bit for big-league at bats.

The team eventually finished the year 83-78, which actually gives them their first streak of three years with a winning record since the early '70s, more an indictment of how inept the team was for much of its history than anything else. A just over .500 record and missing the playoffs is plainly unacceptable, given the money that was spent on building the roster, and given that in many ways the Cubs' front office completely hedged their bets on winning either last year or this year. Now, the Cubs have a lot of players locked into expensive, long-term deals who probably aren't going to get any better or, in some cases, may not even play in a Cub uniform again. The team's new ownership isn't expected to be able to add much to the already massive payroll, as it tries to deal with paying off some of the debt from the purchase, and looks at options to renovate the stadium. In order to keep the team competitive in the coming years, its going to take some creative moves with limited resources, and I'm not sure that Jim Hendry--who as of right now is still going to be the team's GM next year--is up to that task.

No player better exemplifies the failed expectations of the team as a whole moreso than Milton Bradley, the team's biggest free agent signing of the off-season. Bradley, oft-injured throughout his career managed to get on the field for 124 games, but hit for an OPS barely above the league average, and manged just 40 RBIs despite batting mostly in the middle of the order (he moved to the #2 spot late in the year, and seemed to fare a bit better there). Other free agents from last year that were discussed as other options for a left-handed power bat were Adam Dunn (38 HRs, 105 RBIs with the Nationals) and Raul Ibanez (34 HRs, 93 RBIs with the Phillies). Both of them are also true left-handed hitters, as opposed to Bradley, a switch-hitter who is actually a worse hitter from the left side, despite being brought in to be an RBI producer against right-handed pitching. Beyond his bad production, his the effect of his constant negative attitude and oft-times laziness on the field can't be discounted. Normally I stray away from stuff like "clubhouse presence", which is unquantifiable, and which I'm not really in a position to know anything about except secondhand from columnists and reporters who sometimes don't seem to know what they're talking about either in spite of their greater access. With Bradley, though, it was stark enough and obvious enough to seem to be a significant distraction for the team. Bradley still has two years left on his deal, and now face a situation in which they seemingly have to trade him, even though its difficult to see how. The Giants expressed some tepid interest immediately after the season, but nothing concrete has come from it up to this point. Any trade made would most certainly involve the Cubs eating the bulk of the salary.

There were many, many, other problems besides Bradley, however. Alfonso Soriano, another owner of a huge contract, had his worst year in a Cubs uniform, hitting a meager .241 with 20 HRs and missing a big chunk of the back end of the year with an injury. He'll be 34 next year, an age at which hitters often start to see a marked decline in their hitting. Was this year a fluke, or has that already started with Soriano? After winning NL Rookie of the Year last year, Geovany Soto hit a putrid .218 and ended up splitting playing time with journeyman Koyie Hill at the end of the year. Kosuke Fukudome had a marginally better year than 2008 at the plate, but still only hit .259 with 11 HRs. Finally, there's Aaron Miles, who made a couple of million dollars this year to fill in for Mark DeRosa after he was traded. He played below replacement level and, pathetically, hit 5 RBIs all year. A couple of days ago, the Cubs signed Rudy Jaramillo, the former Ranger's hitting coach, who has a ton of respect around the league. Its certainly plausible that he could correct some flaws that have crept into the batting stances of some or all of the above players, but really the lineup as a whole has to be dramatically better and, as I mentioned earlier, financial constraints are probably going to limit how different the lineup can really look next year. One name that's popped up as a possible target for the Cubs is Mike Cameron, who at 36 still has decent pop in his bat and still plays a good defensive center field. Without a real possibility of signing an absolute top-tier free agent, Cameron would probably be a good addition.

