Path of Exile: It's like pokemon, but they're rocks

The main problem with Diablo 3 is that it removed the metagame.

I'll just let that stand alone, for a moment.  So you can soak it in.

This removal has a few consequences with respect to character creation.  The over-simplification of stat allocation and skill acquisition extirpated the need to employ spreadsheets and spend hours researching character builds on forums.  It also eliminated the flavor of character creation.  In Diablo 2, your leap Barbarian felt like *your* leap Barbarian.  Sure, all leap Barbarians may be functionally identical, but by allowing players to pick their own stats, and maintaining some permanence to skill choice, one felt as if they had created a character unique to them.  Diablo 3's character creation system, by contrast, is so bland and inconsequential that it purges any sense of uniqueness from characters.  Your Barbarian is exactly like every other Barbarian, so "fuck it".

Path of Exile is the antithesis of that, due to this:

and these:

Path of Exile's passive tree, and skill gem system, allow players to build a character unique to them.  As with Diablo 2, every Spork Witch is functionally identical, but the game manifests the feeling of building your own unique character.  To make Sporky the Spork Witch, a player has to hunt down the Spark and Fork gems.  Said player then has to read internet forums and theorycraft the passive tree that will most compliment Sporky's intended purpose.  There is consequence to character creation, and an ample metagame over top the game proper.

To provide a bit more detail on just what that means, characters do not gain spells as they level.  Instead, spells are attained by acquiring spell gems.  In Diablo 2, you get fireball by leveling up.  In Path of Exile, you get fireball when the fireball gem drops off a mob, and you socket it into an item.  As your character gains experience, so too does the fireball gem.  When you get better items, you can unsocket and resocket the gem into the new items.  Gems can be passed between characters as well.

So, in addition to leveling your character, you also level your spell gems.  This creates another avenue for uniqueness and individuality to your account.  A player has a level 30 witch, a level 7 spark gem, and a level 4 fork gem.  It's like pokemon, but they're rocks.

The passive tree is where this goes a bit too far.  "Intimidating" fails to adequately capture the sense one has when allocating passive points.  While there are some mechanisms for a partial respec of points, the depth of the passive tree may foster a sense of 'Diablo 2 Skill-Point Anxiety', wherein players hoard their points until they have a better grasp on the game mechanics, and then spend them with trembling hands.  If Path of Exile has a fault, it is found in this expansive passive system.  However, given how shitty Diablo 3 was, this is a fault one appraises with a kind eye.

Moreover, any character can use any weapon or skill.  So, you want to build a barbarian who throws fireballs?  Go fucking nuts.  Fagballs the Flamer Barb may be completely ineffective at endgame, but you still have the option of making him.

Hear that, Blizzard?  "Option."

The game also solves the perpetual problem of gold currency devaluation by removing coinage.  The "currency" of the game is found in identification / town portal scrolls, and various orbs a character can use to modify their items.  One Orb of Scouring (remove all properties from an item) is worth six Orbs of Alteration (reforges a magic item with new random properties).  Helpful websites exist to articulate the current exchange rates.  This system solves the problem of the SOJ economy dilemma, by making the most valuable currency items reasonably available to all players.

PoE also solves the problem of Hardcore being retarded.  In Diablo 2 and 3, when your Hardcore character dies it is gone forever, lost to lag and mourned for days.  When your Hardcore character dies in Poe?  It is changed to a Softcore character.

That's it.  You don't lose your gear.  You don't lose your items.  Fagballs simply changes from Hardcore to Softcore.  There is absolutely no reason to not start as a Hardcore character.

I know, right?

Between the passive tree, skill stones, a sensible approach to Hardcore, and the currency system, Path of Exile may very well be the greatest Diablo game, ever.  The graphics are also quite nice, and it's free to download / play.  The company turns a profit through microtransactions that allow players to make aesthetic changes to their characters.  While the game is in beta, there are Open Beta Supporter Packs for sale that allow players to gain points and a few unique items before the game is officially released.  Best of all, if you give them $270 you get your name in the credits!

Anyone who was disappointed with Diablo 3 is strongly encouraged to play Path of Exile, and to give all of your money to Grinding Gear Games just to spite Blizzard.

I give Path of Exile 8 kicks to Jay Wilson's stupid loser face, out of a possible God damn Diablo 3 is a shitty fucking mess of retarded faggoty dumb.

3DS Mario Tennis Open: Review

Video gaming started with tennis. Pong, released in 1972, was the first commercially successful video game, and its success spawned the video game industry. While gaming has expanded beyond the realm of tennis simulation, it remains beholden to tennis' core gameplay mechanic: Multiple players vying for points by means of manipulation of some third entity. Despite the integral role played by tennis, there are very few quality tennis simulations available in the contemporary gaming market.

Previously, I maintained that Mario Power Tennis, for Gamecube, was one of the best Gamecube games, and an excellent tennis simulation. It offered, at base, a comprehensive and refined tennis simulation. Unfortunately, the game was afflicted with "Mario-Game Bullshit Syndrome," a dreaded video game malady in which dickholes at Nintendo take a functional gaming structure and inundate it with repugnant stupid nonsense. Nonsense such as power moves, item bonuses, trick courts, and all the shit we've come to expect from the assholes who made Mario Party.*

Mario Tennis Open, for 3DS, seems to have been inoculated against Mario-Game Bullshit Syndrome, and so offers a refined tennis experience, with Mario characters, absent all the usual Nintendo nonsense. Moreover, the game takes advantage of some of the 3DS' bells, without succumbing to its wasteful whistles.

The most impressive feature of this game is gyro mode. There are two options for player control. The first is a top-down mode in which players control character movement via the waggle-stick, and aim shots via the waggle stick. The better option, called gyro mode, automates character movement while allowing the player to aim shots by rotating the 3DS. To aim left, move the 3DS to the left. To aim right, move the 3DS to the right. Here's a goofy picture, with some moonspeak, that illustrates gyro mode:




But it gets better. Instead of engaging with the oft-lamented requirement of memorizing button-to-shot correspondence, a plague of the fighting game genre, gyro mode simplifies shot selection by displaying shot buttons on the touch screen, and players select their shot by tapping it.



Lobbing a shot to the left does not require a player to press A+B while waggling the waggle stick to the left, after waggling the waggle stick to position one's character. Instead, one rotates the 3DS to the left, and touches the yellow area of the touchscreen. It's fucking magic.

Some reviews have lamented this feature, calling it "dumbed down" and "over-simplified". I prefer to think of it as bullshit removal and refinement. Players can focus upon their shot aiming strategy, rather than stick waggling for movement.

The only "gimmicks" to be found in the game proper are little glowy power circles™, which probably have an official name but I don't care to search for it at the moment. Standing in the blue little glowy power circle™, and performing a slice, gives one's shot a power boost. These are not technically gimmicks, in the sense that manifestations of Mario-Game Bullshit Syndrome are gimmicks. Functionally, the little glowy power circles™ serve as indications of the proper shot to take. It's not goofy peripheral nonsense but rather an extrapolation of the core tennis game.

One reviewer stated that these little glowy power circles™ reduce the game down to Simon Says. My reply is that tennis was never anything other than Simon Says. It's just that, usually, the proper shot is not explicitly indicated by little glowy power circles™.

Predictably, the game offers a wealth of content to unlock. New characters, courts, tournaments, items, etc. are available to compel continued play. A nice feature of the unlock system is that it requires users to engage all aspects of the game. One unlocks items via exhibition / tournament matches, and unlocks the currency to buy said items through minigames. Luckily, the most efficient way to amass currency is to play the easiest minigame (ringshot) in the easiest mode. After a bit of practice one can amass slightly over 200 coins per minute, so coin acquisition is not difficult. The most efficient coin-farming minigame is also the best minigame for tournament practice. Ringshot requires players to aim shots through randomly appearing rings, so players can practice their gyro-aiming while amassing coins. There are some other minigames, but I haven't spent much time with them since they're inefficient for coin accumulation, and dumb.

A feature with which I do not have familiarity is online multiplayer. This is because, for online matches, one equips one's Mii with gear unlocked in single player to gain various stat bonuses. I have not yet unlocked all of the best-in-slot items, and I shan't play online matches until I have every possible advantage, because I'm that guy.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: One selects between gyro mode and normal mode by 3DS positioning. If you place the 3DS in your lap, then it displays normal mode. If you hold the 3DS up in front of you, then it switches to gyro mode. I happen to habitually hold the 3DS up in front of me, and so my habituated manner of holding portable consoles affords me the ideal gaming mode. If you habitually play with things in your lap (such as your penis, vagina, or unidentifiable mess, you poor bastard), then you may find yourself having to break your habit in order to play gyro mode.

Mario Tennis Open is a welcomed addition to the Mario Sports Game franchise. It's everything you would want from a Mario Tennis game, without any Mario-Game Bullshit Syndrome nonsense. And best of all? The entire game can be played without ever turning on the 3D. Because fuck 3D.

I give this game three blue shells, out of a possible banana peel.

*You insulted Mario Party: Lose a star.**

**You lost a star. Gain two stars!

The Hobbit Review: An Unexpected Thrush

I saw The Hobbit at 24 fps.  So, unlike most other reviews, I won't spend my time complaining that I saw Sir Ian's contact lenses, or that the film sets looked like film sets.  Instead, I'm going to piggyback off MA17's review of Paperman, and argue that there are two different categories of birds in Middle Earth:  Improbable birds, and impossible-except-for-now Deus ex machina birds that need to either fuck off, or get off their lazy asses and help more.

