Charge Shot!!!

Weird-ass Youtube Roundup!

2010-03-13T16:27:00.001-05:00

It’s Saturday. You don’t feel like using your brain, and neither do we. To that end, here are some YouTube videos.

My impression is that being linked to this guy is the Russian version of getting Rickrolled. It has a similar appeal.

Mayhem starts at 2:10. For the record, I’ve never made it all the way to the end of this one.

I might actually understand why people watched Glee if our version was more like this.

Book Review: The Lost Books of the Odyssey

2010-03-12T15:00:00.001-05:00

Homer (whoever he was) has generally been considered the starting point for all of Western literature. His stories have been handed down for thousands of years, told and expanded and retold, to the point that the number of reimaginings rivals Shakespeare's. People have been reinterpreting Odysseus since Dante put him in the bowels of Hell for being a false advisor. Poets like Tennyson portrayed Odysseus as leaving Ithaca to embark on more journeys at the end of his life; twentieth century adaptations of the story include Joyce, the Coen Brothers, and Nikos Kazantzakis.

So when a new book comes out that purports to be a retelling of the Homeric catalogue, one has to wonder what new material could possibly be added to over two thousand years worth of storytelling. Surprisingly, however, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a breath of fresh air. It might be presumptuous of me to declare this book as something completely new, as I'm sure that this sort of thing has been done before. But Mason takes his project and manages to create both something timeless, and a new conception of Odysseus that is very much part of the twenty-first century.

The conceit of the novel is that the twenty-four books of The Odyssey are simply the twenty-four stories about Odysseus that happened to be written down. In a brief prologue, Mason discusses the idea that before the tale was committed to writing, there were an infinite number of Odysseys told by an infinite number of storytellers, and the idea was that these same few stock characters and images ("black ships drawn up on a white beach, a cannibal ogre guarding a cave mouth, a man searching a trackless sea for a home that forgot him") can be rewoven in countless ways. Mason himself provides forty-four "new" books of The Odyssey.

This might sound like a corny creative writing project from a tenth-grader, and there was always the danger that The Lost Books of the Odyssey would have turned out that way. Mason, however, has taken his first novel and created something extraordinary. Instead of merely relying on his admittedly clever premise, Mason has taken each of the book's 44 chapters and made them something worth reading, something that is completely new to the reader while still hearkening back to the characters who are ingrained in our cultural heritage.

Everybody knows the Odyssey and the Iliad. Even if you haven't read them, you're aware of the war outside the walls of Troy, the sailor Odysseus trekking across the stormy seas for a decade to get home, the seductive sirens beckoning his sailors, the faithful Penelope at home patiently awaiting her husband's return. Mason knows our culture's familiarity and relies on it. The forty-four books that he has written do not mesh together coherently - they are not a "new" Odyssey. Rather, he explores forgotten facets of the story, and narrative dead ends, what-ifs and what-might-have-beens and unconsidered possibilities.

In one story, Odysseus meets himself and the two men have to try and outfox one another. In another, Odysseus comes home and sleeps with Penelope, but the book ends with the two lovers both staring up at the ceiling as they drift off to sleep, both aware that the other has been unfaithful, but too scared to bring up the fact. There are books where Odysseus makes it home safe and sound, books where he wanders the earth for eternity, books where he dies outside the walls of Troy before his journey home even begins.

Odysseus, like Homer's version of the character, is constantly portrayed as a trickster and a clever man, but there are countless facets of this one stock character trait that Mason explores. Additionally, Odysseus is not the only character that receives new life - evil Circe, the id-driven Cyclops, brash Achilles, stubborn Agamemnon - all of these characters are developed and rediscovered numerous times. One story retells the Trojan War with Paris as Death, bringing violence and chaos to Earth. Another, one of my favorites, tells of Agamemnon as a foolish ruler desperately seeking wisdom, and asking Odysseus to scour the world far and wide to sum up all of human knowledge in a single word.

But perhaps the best chapter in the entire book portrays a very different retelling of the Trojan War, with Odysseus as a headstrong soldier who goes against the advice of his Greek comrades. After the fall of Troy, he disguises himself as a storyteller, and travels the land recreating his own version of what happened at Troy. The tales that Odysseus invent paint himself as the hero, and eventually become what we know as The Odyssey today.

It's a very simple story - all the "new" books are. But Mason paints it with such elegant language that it feels right at home next to the Homeric tales we have grown up with. This version of Odysseus, the storyteller stroking his own ego, ties all the other books together and makes the reader think about what tales are passed down and why.

And that's the best part about The Lost Books of the Odyssey. The reader is forced to consider Homer's legacy. Why do these tales have such dramatic power? Why do we return to them? Why do they still speak to us thousands of years later? Is there really just one story, Joseph Campbell-style, with countless retellings and reimaginings? Does the tale speak to some primal narrative impulse within us? Or is the Odyssey a fluke, an accident of history that just has happened to be preserved through chance?

I don't want to make the case that The Lost Books of the Odyssey is some new masterpiece that will be read for the next two thousand years. Some of the stories fall flat, and the episodic nature of the book gets tiresome by the end, as the "new" books rarely last longer than a couple of pages. But if you feel compelled to revisit the windswept Aegean Sea and re-embark on a new journey with Odysseus, why not choose to make it a different kind of trek? This novel could have been a pretentious failure that appeals only to classicists, or it could have read like juvenile Homeric fan fiction. But instead, Mason has achieved what some of the best writers of the past millennia have managed to do - he has taken a timeless story, and put his own signature onto it, recrafting the piece in his own image without losing sight of what made the original so great. That alone is worth a read, I think.

The (Fictional) Future Is Now

2010-03-12T07:14:00.000-05:00

I am not the world’s biggest tech geek. There are, admittedly, people who write for this very blog who know a hell of a lot more than I do about gadgets, operating systems, emails, etc. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in our increasing relinquishment of flesh-and-blood responsibilities in exchange for technological advances of exponential complexity. I’m what you might call feverishly intrigued.

I’m also on constant lookout for signs of the impending robot apocalypse.

Recent news, however, has actually gotten me excited for the future, a welcome change from my state of constant fear. Over the last century, science fiction’s been fervently trying to break into science fact. When the Japanese get tired of ogling giant Anime robots, they build their own. When DOD scientists log too many hours on the Xbox, they come into work with super soldier schematics. Then there’s the guy who turned himself into Bumblebee.

Plenty of modern technological innovations derive at least some inspiration from science fiction, or at least have been so popularized by it that public demand ensures people will strive to create even the most impractical gadgetry (are you telling me you don’t want people to figure out how to make a lightsaber?). Does everything fit into neat, tidy, Point A-to-Point B relationships? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean the connections aren’t there.

Look Ma, No Hands!

Last June, Microsoft dove headfirst into the casual gaming ocean when it announced Project Natal. This revolutionary camera tech promises “controller-free gaming,” meaning any idiot with limbs and a voice can play Natal games (such an idiot could also just play Charades). Another magical power Microsoft purports Natal to possess is the ability to scan real world objects and render them in the game’s virtual space. Think Star Trek Holodeck technology but in reverse.

It’s been almost a year since the initial announcement, and the public’s still pretty much in the dark about the whole thing. Natal is supposedly a codename, but no alternative names have surfaced (it’s not like we haven’t seen stupid names take off before). A 2010 holiday release is expected, but we’ve heard nothing regarding price points or bundles. The only concrete detail I’ve found is assorted confirmations of some noticeable lag – a flaw that apparently caused Nintendo exec Saturo Iwata to pass on the Natal tech before Microsoft snatched it up.

Natal holds significant promise beyond the world of gaming. Remember the scenes in Minority Report where a pre-Crazytown Tom Cruise navigates his computer by gesticulating like a maestro? Imagine never having to touch a grimy keyboard again. In a world where we can manipulate a device by simply waving at the screen, Apple’s iPad begins to look like a half-measure. Screw your object-oriented interface. I want to conduct the opening bars to Beethoven’s Fifth and have my computer queue up the fifth straight-to-DVD Beethoven movie.

It’s you. You’re the Rocket Man.

During our decade-end coverage last December, I took the Aughts to task for failing to deliver on a myriad of Future promises perpetuated by science fiction: flying cars, robot butlers, ubiquitous space travel. However, I neglected to mention possibly the most important of them all: jetpacks.

I espoused the allure of the jetpack in my write-up on Dark Void’s ultimately disappointing demo. Namely, we wingless creatures want to strap onto our backs whatever it is that makes planes go. We’ve been dreaming of this since the 1920s, and it’s gotten to a point where most of us have moved on with our lives. We’ve stopped looking at The Rocketeer or Minority Report or Red Faction: Guerrilla and thinking, “That’ll be me someday.”

There’s hope yet, folks. According to Tom’s Guide (via Andrew), Martin Aircrafts is currently accepting orders for its Martin Jetpack. The 250-lb carbon-fiber jetpack runs on old-fashioned dinosaur juice, can climb to heights of 8,000 ft, and should provide up to 30 minutes of sustained flight. The price tag: a mere $86,000. Martin hopes to eventually lower its prices once demand increases, and if our sci-fi-infused popular culture is to be believed, there’s a metric fuckton of demand for freaking jetpacks. Just imagine doing this at 8,000 ft:

Come On Now, Touch Me, Baby

Object-based, touch-screen user interfaces are all the rage. Apple revolutionized the phone (and mobile computing) market with the iPhone. Its attempting to do the same with the iPad. They look poised for at least modest success, seeing as how we’ve grown accustomed to scrolling through menus with our fingers and typing on virtual keyboards. Despite my affinity for the tactile clickety-clack of actual keys, I’ve always appreciated the flexibility of these devices’ visual real estate. User input doesn’t have to conform to the standard keyboard/mouse setup. Input can be tailored to whatever’s onscreen.

But what if there is no screen?

A combined team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft’s Redmond, WA research lab have harnessed body acoustics to transform your arm into a touchscreen. Dubbed Skinput, the tech merges low-frequency sound detection with tiny tiny pico projectors. The user wears an armband on their upper arm, which does two things: detect the sounds made when you tap various locations on your arm and project various images/interfaces onto your arm. Do I sound like a crazy person come from the future to confuse you? Just watch.

While developer Chris Harrison discusses Skinput’s creation as arising from work on other projected interfaces, I can’t help but see similarities to the Omni-tools in the Mass Effect universe. Okay, so Skinput can’t hack terminals or “rapidly assemble small three-dimensional objects from common, reusable industrial plastic,” but it can probably connect to devices that can. Wireless technology (Bluetooth, etc.) can connect Skinput to other devices like your iPod or cell phone. Also, the shot of him playing Tetris reminds me of that kid in Children of Men playing his puzzle game in the Court of the Crimson King.

Early adopters may look a little silly tapping their veins like heroin addicts trying to find the right song for their morning jog. But if this can release at a reasonable price point and in a comfortable armband, Skinput should go over like gangbusters.

I’m Sorry I Doubted You, Future

As I said before, I’ve spent the better part of the transition out of the Aughts railing against this Willennium of ours for not giving me all the comforts of a Jetsonian world. Clearly I was wrong. Jetpacks are coming. Soon I won’t need my hands to play videogames. And if I want to use my hands, I can just play games on my hands. Thanks, science fiction!

Review: Hot Tub Time Machine

2010-03-11T23:02:00.004-05:00

Craig Robinson has an immaculate deadpan delivery. It has to do with the breathy, deliberate, almost somber quality of his speaking voice that makes his characters usually seem unflappable or just perpetually sleepy. It's also why when he says the impossible titular line, "it must be some kinda...hot tub time machine..." you can almost forget the calculated irony of the movie's main plot device. Fortunately, Hot Tub Time Machine allows Robinson to play a character with a bit more depth than usual (which is admittedly, not saying much). Miraculously, it also (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of a comedy centered on such a conspicuous gimmick.

Believe it or not, Hot Tub Time Machine is not so easily summarized by its title. Unlike say Snakes on a Plane, the background of the four characters affected by the magical hot tub is of surprising import to the story of the film. We are first introduced to Nick (Robinson), a man who is clearly too old for his job at Sup Bitch, a spa for dogs. He has grown considerably distant from the two best friends of his teenage years, Lou (Rob Corddry), who's now a broke alcoholic stuck reliving his virile years, and Adam (John Cusack), who's more successful than Lou but recently and less than amicably separated from his wife. Adam shares a now half-empty house with his weirdly live-in nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), a shy high-schooler spending his free time in a Second Life jail. The same night Adam's wife leaves, he and Nick are reunited in the hospital to visit Lou, who may or may not have attempted suicide by suffocating himself with car exhaust. Realizing they are his only emergency contacts, Nick and Adam arrange for the three of them to forge a new or at least temporary friendship by spending the weekend exhuming their glory days at a once popular ski lodge. Jacob is also going.

Twenty years have been unkind to their old haunts. The ski town has all but closed down and the decrepit lodge has only one-armed Crispin Glover for a bellhop. The guys tentatively go through with their plan to stay there, resigned to humor Lou's insatiable and solitary need to party, until they realize the hot tub in their luxury suite works. A night of drinking montage later and they are hot tubbed back to the 80s.

The heroes only realize what happened after excessive visual references to 80s popular culture are lobbed at them on the ski slopes the next day. To the script's credit, this is the only time Hot Tub Time Machine devolves into an episode of I Love the 80s. Of course, there are no shortage of giggles to be had about Poison headlining the weekend party, a world without the internet, or the tacit fear of communist invasion (which all of a sudden doesn't seem so dated). But the writers resisted the temptation of making the protagonists walking punchlines to the setting's endless set-up. We are reminded that they are freaked out by the situation despite its novelty, and would like to get home.