The best component of the team throughout the year was its starting pitching. Even though four of its five main starters (Ryan Dempster, Ted Lilly, Carlos Zambrano, and Rich Harden) spent part of the year banged up, and the fifth (Randy Wells) started the year in AAA, the starting pitching was remarkably consistent. Even Rich Harden, who had a ton of issues with high pitch counts in his starts, managed a 9-9 record and a slightly above-average ERA. Cubs starters averaged about 5.97 innings per start, with a 3.71 ERA. In other words, they basically averaged a quality start. The bullpen wasn't horrible either, but had a higher ERA of 4.11 and its back end of Carlos Marmol and Kevin Gregg both went through significant periods where they struggled mightily closing out games. Marmol clearly regressed from where he was in 2008, still proving hard to hit, but giving up 24 more walks in 13 fewer innings. Gregg was passable for much of the year and managed to amass 23 saves, but collapsed in the 2nd half of the year and finished with a 4.72 ERA. One thing that can be said about the bullpen is that--in a year in which there weren't many true prospects ready to come up in the Cubs's system--it did provide a couple of possible bright spots. 25 year olds Esmailin Caridid and Justin Berg both got to pitch some down the stretch and put up good numbers, albeit in very small sample sizes. You can find an infinite number of relievers who started out their careers with a good dozen or so innings and turned out to be nothing, but I'm straining to come up with something positive to write here.

Basically, it seems to me that if the Cubs are going to be any good in 2010, a couple of players have to have a year that comes completely out of nowhere. They kind of got that guy this year in Randy Wells. They may have to somehow find a couple more guys like that next year who excel beyond what they were projected to be, because there isn't much to be done by way of free agency, and the team as constructed seems to be slipping into a malaise of mediocrity. Uh... go Cubs go?

Cowboy Bebop Session #3: Honky-Tonk Women

Session 3: Honky-Tonk Women

In appearance and attitude, Faye Valentine represents the classic noir style femme fatale character. Perhaps take out the parts where she's kept in suspended animation for a few decades and where she's, you know, in outer-space (and I guess the purple hair as well), and she'd fit right into a Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane story. She's as alluring as she is strong-willed, and seems to personify trouble. Later on in the series, she'll actually more play the role of the redeemer character--another archetype for female characters used in a lot of films in the noir period--the character who tries to save the protagonist from being destroyed by the true femme fatale character. That all comes later though. We see her from the ground up, starting with her big white boots, as she walks into a shop on Mars, apparently getting tailed by three guys. She pulls a sub-machine gun out of a grocery bag and opens fire. "The first rule of combat is to shoot them before they shoot you," she explains. She doesn't get shot, but she gets caught as a bunch more people show up. We get our title card, and the next time we see Faye, she's back out in space on a floating casino in handcuffs. She's speaking to a man who refers to her as "Lady Luck", "Poker Alice", and the "Queen of Hearts" (red!). He apparently offers her an ultimatum to keep her from being turned over to the police--the details of which we're not privvy to at the moment--and with a flick of his wrist produces an Ace of Hearts (also red!)

Spike and Jet are also in the casino, on an elevator talking about a dream that Jet had. They hit the casino floor, and after a brief stop off with the three old codgers who we first saw in Asteroid Blues and who will pop up from time to time throughout the series, we see Faye again, now dealing at a blackjack table. She produces a blackjack hand with the Queen of Diamonds and the Ace of Hearts, two red cards. Spike starts playing at her table, and starts winning. We get something of a dream sequence as Spike gazes at her and we flip between a bunch of quick shots of slot reels and roulette wheels spinning. We then flashback to Faye's meeting with the mysterious well-dressed man. He explains that all she has to do is wait for her "target" to arrive, who will lose all of his chips and give his last one to her as a tip, which she is to deliver to this man. Spike ends up losing everything he's won except his last chip, and decides to "keep it as a souvenir." Thinking him to be the target going back on the deal, Faye runs off after him. The actual target, not sure what just happens, runs off as well. While leaving, Spike turns around to see someone winning a slots jackpot, and runs into the target, causing both of them to drop their chips. They end up picking up each other's chips. Faye finds Spike and tells him that he's ruining the deal. Spike reveals that he noticed she was cheating the entire game, and swallows his (or actually the target's chip). Spike gets into a tussle with a bunch of security guards, much to the chagrin of Jet, while Faye remotely activates her ship. The casino execs put a price on Faye's head, as Faye gets captured by Spike and Jet on her way out and they lock her up in the Bebop's bathroom.

