News for Nerds

Roar (1997)
I stumbled across this on the Sci-Fi channel; it’s another one of these bad fantasy shows that SciFi has resurrected after their deserved first-season cancellations. Heath Ledger, surprisingly, stars as a polite and friendly Irish warchief circa 400AD. His older sidekick sports a handlebar moustache and looks more like a leather-daddy than Pictish warrior – they are all named things like Colm and Liam and I’ll be damned if I remember which one is which. It seems basically like a silly Xena knock-off, but is certainly an interesting piece of TV ephemera.

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 – Avatar Tuners
Avatar Tuners is, of course, the secret bonus unnecessary subtitle for this most recent Megami Tensei outing. I played SMT:DDS1 but not all the way through; I found it kind of boring and monotonous, and also monstrously difficult, although in a rare twist I actually liked the story. About a fifth of the way through I returned it to Gamestop, which involved a shouting argument with a Russian immigrant and the manager which left me shaking with rage SO BAD that I had to move to England and marry into a wealthy family and kill a troubled actress before I even wanted to TALK about it.
Anyway, we’re talking about the sequel here. Every review I read said that the first game was not as good but you needed to play it in order to have the faintest idea what’s going on in this version. This is true if you are kind of slow or if you suffer from the vapors or aphasia. I chose just to enjoy the new plot as an in medias res beginning – it’s not too hard to pick up on, since it’s kind of a blend of the Matrix and most Megami Tensei games (although not as willfully dumb as the matrix). As usual for the series the world has ended, people have made deals with the devil, and your character is part demon, part waifish Japanese wisp. It doesn’t look to be as philosophically interesting as the opposed reasons in SMT: Nocturne (you got to pick between Struggle, Solitude, and Silence, so in retrospect they weren’t that interesting either). The fact that this tissue-thin story is winning my praise really says something about the general quality of RPG plots, but it is not something that hasn't been said frequently and inarticulately before.
The camera controls are a little stiff and there’s no way to shut off the clamorous, idiotic music, but they’ve brushed up the graphics, combat and character development systems and it looks like it’s going to be a whale of a game. The balancing also seems better. The game is wickedly hard for about the first five battles, but after that it settles – most battle require some thought and there’s definitely a possibility that ANY encounter could leave you dead, but that’s a nice change of pace from the ponderous or very easy systems of a lot of other PS2 games (Dragon Quest VIII and any final fantasy, for instance). Also, the battles generally resolve in less than a minute, which sounds like it would cause seizures, but is actually just perfect.

A delightful New Yorker article on Battlestar Galactica, my new favorite show, which I praised in my blog literally WEEKs ago. It seems odd that girl reporter Nancy Franklin chooses to spend fully a third of the article talking about what Science Fiction is like as a genre (only to admit that the new Battlestar doesn't fit), but her descriptions of Starbuck and Doctor Baltar are absolutely dead-on, and perhaps her magazine legitimacy will convince those reluctant to watch a show about a giant spaceship and its problems with sexy robots. Also, NB, available on iPod video, for those of us who like to enjoy the series in a postage-stamp sized format.

"Let's escape on my barge!"

Kinds of Funny
Will Arnett and Amy Poehler both made it into New York magazine’s New Yorkers of the Year list – in the interview Arnett introduced the phrase “L.A. funny”, a phrase that he and Poehler use to mean just barely funny enough to be considered funny (as opposed to “New York funny,” actually funny). Learn it and use it, people!

Casanova
Let me see, Casanova. This movie was one of two things:

1. The Japanese made an irresponsibly allusive Playstation game about the life of Casanova, which then got picked up and made into a movie for some reason.


2. Heath Ledger and his friends went on an unusually well-financed LARP set in 18th century Venice.

I really wanted to like this movie – anything transcendently stupid enough to try to be a Venetian court drama AND a ninja battle has to be at least worth watching. But it’s basically a modern romantic comedy with a bunch of brocade outfits, and it falls prey to all the stupidities inherent to the genre: pale characters, L.A. funny dialogue, convoluted yet inane plot, meaningless action sequences, and of course the central romances have absolutely no substance to them. Maybe watch it for Jeremy Irons' purple gloves, I can't think of any other reason.

Dem HOV Fetus Exclusion Blues

Another fine zinger from Rafil Bonerston-Smith - just try breaking this news to Rosasharn, unless she is too busy symbolically suckling vagrants. GROSS-OUT!