Doing so, by Hollywood time-travel science standards, involves Adam, Lou and Nick all reliving their lives exactly as they had on the day they have been transported to. Unlike Back to the Future, they have been transported into their former selves and are perceived as such by everyone else around them. In fact, the director seems to bank on the audience's exposure to other time travel films, as the exposition, despite its departure from the norm, is glossed over at a brisk pace. As fortune would have it, the day is wrought with emotional events for each of the former friends and living through them again proves difficult. We see Lou and Nick testing the moral fabric of time travel. We see Jacob finding a way to restart the hot tub before his then nonexistent self disappears. Most importantly, we get to see Adam in girl trouble, enduring a gauntlet of John Cusack's former roles like Say Anything and more directly, Better Off Dead. A droopier Cusack gets to gradually reinhabit the wardrobe and listless angst that characterized his own rise to stardom, completely satisfying the absurd and fantastic conceits of the film. If the casting in Hot Tub Time Machine seemed a bit strange, it suddenly makes sense the moment the transformation begins. And while Cusack's meta-performance might be the strongest part of the film's comedy, Corddry and Robinson have enough chemistry to roll through the occasionally stale anachronism jokes and lamentable gross-out gags. The movie is rife with all manner of bodily fluid, at odds with the restraint the scriptwriters otherwise possess, but the apparent quota gets filled quickly enough.

Of course, time travel brings all the friends back together rather neatly. At its heart, Hot Tub Time Machine is a curiously sincere story with a fair amount of cheese and acute dedication to that unrelenting force, the heterosexual male bond. The 80s is a surprisingly ancillary feature of the humor, although the jokes at the time period's expense are numerous and predictable. Above all, the movie is not beleaguered by precious detachment nor a moralizing pretense. It is rather astonishingly, smarter and funnier than its title would suggest.

Borderlands, the Endless Game

2010-03-11T07:30:00.001-05:00

I picked up a copy of Gearbox’s RPG-shooter hybrid Borderlands on launch day after some prodding by Rob, and because all of the pre-release press called it basically a first-person Diablo with guns. I was reluctant, but I quickly came around.

Borderlands was one of our favorite games of 2009, not least because it was not a sequel to something in a holiday season that was predictably filled with sequels to stuff. We enthusiastically agreed to do a group review of the game, probably because none of us wanted to stand by while someone else got to gush about this game for a few hundred words.

We never got around to that review. It might be because we’re lazy, shiftless assholes with real jobs who don’t want to spend time reading each others’ writing. It could also be because we’re still playing this game.

The game itself

Borderlands is, like 98% of all video games, a Shooter of the First-Person variety (the other 2% is 1% ~~artsy puzzle-platformers~~ indie games, 1% other ). The twist in this case is the RPG part of the equation – you pick a character class at the game’s outset, your character levels up, you spend a lot of time allocating skill points, and you quickly become obsessed with collecting the loot that rains from your enemies’ dead bodies like candy from a piñata.

The game also plays a little in Grand Theft Auto’s sandbox, featuring a structure that is mostly mission-based (“go here, do this, repeat”) and generally ignoring story in favor of anarchical mayhem. The game does have a sense of humor just off-kilter enough to be endearing, even though it doesn’t seem like the game knows what it wants to do with its sense of the humor most of the time.

And there are cars, and enemies with ridiculous names like Badass Corrosive Skag, and your character can throw exploding punches if you really want him to. If you’re a fan of either shooters or RPGs, Borderlands’ barely-contained madness is going to strike a chord with you.

It’s dangerous to go alone

It’s a blast to play by yourself, but where Borderlands really shines is in its cooperative multiplayer. Any of your friends can hop into your game and run and gun with you at any time without interrupting your progress, and the game’s only response is to scale the difficulty accordingly.

Occasional weird sync issues aside, this is where you find the true meat of Borderlands – playing with others adds a certain something to the game that it’s missing in the regular single player mode, whether you’re in over your head in a cave full of enemies or driving off into the distance, leaving your friend to curse your name and watch you disappear over the horizon.

This is the game that never ends

Second only to the multiplayer on the list of things I like about Borderlands is Gearbox’s aggressive downloadable content strategy – plenty and often. The first download, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, was a solid reiteration of the game proper’s tropes set in an environment that was actually a little different from the one or two looks that the rest of the game had. The second, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, changed things up a bit by focusing on arena-style battles instead of free-ranging missions. The most recent piece, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, moved the game into full-on World of Warcraft mode, raising your character’s level cap and adding new vehicles and weapons in with the requisite new missions and levels.

The WoW comparison, distasteful as it might be to some, is actually more apt than most – Gearbox’s Paul Hellquist gave an interview earlier this week in which he suggested the possibility of even more downloadable content to come, and a suit from Borderlands’ publisher Take-Two went far enough to say that new content is coming.

Couple those statements with the fact that Borderlands continues to sell well past the one-or-two-month window where most big games make the majority of their sales and the fact that all of the downloadable content packs have been Xbox Live bestsellers, and you’ve got yourself a game that isn’t going anywhere.

The review does end though, guys, sorry

Borderlands has its share of problems. Your cars frequently move as though they were filled entirely with helium, which is equal parts hilarious and frustrating. The graphics are serviceable but the game worlds are almost universally the drab gray-and-brown that game developers can’t get away from of late. The story is both nonsensical and inconsequential, and the final boss battle is the very definition of anticlimax. I hope I didn’t spoil anything for you, but if I did, I’m sorry I spoiled your disappointment by allowing you time to prepare yourself for it.

Those flaws are there, but they are part of its character, and part of what makes it the solid B+ game that we enjoy so much around these parts. I can’t recommend it enough, and if Gearbox has its way, I’ll probably not be able to stop recommending it to you for quite awhile.

Mopping Up Culture Vomit: "Parks and Recreation" and "Star Wars" references

2010-03-10T15:53:00.008-05:00

So an interesting thing is happening in NBC's last bastion of decent programming (i.e., featuring shows that aren't inspired by games you teach remedial kindergarten classes): the learner is becoming the master.

For no reason I can divine, I've never quite gotten into NBC's The Office. And it's not out of a misplaced sense of Anglophilia, either. I'm not a huge fan of the BBC original because, weirdly enough, I prefer the American version's sweet haplessness to the British incarnation's mean-spirited awkwardness. You see that it's perplexing as to why I don't watch our Office religiously. Regardless, The Office has always been a show I can take or leave.

So when Parks and Recreation appeared as a mid-season replacement in April of 2009, I was hesitant to jump on board. "Another mockumentary sitcom? Don't people understand that awkward does not always equal funny?!"

The pilot didn't help matters, either. And most distressingly, it wasn't bad because of a half-baked premise or a mismatched cast. It just wasn't funny.

I though the pilot was so bad, in fact, that I refused to watch the show even after I'd heard that the show had improved dramatically. But because Parks sits amongst NBC's aforementioned not-crappy Thursday night lineup (including The Office, Community, and 30 Rock), I ended up watching the thing almost by accident one night. Holy crap, was I surprised.

Parks had transformed itself into a laugh-out-loud funny, emotionally affecting stroke of genius. Working off of feedback from audiences and their own observations of the cast's strengths, the writers have managed to craft a superb second season that showcases some of the best ensemble work on television. While 30 Rock is getting increasingly lost in a thicket of mediocre (but high-profile) guest spots, Parks has kept its head down, content to just be fucking funnier than everybody else.

Funnier, in fact, than that Office show. And though you could blame the show's current "meh"-ness on the Trix rabbit getting the Trix (i.e., Jim finally getting together with Pam), I'd say the same thing I said, ironically enough, about the Parks pilot: it just isn't funny. The writers seem to be having a difficult time juggling the funny and the touching (see the YouTube-aping wedding episode), as they did so deftly early on.

Parks undoubtedly takes much from The Office. So much, in fact, that it was initially announced as a spin-off and is still thought of as the latter's sister show.

But even NBC seems to recognize that Parks has eclipsed The Office (in creative success if not in audience). The biggest hint? Parks got renewed a month before its forebearer. Of course, with its witless and hitless schedule, NBC would have been idiotic not to pick up the rest of its Thursday evening lineup.

As shocking as it is to think of the once-mighty Office being defeated by its Padawan learner, Parks, it's actually quite a familiar pattern.

Take juvenile provocateur/fat Jesus Kevin Smith, for example: the guy essentially invented the "twentysomething males curse and complain about their crappy lives" genre, and he's seen his own star eclipsed tenfold by the likes of Judd Apatow and Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall). 2008's limp Zack and Miri Make a Porno (seewhatIdidthere,didjadidja?), released most certainly to capitalize on the success of the genre Smith founded, was a critical and commercial off-note. It wasn't quite a flop, but it made clear that Smith had been beat at his own game.

Or The Simpsons and Futurama: members of the creative team of the former peel off to work on the latter, and the latter goes on to wild critical acclaim...and cancellation (and subsequent rebirth, but the jury's still out on the success of that third chapter). The Simpsons, meanwhile, is wheezing through its 21st creatively but still walloping the competition audience-wise.

So whaddya think: are we witnessing, as Darth Vader (Parks) put it so succinctly all those years ago, the learner becoming the master? Or will Obi-Wan Kenobi (The Office) tell Darth to eat a dick, cut the dude in half, and keep on living ten years past the time he should have become a Force ghost?

All I can say is, don't switch off your targeting computer just yet.

Iraq At The Movies

2010-03-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

Kathryn Bigelow triumphed over James Cameron. The low-budget indie film beat the most expensive, highest-grossing film of all time. The ex-wife beat the ex-husband. Woman conquered man.

But what about The Hurt Locker?

You almost forget there’s a movie under the narrative scaffolding surrounding year’s Academy Award winner. So what is The Hurt Locker? It’s a war movie, grim and gritty; it’s an indie film, authentic and rugged in its austerity; and it’s the first movie about the Iraq War to connect with audiences.

But it isn’t the first time a film crew tried to capture the Iraq War. A surprising amount has tried since American tanks rumbled across the Kuwaiti border in 2003; Brian De Palma tried with Redacted; and The Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns tried with Generation Kill. While De Palma’s film was panned as being heavy on polemics and light on substance, Generation Kill is as good, if not better, than Bigelow’s Oscared film.

American moviegoers are finally paying attention to the Iraq War. What have we been missing?

For the purposes of brevity, I’ll be glossing over a number of films that bear at least mentioning: In The Valley of Elah, one of the first and one of the best; The Messenger, which got Woody Harrelson an Oscar nod this year; and a number of excellent documentaries like Gunner Palace. I’ll pass on The Kingdom, a blasé shoot-em-up with Middle East flavoring, and Body of Lies, interesting but flawed.

Redacted is flawed and uninteresting. It seems to confirm every suspicion it might prompt – that De Palma had his knives sharpened, and made his film with an agenda at its core. “Truth is the first casualty of war,” the trailer tells us. “See what they don’t want you to see.”

Instead of pursuing something deeper than headlines, De Palma went for a fresh wound and based Redacted around a massacre in Al-Mahmudyiah, a town south of Baghdad, in March 2006. Five U.S. Army soldiers participated in the gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, and the subsequent slaying of her family. While the killings stoked rage and shame on the home front, nobody was rushing to their cameras. Except De Palma, who hatched out a piece of anti-war schlock one year later so poor it can only be called propaganda.

Redacted strives for the kind of docu-drama feel achieved by Paul Greengrass’ United 93. It was risky when Greengrass made his film about one of the three planes hijacked on 9/11, only five years after the fact; but action-auteur Greengrass is a master of the shaky-cam, and United 93 was praised for being subtle and sensitive.

De Palma is anything but. Watch this clip from Redacted. It looks like a high school film project, and it feels like the work of an angry mind, frustrated by its own inarticulateness. To tackle a wound so fresh with such crassness is itself a kind of war crime.

Generation Kill is leagues better. Of course it is – Wire creators Simon and Burns nearly fetishize verism. They captured Baltimore down to the gutters. Simon, a former reporter, knows the importance of detail – without the color of the wallpaper, the brand of coffee served to you in a chipped mug, you have no story.

Generation Kill is based on the namesake nonfiction book by Evan Wright. Embedded by Rolling Stone, Wright ditches his assignment to link up with a special forces unit and ends up spearheading the invasion into Iraq. His portrait of highly trained, sardonic killers, cynical and distanced but somehow still soft, still innocent, is probably my favorite work to emerge from the Iraq War. Its fast-and-loose tone is a natural fit for Burns and Simon; between the jargon-laced conversations and the laconic observations on life, love and the Marine Corps, Gen Kill feels more like a road movie than a war flick. And it was true to the Marines, who feature prominently in the DVD commentary. Two even star in the miniseries.

Gen Kill was well-received, but Burns and Simon’s attention to detail may have been too overriding. Some critics were turned off by the jargon; others thought Simon and Burns were too detached from their characters. Reception regardless, Gen Kill didn’t have the venue of The Hurt Locker.

And yes, The Hurt Locker is a fantastic film. It was my pick to win Best Picture, and I’m glad it won. But why did America choose this as its moment to suddenly care about the Iraq War?

Well, maybe I’m wrong to assume that the majority of Americans are either war-is-icky handwringers, ill-informed peaceniks who confuse ‘Democrat’ with ‘pacifist,’ or worse, flag-waving demi-fascists, concerned more with pomp than fact. I lost my best friend to the Sunni Triangle, and watching the nation tune out of the Iraq War as if it were American Idol might have permanently embittered me. But let’s say The Hurt Locker made someone look at the seven-year war with fresh eyes. Let’s assume someone actually gave a damn.