Jet analyzes Spike's chip and finds that there's a chip (the computer kind) hidden within the chip (the poker kind). This leads us in to another exciting episode of "Big Shots: The Bounty Hunters!" Faye managed to get herself on the show. Faye contacts Gordon--the head casino guy--with some sort of transmitter disguised as a lip gloss container and tells him that her captors have the chip. Spike and Jet decide that they're doing to turn in Faye for the 6 million wulong reward, which Faye decides is somewhat low-balling her worth. Gordon contacts Jet, and Jet reveals that he knows the chip-within-a-chip is a sort of master decryption key that the police misplaced some time ago and have been looking for ever since. Spike gets into a space suit, with boots that can apparently latch onto the side of a ship at the push of a button, and in a cool little sequence floats his way over to the ship with the casino brass. The deal is that Spike is going to flip them the chip at the same time they're going to flip a briefcase full of 30 million wulongs to Spike. Unsurprisingly, this is not actually how they're planning on having it go down in reality. A casino lackey opens fire on Spike, but mistimes it so his shots hit a rotating mechanism going around the outside of the ship. By the time its rotated past them again, Spike is gone floating upwards again. Faye meanwhile has picked her locks and escapes in her ship. Spike catches the chip, while Faye snatches the briefcase with a detachable claw. Team Casino opens file on Faye, but come closer to shooting Spike than her ship and end up getting blown up with one of their own missiles. At the end of the episode, Spike and Jet are walking into the casino again, musing that all the chip is good for now is one bet. Its another ending where the Bebop crew are surviving, but not thriving, such is their plight. Spike turns around watches Faye zoom off in the distance, looking from far away a bit like a shooting star.

The main purpose of this episode is to introduce Faye as the female lead of the series, but its a fun episode on its own merits. The shootout in space is a creative twist on your standard wild west-style showdown. Up next, we meet the eco-terrorists led by a crazy woman who reminds me vaguely of Mom from Futurama in Gateway Shuffle.

Cowboy Bebop Session #2: Stray Dog Strut

Session #2: Stray Dog Strut

A guy in a bathroom stall is unwrapping bandages that were over his face. He's sporting a big afro and some gawdy jewelry. Three guys with guns position themselves in front of the stall door and tell "Abdul-Hakim" to come out. Almost in one fluid motion, Abdul-Hakim knocks all three of them out and calmly walks away carrying a briefcase. Seeing as he's a tall black guy who knows martial arts, I think Abdul-Hakim may be a nod to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who studied martial arts, and was the veritable "final boss" at the end of the pagoda that Bruce Lee was fighting his way through in Game of Death, the movie he was filming when he died. Also he was a vampire. Seriously, its sort of awesome. And actually, going to the IMDB page, his character's name was Hakim, so that would seem to increase the chance that I actually know what I'm talking about. We get our title screen--"Stray Dog Strut"--and then see the Bebop cruising through the gates on its way to Mars.

Aboard the Bebop, Spike kicks the TV, which is coming in as white noise--weirdly still a problem in the future--and gets it to work, and we get our first glimpse at Big Shots: The Bounty Hunters. I'm convinced that this needs to be made into an actual show. I never make a point to watch "America's Most Wanted" with John Walsh, though I do hear that that show has had a lot of success over the years in terms of getting people to give valuable information to the police that eventually lead to the capture of some high profile suspects. Now, if it was a black guy and a ditsy blonde girl inexplicably wearing cheesy cowboy outfits and telling me how to "wrassle up some criminals" I know I'd totally watch that show. I think the execs at Fox have some retooling to do. Anyway, the Big Shots hosts tell us that Abdul Hakim is a notorious criminal and in his latest caper he stole an experimental lab animal. Conveniently, as the show's ending, Spike gets a videophone call from "Doc", who had his lab busted up by Hakim, and who has a description of his face post-plastic surgery (hence the bandages). The game is afoot.