Within any fantasy story we're hard-pressed to discern a clear distinction between the improbable and the impossible-except-for-now.  No author explains absolutely everything about everything at the beginning of a story, in order to allow surprises along the way.  Yet as MA17 noted, some of these surprises seem sensible and fine while others rub us in an unpleasant fashion.  Let's start with the sensible and fine bird in Middle Earth:  The Thrush.

The Thrush:  "I am the thrush!"

When Dildo et al. visit Rivendale, they present Ren Faire Agent Smith with a semi-unreadable map.  He informs them that it contains super-special moon runes that happen to only be visible by the light of the moon that just happens to be in the sky this evening, and it also just happens to be evening when they give him the map.  Agent Smith informs them that, according to the map, the super-secret entrance into the Emo Mountain shall be evidenced by a Thrush beating the shit out of a snail.

While all of that is incredibly improbable, it is consistent with the story we've been told so far.  The invisible moon runes cohere with the mark Magneto made upon Dildo's door at the beginning of the story:  Middle Earth contains sometimes-visible markings.  The happenstance "oh these runes are invisible every day but today" coheres with previous remarks about fate and fortuitous "signs" previously in the story, having to do with dates and opportunistic seeming-coincidence.

The Thrush, itself, is a newly introduced rule:  Birds can evidence doors.  While this is a new rule, we accept the rule because it is articulated prior to its being utilized.  When Thrushy Mc Thrusherson appears later in the movie, and beats the fuck out of a snail, the audience accepts this improbable act because Agent Smith told us about it two hours ago.

All of the coherence and foreshadowing of the Thrush is to be contrasted with the god damned Eagles.

Eagles:  Take it, our suspension of disbelief, to the limit...one more time.*

In contrast with the Thrush, whose appearance is explained and predicted hours / pages before its appearance, Tolkien Eagles appear whenever the fuck it's convenient, except for all the other times when it would be incredibly fucking convenient for them to be there, and then leave abruptly for no god damned reason.

The difference is that one can explain the Thrush prior to its appearance without raising any additional questions:  At some point a Thrush will appear to show the door, and now we have to get there, so let's continue with the journey.  Suppose the Eagles were explained in the same way:  "At some point in the future some gigantic Eagles may show up, defeat our enemies for us, and then carry us to safety."  Were Magneto to say that, everyone in the audience, and every character within the story, would exclaim as one:  "WHY THE BLOODY FUCK DON'T WE JUST FUCKING RIDE THE FUCKING EAGLES ALL THE FUCKING WAY THERE YOU FUCKING FUCK?!"

As seen here:




Where the Thrush coheres with the plot and provides an improbable means of door discernment, the Eagles undermine the entire narrative:  Why are these assholes walking when they could just ride Eagles?  Why do they have to fight when the Eagles could fight?  Why is there any evil in Middle Earth at all if the Eagles can simply kick the shit out of it whenever they choose?  And why the fuck aren't the fucking Eagles helping?  And how the shit does that moth get to Eaglesville so quickly?

I take this to be the means by which one can discern improbable coherence from impossible-except-for-now Deux ex machinas.  Improbable coherence can be explained prior to its utilization in a manner that does not detract from the overall rule-structure of the fantasy world.  Impossible-except-for-now bullshit is shoehorned into the plot without adequate prior explanation for the sake of resolving some problem, and ultimately raises additional questions about the rule-structure of the fantasy world.

Also, the Riddles in the Dark scene was very good.

* This one joke justifies the entire review.

Deus Ex Machina (also, Paperman)

In case it is possible to spoil the Disney animated short Paperman , I respectfully offer you this warning: Paperman spoilers ahead.  While we're here, let's spoil Toy Story a bit as well.

***

I don't like the ending of Paperman, and I think it's because the way it wields its deus ex machina.  The rest of Paperman is fine.  It's a charming story of a man's futile attempts to use paper airplanes to get a second chance with a missed connection.  Futile in that he's trying to get the woman's attention by throwing the airplanes from the open window of his office building into the open window of her building adjacent.  True to life, the airplanes are virtually impossible to aim, leaving one after the other to bop uselessly against the side of the building, sail into the wrong windows, helplessly flutter away and so on.

Eventually he has to admit that he has failed, accept that he may never see the woman again, and give up.  At that point, something special would have to happen to bring these two people together.  Instead of thinking of something special, the writers suddenly bring the airplanes to life so they can drag the two back together and go on a date.  Ultimately, that's what we wanted, but...not like this.

Pictured: Man and woman wishing they had the courage to speak to one another / Not Pictured: Motherfucking magic

Part of what frustrates me about this ending is that general sense of dissatisfaction that deus ex machina typically produces, i.e. it's hard to feel good when a convenient betrayal of the fictional reality's rules solves a problem that flowed logically from adherence to those same rules previously.  In the general sense, when we understand how the hero got into his predicament because we've been shown each relevant step that brought him there, we would like to see the relevant steps that will bring him back out again.

I'll admit that I don't fully understand why that is.  I suppose we're natural rule-followers who get invested in the stories we're told, and have certain expectations as to how they're going to play out.  Upending those expectations can be a lot of fun, as in a great plot twist, but that's not what deus ex machina is.  A plot twist doesn't necessarily undo the logic of the story, it follows it to a different conclusion than what the audience would have reached on their own.

Deus ex machina is the lazier version of that.  Like a kid rewriting the rules mid-game so he can win, it just crosses out the previous logic and writes in whatever it wants to reach its conclusion.  When that tactic fails, it's because it hasn't given the audience anything to replace the nice logical progression it destroyed by showing up.  But if it does give the audience something, then I don't see any reason why deus ex machina couldn't be successful.

It doesn't even have give all that much, so long as it has some sort of meaning.  People like us play this ridiculous game in which artists place meaning into their work and we take the time to pull it back out again so we can feel smart.  There is likely no single mechanical aspect of storytelling that can't be completely destroyed so long as a little nugget of meaning pops out of it.  In that sense, I'm tempted to look at Paperman's disappointing ending as a demonstration that there is a bittersweet joy in honest failure and that unearned success feels cheap and unsatisfying.  If the magic living planes at the end seem stupid, it's because easy solutions are, in actuality, stupid.

However, I'm much more tempted to look at the magic living planes as just regular, face value stupid.  I feel a bit justified in that because, matters of deus ex machina aside, I'm not sure the writers thought about the implications of magical living paper airplanes in an otherwise familiar reality.  Are the airplanes sentient?  Can they die?  Are they being controlled by someone?  Is the universe using some crazy wind patterns to make it look like the planes are alive?  Were they missing the window on purpose this whole time?  Are contracts alive?

While fun to do, I'm not entirely sure it's fair to criticize the story on this level, because understanding the lives of paper airplanes wouldn't add anything to the story the writers want to tell.  It wouldn't be relevant.  Really, it should be enough for us to know that they can come to life and affect things, because that's what serves the intended story of bringing two people together.  Nevertheless, living paper airplanes is kind of a big revelation, and it can distract from the ending if the audience is trying to process both at the same time.  Imagine Toy Story in which the toys are just regular, inanimate toys until they come to life to teach Sid a lesson towards the end of the movie.  Sid ran off screaming, frightened and confused when that happened, and the audience might well have felt the same way if not already introduced to that reality.

Paperman basically treats us like Sid, but expects us to melt and coo instead.  Between that little miscalculation and the meaningless use of deus ex machina, I just don't like the ending of Paperman.

Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Hyphens are problematic.

When a film is categorized as "comedy-drama," one expects the film to contain both comedy and drama.  When the trailer for said film contains 90% comedy and 10% drama, one expects that ratio to carry over into the film itself.  We understand that the film may deviate from the trailer's ratio to a slight degree, but only slightly.  It's a comedy-drama, so it will contain both comedy and drama.  Since comedy came first in the relationship, the film will privilege comedy over drama.  Right?

Dear God No.

SaFftEotW, or SFEW, is an apocalyptic drama that tells the story of a car trip that serious Steve Carell and emotionally fragile Keira Knightly take during the three weeks prior to the end of the world.  Steve wants to reunite with his long lost love, Keira wants to reunite with her family, and asteroid Matilda wants to unite with planet Earth.  There's also a dog, for some reason.  It doesn't do much.

The film begins in the style one might expect:  Humanity learns that earth is doomed, so we get a few scenes of apocalyptic comedy.  It's the end of the world, so you can wear casual Friday garb every day.  Ha.  Ha.  We only have three weeks to live, so people have lots of sex, take drugs, and don't worry about the consequences.  Oh, my sides, they split.

The trailer presents these scenes as comedy, as jokes.  The film, however, reflects upon these scenes as indications of a fundamental problem with the human condition.  Serious Steve Carell watches his acquaintances shoot heroine and engage in orgies, but he feels emotionally unsatisfied with their hedonistic revelry.  While his friends try to make the most of their final days through meaningless pleasure, Steve ponders the question of whether he's made the most of his life.  Once he meets emotionally fragile Keira Knightly, the two join together on a quest to reclaim their emotionally significant losses, while their friends fuck away their final days.