Maybe it was time. It’s notoriously difficult to create a work of fiction about contemporary events. It usually takes generations to pass before something so complex and damaging as the Iraq War can be fully understood and rendered in fiction, but Bigelow’s film is smart, forceful and non-judgmental. Unlike De Palma, she doesn’t try to wring a thesis from the war. She’s more like Burns and Simon, letting facts and details drive the story.

It’s the only way to tell an Iraq War story. It’s almost impossible to draw conclusions before U.S. troops withdraw. Perhaps I’m looking into Bigelow’s success too deeply. Perhaps it’s simply enough to tell the story and tell it well, shelving the knives for later.

Stories from Facebook's Sordid Past

2010-03-09T16:27:00.000-05:00

Well, the Oscars on Sunday were seen by an estimated 41.3 million people, according to preliminary Nieslen ratings, an admittedly flawed system. Slipping under the radar was a bit of news that could potentially have a negative financial impact for close to 13.9 million people: The courts have ruled that the DVR systems manufactured by satellite-TV provider Dish Network infringe on patents held by TiVo. Not only would Dish have to pay TiVo over $620 million in damages, they'd also have to fork over a licensing fee to continue using those DVRs. Where's this $620 million going to come from? Not from the executives' paychecks, but from the pockets of the 13.9 Dish Network subscribers.

In other news, TiVo stock jumped 62% on Thursday.

So one company had to pay gobs of cash to a rival company after "developing" a product that took a little bit too much from some ideas that were patented by the rival. This is a story about a legitimate legal disagreement between two publicly traded companies - both of which take great pains to protect their assets and both of which employ very astute (and probably very highly paid) teams of attorneys.

There's another, rather similar story rattling around the internet about a legal disagreement between three former Harvard undergrads who developed an interesting idea for a website and the enterprising hustler who allegedly stole it from them and turned it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

Hear more about the ongoing legal battles between Facebook and ConnectU after the jump.

This story broke in a great three-part expose on the founding of Facebook from BusinessInsider.com. I linked to the first part above, and I'll link to the other two parts below. I heartily encourage you to read the whole article, or at least the first part, if you get a chance. It's a nasty tale of deception, intrigue, and website programming. In fact, a major studio is currently in post-production on a film based on the story. I'm sure everyone involved is hoping that the entire litigation process will be visible in the rear-view mirror by the film's October 15, 2010 release date.

For those of you on a tight schedule, I'll give you the nitty-gritty version: In 2004, three Harvard seniors (brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra) approached a Harvard sophomore (Mark E. Zuckerberg) regarding an idea for a web project - a social networking website called Harvard Connection. The three ambitious entrepreneurs would retain legal and creative control of the site, while Zuckerberg would write the code and develop it from a technical/professional side. This plan did not work out, as Zuckerberg first delayed production of the original site, then launched his own rival site, thefacebook.com.

The Harvard Connection team rebranded their project ConnectU and filed a suit against Zuckerberg for breach of contract. Since then, a judge has ruled against ConnectU on the grounds that "dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract." However, another judge ruled against Facebook's move to dismiss the charges, and a settlement was announced (but not finalized).

Some fine investigative reporting from Business Insider has revealed that, yes indeed, Mark Zuckerberg knew exactly to what degree he stole from and screwed over his collaborators in this whole affair. While this new information has no bearing on the ongoing legal battles, it does expose Zuckerberg as somewhat of a raging dick.

The other two articles in the series - about how Zuck hacked into various people's private email accounts and ConnectU pages, respectively - solidify our hero as a peculiarly tech-savvy and immoral raging dick.

Cue the outrage, am I right? Don't get me wrong, it's an outrageous story. But I personally have no problem with some whiny, pimply-faced, jerk-off manipulating the people he said he would help, betraying their trust, and getting rich in the process. And considering he did all this while avoiding any serious (read: convictable) legal trouble one could even go so far as to congratulate him on his business acumen; as was the case when PayPal CEO Peter Thiell made a very generous $500,000 investment in Facebook in 2004. And, honestly, even if I did have some kind of problem with Zuckerberg's actions, I wouldn't say it, because I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of such a powerful, crafty, vindictive guy.

Would I personally engage in this type of behavior, or encourage someone else to behave this way? No, probably not. Mistreating the people who placed their trust in me would likely make me feel too bad to offset any personal gain. Call it a moral compass, call it fear of getting caught - I don't know the motives, or particularly care. But there are some people out there who don't share my views, and these are the kinds of people who will inevitably make the big bucks.

Perhaps more damning than the backstabbing and deceit are the email-hacking shenanigans that nowadays would be classified as shameless identify theft. Apparently he checked failed login attempts, saved on Facebook's servers, and used the passwords he found to access the private email accounts of two members of Harvard's campus newspaper on the eve of this particularly unflattering article. He also hacked into the ConnectU pages of numerous individuals using unknown methods.

Now, I know what you're thinking: I'm a member of Facebook. Should I be worried that its founder and CEO could potentially gain access to my personal information, since he has done so to other people in the past? Probably not. Not anymore, at least. Facebook is legitimate enough that there are numerous laws and "privacy policies" in place preventing anyone questionable from having access to sensitive information. Plus Facebook is a big enough enterprise that they're better off protecting the best interests of their clients rather than stealing from them. I have to admit, though, that I immediately changed both my Facebook and my email passwords after reading these articles, just to be safe.

But before we ring up Mark Zuckerberg on charges of e-crime, let's look at how he actually applied his hacker knowledge. In addition to deactivating various ConnectU accounts, he made a fake page making fun of "disgruntled litigant" Cameron Winklevoss, listing his height as 7'4", his hair color as Aryan Blond, and his language as WASP-y. He didn't access bank accounts, steal social security numbers, or even screw with email accounts. He was just lashing out - in a decidedly immature and juvenile way - against someone he felt "intimidated" by.

When we closely examine the lives of people who have done great things (and I do consider the transformation of Facebook "from a college website into a global service playing an important role in the lives of 400 million people" a pretty great accomplishment), the picture is rarely a flattering one. Nevertheless, such examinations are important, as they often shed new light on some things that play a big part in our lives, and subsequently force us to reexamine how big a part that thing should play.

...Or at least it has for me.

24 in 24 Words: Day 8, Hour 11

2010-03-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Episode 11 - “2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m.”

Spoilers after the jump!

Chloe in charge of our days and our nights. Jimmy James gives Starbuck a call, no one cares. Jack salvages the proceedings - KABOOM.

You can catch up on our concise 24 coverage here. Did we miss something? Leave it in the comments!

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – Brazilian Whacks Edition

2010-03-09T07:26:00.000-05:00

Another week, another country surprising me with its impressive repertoire of electronica. Honestly, this genre is like soccer. There’s an adequate number of hardcore fans in the States, but its more popular than Santa Claus everywhere else. And Brazil is no exception.

Psytrance Brazil seems to be a Speedsound analog. In fact, it may actually be an incarnation of Speedsound, if my Google searches are to be believed. Their library is an extensive collection of elecronica and trance, which may or may not be remixes of other artist’s songs. I’m not sure. I’ve never been sure. And the Internet’s never felt like helping.

The three tracks this week offer varied perspectives on the one particular style of electronic music. “Sunrise” integrates thrashy guitar. “Is All Right” features plenty of looped sound clips. And “Bullet in the Gun” is nine minutes long.

Hold on to your butts, indeed.

The Songs

“Sunrise” does a good job invoking its title. The scattered slower sections expand slowly, mirroring the various ascents. However, I’ve never seen (or heard) a sunrise so metal. Once the song gets cooking, some serious riff-slinging begins. It’s a grinding style of guitar that any metal fan can appreciate. Think Prodigy or NIN and other turn of the millennium hard rock/techno mashups. At one point the track comes to a complete halt, nearly rocketing you forward into the screen it throws on the brakes so hard, only to roll on like nothing happened. The guitar returns, this time in a higher, more melodious register. Whoever decided to put guitar on this song was a genius. It’s the unique element needed to distinguish this track from the rest of the week’s offerings. (Remember how No Doubt was Just Another Ska Band until they hired some metal-head guitarist to spice up their sound? It’s kind of like that.) The shredding solo lends the song an epic vibe it would otherwise lack. While I may not want to dance to it in a club, it might just be the perfect song for a crazy vacation montage: wide angle shots of people grinding up a storm, sped-up sequences of driving adventures, cliff diving – lots of cliff diving. If I took a balls-to-the-wall trip to Brazil, I would definitely score my home movies with this. Play this song.

Why is it that the only voices heard in electronica are dull, heartless robots or unintelligible female wailers (Not that kind…or that kind.)? And if its neither of those, we get Keanu soundbytes from The Matrix, like in “Is All Right.” I always play with headphones – okay, earbuds – which helps clue me in to the subtler production flourishes my tinny laptop speakers often miss. Without them, I wouldn’t have noticed how the main loop at the top of the first downhill kind of sloshes around between the left and right speaker. It’s not a full-on Robert Plant pan back and forth. It resides somewhere in the space between the two sides, and there’s a liquidity to its movement that actually feels a little obscene, the more I think about it. I’m going to stop talking about this now. I’ll move on to how the music starts fighting itself halfway through, with the new loop butting heads with the underlying beat. I could feel the two trying to become one, but it never quite clicked, which was distracting to my ear. The seizure warning that follows Audiosurf’s loading screen prepared me for the possibility of an epileptic fit. But I don’t think it mentions the potential of being so aurally jostled by techno. I’m reminded of a scene in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when the main character, a teenager with severe Asperger’s, puts his ear to a radio and turns the volume all the way up on static. This music’s better than radio static, but it’s just so—oh crap, I think my nose is bleeding.

As if to answer my earlier question about techno vocals, “Bullet in the Gun” starts with a woman legit singing about putting a bullet in the gun. Consider my snark snuffed – until, oh wait, a woman begins to wail. Apparently, any singing whatsoever is an invitation to textbook soaring Oohs and Aahs. The lyrics of “Bullet in the Gun” do attempt to impart some wisdom, however. Midway through, the vocalist instructs us to “fight fire with fire” (clearly a Metallica reference) and “fight enemies with love.” I don’t think the phrases quite make a logical syllogism, but I’ll trust her on this one. She just sounds so serious. Much of the uphill sections feature a strobing string sound, a similar sound to that one Usher song I like so much. Granted, the rest of the song sounds nothing like “Love in this Club,” but just that initial similarity is enough to get me on board the “Bullet in the Gun” train. And it’s a fun train to ride: bumpy but not vomit-inducing, fast but not dizzying. Like all of this week’s songs, the build-ups to each downhill section are superb. They’re just long enough to lull you into thinking the crest isn’t coming, and then Wham! you’re tossed into a steep dive.

Author’s Note

All songs were played at least twice on the Pro difficulty using the Eraser and Vegas characters. I know I’ve been singing Eraser’s praises nonstop since it was updated, but I just wanted to remind people aiming for the leaderboards that Eraser’s ability to spit out recently erased blocks is an excellent way to keep combos going.

I also want to return to “Sunrise” for one second. Audiosurf user LostLights commented, “this song + coffee + cigarette = good morning world! it’s a great song to start the morning with!” I wish I had the luxury of (or energy for) [length] of kickass electronica at the top of my day. I usually start my mornings by picking a fight with my alarm clock and shuffling all Romero-style to the shower.

The King of the World is Dead! Long Live the Queen!

2010-03-08T14:00:00.001-05:00

Well, at last our long national nightmare is finally over: the 82nd Academy Awards have come and gone. You can now stop calculating formulas to get the best picks in your office Oscar pool, and you no longer have any sort of obligation to keep Precious in your Netflix queue.

I for one am somewhat relieved for Oscar season to have finally passed, it's had a grip on moviegoers' since last fall and now we can all go back to watching movies without whispering to our friends "The Oscar buzz for this one is huge..." during the trailers.

The winners were for the most part completely predictable, but that in no way diminished from the history-making of the ceremony's finale, as Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win for Best Director in the Academy's history. It was a pretty big deal and I'm fairly certain that everyone watching was plenty aware of that, but how could such an important Oscar night feel so clumsy and awkward? That probably had less to do with the nominees and winners and more with the presentation.

Much has been made this year of the Oscars' attempts to become more "populist" (i.e. "stupid") in an effort to attract a wider home viewing audience. To counter allegations of Hollywood elitism, this year the Academy nominated ten films for Best Picture instead of the usual five, something that hasn't been done since Casablanca won in 1943. While being billed as a return to old-timey Hollywood tradition, the move was transparently made to get bigger, more widely-seen films into the Oscars with the expectation that more people will watch if movies they like are nominated.

Everyone remembers last year's Oscars party when that one guy wouldn't stop complaining that The Dark Knight wasn't nominated for Best Picture, well this year he was probably complaining about Star Trek. When the ten movie format was announced last year, everyone was sure that J.J. Abrams' space opera was a lock for a nomination. Even before the usual round of Oscar bait was released, everyone was sure that Trek was going to be given a spot in the the ten as a nod to and representative of all the fine blockbusters released in 2009. Unfortunately, this was the year (or perhaps was going to be the year) of Avatar, and the big budget science fiction slot was filled by the highest grossing movie of all time. In a doubly confusing slap in the face of Trekkies worldwide, the just fine but without-a-chance District 9 was nominated for Best Picture as well (and was given an introduction by Chris Pine!).

The problem with ten Best Pictures was that none of them seemed to be anything but dead in the water. By doubling the field of nominations, the Academy effectively diminished the honor of being nominated by fifty percent. Films like District 9 and The Blind Side, usually ghettoized as nerdy science fiction and "inspirational" schmaltz, were now presented as if they were anything but just that. I can't honestly believe that a great number of Academy members seriously gave much of a thought to voting for either of these films, whatever their merits may be. Besides, it has been common knowledge that this was going to be a showdown between Hurt Locker and Avatar anyway. Why else would you put former spouses/current rivals Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron right next to each other in the audience?