Back on Mars, Hakim ducks into a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese bar (literally ducks in, as he's taller than door) and asks for some lao chu. The drink is red, maybe fitting in with the whole red motif I mentioned in the previous Bebop post, or maybe just coincidentally. A scruffy looking guy runs into him at the far and tries to apologize, and is somewhat miffed when his apology is met with silence. Abdul-Hakim grabs a cockroach crawling across the table, drops it in his drink, and shoves it down the guy's throat. During the tussle, a man with glasses manages to sneak in, grab the briefcase, and run off with it. He hops on the back of the trunk, opens up the case, and is surprisingly met with a growling noise. Elsewhere, two guys in white coats are driving another truck, discussing how Hakim took out three of their associates and how Hakim has no idea how much "that thing" he's carrying is worth. Spike talks to the proprietor of a weapon's shop who talks like he should be in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and who tells him he'll find what he's looking for at a pet store. The spectacled man is trying to sell whatever's in the briefcase to the somewhat eccentric pet store owner, when he sees Spike, in an amusing moment, watching him through the other side of a fish tank. Spike takes him to be Abdul-Hakim with another new face. The store owner opens the case and produces... a pembroke welsh corgi! Spike leaves as the guy attempts to talk the pet store owner into giving him more than the 2 wulongs she says the dog is worth. Abdul-Hakim shows up and puts a gun to his back and asks for it back. Quite a commotion breaks out, and Spike sees Hakim come running out as he's walking away dejected. Suddenly he's interested again. The two guys in white coats follow in their truck as well.

Hakim runs after the dog while Spike runs after Hakim. In a great rule of threes bit, the chase brings them in the path of a crowd of people watching two guys play a game of Go. The corgi ducks under the table on which they're playing, Hakim swiftly jumps over it, and Spike, uncaring, just crashing through it, sending pieces flying. Then the two guys in white coats show up and stop in their tracks as the Go crowd just scowl at them, crouched over the ruins of their board. Spike catches up with Hakim and they have themselves a bit of a spar, seemingly being roughly equal in skill. The corgi thinks, "to hell with this" and jumps down onto a passing barge. Spike and Hakim both jump down after it. Spike ends up falling in the river, but comes up with the dog. Spike brings the dog back to Jet, who confirms that its just a regular corgi and nothing else, but seems to take a liking to it--moreso than Spike, who is just annoyed by the whole concept of pets. The dog's owner, however, is worth a fortune, says Jet, and he has a plan.

The two guys in white coats, meanwhile, are back in the truck, with some of their also white coat-wearing brethren, still trying to track down what they now describe as a "data dog." Spike takes Ein for a stroll down the street, as Hakim tries unsuccessfully to postpone a meeting with the guy he's supposed to meet up with when he has the dog. Hakim gets stopped by an old man sitting on the sidewalk who says he can tell that he's looking for something, and insists that Pico, his tiny little bird, can help him find it. Begrudgingly, Hakim hears what he has to say. The men in white coats decide they need to turn on the dog whistle, which Ein (they haven't named him in the epsiode yet, but I'm just going to say it. Tired of writing "the corgi") and about a hundred other dogs hear, causing them to start yapping and following the truck. The fortune teller tells Hakim that Pico has picked the moving card and that what he's looking for is about to move, and then says its here just as the big cluster of dogs run down the street being Hakim. This is the second time in as many episodes that a character has gone to a sort of mystic or a spiritual guide for answers and they've pointed them in the correct direction (in "Asteroid Blues", the old Native American mystic tells Spike where to find the "red-eyed coyote). Of course, in Hakim's case, he likely would've figured it out anyway when he heard a cacophony of yapping dogs, but I find it interesting nevertheless. The dog catchers try and launch a net to catch Ein and manage to catch every dog except him. Hakim steals a car from a newly wedded couple, almost runs down Spike, and picks up Ein. Spike gets into his red ship (pretty sure it has a name that I can't recall right now) and pursues Hakim. Ein bites Hakim and jumps out of his car, causing Hakim to lose control. Spike goes after the tumbling Ein ("this is why I hate pets!") and manages to catch him safely on the wing of the ship. Hakim and the dog catchers both go spilling off the side of the road and into the water. Spike brings back Ein to the Bebop and still hasn't warmed up to him, suggesting, maybe only half jokingly, that they just salt him and eat him.