Once Steve and Keira begin their quest, the film shifts its focus from the apocalypse to their relationship.  All the end of the world components to the film act as backdrops to their emotional journey.  The daily countdown to Matilda's impact is a ticking clock that strictly defines their temporal limitations.  They're trying to make the most of their lives with full knowledge that their lives are finite.  They're trying to reclaim what they've lost, all the while aware of the fact that they're just going to lose it all again.

Which is why I love this movie.

If you ignore all of the lousy comedy bits that, I suspect, some marketing schmuck forced into the film, you're left with a heartfelt reflection upon human finitude and the quirky ambiguity that is desire.  Steve and Keira begin as two individuals using each other as means to obtain their independent goals.  Over the course of the film, though, they come to suspect that what set them on the journey is less important than what they've found along the way.  It's the sentiment from that John Lennon quote:  "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

I suspect that most people will not enjoy this movie.  Staring at your own mortality isn't necessarily a fun way to spend one's afternoon.  However, the film tries to deal with that in a very subtle way.  Steve and Keira confront the end of days and strive to find meaning in their mortality while their friends drown themselves in booze and sex.  Audience members who sympathize with Steve and Keira will enjoy the film.  Audience members who ignore their own morality will find resonance in the actions of Patton Oswald, who just wants to get laid.  Since the film focuses upon Steve and Keira, it attempts to convey the message that, perhaps, the Patton Oswalds of the world have it wrong.  If you don't often think about your inevitable death, and don't want to, the film offers you a subtle suggestion:  Maybe you're wrong.  Maybe you shouldn't be like Patton Oswald.  Maybe there's something more to life than sex and booze, and you should fucking think about it.

That's kind of the point.

I wouldn't say this film is depressing, but it can be emotionally draining at times.  If you feel your way through the journey and empathize at all with the characters, you'll find yourself struggling with some scenes.  I cannot adequately describe the feeling you have when the film ends.

The final scene is beautiful.  But it's that empty, painful beautiful of gaining what you love at the very same moment that it's lost.

Cowboy Bebop - Session 10: Ganymede Elegy

As anyone reading the past few episode reviews may have noticed, I support the theory that most episodes of Cowboy Bebop are about Spike, even the ones that seem like they aren’t. The exceptions to this rule are the stories that revolve around Jet or Faye (and to a lesser extent, Ed), which may involve Spike or support his story, but otherwise they belong to those characters only.

“Ganymede Elegy” serves as the first good example of such an exception by focusing almost exclusively on Jet and his past love, Alisa. Although certain details of this failed relationship closely resemble Spike’s own, the episode is largely about adults letting go of the past and moving on with their lives – a lesson that might end the show early if Spike were to learn it. It is also concerned with a symbolic stopping of time and its impact on ones ability to grow and mature, not unlike what we saw in "Sympathy for the Devil".

There are certainly similarities between Jet’s past and Spike’s, first introduced during the flashback early in the episode. It has all the rain, desaturated color, and implied heartbreak of the images Spike sees regularly, but without any of the violence, and with the addition of an odd pocket watch. Jet still carries the watch and, presumably, feelings for Alisa, judging by the way he rushes off to meet her when he finds out she runs a little bar called La Fin nearby on Ganymede.

Spike and Faye subsequently drop off their latest bounty without him, which prompts Faye to make a sarcastic comment about justice and duty, the sorts of virtues Jet chided her with as being definitively masculine in “Sympathy”. After Spike makes some remark in Jet’s defense, Faye adds something to the effect that it’s a mistake to believe that a woman from his past is still thinking about him. The official dub and sub disagree on who she means by "him", one saying Jet and the other Spike. Frankly, I think it is a mistake to choose at all. In the Japanese dialogue, she doesn't explicitly refer to either, a seemingly intentional decision because of how it works equally well for both of them. Regardless, not every woman thinks like Faye, as Spike immediately points out and Alisa soon demonstrates.

At the very least, Alisa still remembers Jet and their time together and seems pleased to discuss it at some length. As they talk about the recession and Alisa's boyfriend, Rhint, Jet puts the watch on the bar and tells her the story of how, after she left, he decided to leave Ganymede when the watched stopped running.

In doing so he introduces the stopped time motif, emblematic of the fact that Jet seems to think Alisa hasn't changed since he knew her eight years ago. He still worries about things like her financial situation and is shocked when she jokes with him about being married to Rhint and having three of his children. Ultimately, she avoids answering Jet's question as to why she left that day and ends the conversation by saying that she doesn't need time that has stopped.

Back on the Bebop, Faye is working on her tan after a nice throwaway line to Ed about how a woman's skin care is ultimately futile. Spike, meanwhile, is working on his ship, a job best left to Jet judging from the cartoonishly hard time he's having of it. As he's struggling, he gets a call from Jet's old cop buddy who lets him know that Rhint has a fresh bounty on his head for killing a loan shark.

While Jet is leaving La Fin, he sees Rhint sitting nearby, trying to light a cigarette with an uncooperative lighter held in shaky hands as he flashes back to the murder he committed. Rhint's nervous action and the jerky motion of the camera in his memory underline the difference between himself and Jet, who moves deliberately and calmly, even under stress. It is even reminiscent of the Bloody Eye trip Asimov had in the very first episode, with the slow yet jittery motion and eerie sound.

It also stands out from the long scenes in the bar between Alisa and Jet, in which the majority of the motion comes from the occasional shots of a drinking bird toy dipping into a glass of water or ice settling in a glass. It makes sense to have a bird like that in a bar, since it is constantly drinking, but it also exemplifies the regular, almost rhythmic motion that is characteristic of the mature characters in this episode.

This is at its most obvious in the remainder of the episode, beginning with the way Rhint sits on the floor of the bar in a mild panic after finding out he's wanted. Alisa decides that they should flee and they are soon pursued, first by Spike and later by Jet. Rhint fires wildly at Jet's ship from a fanboat that skitters over the waves as Alisa steers and Jet smoothly cruises over the water. Just before the boat is halted by the Jet's grappling hook, Alisa begins to stand in an arrestingly smooth motion that is soon replaced by the same panicky motion and wild shooting as Rhint in response to Jet slowly walking towards them back on land.

As he approaches, step by deliberate step, she finally explains why she left him. She felt like a child when they were together, since Jet made all the decisions and all she had to do was whatever he said. Alisa wanted to live her own life, even if she made mistakes, so she left. Now she runs a little bar on borrowed money in a bad economy, Rhint is likely going to jail because he killed her loan shark, and her solution to both of those problems is still the same as it was back then: run away.

In that way, Jet wasn't wrong when he assumed that time had stopped back on Ganymede. Alisa had become more self-assured, but basically she was just as prone to flight as she was back then. For her to grow up, she has to learn to stay, which is exactly what she does at the end of "Elegy". She is going to stick with the bar and wait for Rhint to be released, which shouldn't take long since the shooting is being considered as self defense.

In a similar vein, Jet can stop worring about Alisa and trying to protect her. She's grown up and with someone else and all he can do is let them make their own decisions. As he walks away from Alisa at the end, he looks at the watch, smiles, and throws it into the river, returning time to its normal flow.

Cowboy Bebop - Session 9: Jamming with Edward

"Jamming With Edward" opens with a closeup of what appears to be a robotic eye, not entirely unlike the one Spike has implanted at the beginning of "Sympathy for the Devil". This time, however, the eye belongs to one of the many satellites that suddenly begin carving up the deserted surface of what is later revealed to be Earth. As apocalyptic as that may sound, this isn't so much the end of the world as it is a bit of graffiti, albeit on a global scale. It isn't an entirely innocent act, however , and the search for the who and why behind it occupies a good portion of the episode. Fortunately, the why ends up being significant not only to understanding the vandalism, but also the reasons why Spike lives as he does.

Incidentally, the reason nobody seems terrorized by the fact that satellites are burning pictures on Earth is because almost nobody lives there anymore, and those that do have moved underground. Mankind has relocated over the last half-century to avoid the moon chunks that have been crashing into Earth as a result of the gate accident we also saw in "Sympathy". The people remaining under the Earth are seen as a little strange by the people who left for other planets, partly because they have become remarkably adept hackers as a necessary part of being able to communicate across space. In the scene where Spike decides to sit this one out, Faye isn't necessarily talking about all Earthlings when she disparages the hackers and otaku there, but considering that they have become a race of subterranean computer geeks who refuse to move away from home and have an unexplainable love of Japanese trash, she may as well be.

Enter Radical Edward, a weird and gender ambiguous young girl who is the prime suspect in the mysterious satellite laser doodle case. She is one of the Earth-bound hacker elite who uses an odd combination of video-goggles, hand gestures, and occasionally her feet to gain unauthorized access to computer systems. Her formidable technical skills and impish nature are both on display when she uses the controls from a homemade toy model of the Bebop to hijack and crash the ship belonging to the cops who come to arrest her. This kind of circumstantial evidence certainly points to her as someone who would take over the Star Wars defense just to draw a smiley face on South America, but she didn't do it, at least not yet. So even though the episode title would suggest that this is her story, her main purpose in the episode is to pursue the real culprit, which is how we get to the vastly more interesting MPU.

Through Ed’s sleuthing, we discover that MPU is an artificial intelligence trapped in an old spy satellite that has outlasted its purpose and is doomed to orbit Earth for as long as it continues to function. In order to occupy his time, MPU has been using the laser-equipped satellites he’s linked with to draw pictures of birds and other Nazca-looking designs on Earth. It isn’t much of a distraction, but he seems to be comforted by images from the past and helps him forget that his reason for existence was lost decades ago.