The ceremony itself was something of a mild disaster. Hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin bumbled their way through their monologues and banter where one of them probably would have done just fine. Gigantic montages of scenes from all ten Best Picture nominees were presented throughout the evening and ended up taking so long that Tom Hanks didn't even have time to give an introduction when he came out to announce the winner. The performances of the numbers nominated for Best Original Song were sacrificed on the altar of Ten Best Pictures as well, and a break dancing troupe's performance during a medley of the Best Original Score nominees was truly the low point of the evening. For chrissakes, a guy did the Robot as an interpretation of the score from Up: that's unforgivable.

Regardless of the unpleasant surprises during the ceremony itself, the acting winners were almost exactly as everyone has predicted. Christoph Waltz deservedly won for Best Supporting Actor in Inglourious Basterds as he has been predicted to since Cannes. This didn't stop him from being completely gracious and humbled by the award. It was touching to see a man who spent most of movie strutting around with such malicious confidence be so happy to win an Oscar he has to have known he would get since this past summer. Waltz's win, the first award of the night, however great to see, set the tone for a mediocre night in the acting category. Not to slight the winners, they all gave fine performances, but there must have been something wrong with this year's field of acting nominees because this was the most easily predicted Oscars in a long time. The odds were just not that high on this one.

Mo'Nique won Best Supporting Actress for Precious; like Waltz she has been a long time lock in the category for playing a villain, continuing a trend of rewarding evil performances. I wasn't sure what she meant when she thanked the Academy for not making their votes "about the politics". Really? Is the Academy usually hostile towards movies like Precious? I've never really been aboard Precious' "little indie that could" bandwagon. It had the backing of two of the biggest names in Hollywood and was Oscar material in every way. I was actually surprised by how good Precious was, it wasn't perfect by any means but it wasn't the pandering poverty porn it had the potential to be. And yes, Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe both gave really good performances. I just don't think it was as much of an underdog as its cast and crew thought it was. Believe in yourself, Precious!

Jeff Bridges won for Best Actor and did nothing with his acceptance speech to dispel the notion that he is in fact the Dude, which is perfectly fine by me. His performance in Crazy Heart was more than deserving of the award and its good to see a great actor who has been nominated so many times finally get his due. Sandra Bullock took home Best Actress and became the first person in history to win and Oscar and a Razzie in the same weekend. As much as I hated The Blind Side for being low-brow, pandering, "inspirational" crap with a message of white paternalism that's really kind of unsettling in this day and age, I have to admit that Bullock was pretty good in it. Just as Christoph Waltz can win for playing a Nazi and Mo'Nique can win for playing an abusive mother, Bullock can certainly win for playing a pretty white lady who helps black people out by teaching them how to play football. Maybe that's what Mo'Nique meant about not making it about the politics.

I really don't think enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow's win for Best Director. In an industry where women are usually seen as only being able to make stupid romantic comedies and weepy melodramas, Kathryn Bigelow won as the odds-on favorite by a longshot for directing an action-packed war movie. That's really just mind blowing. This was really important moment for women, directors, and women directors everywhere and I'm sure the Academy's going to be patting themselves on the back for years to come over this.

Most importantly of all, Hurt Locker and its director defeated Avatar, the best picture won Best Picture. I was really afraid style would beat substance this year, especially with the ceremony's craptacular new format as an indicator of the lowered expectations of the Academy. But history was made and we "snobs" safely held on to the Oscars for another year.

Now I'm going to sit back and watch Crank 2: High Voltage because after months of watching what the Academy tells me I should watch, I think I've earned it.

Oh, and if you'd like some more views into Charge Shot!!!'s views on this year's Oscars, check out these past posts and our Twitter.

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 49 - Little Walter

2010-03-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

For all you loyal readers, you might remember that I promised to explain to you this week's rather eclectic listening choice. Normally I just sort of choose whatever artist strikes my fancy or happens to intrigue me on that particular day (though I tend to try and avoid consecutive artists from the same decade, as a loose rule). But there is a fourfold reason for this week's investigation of Little Walter.

For one, my exposure to popular music before the 1960s has been very limited. Last summer I had a week where I listened to Robert Johnson, and another where I listened to Johnny Cash, including his early stuff. But there's a lot of great names that are thrown around, the old Kings of blues and country and jazz, who were very influential in a lot of respects, and I think it's fun to look back and listen to some of the former greats.

We like to think history can be traced as a single line of progression, where the causes and the effects are obvious and everything is constantly moving forward. Things are never that simple, of course, but that doesn't mean you can't try and link certain cultural and artistic movements together. Even in our present day, it's hard to realize the myriad of historical influences that are tugging on us in every direction, let alone who was influenced by what in the past. But it's fun to try, and I don't think it's a completely fruitless endeavor.

This brings me to reason number two for this week's choice - the fact that I listened to Cream last week. As I reported, I was particularly taken by Cream's version of blues-rock, and especially by the harmonica solos. This got me thinking about the blues harmonica, and what harmonicists of yore might have influenced the band. As it turns out, pretty much every harmonica player of the past sixty years plays in the shadow of Little Walter, a giant in this small musical subgenre, and the only artist inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame primarily for his work on the harmonica.

So I grabbed some "Best Of" CDs and introduced myself to his music this week. And that's part of the fun of exploring old music - you're never quite sure where it's going to take you next.

WEEK 49

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Little Walter

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: Nothing. The man's name rang a bell, probably because I'd seen him on one of those Greatest Albums of All-Time lists in Rolling Stone or something, but I wasn't even aware of his significance as a harmonica player.

MY LISTENING: A vacation prevented me from my normal habit of picking one album to listen to every day, but Little Walter was a singles artist anyway, with only one album - a Best Of - released during his lifetime. I spent most of the week going through the two disc The Essential Little Walter (1993), with some dabbling with The Best of Little Walter (1958) and Little Walter: The Chess Years (1952-1963) (1992).

WHAT I LIKED:

The third reason that I chose Little Walter this week is that I'm a harmonica player myself. I play mostly old fiddle tunes and folk songs, but I've been working on the blues more and more lately, and it was a lot of fun to listen to the man who pretty much invented the repertoire. A lot of times when you go back to the past and experience an influential artist, it can be boring. When an artist is so influential, their work so pervasive in the present day, it's hard to experience what a shock it must have been to hear the music for the first time. (Listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, for example, and tell me it would start a riot today).

But Little Walter's music still packs quite a punch. Perhaps it's because he plays the blues. The old-fashioned twelve-bar blues songs have a way of sounding timeless, like something that has been present in the roots of America for millenia. It's a great kind of music, and Little Walter manages to hit both its poles perfectly - he can grind out some riffs on the harmonica so fast that the rest of the instruments can barely keep up. But he can also slow it down, and draw every ounce of melancholy and anguish out of the notes, bending the tones to give the blues just that hint of being slightly off, the note not moving quite where you expect.

But in the end, the blues have an intense forward drive, and even though it's only a twelve-measure pattern with three chords, it's amazing how many variations Little Walter can wail out without it sounding repetitive. These blues songs are great for that feeling of catharsis, slowly building as the music stumbles toward some sort of loud riff at the end as the piano jangles and the cymbals roll.

Little Walter was also one of the first harmonica players to take advantage of electrically amplified acoustics. You'd think this might be an impediment, but instead he uses microphones and the like to his advantage, drawing sounds out of the instrument that you didn't know were possible. He's been described as the first artist of any kind to intentionally use electrical distortion, and listening to the simply titled "Boogie" demonstrates his prowess.

Boogie - Little Walter

Finally, the fourth reason I chose Little Walter this week was because I took a vacation to New Orleans. Driving through the bayous of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta, I assumed that Louisiana-native Little Walter's music would be appropriate. And it was, both driving there to the promising reunion with old friends, and driving home and pondering the fact that I was still alive and in one piece. When music works for both arrivals and departures, you know it's good music.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:

I'm easy to please, and this tends to be the slimmest section regardless, but it's going to be shorter than usual this week. In case you couldn't tell, I liked Little Walter a lot. I will state that he's better listened to in small doses - there's no need to listen to one of his four volume anthologies all at once, like I tried to do during my drive today. Instead, choose a song or two when you're feeling blue. Like many older artists, he works better in smaller chunks.

FURTHER EXPLORATION WOULD ENTAIL: In addition to his own stuff, Little Walter played backing harmonica for a lot of the old Chess Records artists. However, he got his start playing with Muddy Waters' band, which would probably be a good next step.

BEST SONG YOU'VE HEARD: "Juke"

BEST SONG YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: "Back Track"

Back Track - Little Walter

NEXT WEEK'S ARTIST: Gorillaz

After the Jump: Perform Gestures on an Unlock Image

2010-03-08T00:41:00.001-05:00

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us on the iTunes store!

I bet you thought I had forgotten about the podcast this week! THINK AGAIN.

We’ve got a long one for you this week, covering such wide-ranging topics as Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, Apple’s super crazy lawsuits, Pokemon, our cast picks for the Gilligan’s Island movie, the difference between vegetables and fruits, Vietnam, and the city of Google, Kansas.

Music this week is the theme from ToeJam & Earl, a game that you probably remember even if you don’t remember Panic on Funkotron or the ill-fated ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth.

Writer’s Jukebox – Oscars? Oscar’s What?

2010-03-07T21:00:00.000-05:00

As I write this, I’m watching Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin tear each other (and the entire Academy) a new one at the Oscars. If you really love Hollywood, take a look back at Pankin’s predictions for the Oscar for Best Original Score. If you’re just here for the tunes, please keep reading.

Roberto reminds us all that Broken Social Scene’s worth out time and (maybe) money. Andrew wanted to write about The Hours’ “Ali in the Jungle,” but I wouldn’t let him. So he bought a Muse album and the new record by “that band Cracker.” Oh, the 90s. As for me, I probably listened to “Ali in the Jungle” at least fifteen times this week.

So…yeah. You can guess what I’m talking about today.

Rob – Re-coming onto the Scene

We haven't heard much lately from Canadian commune/indie outfit Broken Social Scene. Their last full-length was 2005's eponymous LP. Broken Social Scene was well-received, but generally considered to be less than 2002's near-perfect You Forgot In People.

BSS need not return to form. They have not fallen from grace. But judging by "World Sick," a free-to-download 8-minute epic, Broken Social Scene will transcend on May 4 with Forgiveness Rock Album.

Fans will recognize the signature sprawl - guitars loop and lace through a chugging tribal beat before exploding into a chorus that stretches to the horizon. The song may be tinged with weariness and disillusion, but BSS sound anything but. They sound in love.

Treat yourself to a free download here.

Andrew – Taking the Information Superhighway back to the 1990s

Craig seems to think that he can just call "Ali in the Jungle," like he owns it or something. I won't write about it, but it's because I don'twant to, not because of him.

After downloading "Ali in the Jungle" from Amazon MP3, I decided I'd dig through the rest of their on-sale offerings to see what I could see. One of my finds was Muse's Black Holes and Revelations. It's a great album if you like Muse's shtick (high-pitched warble, dense guitars, 32nd notes), though it's not going to change your mind about the band if you don't care for them. Highlights include the insistent riff of "Map of the Problematique" and Guitar Hero mainstay "Knights of Cydonia."

Amazon also transported me to the distant past. Remember the 90s? Remember that song "Low" by that band Cracker? Well, apparently they are still around - still! - and they're still putting out albums, and they still sound exactly the same as they did fifteen years ago. Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey is by no means an essential listen or a masterful album, but it does showcase Cracker doing what Cracker does, delivering alt-rock with a hint of a twang. Put on "Tune In Tune Out Drop Out With Me" or "Shine a Light," grab some Dunkaroos, and unearth your fullscreen VHS copy of Jurassic Park - you'll feel like it's the 90s all over again.

Craig – Rocking at All Hours

I can, in fact, call “Ali in the Jungle” if I want. I first heard The Hours’ 2006 single during this year’s Winter Olympics. Nike ran a commercial featuring the song, and I immediately purchased it from iTunes.

The prechorus “Everybody gets knocked down/How quick are you gonna get up?” is just so damn invigorating. It’s not quite uplifting. It’s not just a kick-me-when-I’m-down taunt. It’s a blunt challenge. As if that weren’t enough, the chorus then goes on to list people who’ve faced insurmountable odds: Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Joe Simpson, Helen Keller, Tony Adams, and Ludwig Van Beethoven. Your problems cannot outweigh what these people dealt with. And The Hours want to remind you of that.

The music’s decidedly pop indie rock. A piano sets the mood over the ticking clock of the drums. Guitars underpin the vocals throughout the first half, and the bass rumbles joyously throughout the second. I’ve listened to thirty-second samples of The Hours’ other material and I’m not entirely sold. But “Ali in the Jungle” is exquisite. Need further convincing? Watch this:

When not glued to my laptop with The Hours on repeat, I’ve been commuting to a constant soundtrack of The Beatles. A few days ago “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” supplanted the entirety of Rubber Soul as my favorite cut of the Fab Four’s oeuvre. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the way it emerges from the Abbey Road medley. Or how Paul jumps playfully into falsetto on “And though she thought I knew the answer…” Whatever the reason, I’m happy to keep it on repeat – until I learn all the words to “Hey Bulldog” anyway.

More Portal? Why the F Not?

2010-03-06T20:18:00.000-05:00

On this week’s forthcoming podcast, you’ll hear us discuss Valve’s genius secret message marketing embedded in a recent update for the popular first-person puzzler Portal. We didn’t know much about what the crazy Morse code-slash-BBS dial-up signals meant. So when listening, enjoy the irony of knowing what the Internet discovered after we recorded:

Portal 2 is coming.