Always Bet on Black

Matchpoint
This is a swell movie and was also a swell movie years ago when it was Crimes and Misdemeanors. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is perfect as lucky Irish jerk Chris: his fleshy, saturnine face, tumbling speech and penetrating glare bubble up through his plucky tennis-pro persona and reveal the murderous voluptuary beneath. It’s hard to believe that he also played Gimli the perverted dwarf in Lord of the Rings. Emily Mortimer is delightful as his clueless GFF Chloe Hewett, Matthew Goode is note-perfect as her brother Tom Hewett, whose job is to be thin and jolly and handsome and have a wonderful time. Scarlett Johansson plays Nola Rice, who starts out on a delightfully subtle, vulnerable note before mega-morphing into a shrieking harpy, but she is always very good at acting and such. E. Hastings pointed out that Rice looks like she’s about to burst into tears whenever she’s discussing her acting non-career, although in real life Scarlett Johansson is a famous actress! Talk about movie magic! The movie’s central question, whether it is better to be lucky or good, is interesting although of course you don’t really get to choose that kind of thing; it also suffers a little from trademark Woody Allen intellectualism (i.e. Chris ostentatiously reads Dostoyevsky early on so we know he has depth). The direction and cinematography are invisibly assured and perfect (and reminds me why filmmakers rely on the small vocabulary of traditional pans, pushes, etc.), and the soundtrack is an amazing selection of famous, scratchy opera performances. All in all, this movie made me think it would be very nice to be an immensely wealthy person in England, and also that it is not nice to do murders. Recommended viewing for people who are trying to decide between these two options!

He's a Hungry Fighter

Maybe the Best White Ninja Comic Ever.

Also, I'm upgrading my review of Battlestar Galactica from "pretty good" to "one of the best series I have ever seen." I would seriously rank it alongside Rome and maybe even Six Feet Under. It's ambiguous, intense, and makes me almost hysterical over the characters, who are now uniformly delightful (even Dr. Baltar and poor Number Six). I have rarely been as simultaneously happy and worried as I was this week when Commander Adama told Starbuck to shoot vile ol' Admiral Cain directly in the head. Superb television watchery. Even if you don't like sicence fiction, it's worth a shot, since it's very little about robots and lasers and much more about politics and people and dissapointment.

A One-Way Ticket to Palookaville

"I'll canary up, see - I'll finger the mooks who took the mazuma, but I don't wanna see the inside of the Big House, and if any of youse flatfoots try to put the flimflam on me, I'll ring your chimes, fella!"

Some More Reviews

D.E.B.S.
I only caught the last half of this movie, on Stars, the Channel Where Movies Go to Die. I can’t believe that I haven’t already seen it and fixed it in the firmament of cinematic classics, and I also can’t believe that anyone actually made it. The premise is somewhere between Mean Girls and one of the less-loathsome Austin Powers movies – the eponymous D.E.B.S. are superspies-in-training at some kind of Department of Homeland Security superspy academy, which requires them to wear Catholic schoolgirl uniforms and wield enormous guns. Also, they are all attractive young women. Lest you think this movie offers too little to the randy male voyeur, the main plot tension turns out to be a lesbian romance between Amy, one of the D.E.B.S., and not-terribly-villainous supervillain Lucy Diamonds (played by the luminously beautiful Jordana Brewster). Some inspired montages and confidently snappy dialogue lift this from ethereally insubstantial fluff to delightful, enduring fluff.

Battlestar Galactica
I am talking here about the new, Sci-Fi channel remake (on DVD, as well, since I don’t really want to sit through half an hour of commercials for e-harmony.com). This is delightful middlebrow sci-fi at its absolute best, and the writers display a remarkably light, original touch. It’s more Larry Niven than Star Wars (although there are some messianic, mystical touches). The crew of the Galactica has to confront problems like water shortages and political maneuverings as often as they must fight the dastardly Cylons, and standard Star Trek deus ex machina weirdness is largely absent (no aliens or strange nebulae at all so far, in fact). The cast is large, capable and attractive (especially Starbuck, who is the kind of woman I find appealing but who invariably turns out to be gay), with Edward James Olmos standing out as Commander Adama. Unfortunately, the writers have blended in some extremely annoying elements: Ellen Tigh, the XO’s boozy wife (who would have worked much better as a solely comic note) and Doctor Baltar’s odious relationship with Cylon/neurotic figment Number Six. Baltar shows a frustratingly stymied gift for comic acting and I only hope that as the series progresses we will see more of him and less of Number Six, who is very pretty but also basically one-note, and it’s not a very interesting note at that. The pacing drags a little at times and they may be maintaining a few more plots than necessary (it certainly doesn’t compare to the blissful pacing and assurance of the multiple plots on Buffy). The Blade Runner-esque ongoing guessing game about who is or isn’t a Cylon is getting a little tedious, but all in all, it’s enjoyable to an almost obscene degree. Bully!