This depressing fact nicely continues the futility thread we picked up in the previous episode and gives MPU a connection to Spike that goes well beyond their mechanical eyes. Their connection is even reminiscent of the one between Spike and Roco in "Waltz for Venus", despite Spike and MPU having never actually met. Roco and MPU are both nevertheless joined to Spike by their sense of futility in a specific enough way that we can observe Spike through them.

When we see Roco’s life of hard work and risk-taking end prematurely in defeat and loss, we are also seeing a more fatal approximation of Spike’s life coming to a similar end. Spike survived, obviously, so when he claims that he has already died or that he is watching a dream he can't wake from, it's Spike's dramatically circuitous way of saying that his old life is over and nothing in the present matters to him. While we still don’t know everything about the life he left behind, we have seen enough of his flashbacks to understand that at the very least, Spike has firsthand experience in defeat and loss that have left him feeling not quite alive.

If "Waltz" lets us see Spike’s figurative demise in miniature, "Jamming" shows us what happens in the life that follows. Unlike Roco, whose life and goals were lost simultaneously, MPU continues to function long after his reason to exist disappears. As is the case with Spike, he now drifts through space with a longing for the past while using his limited resources to keep himself occupied without ever really finding any meaning in it.

I think this is the connection we need to finally understand why Spike is not only a bounty hunter, but an oddly dutiful-seeming one who takes on lost causes and impossible missions without much thought for rewards. He believes that his life is meaningless, but he doesn't give up or kill himself because some part of him believes he may be wrong. Whether that means he thinks he can get his past back somehow or if he can eventually let it go and start a new, meaningful life is the question to keep in mind from here on out. In the meantime, he's going to continue taking on exciting or interesting jobs just to keep himself going until he can figure it out.

The sad result of this kind of empty life is loneliness, a diagnosis Spike himself makes after Jet wonders what possessed MPU to start drawing on Earth. His theory is supported by the intrigue MPU shows when Ed promises him that he’ll have lots of friends on the Bebop if he agrees to let them download his programming. Granted, we don’t see MPU again, so it’s hard to call this offer genuine; perhaps it was just the most convincing argument a lonely kid could think of.

Judging from Ed’s offer of friendship and her desire for it herself – evidenced by the one condition for helping the Bebop crew being that she could become a member of it – friends are supposed to be the cure for loneliness. It’s the child’s cure, anyway. Spike isn’t interested in them, instead closing out the episode by complaining about his traveling companions as we look back at the smiley face Ed drew on South America.

Cowboys & Aliens: It's really quite Terrible

I walked into Cowboys & Aliens with no expectations. I had been outvoted 3 to 1. It was not my choice. As we were walking out of the theater I turned to Sarah and Brian Jolly and said, "It of been worse. At least it was better than Indiana Jones 4. I could write pages about Cowboys & Aliens crimes. But there seems to be little point in that. Its plot makes very little scene. Things happen for movie reasons. Than the movie ends. Its that sort of movie.

I could talk about painful-orgasm face (Olivia Wilde) whose character only exists to play the titular part of the ampersand. I could talk about the only reason they had to be old-timey cowboys was in order to justify the tortured alien-ships-hog-tie-humans visual effect. I could talk about how the characters were so poorly drawn as to make it hard to tell them apart*. I could talk about all of those things. But its not the point. The point that these are problems that any wide release summer action film have. No one goes to see an action movie staring Bladerunner and Layer Cake with the expectation of seening deep meaningful story telling.

Here is the central problem with Cowboys & Aliens. The action sucked. There were four big action scenes. The attack on the town. The attack at the River Boat**. The attack on the gang's camp. The final batter.

1 and 3 are exactly the same with the added stupid "we're flying" thing. POF has flown before. Worst. The second was Spielbergian child torture. And the final battle was the same 3 stunts repeated endlessly. Despite being out maned and out gunned, the cowboys and indians don't seem to suffer any major loses. At one point the whole battle seems to come to an end while the character stand around and talk while their friends are being slaughtered. Inside the ship, POF and The Golden Compass seemly have no problems. The aliens just run and at them for him to kill. Its like the worst First Person Shooter ever.

I cannot wait for the sequel Cowboy and Alien. Worst.

* Harrison Ford's character was involved in 3 different wars. As a boy he was involved pre-civil war indian wars (which may or may not of been the Mexican-American War). As a Young man he fought for the North in the Civil War (maybe) and that fought in later Indian campaigns. Maybe. Its Unclear.

** Is this a reference to something? I think we are lead to believe that the aliens brought it there, but it is never clear.

Cowboys & Aliens: It's really quite good.

In the tradition of Snakes on a Plane, Cowboys & Aliens utilizes titular clarity to make explicit what it is all about. In deviation from Snakes on a Plane, though, Cowboys & Aliens delivers more than simply Cowboys and Aliens. This is a well-shot, well-acted, solid summer film that strives beyond the requirements of its title to deliver a cinematic experience the totality of which will cause any reasonable person to conclude, “That was much better than I was expecting.” It’s like...you know how at the end of Constantine you thought, "That film was better than it deserved to be”? Cowboys & Aliens is like that. You go in expecting goofy shit, yet receive something that was worth your time and money. Plus, the dialog contains enough pauses that it will one day serve for a nice Rifftrax.

[Spoilers from this point on.]

Cowboy Daniel Craig awakens alone in the desert with both a large metal bracelet and amnesia (Read that ‘amnesia’ in the way MA17 / Hedonism Bot would say it). He makes his way to a town, whereupon the town’s sheriff recognizes Craig to be a fiendish outlaw and so apprehends him. As the townsfolk gather to watch Cowboy Craig’s imprisoned departure, aliens attack, since, well, that’s what the title promised us. The aliens cattle rustle away most of the town’s inhabitants before Cowboy Craig realizes that his handy-dandy bracelet doubles as a kick-ass plasma cannon and he guns down one of the alien ships. Realizing that the arm-gun provides them with a fighting chance, they embark upon a pursuit of the aliens to rescue the captured townsfolk.

Up to that point we’re good. But then there’s Olivia Wilde, whose character serves as an incredibly sexy foundation for the film’s MacGuffin.

See, Cowboys & Aliens tries to be more than just Snakes on a Plane, tries to be more than the cinematic execution of a novel idea. In many respects it succeeds at being more than “Cowboy James Bond and Cowboy Angry Han Solo / Indiana Jones fight aliens”. But it strives beyond its titular promises by way of Olivia Wilde’s character, who, sadly, just fails to make any god-damned sense at all. She is the plot device by which the Cowboys and the Indians recognize their commonality and so combine their forces against the aliens. It’s supposed to be an inversion of that classic motif of cowboys versus Indians, us versus them, by portraying the cowboys and Indians as the us, and the aliens as the them. Yet to get this team going, we need a common resource to serve as the point of conflict. What that resource turns out to be is, well, here’s the dialog, as I remember it:

Cowboy Harrison Ford: What do they [the aliens] want?

Olivia Wilde: They want your gold.

Cowboy Harrison Ford: (Flustered) But that’s…that’s ridiculous!

Olivia Wilde: Yeah, the aliens are just as surprised as you are.

Yeah, the aliens are trying to steal our gold. And Olivia Wilde is a shapeshifting alien from another planet, whose gold was stolen, and so she came to earth to stop the bad aliens from stealing more gold. She’s like a sexy version of Ron Paul…or something.

Ok. That part is stupid. I’ll grant you that the plot, with respect to the aliens being intergalactic claim jumpers, is kind of retarded.

But if you ignore the stupid shit, what remains is some spectacular acting, compelling character development, and, you know, cowboys fighting aliens. Harrison Ford is great and Daniel Craig once again disappears into a character to deliver a spectacular performance. The film also offers well-crafted moments of peripheral character development. From the orphaned child’s transition into manhood, to various characters overcoming previous adversities, the movie does some things quite well. And there’s a dog that follows Craig around being all doggy and awesome. I mean, that’s cool, right? He’s a cowboy dog. And he kinda fights an alien at one point.

Ok, you’re still stuck on the aliens thievin’ our gold, aren’t you? Well, what if I tell you that Olivia Wilde is, at one point, wet, in a very tight-fitting, light-colored dress? Will that make it up to you? Plus there’s this:



She has really pretty eyes. And she's single now.

Look, it’s a good movie that happens to contain a stupid plot element. Everything else is quite, surpringly, well done! They fight some aliens, they learn some lessons, Olivia Wilde gets wet, and a dog runs around being great. It’s a nice, fresh take on classic westerns that rehumanizes the genre by pitting humans against aliens rather than pitting white humans against not-quite-as-white humans. It’s a tale of humanity versus non-humanity, with Olivia Wilde as a sexy, shapeshifting alien who is there for exposition, plot points, and boobs.

I give Cowboys & Aliens one cowboy dog out of a possible no cowboy dogs.

Human Centipede

Look, I'm not made of stone, Netflix. If you keep telling me that there is a movie called Human Centipede that everyone seems to know about and has somehow gained sufficient cultural relevance to get a South Park episode of sorts then eventually I will goddamned watch it.

The first thing I noticed about Human Centipede is the way that natural dialogue, like what people say when they're just reacting to the real world and each other and making conversation, probably works best on film when the editing is quick enough to at least give it snappy timing. I reason that if you can't be interesting you can at least be brief. Conversely, you can take all the time in the world when the dialogue itself is clever or important in some way. Even silence can be useful if the audience has enough information to know how to interpret it or trusts the film to have a reason for it.