What do we know so far? Among the expected sequel bullet-points of new crazier puzzles and a how-could-we-refuse? reunion with GLaDOS, the biggest revelation is the inclusion of a co-op mode. It sounds like the game (priced at a full $59.99 for the Xbox 360) will feature separate campaigns for single and co-op play, and that the portal-hopping in co-op will most likely melt your brain. I can already imagine scenarios in which certain portals are restricted so that you’ll have to hop from one of your portals to one of your friend’s and then a cute little turret will start shooting—I can’t wait.

There’s also talk of a new antagonist: Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson. I won’t elaborate because I’m trying to avoid over-spoilerification. Rest assured, the truth is out there.

One thing I’m noticing as Portal 2 info leaks: I’m not seeing the same sequel reticence that preceded BioShock 2. Is it because the first Portal was so brief that we left it wanting more? Personally, its brevity was actually one of its greatest strengths. It demonstrated that a witty, intelligent, (and most importantly) fun game could delivered in a four- to six-hour package. I worry that the move toward a fuller retail product might bloat what should be a lean experience.

Something I am interested to see how Valve tackles is our familiarity with the first game. Portal, from a narrative and mechanical standpoint, is essentially an expertly paced tutorial for its thrilling final chapter. Can the sequel successfully emulate this structure? Or will our prior experience with the gun, the turrets, and the Companion Cube undercut whatever story they try to deliver via gameplay?

Then again, I don’t know why I’m wasting breath with hypothetical nay-saying. I’m so damn pumped to hop through more portals.

Having Fun for Charity with Chime

2010-03-05T07:14:00.000-05:00

Gaming and charity share an interesting relationship.

On one hand, you’ve got Penny Arcade’s mammoth Child’s Play program. It started in 2003, when the guys behind gaming’s most popular webcomic collected game and cash donations to provide an extra special Christmas for their local children’s hospital. Now, it serves almost 70 partner hospitals, inspires crazy gaming marathons, and generates upwards of a million dollars each year.

On the other hand, you’ve got everyone else. Child’s Play, thanks in no small part to Penny Arcade’s massive following, casts a large shadow. It’s hard to know to whom to give or what to do if you’d like to help out outside their specific organization. Last October, the game journos at Rebel FM recorded a special podcast to inform listeners about the Children’s Miracle Network. After the earthquake in Haiti, Microsoft promised to donate relief funds if enough people logged on for a session of Halo 3: ODST (my compatriot Rob and I did our part – and got slaughtered by the Covenant). Both are excellent examples of gamers banding together to make a difference, but it’s easy to miss announcements of these causes amidst the persistent blogroll of studio closures, press releases, and well-endowed figurines.

OneBigGame is one such charitable organization I feel deserves more attention. Founded in 2006 by Martin de Ronde and others, this non-profit publisher “seeks to raise money to solve problems afflicting children everywhere, by creating videogames through a collaborative industry-wide effort.” It’s motto: “Play, so others can.” To execute its mission, OneBigGame publishes games and then donates sizable portions of the proceeds to charity.

They released their first publication a few weeks ago. Chime, developed by British studio Zoë Mode, is a music-based puzzler available via the Xbox Live Arcade service. Players who purchase the game can rest assured that at least 60% of the measly five-dollar price tag goes to a good cause. Your “donation” even earns you a hefty Achievement! Just buying the game should make you feel all warm and fuzzy. But is playing it any fun?

Hell yeah.

It’s hard not to see the imprints of puzzle games past in Chime’s excellent gameplay. Players place shapes (which are reminiscent of Tetris) on a grid (similar to that of Lumines) in order to score points and amass coverage (in a fashion akin to Qix or Jezzball). Shapes fit together to form quads, which clear whenever they’re struck by the constantly-moving beat line (back to Lumines). Forming successive quads increases your multiplier, and that scores you more points. Quads also contribute to your overall coverage of a level. In timed mode, increased coverage means more time to play, and covering 100% of the level serves up a healthy point bonus and clears the grid so you can start anew. While the puzzle aspect is certainly a unique evolution of tried-and-true ideas, Chime’s real hook is its integration of music into gameplay. Zoë Mode’s resume includes more than a few music games, including Guitar Hero song packs, so they have plenty of experience chopping up master tracks and assigning the bits to in-game actions. You won’t be pressing orange and green buttons along with guitar riffs, however. The music is generated vertically in a way, as opposed to simply moving forward through a prerecorded track. Pieces placed on the grid generate notes, with location affecting pitch. When quads are formed, they cause musical phrases to bubble up out of the ether. As you cover more and more of the level, more and more of the song plays.

Of course, not every song is suited for the Chime treatment. Wisely, Zoë Mode only included tracks that seem to benefit by being broken down and reassembled. Moby, Lemon Jelly, Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, Markus Schulz, and Philip Glass all provided songs gratis for the game. The first four artists are all DJs, purveyors of various subsets of electronic music. And I’m not surprised that electronica works wonders in Chime. The individual loops and samples, whether they are ambient squeaks and beeps or the robotic voice in Moby’s “Ooh, Yeah,” do not need to be experienced linearly. There is a constant beat, of course; it’s not as if you’re creating the song wholly from scratch. But much of this genre is about gradual increases in complexity – a perfect aural parallel to Chime’s entrancing gameplay.

In rereading that last paragraph, you may notice the name Philip Glass. Yes, the composer did lend his track “Brazil” to the game. At first, I was skeptical, but it’s actually my favorite of the five songs available. His repetitive, minimalist style fits the game perfectly. A constant percussion phrase underscores most of the level, while quads summon everything from sighing strings to dancing flutes. If you need any more convincing that Glass is perfect gaming music (or you need a more succinct explanation of Chime), watch this video:

You should play Chime. I can’t stress that enough. Play it for charity. Play it to challenge yourself in timed mode or to relax in free mode. Play it because it splices that sense of accomplishment puzzle-solving provides with the particular pleasure that comes with creating music. Play it, so others can.

Why Are We Watching This Again?

2010-03-04T14:44:00.010-05:00

As you loyal ChargeShot!!! readers may have noticed, it's Oscar season. And with Oscar season comes the inevitable scramble to watch the movies that you've heard the critics rave about since Sundance 2009, but whose limited theatrical run and low marketing budget mean that they've somehow slipped under the radar.

Us ChargeShot!!! writers have been comparing notes as to how many of the Best Picture nominees we've managed to see (yours truly is at 10 out of 10, though many of my co-bloggers have wisely skipped Precious and The Blind Side). We're all a bunch of huge nerds, but even outside the blogosphere the rest of the world is finally getting around to watching The Hurt Locker before the big event Sunday at 8 pm Eastern.

I don't think this is an isolated ritual. Last year, my roommate and I tried three different times to go see The Reader in theaters, and all three times the film was completely sold out. The Reader is not a good movie, nor is it a movie that you would think would attract such a wide audience. But, once a film earns one of those coveted Best Picture Nomination slots, millions of Americans feel compelled to watch movies that they normally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole (I watched The Blind Side, for God's sake).

Why do we do this? On one hand, I feel it's a good thing. There are plenty movies out there that deserve a wider audience, movies that the studios don't do anything to support until they start racking up the awards and nominations. Last year's Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire was originally slated to be released as a direct-to-DVD bargain bin title; after earning a bajillion awards, it went on to gross $141 million dollars domestically, and another $230 million worldwide - not a bad haul for what amounts to a foreign language film, something that is usually anathema in this country. But it's a movie with a feel-good ending and a large amount of popular appeal - yet didn't stand to make any money until it's Best Picture nomination.

On the other hand, there's the danger that Americans will let the critics and the Academy make their movie choices for them. How to explain the fact that Crash, a subpar movie even by the kindest of standards, has been the number one rented movie from Netflix for over a year now? Shouldn't the American populace be actively searching for good movies to watch, and not just blankly accepting the Academy's choices for the ~~five~~ ten best movies of the year?

So I'm torn. I appreciate that Oscar nominations have led me to view good movies that I might have never looked twice at otherwise. But for every Michael Clayton, there's a Precious or The Reader that I'm compelled to go see to stay up-to-date on the Oscar race, even though I couldn't care two shits about the film at all. There's hidden cinematic gems, but sometimes I feel the Academy is just fucking with me (again, Blind Side, I'm looking at you).

Really, if you want to start digging for unknown masterpieces, the best place to start is not the Best Picture nominations (which are almost always of a populist bent), but rather in some of the more obscure categories. These are the ones that even the hardcore movie fans who pester you to enter their Oscar pool might not have seen.

My personal favorites are the two Best Screenplay categories. Yes, there's movies like Up in the Air and Inglourious Basterds, both high-grossing success stories that you've probably heard of. But there's also In the Loop, the best black comedy I've seen in a long time. The movie juggles nearly a dozen memorable characters involved in a farcical political drama that functions as a satire not only of the Iraq War, but of politicians in general. It's smart, it's funny, it's relevant...it made less than $3 million dollars, and was ignored in all the other categories. But it's worth your time, and is not only a better movie than Precious, but could hold its own against An Education.

Similarly, The Messenger is another movie that entered the awards season with virtually no fanfare, ratcheting an eclectic pair of Oscar nominations for Original Screenplay and Supporting Actor. It's a smart drama about the Iraq War that's set in the present day United States, following a pair of soldiers who are assigned to responsibility of informing families that their loved ones have been killed in the line of duty. It manages to take the difficult stance of being critical of the war without being preachy, and respectful of the soldiers without being overtly aggressive or jingoistic. It's not a perfect movie, but I'm glad I got a chance to see it, and it's not one that I would have ended up watching if it hadn't been nominated for anything.

There's plenty of good movies that are buried in the more obscure Oscar categories that are worth checking out. So next time you can't get your hands on the Best Picture nominees, check out some of the other films up for an award. If nothing else, they're they're something different, and it might just give you a slight edge in the next Oscar pool.

Book Review: P.F. Kluge – Gone Tomorrow

2010-03-04T07:30:00.001-05:00

In the fall of 2005, Robert and I had an Intro to Fiction Writing seminar with P.F. Kluge. Since I was having Girl Problems, I wrote an awful story about an awful depressed caricature of myself, one of about a dozen such stories that the class produced. Rob’s was about a guy who tries to steal someone’s heart – literally! None of it was great literature, and most of it could be described succinctly as poor.

My point is, this is the rare Charge Shot!!! book review you’re going to read where the reviewer actually knows the author personally.

Were I a more vindictive soul, this write-up would be an eviscerating account of every typo and misplaced comma in the book along with detailed descriptions of passages which I marked as AWK in bright red pen. Kluge would be happy enough to take his gentleman’s B and shamble back to the dorm for some appropriately light Monday night drinking.

I must admit, however grudgingly, that Kluge’s book merits a better treatment than did my sub-par excuse for a short story. How much better remains to be seen.

Gone Tomorrow is about the last year of a man’s life, but what it’s really about is writing. Protagonist George Canaris is the longtime writer-in-residence at a small, nameless liberal arts college in Nowhere, Ohio, but before that he was an up-and-coming author of some renown. Canaris has been working on his next book since before he took his position at the college more than thirty years previously, and it his war with this manuscript that commands most of Tomorrow’s attention.

Kluge’s books are normally populated by writers and academics, though the setting is not always the Small-Liberal-Arts-College-In-Ohio which serves as the backdrop for a disproportionate number of them. What’s present here that’s not in Biggest Elvis or Final Exam is a preoccupation with writing itself – with the ebbs and flows of the creative process, the worries and pressures and expectations with which any writer must deal.

Herein lies my biggest gripe with Gone Tomorrow, namely that Kluge is incapable of distancing himself from his narrative. Every time Kluge-as-Canaris gripes about the use of flashbacks or tries to explain to his students the difference between writing what you know and drawing from what you know to write something interesting, one can sense Kluge-as-Kluge turning to his audience and winking broadly at them above the rim of his scotch tumbler.

This is rarely anything worse than distracting, but it does break that all-important sense of immersion that we sometimes discuss here – too often, you can see the wheels turning in Kluge’s head instead of Canaris’, which is to the story’s detriment.

That said, Kluge is a seasoned and capable writer in the midst of a very productive late-career resurgence, and Gone Tomorrow is nothing if not engaging. The bulk of the story shifts temporally between Then (detailing Canaris’ arrival at the college, his struggles with his manuscript and his romantic encounters) and Now (detailing Canaris’ last year at a college which has abandoned him in favor of new blood) with alacrity, weaving together to create two stories that complement each other nicely. The pace Kluge sets is brisk and sustained, and the book fairly breezes by.

Also excellent is Kluge’s ability to create a sense of place, not just of the Small-Liberal-Arts-College-In-Ohio but of Germany and New York and the other places the story visits on its way to closure. Some authors feel the need to describe every brick, spire, tree and colonnade, but Kluge can do the same thing with a few paragraphs and a well-placed simile. This, along with his characters’ natural, uncontrived dialogue, is one of his greatest strengths as a writer.

Questions and loose ends do fall by the wayside – the book opens with Canaris’ untimely death at the hands of a rogue motorist, and the early and middle parts of the story hint at a menacing presence shadowing Canaris during his last year. This thread is dropped toward the end of the book, though, and by the time we get back to Canaris’ death at the end it is not only unclear who killed Canaris, but it is unclear that the killer’s identity is of any real consequence to the story. A frame narrative links Gone Tomorrow to the Small-Liberal-Arts-College-In-Ohio featured in 2005’s Final Exam and divulges the ultimate fate of Canaris’ life’s work, but otherwise is not at the same level as the rest of the book.