This is more of a lighthearted, comedy-of-errors sort of episode, and there's not that much to discuss in terms of the overarching themes of the show. Its one of my favorite episodes though, with a bunch of genuinely funny bits and an amusing story that manages to throw in a pretty bulky cast of characters and still come to a resolution in just over 20 minutes. Except for maybe "Venture Bros." (new episodes start up again Sunday!), I'm not sure if I know of another half hour show that does that as well as "Bebop." Up next, we meet Faye in what she describes in the episode preview as "a stardust session played in an off-key melody."

Zombieland

Zombieland (***)

The concept of the zombie movie is so ubiquitous at this point that the movies don't even require a set up anymore. In Zombieland, the actual origins of the zombie outbreak are pretty much skipped. Its assumed that once you see your first couple of examples of rotting, shuffling, living dead chasing terrified people around that you can get the gist of it from there, and it can jump ahead to a time when most of the unlucky citizenry has been killed or infected, and only a few hardy survivors are left. One such survivor is Columbus (all of the principal characters use cities as their aliases so they don't get too attached to each other by using their real names), in his previous life a loner who spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft and subsisting mostly on Mountain Dew Code Red. He's our protagonist and our narrator, played by Jesse Eisenberg, recently in Adventureland, which I didn't see. Eisenberg plays his character when the same sort of nervous, awkward, deadpan expressions that Michael Cera has made a name for himself with. At times its actually too much like Michael Cera, to the point that it kind of seems like he's doing an impression of him. Anyway, Columbus has managed to survive this long, as he reminds us of throughout the movie, because he lives by a set of rules of his own devising. He always "double taps" to make sure a zombie's really dead, he's leery of bathrooms (you're never more vulnerable than when you're on the toilet), and he always checks the back seat upon getting into a car.

Out on the road one day, Columbus encounters Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson, who pretty much makes the movie with his good ol' boy redneck shtick. Tallahassee's rules are somewhat less complicated: basically, kill as many zombies as possible with whatever gets the job done. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade with a big cow-catcher sort of thing on the front and a Dale Earnhardt style "3" painted on the side. He seems to be holding up pretty well in post-zombie America, except that he has a craving for twinkies that never seems to be satisfied. Tallahassee freaks out after he and Columbus stumble upon a Hostess truck that ran off the road, only to find that its full of nothing but Sno-balls (Tallahassee hates coconut). Venturing into a supermarket to search for twinkies, Tallahassee and Columbus run into Wichita and Little Rock, who scam them and end up stealing Tallahassee's Caddy. Eventually, though, Columbus and Tallahassee catch back up with them and eventually work out an uneasy truce. Thus, the four of them journey on through "Zombieland" together. Between this and the Left 4 Dead games, 4 seems to be the official size of a zombie survival group.

That's about all there is to say about the plot really. The movie is 79 minutes of tongue in cheek zombie madness, made by and for people who love the genre. In the middle there's a pretty good chunk where there actually aren't any zombies for a while, but it leads to a hilarious cameo by a man we'll only call "BM" for now. As I said, Woody Harrelson's performance is far and away the best part of the movie, as he keeps up his "I don't care 'bout nothin' but killin' zombies and NASCAR" bit as he finds himself in increasingly absurd situations. By the end of the movie, he's riding a roller coaster while fighting off zombies trying to climb up the track with a shotgun. Jessee Eisenberg as Columbus and Wichita and Little Rock aren't nearly as memorable but all have their moments. The writing is clever, and manages to make the movie funny, while not seeming too much like the horror-comedies that have come before it, like Shawn of the Dead. Zombieland is a fun 79 minutes of zombie killing.

Concerning Cats with Megaphones

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime 08:02-10:58

"We'll cross the ocean to the new continent.... even if we are wearing Shinra uniforms."

Nearest I can tell pretty much everyone hates Cait Sith. While I certainly don't make a point of using him regularly in my party (whoever decided that his Slots limit break should have a chance of killing the entire party is a douchebag), but he makes me laugh sometimes. I love his goofy little jigs and just the absurdity of the whole character. Its a cat with a megaphone telling a giant, fat, frankly somewhat retarded looking moogle what do to. And since you find out later that Reeves is telepathically linked to Cait Sith, I guess there's some type of weird multi-tiered mind control thing going on, since presumably Reeves is controlling the cat which is controlling the moogle.