And hell, If you have witty dialogue and brisk timing, then I guess you're Quentin Tarantino directing Rosalind Russell. But if, god help you, you're pacing a mundane script to the languid metronome of two regular people talking about nothing for minutes on end, then you are making Human Centipede.

Fortunately, as I'm guessing most people already know, a couple of these characters end up not being able to talk before too long. As if to reward us for making it to the halfway point, the people who never say another word are the ones who were stumbling through what I hope were the ad-libbed opening scenes. We're then left with a guy who only speaks Japanese (actually, he mostly yells Japanese) and the mad doctor who soliloquizes often, at first to warn us about what we're about to see and then later to remind of us what he did.

Other than that, I don't really know what to say. Seeing this experiment come together elicited some disgust, mixed with relief that there would be some shutting up and the confusion of how this would actually work and why the doctor even assumed it would. I hesitate to grant any metaphorical significance to the actual human centipede beyond what horror movies in general can typically claim. As a freak show attraction on film, it delivers, I suppose and there is some suspense every now and then.

Honestly, I expected to see a lot more graphic stuff happening a lot more often, just to keep pace with Saw and others. Obviously, there is nothing pleasant about Centipede but neither does there really seem to be much to it at all besides the ostentatious premise. Unless someone takes ninety minutes to explain the central conceit of movie to you, you're probably better off hearing about it instead of actually watching it.

Captain America: The First Avenger

So, back when they were starting out this whole Avengers dealie with that Iron Man movie everybody went to see, I was a little worried about the future. I mean, Iron Man is a pretty easy sell: he's a slick douchebag by day who fights crime in a suite made of technology porn. Sold.

But then we have to do The Hulk, which really isn't so bad since everyone at least already kind of knows this guy. And even though there's been some dumb shit associated with him put up on movie screens in recent memory, he is recognizable and his film came out close enough to Iron Man to maybe sell a few movie tickets, free ride style.

Years pass. Thor is next and it is going to have a rainbow bridge and a dude who flies by throwing his hammer and holding on. Is he going to spin his hammer really fast and use it as a dimensional gateway? Fuck, he might! He's magic! He's got wings on his helmet and pals around with a big fat guy whose super powers are apparently belly laughs and gruffling turkey legs. The future of this franchise is in danger because the odds of this movie sucking are good. Mighty good.

After him comes Captain America who promises to throw his shield at people like a fearsome boomerang and punch a guy with a red skull for a face...in the face...but not before that dastardly villain makes a thrilling escape in his whirly-bird rocketship! Cap's going to have little wings on his helmet that look like he could use them to flutter gently to the ground from high atop ridiculousness, if he were actually inclined to do that. Shit, this movie might suck, too. There's just too much stupid stuff related to some of these characters and no amount of Samuel L. Jackson is going to distract from that.

Which is why it came as a great relief to find out that Thor kept a lid on the goofiest aspects of the character and world while giving us a reasonable enough explanation of why the things they left in exist. The movie acknowledges that we already know who Thor is and that we know he is the god of thunder, but then distances itself from that interpretation of him (wisely, I think) by making him an awesome superman from an advanced world. In this version, magic is technology is magic, misunderstood by the ancient Teutons who saw the Asgardian aliens in the distant past all zapping dudes and freezing each other and jotted all that down into what became their (and our) mythology.

Captain America goes one step further by embracing the campy nature of a guy in blue pajamas before moving on to him being awesome. Yes, he wears a dumb costume and prances around with tiny wings on his head. Yes, he lets people call him Captain America, but he only does it because he takes a job shilling war bonds with chorus girls after his barely-begun military career falls through. Via a montage of can canning and fake Hitler punching, we see Cap build a popular character out of a government run marketing pitch. Hell, we even see kids buying up Captain America comic books, which means that, unlike Thor, his mythology wasn't the result of a misunderstanding by primitives, it was invented to appeal to them.

After that, he finally gets to realize his potential as a super soldier, so the action ramps up and before long he's jumping his motorcycle in front of a tank that explodes behind him in slow motion, and he hangs there like he's modelling for a splash page. It's pretty fun to watch and, for me at least, finally assured me that this franchise is no longer in critical danger of sucking.

Cowboy Bebop - Session 8: Waltz for Venus

There are a few themes worth keeping track of throughout Cowboy Bebop, but I consider only two to be central to what the series is all about. First is the subject of time -- particularly one's past and its relationship with the present -- which we have thus far seen primarily through Spike's eyes. This will eventually become an important concern for every principal character in some way after we get a much clearer look at the histories of Faye, Jet, and the rest.

The other element, critical though it is, doesn't really surface until Waltz for Venus. It's the ultimate futility of it all, which benefits greatly from the information about the character's pasts given ostensibly in service of the other theme. I'm sure I must be quoting someone, though I can't determine who or how loosely this is paraphrased, but, in essence, "there is no sadness without memory". In other words, for this futility to have any impact, it helps to get a little perspective via backstory. It's still far too early to say anything definitive about how anything or anyone winds up at the end of Bebop, but this episode does provide a nice preview, in miniature, of what is to come.

As gloomy as that may sound, Venus doesn't start out as a drag. In fact, after a successful bounty collection by the on-again team of Spike and Faye, the Bebop crew is temporary flush with a little cash. To celebrate, Faye seizes the opportunity to resume being broke by way of the casino and Ein gets a nice meal. On the whole, though, their lives don’t really change much for the better after this rare victory, even temporarily. Shortly after the bounty is turned in and the reward has been distributed among the crew, Jet is already looking for the next bounty to start the whole process over again.

And now that we’ve seen the meager rewards for success in their work, it raises the question of why they even bother doing it at all. Considering the risks involved and, perhaps more importantly, their constant failures, it is surprising that they’re able to earn enough money to survive. They must be cashing in on some bounties between episodes, because the available evidence does not suggest that they could last this long otherwise. Leaving Faye and her gambling aside, if the money they get from turning in bounties goes towards food and other basic necessities plus ship maintenance and fuel, the purpose of which is to allow them to continue hunting bounties, well, the entire thing seems basically pointless.

To clear the air of existential funk, this episode introduces Roco and Stella, a brother and sister living on Venus whose motivations are much easier to define. They represent a solid sibling relationship with the older brother being willing to do anything to help the younger sister, who in turn loves her older brother unconditionally. This relative simplicity gives them a certain innocence that sets them apart from most of the other people we meet in this universe. It manifests itself first in the way they are both surprisingly quick to put a great deal of trust in Spike, even doing so independently from each other and under circumstances that wouldn't exactly justify it.

Although Roco does so partly out of desperation and necessity, Stella's intuitive judgment of character stems from her blindness, caused by an uncommon reaction to the plants used to terraform the planet. She tells Spike that she can understand things more easily because she is blind, which is how she can quickly tell that Spike is basically a good person, even if that goodness is buried. She compares him to her brother, who is still good even though he is doing bad things with bad people, because he is just using them as a way to get the cure for her blindness.

One way to interpret Stella is through a zen sort of filter which allows her blindness to be the strength by which she can ignore the superficial things that get in the way of understanding. I think the sad reality, though, is that she’s a kind, well-meaning person who is cut off from the world and therefore rather naive as to how it works. Roco is similarly naive, but since he doesn’t have the excuse of being holed up in the desert, I think he is more likely to come across as mostly foolish. None of this is meant to imply that these two are pitiful or stupid, only that their innocence leads them to do some foolish things.

This is most obvious in the way Roco tries to use the criminal gang as a way to secure the rare Grey Ash plant that will cure his sister. In this respect, he’s a little like Faye and her gambling in that he is taking a big risk in hopes that a big payoff will follow, despite the odds being decidedly against that outcome. In his mind, he must have imagined that he could get what he wanted from them and escape, not quite realizing how good they would be at keeping that from happening.

The defining moment in this episode comes during the showdown with the gang when Roco finally succeeds in throwing an attacker the way Spike had showed him. As he smiles to Spike and gets a thumbs up in response, he is shot, without warning, through the chest. As he falls so does the Grey Ash, which withers and dies seconds after its protective glass case is broken. This scene, to be echoed later in the series, makes it achingly clear that not only can life end in an instant, but every important thing gained in that life can disappear just as quickly.

The bitterness of this outcome is sweetened somewhat when Stella is still able to be cured by way of the Grey Ash seeds Roco had smuggled to her earlier without her knowledge. This ending removes much of the futile edge from Roco's life and death, but it also says something about how this series intends to treat earnest though naive people. Specifically, it gives some support to "loss of innocence" as one of the other minor themes worth keeping an eye on as we progress. Its contributions to the overall futility of the series pay off spectacularly.


Side Note:
Faye’s lone-wolf bounty hunting story gets almost no time but is still worth a mention. Mainly because she is in no-nonsense badass mode which is all kicking down doors and shoving pistols into dude’s mouths. I think part of her knows that she’s been making a poor seductress and so she tries the more aggressive stance we’ve hardly seen since her machinegun-accented introduction in the second episode. It’s a great time for her to use this tactic, too, because it puts her in clear opposition to Spike’s Bruce Lee-inspired “like water” style that simply redirects the aggression of his attacker.