Gone Tomorrow succeeds in spite of its flaws, which are few and minor despite the amount of time this write-up spends on them. If you’ve read Kluge before, this is a strong entry in his canon. If not, it’s a good place to start, and you’ll find plenty to appreciate.

In short, as a certain fiction writing seminar taught me not to say, “I liked it.”

Oscar-Shot!!! 2010 (Part 3 of 3) (THIS DA REMIX FEAT. A-PIZZY AKA PANKIN)

2010-03-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my fellow blogger, Andrew Pankin, for guest-reviewing The Blind Side and Precious, which I didn't have time to see before this post. The ProgOSCARcators, if you're wondering, are still authored by yours truly. Unfortunately, I don't need to actually see the movies to predict whether they'll win.

PANKIN, DO YO THANG.

The Blind Side, dir. John Lee Hancock

The Blind Side is based on Michael Lewis’s 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. We follow our hero, real-life Baltimore Ravens star Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) through every step of his football-playing career, starting his introduction to the game in high school and ending with his 1st round selection in the 2009 NFL Draft. (This last part is archival footage, naturally.) During his journey, he overcomes such hurdles as a violent upbringing, utter destitution, and racial prejudice (some of those referees were just plain unfair to him!).

Our hero’s main advocate is real-life philanthropist/interior decorator Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), whose infinite store of kindness and generosity is exceeded only by her undepletable checkbook. In a heartwarming display of "Christian Values", she takes Oher into her lavishly impressive home, legally adopts him since his real family is out of the picture, and sets him up to play football for her alma mater, Ole Miss. Oher gains a family, a career, and economic stability, while the Tuohys (and the viewers) all learn a valuable lesson about the power of love.

In addition to chronicling Michael Oher’s personal and professional trials and tribulations, the film addresses the issue of “boosters” – rich alumni of prestigious athletic-centered colleges who adopt talented yet underprivileged youths, then use their connections and influence to fast-track them into their alma maters. As far as real life issues, though, it’s pretty light weight, and it doesn’t help that they portrayed the woman investigating Oher’s case as a bit of a moustache-twirling villain.

All those warmed hearts and tear-soaked hankys aside, the main buzz around this film is and always has been Sandra Bullock’s performance, the only other Oscar for which the film was nom’d. She pulled out all the stops in a pretty convincing attempt to show that she’s aged gracefully (at least talent-wise) and that she’s ready to take the next step in her already successful career. But while Bullock putting her surprising level of acting chops on display might make for a fun story and perhaps a lower-tier award (if she can beat out the old favorites), one decent performance does not a Best Picture make.

ProgOSCARcator says:

This is a prole-ish selection, even for the Academy. I see this nod as a cynical move to attract a larger audience for the telecast and perhaps the clearest example of why the field was widened to 10. But populist nominations do not automatically indicate populist winners. This ain't gon' happen. 0%.

AIGHT PANKIN, KEEP IT GOIN'.

Precious: Based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire, dir. Lee Daniels

Nothing seems to go right for Clareece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) in this brutal tale of adversity. The movie starts with her hazy recollection of getting raped by her own father. Her mother (Mo’Nique) constantly hurls physical and emotional abuse at her. She can barely read, write, or do ‘rithmetic, and at age 16, she’s pregnant with her second incest-baby without having yet graduated from junior high school.

Shortly into the film, to the relief of the audience, Precious (the character) starts connecting with some positive influences. She finds compassion in Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), a benevolent and committed social worker. She enrolls in a special school, called “Each One Teach One” (try to say that one five times fast), where she makes friends and receives guidance from her lesbian teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton). And she gets advice from an enigmatically wise and attractive hospital nurse (Lenny Kravitz).

But just when she finally gets herself and her two kids (one of whom has Down Syndrome) away from her horrific mother and into a halfway house, it’s revealed that Precious has HIV. Man, she just can’t catch a break! Then, out of nowhere, her mother shows up for an emotional attempt to reconcile with Precious, in a tour de force this-will-instantly-make-my-

character-sympathetic speech from Mo’Nique, which earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination. But Precious stays strong and walks out of the welfare office with her head held high… along with two children, no way to support them or herself, and no prospects in general.

What an encouraging story of overcoming… what, exactly? It seems to me that she’s out of the frying pan and into another larger, slightly less hot frying pan. But the Academy thought it was well acted (two acting noms), well organized (Best Director), well written (Best Adapted Screenplay) and well put together (Best Editing), handing the film six nominations in all. To me, though, it was just a rags-to-also-rags story punctuated by some weird fantasy sequences with absolutely no moral at the end.

ProgOSCARcator says:

In some ways, even a five-nominee Best Picture category was too much: there were always one or two movies that had no chance of winning. So widening the field to ten only increases the number of movies that it's not going to happen for.

Early on, though, Precious seemed to have the same kind of multicultural cachet that propelled Crash and Slumdog Millionaire to the top honors. But somehow, the buzz behind everything except for Mo'Nique's performance died down considerably over the course of the year. Producers Tyler Perry and Oprah should be happy they got a nod, but they shouldn't be waiting on a winner. Survey says: 2%.

YO THANKS PANKIN, IMMA TAKE IT FROM HERE

District 9, dir. Neil Blomkamp

Gah, this movie made me uncomfortable. Fellow Charge-Shooter Alex Boivin once referred to District 9 as "genre," and, ostensibly, he meant "sci-fi." But, for the first half of this thing, I couldn't figure out what the hell he was talking about. Unless of course by genre he meant "body horror" (a genre pioneered by David Cronenberg in movies like The Fly), which I could understand completely.

The premise is patently "sci-fi," though: an alien ship has been stalled over Johannesburg, South Africa for twenty years. But when cowardly bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley, magnificent in his first role) gets sprayed with an unidentified liquid that begins to transform him into one of the aliens he's trying to evict from their refugee camp, I started to get "body horror" sick to my stomach. The thing he (spoiler alert) eventually transforms into is hideous (the humans accurately refer to the aliens as "prawns", after the giant crickets that roam the South African plains), as is his transformation (vomiting black blood, various suppurating alien orifices). And the metamorphosis is made all the more unnerving by director Neil Blomkamp's effective use of documentary technique: Wikus really does seem like a normal (if detestably simple-minded) dude. So the "this could happen to me" feeling becomes all the more palpable. That's what "body horror" is all about: the real terror is inside you. Commence feeling of willies.

But the second half of District 9, alas, evinced my colleague's generic dismissal. The movie degenerates into an admittedly entertaining series of chases and mech battles (Pankin pointed out that two of the ten Best Picture nominees actually end with mech battles), and Blomkamp largely tosses aside the documentary trappings. So if the director came up with an inventive premise, he couldn't quite come through with an inventive movie. Oh well. The bits about xenophobia and racism (the title is a nod to Johannesburg's infamous Apartheid-era District 6), along with the aforementioned creepy-crawlies were intriguing enough to elevate the movie to "very good," if not quite "great."

ProgOSCARcator says:

I admire the Academy for striking out in new directions. Sci-fi (and, in the end, this is decidedly sci-fi) is not typically a genre that gets much love from Oscar (even Steven Spielberg wasn't enough to get Minority Report a nod), and this is definitely a movie that wouldn't have gotten a nod in a five-high category. But progressive nominations precede progressive winners, and it'll be a few more years before sci-fi takes the prize. Plus (and this has nothing to do with the film's chances), it doesn't deserve to win. 0%.

An Education, dir. Lone Scherfig

When I mentioned to a friend that An Education had an unsatisfying third act, he replied simply, "Yeah, third acts are hard." Simply put, but totally on-point: the vast majority of films falter when they need to wrap things up: Office Space was pretty wonderful, but you could tell Mike Judge was more interested in his premse than resolving his story. Ditto for Wet Hot American Summer and about a billion other movies.

Ditto for An Education. The premise, the mood, the performances? All wonderful. Carey Mulligan truly earns her Oscar nomination (and would earn her victory if she could take it away from Miss Congeniality) as impressionistic British schoolgirl Jenny Miller. Her penchant for dropping bits of French into conversation is charming, yes, but also slightly obnoxious. Everyone's praised Mulligan's Audrey Hepburn-esque charm, but her ability to come off as a self-conscious clone of her is perhaps more impressive.

And the story has the anthemic sweep that every good bildungsroman needs: director Lone Scherfig most certainly makes us feel the nauseous excitement of growing up fast, of being put in situations you've never seen before and going for it. His shots of 1960's London and Paris are certainly evocative.

The one who takes her into this new world (an excellent Peter Sarsgaard) also walks a fine line between two contradictory personality traits. This time, though, it's charming and creepy. Art thief and blockbuster David Goldman says all the right things, goes to all the right places, and manages to charm Jenny out of her knickers against her better judgment. So when Jenny (spoiler alert) discovers that Goldman actually has a wife and child, her outrage stems more from disappointment than surprise. He's still a con artist; she's just a bigger target.

Don't worry: it all works out for Jenny. She manages to go back to her all girls' secondary school, despite skipping her A-levels (some weird British test that probably inspired OWLs from Harry Potter), and she eventually ends up at Oxford. The ugly Jewish stereotype has had no significant effect on this girl's life, and everything ends up neat and tidy.

You can tell I'm slightly frustrated. I just wanted more. More angst, more unhealthy relationship recidivism, more indication that this young girl has gone through a seriously traumatic experience. Maybe Scherfig didn't want to punish the girl for her transgressions. Or maybe he didn't want to entirely sacrifice the breezy air of the first part of the film. Either way, I wanted more. A Scorsese-esque (not including all the coke 'n guns, of course) shift from fun to menacing would have been nice. Because, as it is, the film didn't stick with me.

ProgOSCARcator says:

Definitely more likely than District 9, but nobody has really considered this thing seriously other than in the context of Carey Mulligan's performance. I'll say 3%.

Avatar, dir. James Cameron

I'll be brief on this one, considering that I've already spoken at length about the HMFIC's record-breaking opus.

The film has its haters, and though I wouldn't call myself one of them, I'm certainly willing to concede its weaknesses. The plot's a Pocahontas/Dances with Wolves rip, the male lead is none too memorable, and I don't remember being wowed by the Coen-esque wit of the dialogue.

But it's so pretty! Honestly, two months after seeing the movie, I still remember my trip to Pandora fondly. And the whole thing really did feel more like a safari than a regular ol' trip to the movies.

A safari's not actually a bad way to think about Avatar: you see some pretty fantastic stuff while you're there, but it all feels a bit shallow. You wish you could see how the place really worked, rather than the just the carefully-planned show your tour guide reveals. But it was a pretty show.

ProgOSCARcator says:

I'm probably just being contrarian, but I've got a bad feeling about Avatar's chances. Yeah, it won a Golden Globe, but flippin' Bobby got a nomination from those jokers.

What I think is going to keep Avatar from taking top honors: there are just too many actors in the Academy, and actors don't seem to like their computer-generated counterparts. Plus, nominees that don't get Screenplay nods are unlikely to take Best Picture. The last one to do it? Titanic. Nevertheless, I'm gonna give Avatar a mere 22% chance of taking the prize. Which means the last one has gotta be my pick...

The Hurt Locker, dir. Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow's two-hour-knee-to-the-ribs instantly entered my canon of "most unsettling films I've ever seen" when I saw it at a Manhattan theater in July. I was visiting a friend in the East Village, and rain forced our plans indoors. I, being an indoor kid anyway, didn't really mind this. We decided that we'd see a movie, and the choice ended up being, hilariously enough, between The Hurt Locker and Ponyo. Oh, if only I'd picked Ponyo.

The Hurt Locker follows Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), the head of a bomb disposal group in Iraq, as he is sent from place to place in Baghdad and the surrounding area to disarm IEDs (improvised explosive devices). And that's about it. Bigelow gives us no larger plot arc to follow: it's just Sergeant James, again and again, trying not to die. He makes a brief sidetrip to look for a missing Iraqi youth, but even that ends up being subsumed by his job description.

And that lack of anything overarching fucks with you in ways you wouldn't expect. We can't even key into the hero's larger quest if the tension threatens to overwhelm us. We just bite our nails until he disarms the bomb, let out a sigh of relief, and do it again. And again.

It's exhausting and absurd, and, at least from a filmmaking perspective, magnificent. This is one of those rare films that is so effective that you'll never want to see it again. It is truly without precedent in the history of war films. Even Apocalypse Now, a film that I'll probably never see again by choice, had a purpose. This didn't have shit. And, worst of all, it's probably a cake walk compared to the real thing. Gah.

ProgOSCARcator says:

This is my pick. It'd be the first ever win for a film directed by a woman* (and, if she took Best Director, she'd be the first woman to win that trophy), and it's the only nominee that has drawn truly universal praise (a staggering 94 on Metacritic). And, happily enough, it's also the best film of the year. I'll give it the edge and a 30%.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you (in spirit) on Sunday night!

*And yes, I know Best Picture goes to producers. But it's still a triumph. Plus, she's a producer!

Farewell, Rose-Tinted Past: Howie Day Is Not, And Perhaps Never Was, Good

2010-03-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

I think I have pretty okay taste in music. Bands like Okkervil River, Sun Kil Moon and Fleet Foxes all get high marks from indie tastemakers/pompous assholes Pitchfork.com. I will voice, out loud and otherwise, my admiration of said bands. In public.

That said, I listened to some pretty shitty music when I was a sixteen.

I suppose that’s true for everyone. Even Andrew, who recently stoked his love for an adolescent classic (Live’s Throwing Copper) admitted that the rest of their discography was rubbish. We were young, overwhelmed by chemicals we could barely pronounce and vulnerable to such sing-alongy stuff as Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.”

But I’ll defend “Semi-Charmed Life.” I love that song. And I love that album, one of my first.

I have no defense for Howie Day.