I made two attempts at the Speed Squre game at the Gold Saucer and failed both times, slightly less miserably the second time. God, that's incredibly frustrating. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put a shooting minigame into a game that uses the PS1 D-Pad, but suffice to say it wasn't a good idea. After the Gold Saucer you get thrown down into the desert prison and have to find and confront Dyne, Barrett's also-gun-armed and now somewhat crazy in the head acquaintance. The flashback to Barrett and Dyne trying to dodge Shinra gunfire is kind of awful. I realize that circa 1997 there was only so much you could do with 3D, but if you look at Scarlet during the cutscene, she's not even holding a gun. She's literally "firing" her empty arm at them. That bugs the hell out of me every time I see it.

I'm starting to gain levels some of my basic materia (All, Fire, Ice, Lightning), and I have mostly weapons with double growth slots equipped right now (you find a big string of them going along at this point in the game). I really like materia as a magic system. It can be frustrating at times, and having to swap around materia as you swap around your party members gets tedious. Its much less frustrating though, than the bizarrely concived Junction/Draw system they implemented a game later in FF8. It wasn't in any way intuitive at all to learn, although at the same time, once you got late into the game and had a stockpile of good magic, it was easy to completely break the game. With the push of a button you could, say, bring your characters HP from something like 2,000 to the max of 9,999. Materia isn't at all volatile like that, but its also pretty customizable. With some tweaking, you can come up with some interesting combinations, especially with Elemental and Added Effect materias. I also like that most materia will buff and/or debuff some of your stats, somewhat making up for the fact that unlike the earlier FF games, all of the characters aren't all that dissimilar to begin with, as opposed to a game like FF4 where you sure as hell weren't ever going to get anywhere mashing Attack with your caster class characters.

Right now Cloud's at level 21, and I'm saved outside of the Gold Saucer doing a few random battles before taking my sweet-ass buggy down south. Its not too long before I get to Nibelheim. I don't remember what level you have to be at to feasibly beat the boss you need to get past to get Vincent. I'm probably going to try it on the first time I get to Nibelheim regardless, so it could get ugly.

Cowboy Bebop Session #1: Asteroid Blues

I'm going to keep going with my FF7 posts, but I've developed a hankering to re-watch "Cowboy Bebop", far and away my favorite anime, and indeed one of my favorite TV series regardless of its country of origin or whether its animated or live action. The show has a certain brilliance in a way that it melds a bunch of different genres and themes, yet also exudes a style all its own. Its not like Kill Bill, which is almost just four hours worth of Tarantino coming up with random B-movie references (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I really like Kill Bill as well). The movie builds off of a lot of other things: film noir, westerns, science fiction, martial marts movies; but in the end it isn't a hodgepodge collection of all of these things. The sum total of it is something more. As egotistical as the tag line--which you see in some of the background of the bumps coming in out of the commercial break and elsewhere--may sound its kind of true: "The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called 'Cowboy Bebop.'"

Basically my plan is to just start watching and write down my thoughts as I go. Some of it may pertain to what I'm watching at that exact moment, other times it may be larger themes of the whole series. At any rate, let's start with episode 1.

Session #1: Asteroid Blues

The series shows its noir influence from the very outset. The scene that serves as our introduction is a rainy alleyway. Everything is a muted blue color, almost making it look like a sepia tone. Our first glimpse of Spike is of him standing, nursing a half-smoked cigarette, with his head down and his eyes obscured in shadow. We hear a very melancholy sounding music box playing. Music boxes are a pretty widely used storytelling device, I think. The first thing that comes to mind for me is A Few Dollars More, where you'd hear the same sort of music box tune every time there would be a flashback of Indio, the villain, and his ex-lover. I don't know if the usage in "Bebop" is a direct homage or if Dollars inspired it, but I know that Shinichiro Watanabe, Bebop's director, and the rest of those involved with the series know their Man with No Name movies, because there's a more obvious The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reference later in this episode. Spike drops a rose in a puddle as he walks away. The red in the rose stands out against the bluish-black background. We start to see quick cuts of Spike in a bloody shootout with a group of gunmen who we don't know anything about right now. Again, the color red stands out in the washed out looking scene. I think the color red is tremendously important in the series. Already, I can think of a bunch more places that it comes up. The music box tune comes to a stop, and we cut to the series's standard opening, complete with its theme song, "Tank", which I have nothing to say about other than its one of the coolest damn openings ever.