Cowboy Bebop - Session 7: Heavy Metal Queen

Heavy Metal Queen makes its case as an unusual episode immediately by opening with the sight of strangely long bulky ships pushing past each other in space to the unexpected tune of some thrashy metal. Compared to the series’ more traditional space-oriented openers in which sleek spaceships zip through colorful gates or drift unhurriedly through the stars as we listen to the low rumbling of engines and mellow jazz, this one seems to be taking us to a much louder, grungier, and more aggressive corner of the universe.

And although it may not seem so at first, it ends up being a corner that allows for a relatively lightweight palate cleanser of an episode as some relief after couple of dark and important ones. As always, there is more to the episode than what is on the surface, but still, just about the deepest question Queen has to ask is “hey, did you know there are space truckers?” This is just fine considering that we’ve had to shoot a child in the head and slit an old friend’s throat to get here.

The space trucker central to this episode is VT, a tough-looking woman with a strong distaste for bounty hunters accompanied by her cat Zeros and is – by way of her CB handle and taste in music – the eponymous Queen of Heavy Metal. The opening scenes in space conclude with some nicely understated exposition in the form of her docking at a truck stop and humoring an overconfident chump who quickly loses a few bucks in the long running game of trying to guess what her initials stand for. We get a small sense of her mysterious character in the way she adds his cash to the impressive stack of bills gathered, presumably, in small increments over the years from people who recognize her but don’t really know who she is.

After this, we follow VT into a little bar where we find a grouchy Spike, hungover and on the phone with Jet in a bathroom stall. They’re discussing this week’s bounty: an explosives expert / space trucker / Woody Allen look-alike named Decker. While Spike is complaining about not being able to get anywhere near guy, cut to Faye who is seconds away from spotting Decker at a diner appropriately called “Woody’s”.

The sequence that follows is another great example of how Faye’s sensual charm is effective only in a limited sense. As we see here and in her failure using similar tactics in Ballad of Fallen Angels, she has an undeniable power over men, but not all men, and certainly not over those directly relevant to her goals. In this case, she has no trouble whatsoever using her sex appeal to get the drop on the man she assumes to be Decker, but allows the real one to escape while doing so. Bad luck plays a significant role in this, granted, but the fact remains that her attempted manipulations have a surprisingly low success rate, regardless of precisely why.

Also noteworthy in this part of the episode comes when, in the middle of all of this, while Faye is slithering into the booth to get close enough to pull a gun on the wrong man, the scene suddenly returns to the bar, where a ditzy waitress is being harassed by some lascivious desperados. In the span of just a few moments, the depiction of a woman ensnaring a victim changes to a woman being victimized, and then immediately VT involves herself as the woman who comes to the waitress’ rescue. Briefly, both Faye and VT come across as powerful, albiet in different ways. This lasts right up until we discover that Faye has the wrong target, which leaves the only one of the three with any relevant power.

Going back to the earlier assumption that Heavy Metal Queen is going to be loud, grungy, and aggressive because of the title, subject matter, and background music, I would add that these qualities give the episode an air of brusque masculinity. Those sleek spaceships are absent from the opening shots because this episode is about phallic-looking space trucks full of straight lines, loud music and, as we discover later, pinup art and girly magazines. So, the fact that the most masculine of these three women emerges as the hero here is definitely in keeping with the manliness this episode is supposedly about.

To see the flipside of this particular brand of masculinity, though, look at the men involved during these scenes. The man in the diner who isn’t Decker comes across as pathetic and a little silly when he is discovered to be someone else (and what is he doing in a place apparently meant for kids?), and, well, “lascivious desperados” pretty aptly describes way the men at the truck stop present themselves. And then there’s Spike, who is too absorbed in concocting his hangover cure to pay any attention to the brawl going on right behind him at the bar. In short, the “real men” are all pathetic in their own way, plus horny and oblivious in specific cases.

They do redeem themselves here and there throughout the episode, however. Spike eventually helps VT route the desperados in the bar (although for selfish reasons). Jet’s handyman skills prove useful in getting both Spike and Faye back in the air with remarkable speed after their respective spacecraft are damaged. More notably, though, is Spike’s bold action that saves himself, Faye, and VT from the collapsing asteroid mine.

Not that he does it on his own, of course. All three of them work together here (a rarity for Spike and Faye) over the course of a pretty exciting escape that ends with Spike recognizing a photo VT keeps on her ship. It shows an exceedingly famous bounty hunter and a younger VT, which is all Spike needs to figure out VT's name.

I stand by the idea that this is a slight episode that mostly just provides a short break between weightier ones, but I would hesitate to write it off as insignificant. True, we'll never see VT again, nor will we hear of her husband, yet if there is any significance to this ending beyond the way it slightly broadens the Bebop universe and deepens Spike's involvement in it by some degree, I think it lies in VT's relationship to her past.

Like so many other characters in this series, she allows her past some amount of control over her present life. In her specific case, it does so to the extent that she is unreasonably bigoted against people like Spike, who is basically a decent sort of guy in a line of work she is so completely against that she turns on him as soon as she finds out what he does. It's hard to know if VT changes after meeting Spike and realizing that it's ok not to hate him, but I think the point is that the past is a strangely powerful thing that influences everyone, albiet in different ways. So even when Cowboy Bebop is sidetracked on an oddball episode like this one, it still has time to comment on the themes that run throughout the entire series.

Cowboy Bebop - Session 6: Sympathy for the Devil

After running through a significant amount of important-but-not-understood plot detail last week, Sympathy for the Devil feels like a return to the show's entertaining-but-trivial style of episode: a bounty-focused story that goes light on expanding main characters in any way and, as a bonus, shares its title with a classic rock song. Although true that it does very little to build on anything obviously relevant to the series as a whole, there are a few tidbits worth noticing.

The first of these are in the opening scenes of Sympathy, during which Spike is apparently undergoing surgery to implant a mechanical eye. When or by what means he lost the eye being replaced aren't quite known, nor is there any hint as to why it matters that one of his eyes is a fake. As with the other seemingly trivial details collected from other episodes, however, it's generally wise to just remember that these things happened and wait for that knowledge to pay off.

So, following this eye surgery of presumed future import, we're introduced to a child prodigy harmonica player who is apparently mixed up in some criminal organization by way of his wheelchair-bound guardian. What follows is some remarkably Star Trek-y business, right down to a convenient piece of technology that allows Jet to essentially mind-meld with the recently deceased in order to gather information from him. What he discovers there leads to a plot involving a hyperspace gate accident and what Bones might have called a "Fountain of Youth Effect" that halts the decay of a living person over time and allows him to recover quickly from any injury.

The person affected by this strange condition uses his seemingly endless supply of available time to become one of the galaxy's biggest bastards. His invulnerabilities make him immune to the maturity that follows when we realize that, like everyone else, we aren't going to live forever and that we are vulnerable in ways we only gradually come to understand. Without that understanding, he turns aggressive and arrogant, even dismissive of other peoples lives, which is most obvious in that criminal organization of his and the ease with which he kills its members and anyone else in his way.

Back on the ship, Jet and Faye exchange barbs in a quiet battle of the sexes that dovetails with the issues of maturity going on elsewhere. When Faye can't understand why Spike would volunteer to fight a seemingly losing battle against the immortal, Jet responds that men live for duty, adding that women easily betray others. Taken in the context of an earlier scene in which Faye eats the last can of dog food while explaining to Ein that women are born great and are therefore entitled to such things, it would appear that the show is heading towards misogynistic territory.

But although Faye (and all women, by extension) may seem singled out in this episode as immature, we already know that Spike has trouble letting go of something in his past and Jet's comment about women and betrayal suggests that he has a similar problem. Add to that Spike's repeated phrase expressing his inability to understand difficult matters being translated "As if..." in a couple of places during this episode and we get a growing sense that all of these characters struggle with maturity in some way.

In fact, Faye is becoming one of the only people who ever seems to care about anyone else and who comes the closest to admitting it. In the previous episode, Faye may not have been as good a caretaker/singer as the woman in Spike's past, but she at least stayed beside him. In Sympathy, she tries to talk him out of going to what she believes to be his death and mutters that men are idiots after he insists. Not exactly gushing romance, but compared to Jet's most visible act of concern being his accidentally cutting the wrong branch on his bonsai tree in the last episode, hers is a relatively loud proclamation of some kind of care.

Yet despite her protest, Spike sets out to defeat the immortal which, fittingly, involves returning him to the normal flow of time by way of what is basically a magic bullet. As goofy as that may be, it does restore the age and, more importantly, understanding it brings that he had been able to delay indefinitely. As his body withers and dies, he asks Spike if he understands as well, to which Spike replies, "As if...".

While this story is, again, not exactly a key piece of the series entire, it is a great opportunity to lay down some concepts related to the flowing and halting of time and what it's like to become older. These ideas, much like the past/present comparisons that came at the end of the previous episode, will be given closer attention later in the series and, I would argue, will become central to what this show is about.

Cowboy Bebop - Session 5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

So, AV Club is doing Cowboy Bebop write-ups this summer, which is a project I've been tempted to try but failed to attempt on numerous occasions. They're already five episodes in at the moment (Ballad went up over there while I was still working on this one), which leaves 21 for me to take on before they get to them. Let's see how it goes...

Cowboy Bebop: Ballad of Fallen Angels

Much of the first four episodes of Cowboy Bebop have been spent establishing the series' tone, introducing new characters and -- more importantly -- getting them onto the ship. Now that most of the crew has been assembled, Ballad of Fallen Angels takes a break from adding to the roster and instead gives us a closer look Spike's past life beyond the series' opening scenes and the images from the end credits.