Maybe because Day himself is indefensible – he’s a lout and an addict. He dated Brittney Spears, which allegedly ended in a drug-strewn hotel room. And his music sucks. His last two albums, Stop All The World Now (2003) and Sound The Alarm (2009) are…Jesus, why am I even typing this? It’s like writing a straight-faced assessment of the Big-Mac you (guiltily) ate for lunch. His music is terrible. Of course it’s terrible. It’s a consortium of sounds and words maximized for whatever meager profit it can achieve. It’s some suit at Epic records crunching numbers and concluding that the jackass who wrote “Collide” might be good for a few more bucks.

This is Day’s biggest betrayal. When he released Australia in 2000, he had integrity. Maybe even a little talent. He sold low, cashed in and crashed out, scattering anything redeemable to the winds.

But let’s go back to 2001 and give Day the benefit of the doubt, if only for a few paragraphs. I was 16, emotional, obsessed with Dune and (inexplicably) enraptured by Toto’s “Africa.”

Digression: my early interest in “Africa” probably says more than I’d like it to. Extrapolate at will.

Napster was in its prime, and I spent hours trolling the database for live and/or alternate versions of “Africa.” After I’d tapped a 10-minute Johannesburg rendition of all worth, I downloaded “Africa (cover)” by Howie Day.

It was the kind of live recording you scoop up from an artist’s early career, with plenty of disinterested bar talk filling the lulls, the constant chiming empty glasses and nervous stage banter. No confidence. No inspiration. Just a guy on a stage strumming out a cover. But his voice. Day sang beyond his range, making amps cringe with feedback. But he sang from the bottom of his lungs, dumping his soul into Toto’s perfectly idiotic ditty.

We can safely assume there was a soul. Day had just released Australia on Daze Records, a small imprint that presumably went extinct before Wikipedia rolled around. He had a cozy, intimate website on which he posted jokey missives from the road (which, come to think of it, was pretty precocious of him). He wrote songs like “She Says” that, while being kind of dunderheaded, were also kind of honest, cutting and fresh. The chorus goes: “And when she says she wants someone to love, I hope you know / that she doesn’t mean you.”

Not Petrarch, but almost smart. Elegant, even. And it was just Day with his guitar, strumming in a doubtlessly shabby studio.

Australia was good for heatbreak songs, and being an emotional 16-year-old, I was more than primed. Some, like “Morning After,” seem silly in retrospect (sample lyric: “You drive to Europe in the rain, your hair’s done up / no one’s gonna see it / well maybe you should drive me home”), but others, like “Ghost,” still have a hold on me. Try the song’s last verse:

standing in your shoes
i turn and now
you’re standing bare in my doorway
i only wish that i had been prepared
i’m gonna have to go along with your way
just take the plastic camera out
it’s the pants you borrowed in the driveway
alive from the first
now i’m denied by the ghost of you

Honestly? Not bad. It’s half-raw and half-contrived – the kind of thing you might hear at slam poetry night and nod approvingly. Again, it’s just Day and the guitar (and a drum machine, presumably added to squeak the song onto Adult Contemporary playlists. It was Australia’s second single, after “Sorry So Sorry.” It got a video. Neither song charted).

Like any indie troubadour, Day toured his ass off, promoting his album and hoping to snag some major-label attention. Along the way, he established a reputation for delivering the kind of quirky live act you’d see out of curiosity. While introducing his songs, Day constantly invented different inspirations and origin stories. He’d change lyrics on the fly. He’d lie to an audience with a straight face – but that face was more clownish than pretentious, an intense coffeehouse expression contrasting with a nuclear blowdry-job. The audience felt in on the joke, and laughed when Day explained a song like “Lick My Lips” by saying he’d fused his lips to a stop sign during the winter, and tried to coax a neighborhood dog into licking them unstuck.

He wasn’t bad with looping, either. Day spent his songs layering acoustic strumming upon guitar-thumping upon bass licks, impressing audiences (who perhaps didn’t know better, but let’s not be elitist).

So once upon a time, Howie Day was a human being. He cared about his music enough to risk his neck for it, just like any other jerk with a guitar and a dream. And then Stop All The World Now happened. Or more specifically, “Collide.”

Honestly, the less said about Stop All The World Now, the better. It’s exactly what you’d fear it would be: a singer-songwriter swallowed by the corporate music machine, ground up with fake strings, session musicians and single-ready tracks, and spit out for mass consumption. The album scored low with critics, who saw through Epic’s plasticy production and found something utterly without pulse. But then “Collide” snuck onto the soundtrack for an episode of “One Tree Hill.”

It peaked at 20 on Billboard’s Top 100 – a career best for Day. It got play on every schlock TV show from Gray’s Anatomy to Scrubs to Ghost Whisperer to ER. And it is a complete, unqualified piece of shit. Listen to it. Listen and tell me there’s a second of merit, artistic or otherwise, in the canned strings, the trite lyrics (also, face-clawingly boring) or the breezy do-do-do-do that stands instead of a chorus. And there’s the bridge, where the orchestra dwindles to a single guitar, and Day yawls:

Don't stop here

I've lost my place

I'm close behind

…before the strings strike up again, and we’re back to do-do-do-do. There’s schlock, and there’s this.

It made his career. Of course it did. I’m sure it was the soundtrack for a million drunken hookups, a million backseat make-out sessions and a million waiting rooms. Tragically, fame wrecked Howie Day. In 2005, Day was arrested for verbally abusing attendants aboard a flight to Boston. Apparently, the fame-flushed 24-year-old got a little rowdy after mixing a few cocktails with a sleeping pill. Instead of knocking him out, the combination turned Day into an antsy 5-year-old. He heckled the attendants, kicked the seat in front of him and smoked in the bathroom.

A year earlier, he had locked one woman in the bathroom of his tour bus and destroyed the cell phone of another. The reason? He came on to them and they said no. He was arrested for destroying the phone. This is how he explained himself to police, according to USA Today: “That was probably wrong of me. But I felt violated.”

And then Britney. He met her in rehab. Her mother reportedly disapproved of the relationship (how could she? Did she listen to “Collide?” Even the best fall down sometimes, dear). Britney’s bodyguard said he found the starlet sobbing in a room littered with drugs and half-eaten food. Day was asleep on the bed.

Imagine the scene once more. Now subtract Britney; and Howie Day is dead. Would you be surprised? Would anyone be shocked that a once-earnest troubadour sold out, got high and got dead in a hotel room?

I’m depressed just writing this. For Day’s sake, I hope he quits music, cleans up and lives quietly off his ill-earned “Collide” royalties. Sound The Alarm certainly doesn’t make a case for his career. It isn’t even good enough to merit description.

You’ve already sold out, Howie. Cash in and get out before you make someone write your obituary.

Blasts from the Pasts: Myst!

2010-03-02T16:32:00.000-05:00

So I was watching "Lost" last week, and at the point when Jack and Hurley arrive at an impressive stone lighthouse, someone remarked, "That lighthouse looks a lot like the game Myst." Wow... Myst! Now there's a game I used to be obsessed with that I haven't thought about in years. And, yeah, that does kind of look like the lighthouse from the Stoneship Age. Maybe I'll pop in my copy of the game (it is for Mac OS, after all) and relive some of my young-adult memories.

But, alas! It seems that "the Classic environment is no longer supported" on my newfangled Intel-powered MacBook. So I dug out my family's extra old black, clunky PowerBook G3, switched out the floppy drive for the CD-ROM drive, and Bam! I was back in the world of Myst I loved so well.

"The moment I fell into the fissure, I realized the book would not be destroyed as I had planned." Hearing that famous opening voice over sure brought me back. I clicked on the mysterious book lying there, and was immediately transported to the deserted island landscape. Who knew that 256 colors could shine so brightly? It doesn't matter that the picture didn't fill up my entire monitor or that you could see every pixel clearly. The amazing art direction (level design, textures, music, sound) provides a sense of ambiance that few games nowadays can reach, let alone surpass.

At about this time, my girlfriend turned to me and asked, "So, is this just a slideshow? Does anything happen in this game?" I tried to explain to her: "Yes, of course things happen! It's a big puzzle. You move through the environment, but you can only do it one frame at a time, cuz the game's only 3 MB. Clicking once moves you one step forward. See? Then you can turn left and right, or look up and down (sometimes). And you can click on objects to interact with them. See? If I click here, I can alter the path that the steam power takes through the pipes to send power to the...."

She had already turned back to her computer, totally unimpressed. I guess the magic is just lost on some.

But I can recall when I once had a similar reaction to the game. I remember when I first picked up Myst, way back in 1993, I had no idea what I was doing and quickly grew bored of the whole endeavor. These are some pretty cool pictures, my eight-year-old self thought, but I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. Then, by totally random chance, I unlocked access to the above-mentioned Stoneship Age. Out of the eight possible glyphs surrounding the fountain, I happened to click on the correct three of them, which caused the sunken ship to raise from the water, revealing the link book...

But enough. I can already feel your eyes glazing over. The point is, once I realized there were hidden secrets above and beyond (or below) the relatively small overworld, I immediately purchased a strategy guide and let myself be led through this amazing feat of imagination.

There is something to be said against a game that requires the use of a strategy guide for its completion, regardless of how breathtaking the visual style may be. I say "requires" even though all the clues for the completion of the puzzles are right at your fingertips. It's just that it would require a near superhuman combination of insight, observation, and patience to figure them all out. Let's just say that I've yet to meet or hear about anyone who has gotten through the game without some kind of assistance.

As far as story is concerned, the player only gets snippets and hints from various journals and embedded quicktime videos throughout the game. You learn about Atrus and his two wicked sons and his missing wife. And then, to top it off, there's not even really a proper ending! It's as if the co-creators, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, knew their game would be successful enough to warrant a sequel... or if it totally tanked, no one would care about the lack of closure. Fortunately for them, the former turned out to be the case: to date, there have been four sequels, numerous book adaptations, and an MMO based on the game.

The story really takes off in the first sequel, Riven. This was a five-CD behemoth, also for the Classic environment, that takes you to another fantastical world (the aptly titled Riven) and fills you in on most of the backstory you need to know. The denouement is so complete that the start of the next game, Myst III: Exile seems forced and out of place. I haven't played 4 or 5, and to this day continue to ask myself why not.

But why split hairs about the current state of the franchise when what I'm really after is a little nostalgia? The original Myst remains untarnished in my memory. And now, additionally, thanks to my family's pack-rat tendencies, it remains untarnished on my hopelessly outdated laptop's monitor. Granted, this style of game isn't going to hold the attention of everyone - it's essentially one big elaborate beautifully illustrated puzzle - but those who succumb to its charms never forget the wonderful sense of magic and mystery.

24 in 24 Words: Day 8, Hour 10

2010-03-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

Episode 10 - “1:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m.”

Spoilers after the jump (I guess)!

Cherry Jones is one badass president. Operation Weekend At Bernie’s goes awry. Aladdin and Jasmine engage in tantric boning. Starbuck’s still on this show?

You can catch up on our concise 24 coverage here. Did we miss something? Leave it in the comments!

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – Polish Players and French Children

2010-03-02T07:40:00.000-05:00

I can’t find a clear connection between Polish indie rock and French children’s choirs singing spirituals. I just can’t. The indie rock is simultaneously spare and sprawling. The spiritual is dense and bouncy. Maybe I’ll just give up and brief you on each act.

Plug and Play (who I hope took their name from computing) have been around since 2007. Babel Fish refuses to translate Polish to English, so I can’t really glean any information from their MySpace page. Allow me to say upfront that later in this post I’ll refer to their drummer as a “he.” I don’t want to offend anyone, but I can’t confirm that “gary” is Polish for drums (I hope it is) or if Maciek is a guy’s name or not. Let’s just move on.

A surprise entry this week is Les Petits Chanteurs de Montigny. They are a children’s choir from France, if you couldn’t guess. And they hail from Montigny les Metz, a suburb of Metz, the city over which the first international space handshake took place. And they’ve recorded a spiritual. Why? No clue.

The Songs

“Enemy” secures Plug and Play as a descendant of Joy Division and their various offspring like The Cure. The somewhat disaffected vocals mutely deliver lyrics that forebode a deep emotional undercurrent. Something about lovers. Something about enemies. It’s very guarded in its melancholy. Suburban Goths could definitely rally around this – and by rally I mean loiter apathetically outside of Hot Topic. Gentle mocking aside, the ride’s plenty engaging. There’s great interplay between the song’s pace and the rolling slopes of the track. In the second verse, the track dips into brief valleys during the bars between lyrics. In a later passage, there’s a subtle shift each time the drums step forward. In my year+ playing Audiosurf, I’ve yet to figure out all of the track-building algorithm’s tricks, but I’m guessing that the spaciousness in the verses contributes to a stronger relationship between the song and the ride. When there’s less for it to pull from, the correlation between the individual elements feels stronger. That’s not saying there aren’t where this back-and-forth takes a back seat to traffic-heavy downhill slopes; there are. But they aren’t what sets this ride apart.

“Stop Me” proves that Plug and Play’s drummer is more than just a timekeeper. Initially, he lets the song press forward blandly on a relentless quarter-note pulse, before unexpectedly shoving it into double time. The lengthy instrumental break in the middle has him relaxing the beat a bit, riding his cymbals a bit more and easing up on some of the song’s urgency. He then reverses his way to the end, starting with the double time and concluding with the quarter-note drive. It’s nothing fancy but suggests more than just competence and felt worth mentioning. Vocally, the lead continues in the subdued-yet-emotional near-monotone, while sometimes another vocalist yells the same lyrics in the background. The song appears to be about a breakup, and the backup shouting almost sounds like an inner monologue. The id screaming underneath the cool, wounded exterior. I could be reading way too much into this. Maybe they just didn’t know how else to support their hard-edge guitars and double-time drums. But if it so happens that you’re a psych student looking for any opportunity whatsoever to apply stuff you’ve learned in class, I suggest you play this song.