After the opening, we get the title screen and see that we're watching "Asteroid Blues" and get treated to, appropriately enough, blues music on a harmonica. We meet Spike and Jet, cruising through space on their way to Earth, and, inbetween Spike complaining about the lack of beef in Jet's bell peppers and beef dinner, we deduce that they're bounty hunters. Jet has their next target lined up, who's hiding out in Tijuana. In the future, its hard out here for a bounty hunter, and Spike and Jet are broke, as they are pretty much perpetually throughout the series. Jet and Spike, as we'll pick up on throughout the series, started out on opposite sides of the law and kind of met in the middle. Jet was an ex-cop, Spike is a ex-crime syndicate member, and now they're both bounty hunters. They're both sort of half "flawed": One of Jet's arms is prosthetic, and, we find out much later, one of Spike's eyes is fake as well.

Down on the surface, in a dusty old bar in TJ, Asimov walks in, looking a bit like Antonio Banderas in Desperado, with his pregnant lady friend, the femme fatale of the episode. Asimov follows the bartender in the back and is trying to sell him some "red eye" or "bloody eye" (again, the color red shows up), evidently the street drug of choice in the future, which you spray directly into your eyes. Asimov's whole vision turns red, and the drug seems to give him superhuman reflexes as he literally dodges bullets when a gang of men start shooting up the bar. Spike, meanwhile, having landed, is consulting a Native American mystic regarding Asimov's whereabouts. The mystic is a character who sort of bookends the series. He's here at the beginning, shows up again in the middle, and is there again at its very end. He tells spike that the "red-eyed coyote" will appear north of town, and then: "death." Spike, nonchalantly, says "he was killed once before, by a woman." As Spike turns to leave, says somewhat ominously, "Wakan Tanka, guide his spirit," and we get a close-up show of him blowing away a lump of sand from the palm of his hand. We're far removed from the unpleasantness at the series's end, but even here Spike seems to be a character whose fate has been sealed.

Jet, meanwhile, visits the now-destroyed bar, and gets some information out of two guys who show up mentioning that they need to get the bloody eye back. Spike, landing to get gas, happens to run into Asimov in passing in the bathroom, and then--much more literally--runs into his lady friend, and gets caught stealing a hot and a bunch of her other groceries. Evidently she finds a certain charm in this, and they speak flirtatiously for a bit as Spike gasses up. Eventually, Spike reveals that he's a bounty hunter. Turns out, Asimov was right behind Spike listening in, and almost chokes him to death but stops at the behest of the woman. They get in their ship and fly away and the girl tells Spike as he's laying on the sidewalk, "Adios, cowboy." Jet finds Spike, still laying on the ground, passed out, and after Spike comes to announces that the job's not worth it, but Spike knows that Asimov is going to Mars after he sells his bloody eye, and he stole a sample of it during their tussle. Spike, in disguise, sets up a deal to buy bloody eye from Asimov, and Asimov tries to pull out the vial of it that he no longer has. Spike pulls off the goofy sombrero he's wearing, reveals the vial he has, and asks Asimov, "Do you know how much you're worth?" He's wearing a poncho that looks a lot like Blondie's from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and that's what Blondie asks of Tuco in the movie. Spike and Jet are a lot like detective characters in a noir crime story, but they're also not at all unlike gunslingers in a spaghetti western movie. The episode "Cowboy Funk" much later on in the series, will pit Spike against a literal cowboy, and gives us more of the spaghetti western influence on the series, complete with music that sounds a lot like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