Of course, what that past life is, exactly, remains about as mysterious at the end of the episode as it was at the beginning. Or rather, the information we get is seemingly plentiful but most of it is never fully explained or given in proper context and so remains open to interpretation. Fitting for this episode, really, considering how the Bebop crew likewise keeps each other at arms length throughout. Characters walk away from conversations, end them in silence and generally avoid saying too much. As in the exchange between Spike and Jet regarding Spike's relationship to Mao and what happened to Jet's arm, they talk without revealing any details, even as they hint at their own histories and start prying into others'. At this point, it will be some time before we get more out of these characters than they get out of one another

With tensions and standoffish-ness at peak levels back on the ship, both Spike and Faye go after the same bounty without making any attempt to cooperate while Jet stays behind, expressly unwilling to lend a hand. This leaves Spike and Faye free to use their own solo methods to collect on the bounty, which, for Faye, means charm and her feminine wiles. I call this out specifically because of how amusingly useless her charm/wiles combination tends to be throughout much of the series. Considering her wardrobe, posturing, and endless confidence that she can use them to get whatever she wants, it would be an unfair advantage for this tactic to work as well as she seems to think it should in Ballad.

Everyone on the Bebop is skilled or gifted in some way, but their victories are rare and often Pyrrhic through some combination of bad luck, rash action, and underestimation of an opponent. Making an actual maverick out of any one of these potential maverick characters would disrupt this slightly out of tune series. So, Faye may be able to fool a regular schmo into letting her enter the opera house without a ticket but as soon as she is dealing with professionals, she is quickly identified as a bounty hunter and captured.

Understandable, given that the professionals are led by Vicious, Spike's apparent partner in the old syndicate days who is presented here as a force bearing malice, ambition, and a nice sword. He counterbalance's Spike's geniality, aloofness, and nice gun so completely that it they have no choice but to fight in as John Woo a manner as possible in an old chapel. The culmination of this fight provides the opportunity for Spike to flash back to the same images of his past that we have seen already, with some new ones added that, although appreciated, still don't do much to bring us closer to full understanding.

We do get to see the woman that Spike still thinks about and who has some connection to these momentary glimpses of his old life. The episode ends with a nice juxtaposition between her singing while Spike is recovering from considerable injury years ago and Faye doing the same while he heals from his recent encounter with Vicious. Much more will be made of past/present as the series progresses, built on a foundation of these sorts of moments where the present is a dull reflection of the past.

Thor: The Mighty Movie

I saw Thor for the second time last night and I have a few things I'd like to talk about.

First, I rather enjoy the way this origin story plays out. Granted, I still usually enjoy watching a (kid/adult/dog) who (suddenly/gradually/unfortunately) gains super powers and then learns how to use them to (save/destroy/pee on) the world*. That arc is fairly well played out, however, so it is quite refreshing to see Thor take a different, even opposite, approach.

It is the opposite in the sense that much of the major plot points are arranged in reverse order to the norm. Thor doesn't gain powers, he loses them. He doesn't build a team, he is kicked out of one. Hell, he is even the aggressor in an invasion of another world, all of which makes for a more interesting journey than what is usually presented.

Not everything is reversed, of course. The old standards of learning the true meaning of friendship and using one's power to create harmony rather than chaos flows in the usual direction. But it does so almost completely without the messy soul searching and internal conflict that often accompanies a shift in a hero's perspective.

There is internal conflict, certainly, but the second aspect of Thor that I continue to enjoy is that he is a relatively uncomplicated character. He approaches problems with an obvious solution already in mind: Mjolnir or, failing that, his fists. This approach gets him into serious trouble very quickly, but even when he eventually learns that one needs to act with others in mind, he does so in a way that does not invalidate his "smash shit with my hammer" plan.

In my mind, this serves to make Thor a much more fun character than even a delightful douche bag like Tony Stark or a creature of action like Bruce Banner's Hulk. I have nothing bad to say about Stark's sarcasm and bad behavior or the Hulk's smashin', but it is a welcome change to see a guy who is sincere and often polite, and can do so without being a boyscout, which would definitely spoil the fun. This is a guy who drinks and carouses itches for a good fight, after all, but he can drink and fight without being self-destructive like Stark or Banner.

As it happens, those fights do not exactly adhere to the theory I embraced a few years ago that Marvel had found the appropriate number of action set-pieces to include in a single movie and still leave ample time for exposition, character work, and other miscellaneous story requirements. This leads me to the third item I had in mind, which is the apparent negation of what I had pegged as a "three fight rule".

Thor gets into four fights, more or less, two of which are Big Fights, and two of them are minor scrapes (in duration, even if not in importance). All I really want to say about the rule and its fate is that I accept two small fights in place of one big one because it upholds the purpose of the rule: to give fights more weight by contrasting them against periods of inaction and also to keep battles from halting every few moments so that characters can expound on story elements that should have been covered while fists were at rest.

As a final, more personal, note, prior to seeing this movie, I knew that Thor needed to answer a few questions. Not about the Marvel Universe or the Avengers or anything like that, but important questions such as "how is the rainbow bridge not going to look like something on a little girl's Trapper Keeper?" and "will Thor's spinning hammer or Loki's horned hat look anything other than ridiculous?" It was a great relief to see these questions answered and in a satisfactory way.

I give Thor five beards out of a possible Frog of Thunder.

*The third option is describing Underdog, incidentally.

Pirates 4, On Stranger Tides Review: Mermaid Bondage

Very few films cater to the mermaid bondage enthusiast. In fact, when you start looking for it, there really isn’t that much mermaid porn, let alone mermaid bondage porn, in existence. Given Rule 34 one can, of course, find some mermaid porn, but when I dug around trying to find mermaid bondage all I could find was this [NSFW], and it’s pretty damn tame.

Apparently, the writers of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides felt the lack of mermaid bondage is a great slight on humanity. So they created what is, at best, the world’s first softcore mermaid bondage flick and, at worst, a really shitty Pirates movie.

As we all know, any pornographic film needs to have some semblance of a story. In PoTCoST we definitely get the semblance of a story. Johnny Depp, dressed as a pirate, is lured by Penélope Cruz, also dressed as a pirate, onto a ship captained by Ian McShane who is dressed, as one might expect, as a pirate. They have to go find the Fountain of Youth because [who cares]. In order to utilize the fountain, they need a mermaid’s tear because [reason not given]. This sets us on the course for what the film is truly about: capturing and binding mermaids in a variety of ways.

#1: Capture a Mermaid in a net.

This is the most intuitive brand of mermaid bondage. As mermaids live in the ocean, and nets are use to capture entities that dwell within the ocean, the idea of trapping a half-woman-half-fish in a filthy fishing net, only to watch her struggle against its increasingly tightening bounds, both makes sense and raises a chubby in all of us. But PoTCoST goes just a bit further, with even sexier results.

As a poorly choreographed fight / battle / awkward between our pirates and the vampire mermaids (they’re fucking vampire mermaids, by the way) draws to a close we hear a frantic, pathetic flopping offscreen. The camera slowly pans to the left, showing the ripples set off by the feeble twitches of a delicate, supple tail pinned by a rock. We pan further up the dainty, befished trunk of the helpless creature to the bare midrift, the exposed nippleless breasts, and finally the pallor face which frames eyes widened in abject terror and shame. She struggles in vain, cowering against a cold, unfeeling rock as a net falls and men descend upon her.

Fucking hot, am I right?

#2: Imprison a Mermaid in a glass coffin.

Once the mermaid is caught she is imprisoned in a glass water-filled coffin. We are told that our fishy coed must be transported to the Fountain because mermaid tears, apparently, spoil. This is the point at which I realize what the hell is actually going on.

I can grant mermaids in a pirate movie; their inclusion makes sense. Hell, I can even go along with catching a mermaid in a net, because how the fuck else are you supposed to get the damn mermaid’s tear? But when we have to force the naked half-fish chick into a portable aquarium and carry her around with us? That’s just fucking gratuitous.

It gets even more retarded, though. Alright, so we’ve trapped the naked chick in the portable nudie booth and we’re carrying her through the forest, right? Well, someone trips, the nudie booth falls, and it breaks. So the mermaid starts flopping around on the ground. You know what the fuck happens then? She grows legs in place of her tail. Two things.

First, now we have a naked, terrified, naked, wet, naked 20-something girl lying prone, naked, on the ground. Second? WHY THE FUCK DID THEY HAVE TO PUT HER IN THE GOD DAMNED PORTABLE NUDIE BOOTH IF SHE COULD GROW LEGS THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME? I’m sitting there thinking, “Well, alright, if the tears go bad then they’d have to transport her, and she’s a mermaid, so the portable peep room makes sense.” Then the damn thing breaks and she grows legs? So what the fuck was the point of the glass sex pen in the first fucking place?

The only reason to put a mermaid in a see-through fuckin’ crate is because she has to be in water. The fact that she doesn’t have to be in water since she can grow legs suggests to me that there was no fucking reason to have the jizzquarium in the first place, other than to arouse someone’s damned fetish.

#3: Tie a Mermaid to a rock.

Then we get to the money shot. Near the fountain we find a marsh, or tidal estuary, or whatever the word is for a big fucking rock with holes full of water: Plot device. Ok, so we reach a big plot device. The actors dressed as pirates notice many merskeletons tied to rocks, half submerged in water. Guess what, kiddies. Time to fucking tie the naked chick to a rock and make her cry!