“Go Tell It On The Mountain” is a spiritual. You’ve probably heard it before. You may have even sung it before. I know I have. But I’ve never sung it (or heard it, for that matter) with a thick French accent. Be prepared to do some syllable-deciphering. When the kids sing “Jesus Christ is born,” it kind of sounds like they’re saying “Jesus is a boy,” as if there were any doubt. Just because this is a choral song with no instrumental accompaniment does not mean it’s an easy ride. The spare traffic coupled with an intense track speed and vicious hills makes achieving a high score quite difficult. (Pro Tip: yellow blocks rarely appear, so netting a few will ensure you the Butter Ninja score bonus.) I’ve loved riding choral music since I first discovered Audiosurf, playing it on college choir tour. Don’t expect a driving beat or a rich panoply of electronic bells and whistles. Enjoy the dulcet tones and hold on to your butts because the rides are windy and more difficult than you think.

Author’s Note

All songs were played at least twice on the Pro difficulty using the Eraser and Vegas characters.

Anyone interested in a little Internet religion-griping should check out the comments on “Go Tell It On The Mountain.” A pleasant, joyous spiritual becomes a launching pad for sarcastic Jesus-praising, odd Atheist-bashing, and (thankfully) even-keeled rebukes of Internet extremism. Usually the debates rage around the merits of indie rock or a metal band’s scream quotient, so it’s interesting to see religion crop up, even if the discussion isn’t entirely original.

Spartacus and Blood and Sand and Revisionist History and Tits and Ass

2010-03-01T16:00:00.005-05:00

The Best Picture wins of Braveheart and Gladiator at the 1996 and 2001 Academy Awards, respectively heralded a brief renaissance of the big, sweeping historical epic at the multiplex. Well, to say it heralded a renaissance is a bit much; what really happened is that studios saw they could make a buck on the genre and released a bunch of movies as a cash-in. This brief phase of Hollywood history brought moviegoers crappy epic knockoffs like Troy, King Arthur, and Alexander as well as completely under-appreciated works of genius like Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (rent the Director's Cut, it's incredible). By the midpoint of the Aughts, the historical epic had seemingly run out a steam and another way of looking at history on celluloid had taken hold.

The success of the BBC/HBO co-production Rome which had its first season in 2005 began a trend of presenting mankind's past as a vulgar, ultraviolent, sex and death-filled hellhole. Depending on who you ask, this is either an attempt to bring a level of irreverent "authenticity" to history (think the late Howard Zinn, but with an adolescent obsession with boobs and gore) and strip away the generations of politically correct whitewahsing by textbooks, or a cynical method of drawing in an audience by presenting history with the aesthetic of a snuff film.

Like most questions of "real" history, the truth probably lies somewhere in the center.

Revisionist history of course has a long and storied...history on film. Western movies had their own phase of re-presenting the Old West as a violent, scary, morally ambiguous place: take The Searchers, Unforgiven, the works of Cormac McCarthy, and Deadwood for example. These works rose mostly from the fact that American history had been presented in a sanitized, family friendly form for too long. The stories of men on the fringes of society, fighting to settle a wild frontier could not be nearly as heroic as Hollywood had convinced us. Soon enough, White Hat and Black Hat cowboys had been completely replaced by Gray Hats or muddy Brown Hats.

Ancient history would soon undergo a similar transformation. The first, and most extreme, example that springs to my mind is the infamous 1979 abomination Caligula. Conceived as a Ben-Hur-esque historical epic, the original idea was to make an honest depiction of the life of Roman Emperor Caligula and was stocked with a cavalcade of classically-trained thespians (Peter O'Toole! John Gielgud!) as well as British cinematic bad boy Malcolm McDowell in the title role. The film also boasted Helen Mirren, but I am wary to throw her in with O'Toole and Gielgud because as I understand it, until recently Dame Helen was just as famous for getting naked on camera as she was for playing royalty.

Everything went off the rails when Penthouse's Bob Guccione came on as producer and insisted on having hardcore sex occurring in almost every scene. Much to my disappointment (yes, I bought it), the hardcore sex doesn't involve any of the leads but instead occurs awkwardly in the background or in dedicated, literally orgiastic montages. I can't show you parts of the film itself, but I'll let the trailer give you an idea on what it's like.

The intentions may have been to present decadent imperial Rome as it was, but thirty years of critics and scholars have agreed that Caligula is pretty much just big-budget porn with a historical setting and a script by Gore Vidal, not to mention excessive violence.

The question of when a film like this becomes excessive and pornographic instead of just a true-to-life depiction of a historical character renowned for his perversion and bloodlust I suppose is up to the viewer; but one must wonder if our understanding of Roman history is made better by a scene where McDowell rapes a virgin bride in front of her husband and then fists him up the ass. Somewhere out there, Suetonius is rolling in his grave.

The next best example of the revisionist history epic might be the previously mentioned Rome. Depicting the events surrounding the rise of Julius Caesar and fall of the Roman Republic, Rome alternates plotlines between historical aristocratic characters and fictional plebeians. The depictions of Caesar and his friends, family, allies, and enemies are generally in line with the Shakespeare/I, Claudius school of dignified historical fiction while the series' original creations are bawdy products of 21st-century sensibilities (towards history anyway). All the while, there's plenty of ultraviolence in both spheres of Roman society and more than enough shots of Mark Antony's massive, uncircumsized member. The show goes out of its way to remind us that the Roman heroes we read about in history class were men and women just like you and me and their pre-Christian system of values allowed for plenty of murder and having sex in front of slaves.Even with its claim of authenticity, Rome goes batshit insane from time to time. The future Augustus' sister Octavia engages in a lesbian affair with Brutus' mom for some reason and then has sex with her own brother. This of course has no basis in the historical record and is only there for our, the viewers' enjoyment. There's also a scene in the second season where a Roman mafioso's head is shoved in a pre-indoor plumbing toilet while he is anally raped but a rival on the orders of a main character. I don't remember Plutarch mentioning that, though I'm sure that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. What else would you expect from a show that features a drawing of a giant penis in its title sequence?

300 is the big one: the sign that everything that could go wrong in an epic had in fact done so. The story of King Leonidas and his Spartans' last stand during the Greco-Persian war was of course based on real events, but more importantly it was based on a Frank Miller comic book.

Now don't get me wrong, I love Frank Miller with all (well, some of) my heart, but I'll be the first to admit that by the time the 1990's came around his formula for writing had become "Violence + whores = GENIUS!". 300 is in no way exempt from this. Taking blatant liberties with history for the sake of making kickass action sequences, Miller and co. have defended 300 as less a depiction of history as it happened than history as the Spartans themselves would tell it, hence all Spartans are superheroic badasses who fight lizard ninjas and mumakils. It would seem that for Miller, a Greek army fighting off a massive Persian invasion at unimaginable odds wasn't enough, he needed to have a cave troll.

Whatever, this is all well and good. But Miller also ignores or worse yet, revises important bits of Greek society. Leonidas chides the Athenians as "boy-lovers", the ultimate insult from a super masculine Spatan warrior right? Wrong. Yes, the Athenians really, really liked to have sex with boys, but I think the only society that really outdid them in the pederasty department was Sparta. So historical social mores are desecrated in the name of modern homophobia. Great, thanks Frank Miller.

Despite (or because of) its liberties with classical history, 300 was a boffo box office success and minor cultural event. Surely you remember 2007, when every bro at a party would scream "This! Is! Sparta!" after downing his fourth can of Beast. Yeah, those were good times. The success of director Zak Snyder's film led directly to the creation of the latest piece of revisionist historical epic: Starz's Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

I initially wasn't that interested in Spartacus because it looked like a blatant 300 rip-off. But then I heard that Lucy Lawless is in it and more importantly, she's naked. Being a longtime Xena fan, I could not turn down this, the opportunity of a lifetime. So for the past month or so I've been streaming Spartacus on my Xbox through Netflix.

With all its CGI blood and backdrops and slow-mo, Spartacus is indeed a 300 rip-off. There are times that you think you are in fact watching 300, it so shamelessly apes it. The plot concerns the titular Thracian hero's quest to be reunited with his wife after being enslaved by an evil Roman general by fighting his way up through the gladiator circuit. So in other words, its blatantly a Gladiator rip-off too.

While Spartacus' main plot is cliched and the 300 aesthetic doesn't help, I find many of the side characters to be fun. John Hannah (better known as Rachel Weisz's brother from the Mummy franchise) plays Spartacus' master, a gladiator school proprietor named Batiatus. While Spartacus spends most of the time moping about his wife and honor and bullshit, Batiatus is constantly trying to hustle his way out of the minor leagues of bloodsport and into the majors. He comes off as the owner of a AA baseball team trying to get his players called up to the Show, all the while staying one step ahead of loan sharks while his wife (Lawless) cuckolds him with his prize gladiator. It's pretty good entertainment, even if it is pulpy shit. It's violent and stupid, but its there to entertain. I suppose it can only encourage viewers to pick up a copy of Livy and that can't be all that bad.

But most importantly, Lucy Lawless is naked.

Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 48 - Cream

2010-03-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

One of the better discoveries I've made through this project is my love of instrumental jam sessions. This is something I never expected that I would like as much as I do. When I was in high school, I had a friend who was a big fan of jazz, and would drag me to various shows around the area. He would sit, transfixed, listening to a trumpet player toot on the same three chords for half an hour, while I struggled to stay awake.

I suppose that experience turned me off to jamming. I could appreciate the skill that it required, and admire the talent of a group that could play improvisatory pieces together as a unit. But this sort of thing never really impressed me until I started exploring blues-rock groups for this project. Starting with the Allman Brothers Band, and extending to Cream this week, I've been consistently floored by the experience of listening to an electric guitar jam away in blues progressions for fifteen minutes on end.

I'm not sure why this kind of jamming has won me over whereas I'm still lukewarm toward jazz. Is it that a rock ensemble simply packs more of a punch when they play? Is it that this blues music has more direction, naturally driving toward a cadence, whereas jazz players tend to dick around on the same chord for hours? I'm not sure.

Regardless, listening to Wheels of Fire (my favorite of the albums this week), I always found myself anticipating the second half of the album, with its powerful live recordings of Cream jamming away. Some of the tracks are over 16 minutes long, but they never seem boring or repetitive. Maybe only virtuoso supergroups like Cream can pull off this sort of thing and actually sound good, but I'm glad this stuff is out there.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll continue this post in twenty minutes when this track is done.

WEEK 48

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Cream

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: I'm pretty sure I've listened to a "Greatest Hits" CD from the group sometime in the past. I was certainly familiar with all their major hits, but I hadn't realized that their albums also contained these longer jams, which might have added to their appeal.

MY LISTENING: I listened to Disraeli Gears (1967) every day this week. I also put on Wheels of Fire (1968) three times and Fresh Cream (1966) twice. And I'm listening to Goodbye (1969) as I write this.

WHAT I LIKED:

Generally, the harder Cream rocks, the more I like their stuff. The trio is at their very best when cranking their amps up to 11 and blasting away without any sort of reserve or restraint, best demonstrated on the unforgettable "White Room". Some tracks dominate simply through the sheer force of their riffs, like the gritty opening to "Politician"; others through their unbridled energy, like the fast-moving "Rollin' and Tumblin' ". Still more tracks might have languished in psychedelic obscurity if it weren't for their hard-rocking blues - here, I'm definitely thinking of "Tales of Brave Ulysses", a bizarre neo-Homeric ode rescued by a dark foot-stomping blues riff that rises above the song's pseudo-mythological pretensions.

In addition to the group's own compositions, their cover songs are equally enjoyable, and rock just as hard. Tracks such as "Born Under a Bad Sign" or "Sitting on Top of the World", not to mention the unforgettable "Crossroads", convey the melancholic power of the blues in a manner totally unlike anything I've heard before. It's during these songs that the musical unity of the group is more apparent - Jack Bruce's bass sets up a riff-heavy blues foundation while Eric Clapton's guitar squeals on top, dancing in and around the structure that Bruce has set up. Meanwhile, Ginger Baker's drumming fills in gaps you didn't even know were there with fun kicks and syncopations.

Finally, like I said, I loved the lengthy jamming sessions. "Toad" is an impressive showcase for Baker's drumming and a lot of fun to listen to, but the highlight of Wheels of Fire, for me at least, is Clapton's epic guitar solo in the sixteen-minute version of "Spoonful".

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:

For all their hard blues rock, there's still an element to Cream that ties them to the latter half of the 1960s, and unfortunately this lends itself to an inescapable datedness. While some of this is redeemed by the hard blues I talked about above, there still remain songs like the regrettable "Pressed Rat and Warthog", that bring down the otherwise irreproachable Wheels of Fire. Even worse is when the band tries to make a joke - the "Mother's Lament" that ends Disraeli Gears is nothing but an annoying trifle, and ends the album by leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

FURTHER EXPLORATION WOULD ENTAIL: Cream has a whole crop of live albums that I feel I should start exploring, from their initial tour in the 1960s to their 2005 reunion concert. Additionally, both Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker have remained active, teaming up with various groups and recording some solo albums. Eric Clapton, on the other hand, never did anything ever again.

BEST SONG YOU'VE HEARD: "White Room"

BEST SONG YOU HAVEN'T HEARD: "Traintime"

I'm a sucker for a seven minute harmonica solo.

NEXT WEEK'S ARTIST: Little Walter.

This choice might be a bit more obscure than the artists I usually listen to. But there's quite a few reasons for this pick, which I'll elaborate on next week.