Spike and Asimov have another tussle, but their interrupted by more gangsters trying to gun down Asimov. In the chaos, his girlfriend is nicked by a bullet and we she that she's the one carrying the big stockpile of bloody eye because the vials all come spilling out onto the ground. Asimov is furious that she almost lost them, and, looking into his eyes, the girl realizes that he doesn't really care about her at all, just the drugs. With a somber jazz saxophone tune playing, Asimov, drugged up to all hell, flies up off planet and into space, tailed by Spike. With a blockade of police ships looming ahead, the girl decides enough is enough, and shoots Asimov as Spike, his ship now side-by-side with theirs, watches, horrified. Before she dies, she tells Spike again "Adios." Their ship gets riddled full of bullet holes, and the girl drifts out into space, leaving a trail of red eye vials. At the end of the episode, Spike and Jet are again aboard the Bebop, Jet again making up some "bell peppers and beef." They're back to where they were at the start of the episode. C'est la vie.

The episode first and foremost introduces us first and foremost to two of our main characters, Spike and Jet, the original Bebop crew. Jet is more of a wiser, calculating man, Spike is more wreckless and impatient, yet also has this dark, somber aura about him. It also establishes the noir overtones that are going to pervade the series. It tells a self-contained story where the protagonists track down the antagonist they're seeking, and make it out of a fight with him alive, but the resolution is anything but happy. Spike, already having been "killed by a woman once," here watches as a woman dies needlessly, her only crime seemingly being hooking up with the wrong guy. Their brief flirtation suggests that maybe, had she escaped and fled with Spike, maybe she could've been happy, but in a noir story, characters always seem bound by their fate, and dreams can never really manifest themselves into reality.

The next episode is a much more light hearted one, and one of my favorites--Stray Dog Strut--where everyone's favorite Pembroke Welsh Corgi makes his first appearance.

The Man in the Black Cape

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 06:00-08:02

"Am I... human?"
"He continued to read, as if he was possessed by something, and not once did the light in the basement go out."
"I challenged Sephiroth and lived. Why didn't he kill me?"

I completely forgot about all the silly minigames in Junon Town. First, there's having to do CPR on Priscilla, a girl whose entire purpose in the game seems to go no farther than to exist you can save her and get the Shiva materia as a reward. Then there's the part where you have to have the dolphin boost you up to the top of the high voltage tower, which I never seem to get right the first twelve times. Then there's the marching scene, where you basically just have to march in line (I won 6 potions, I don't know if that's good or not, nor remember what I usually get). Now I'm saved on my way to the docks to do drill for Rufus's send off.

Before getting to Junon was the big flashback to Nibelheim with Sephiroth going insane and burning the town. I'm still not entirely sure I get the entirety of the story with Jenova, and the Cetra, and how Sephiroth came to be. You get bits and pieces of it here. The Cetra were the original inhabitants of the planet, but came from elsewhere. Mako is like the physical manifestation of the Cetra's wisdom. Jenova is something that fell from the skies during the time of the ancients and sat in the ground for about 2,000 years before it was pulled out by the Shinra. I know on Disc 2 there's an optional scene where you can find a recording that Professor Galt made going into some of this. Going to have to do that and pay attention. I'm sure there's more explained in the game than I can really recall right now, but even so, I don't think they do as good a job painting the complete picture that they could have. Some of the telling of the background feels incomplete.

Cloud's at level 17 right now as I'm sitting in Junon. I got my first two summoning materias in the form of Shiva and Choco/Mog (the animation for which never fails to make me laugh). Now that I'm starting to accrue some materia, at some point in the near future I'm going to make a post talking about the system, which I think is one of the best magic systems in the series.

Arkham Asylum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

9 (***)

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

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

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

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

Sephiroth is Alive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Golden Shiny Wire of Hope

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

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

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

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

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

You're the One Who Wants to be Cute

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Step on the Flowers

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

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

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

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

This Isn't Just a Reactor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Were Mako Eyes

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

Ponyo

Ponyo (***1/2)

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Skies Over Wrigleyville

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

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

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

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

Funny People

Funny People (***)

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

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

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

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

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