They plop Astrid Berges-Frisbey into a hole, so her tail grows back, and tie her to a rock, so she can be tormented, and proceed to obtain a tear. First we torment her by pointing to the skeletons of her long dried out sisters. Because it’s good to start by mocking the dead. Then we threaten her with physical violence, cause that’s a message kids need to hear. Finally we move onto other strategies that I do not remember because I became acutely aware of the fact that I was sitting in a public theatre surrounded by children watching a mermaid bondage torture snuff film. Also, I may have reached climax at that point. I don’t quite remember. But, hey, mission accomplished, Disney!

You want mermaids in your pirate movie? Fine. You have to catch them in a net? Ok. You need a tear? Sure. You have to put them in a portable sex tank and carry them around? Ok, that’s weird. The tank breaks and she lays sprawled naked, terrified, shivering, naked in the ground? That’s uh… Then we have to tie her to a rock and torture her? Come on, man, seriously?

Oh, best part? After they get the tear? They leave her for dead. They all walk away as the bound topless mermaid lies sobbing, half-submerged, waiting for death.

PG-13, indeed.

I really hope someone got off on all the BDSM Mermaid shit. Because as far as I can tell that’s the only justification for its being in the movie. Though, to be fair, the Mermaid bondage is the only reason I can think of for why the movie exists at all. Well, that and the fact that Johnny Depp probably wants to put another wing onto his house, of course.

I give PoTCoST one dying, sobbing mermaid tied to a rock scene out of a possible ball-gagged, screaming mermaid scaling scene.

Review: Evangelion 2.22 You Can (Not) Advance

Any particular story exists as a concept, as a tapestry of ideas skillfully woven together by a caring author whose purpose is to communicate a core message, an infinitesimally precious and delicate realization of truth. The author notices a something, a real, and carefully guides the audience towards an understanding of that aspect of reality to which we cannot speak, but only gesture and hope with a shared yearning and eagerness to understand. Neon Genesis Evangelion, in its previous iterations, gestured at one key aspect of life, a primordial feeling of a wrinkle in our being, that resonates with all, but seemed fundamentally incommunicable. The remake, represented by these first two films, may be the closest we as a species have ever come to saying what that wrinkle is.

The first movie blew me away. If you read my review, you know that my initial reaction was to loudly exclaim, “WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?” in inexplicable shock. 2.22 makes that reaction seem tepid, commonplace, boring. 2.22 redefines the series; it takes the series somewhere for which there are no words.

We enter the story where we left, at the point of deviation from our core canon. The narrative skillfully shifts to accommodate new characters, new angels, and new relationships while still maintaining precious core components of the original series. We are in Tokyo-3, but it is not the same. We encounter Shinji, Misato, Rei, and Asuka (voiced by the blessed return of Tiffany Grant) and recognize both their familiarity and their novelty. Asuka’s entrance and initial, “What are you, stupid?!” somehow communicates both that this is the same character, and that she is undeniably different. Somehow a new Eva pilot is added to the mix in a manner that makes her seem familiar. When she first appears I am not shocked or jarred but, rather, I think, “Oh, hey, it’s Mari. It’s good to know that she is back.” despite the fact that she has never been here before.

Actually, think of it this way: Take the relationships Shinji had with Misato, Rei, and Asuka. Now divide each of those relationships into their core features. Alright, now take all of those features and divide them between Misato, Rei, Asuka, and Mari. By redistributing and redefining these relationships, the series is tightened and eloquently restructured to more acutely communicate that which the television series, at best, implied. Shinji’s relationship with femininity is honed with far greater precision by dividing it between four characters rather than three. Through these redefinitions and subtle changes, the characters in 2.22 seem more core and foundational than the characters from the original show. 2.22 gives us the real Asuka, the true Rei, 16 years after these characters were created.

The story of 2.22 covers episodes seven through nineteen, or at least moves us along the path from seven to nineteen. With all the additions I thought the series would fully deviate from the established path. But the beauty of 2.22 is its ability to weave between novelty and canon to finally place us at a precipice that is, in one word, astounding.

The finale puts us at the battle from episode 19, that quintessential moment at which Shinji finally actualizes his own volition and maniacally defends the Geofront from Zeruel. This reimagined battle loosely mirrors the original and then, in one moment, drastically shifts everything we knew about the series into a fundamentally new framework and direction by hurling the viewer into an event of the most fucking-epic-of-fucking-epicness you have heretofore been incapable of imagining.

That is not hyperbole; this shift is fucking amazing.

We make the turn, we take the plunge, and we’re gazing into a void of unknown, unimagined futurity that deviates entirely from any semblance of a track known to prior canon. Then the action, the scope, the possibilities get bigger, and we mutter in amazement, “Ho-ly shit, they just cranked it to 11.”

Then it cuts to black.

As the credits roll we fill with a bittersweet adrenaline high as we realize that what we witnessed cannot be topped. We know what the manga did, what the television series did, what the End of Evangelion gave us, and there is nothing in any of those stories that can match what we just witness. This reimagining has reached the ceiling, and with two movies left, all they can do is match this height.

Then the credits stop. And something happens.

You do not utter a syllable. You do not think. You do not applaud.

Your mouth falls open.

You stare at the screen in unintelligible amazement, incapable of processing what you saw. And then you slowly come to realize what just happened: They broke the ceiling of what Evangelion could be. They redefined the scope of this tale.

Hideaki Anno just said, “Fuck 11. Fuck 12. We are cranking this story to all.”

And there are two more movies to go.

I cannot stop smiling.

Sucker Punch is AWESOME!! (which is bad)

Maybe my feelings about this are the result of the aging taste of a guy who never really had great taste to begin with, but I've noticed that I chafe pretty easily whenever a thing tries so overtly to be AWESOME!!

I would define AWESOME!! as what you get when you force any number of disparate yet exciting things into one package and add a rocking sound track (optional). A summary of Sucker Punch's idea of AWESOME!! is school girls fighting steampunk Nazis by way of machine guns, axes, katanas, and a mech with a bunny painted on it. Also, there is a rocking sound track.

I'm not against that, necessarily, but when that's all there is to a movie, it kind of feels like something is missing. It seems work in a trailer because, well, what else are you going to do in 90 seconds besides blast both AWESOME!! barrels at once? Spread it out to a couple of hours or so, add in the price of admission, and I start to wish that they could have thought of something besides what could have been generated by a machine programmed to randomly assemble things that are just regular awesome. It winds up feeling a little lazy and devoid of real creativity, which is a fatal flaw for something as absolutely dependent on spectacle as this movie.

Incidentally, another deadly mistake is to choreograph fight sequences in such a way as to reduce the combatant's fighting style to some variation of putting her foot out and trusting the wire-fu guy to swing her over so that she kicks the bad CG man in the face, interspersed with slow motion spinning around.

One thing I did enjoy was the awkwardness that they established, almost immediately, around sexuality. For the most part, Sucker Punch's men are all rape-thirsty grab monsters and the women are all strong yet fragile and probably virtuous. So, when the girls start dressing slutty, it is almost a challenge to the audience; a dare to find short skirts and exposed midriffs sexy.

It was a very similar awkwardness to seeing Dakota Fanning in Runaways, actually. In that movie, their manager is so vile and unwaveringly sleazy, while Fanning 's startling real-life transition from a cute-as-a-button child actor makes the thorough exploitation of her sexuality doubly uncomfortable.

In both movies, the juxtaposition of sexual pandering next to some pretty troubling conditions on the part of the people that would otherwise be objectified is interesting, I think, especially when there is a character (or several) who are more than willing to keep on objectifyin' when they should be showing a little empathy. Perhaps I only speak for myself here, but it is as if the movie were saying "all we have to do is change a couple of parameters, and this guy? That's you."

Otherwise, I'm not sure that Sucker Punch had much going for it. The fights are all imaginary, by the way, as the trailer indicates. As far as I can tell, any metaphors they might have squeezed out of the imaginary fight scenes were pretty much reduced to ordinary items defining the theme of the environment and engagement. Reasonably clever, I suppose, but it seems like a wasted opportunity not to let certain things in the imaginary world have more to say about the real world besides "that wyvern is actually a zippo".

I give Sucker Punch one conspicuously unused sword out of a possible does the fact that the Asian girl was flying in pretty much every dream fight have any significance?

BONUS: A single viewing of the trailer for Sucker Punch a few months ago reminded me of watching the Casshern trailer endlessly a few years ago. Not a bad thing at all, really, except that the Casshern trailer gave way to the foolish $80 purchase of an imported 3-Disc special edition of the movie that, as it happens, really kind of sucked. So, I resolved to not get to excited about Sucker Punch, but also to go see it when it came out. My reduced investment, both monetarily and emotionally, softened the blow, I think.

BONUS 2: There is a commercial for some bank around here talking about their overdraft protection that uses AWESOME!! It features mutant zombies etc and you fight them with a rubber ducky or something (which is why you didn't get to the bank to cover that $10 Dairy Queen charge). The duck is part of that other thing I hate, OMG RANDOM! which is also pretty lazy, but my point is that a fucking bank has this stuff figured out, so the movies really need to step it up. To paraphrase Eddie Izzard "Space is awesome, sir. / What, like a hot dog?" Sucker Punch is awesome like a hot dog.