Dragon Quest VIII
A slime draws near! This game is very good, appallingly slow-moving, bright, thinly-plotted, and has few load times. The voiceovers are atypically good, and the game boasts a full orchestral soundtrack performed by the Tokyo symphony orchestra or something; I found, to my delight, that I could turn it off. When I want to listen to monstrously vulgar and pointless orchestral music, I will get some Mahler out of the public library. By around level 30 the battle system has become extremely tiring, yet I find myself yearning to keep playing. The highlight, for me, has been the taxing boss-battles, which actually force the player to make some tough decisions instead of sleepwalking through (kind of like every single battle in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, which is probably the best RPG ev-ar). There is also a current of peculiarly Japanese misogyny throughout (the one female playable character gets a bunny outfit as one of her best armors, and one of her unique powers is Sex Appeal). I found it embarrassing. The box proudly notes that it contains a playable demo of Final Fantasy XII. It was an unplayable mess, as far as I could tell, and although the opening movie was technically impressive, we REALLY don’t want another fucking story about Air Pirates and political tensions between two dumb kingdoms and giant robots and a female healer messiah figure, PLEASE.

The Great Transit Strike of '05

The snow is snowing, the wind is blowing, and now the transit workers are striking.  So it looks like YT will remain in CT until the picket lines pack up and the strike restores the dignity of labor.  I spent a few minutes this morning thinking about the situation and I suppose I support the MTA workers – if they can squeeze a very nice raise and benefits package out of the city of New York, maybe they will inspire other unions across the country to demand better treatment for their members, which will in turn encourage more workers to join unions, which could make an impact on American poverty, the healthcare system, illegal immigrant labor, getting more Democrats elected, etc.  Perhaps this is hopelessly naïve.  I know that Kurt Vonnegut and all of his Eugene Debs loving protagonists would be proud.  I guess I’ll just wait for the Fox News report (“Union communists rape Christmas”) so I can make up my mind from the unbiased, bare facts.

Now, some reviews!

SYRIANA
A pretty, pretty, pretty good movie.  In it, a great number of fine actors romp around and grow moustaches and generally confuse the hell out of the audience for most of the movie.  Amanda Peet is notable for being the only girl and reprising her role from Saving Silverman (Jack Black doesn’t make it) as Matt Affleck’s wife.  Jeffrey Wright, of Angels in America fame, plays a lawyer who has one of the above moustaches and does not really care all that much about the truth, justice, etc., preferring fine cufflinks and talking very fast and quietly.  George Clooney is supposed to be fat but isn’t.  The guy who plays Prince Nasir looks a little like a much more handsome version of actual Prince, and basically swans around being handsome and progressive and wearing wonderful white suits.  I can’t reveal any plot details except that the oil industry ends up looking like a bit of a bad egg.  Go see it if you want to understand why America is cutting the throat of the Middle East, Europe, America, and the Middle East.

AEON FLUX
Also pretty good, not as good as Syriana.  Charlize Theron looks and sounds a lot like Aeon from the cartoons, which is impressive, also she is like a goddam battleship and is nine feet tall.  All their futuristic clothing is amazing (the costumers wisely decided not to go with Aeon’s trademark bondage gear), as are the sets which look like they were designed by a coke-addled Zaha Hadid.  Lots of delightful touches from the cartoon make it in (not enough, and mostly towards the less-bizarre end of the spectrum), and Trevor Goodchild is engaging and has great hair, though he’s not blonde in this version.  Unfortunately, Goodchild engages a little too well; he’s for sure a good guy, whereas in the cartoon he was pretty morally ambiguous (or, actually, just a megalomaniacal villain) which make his relationship with Aeon more complex and interesting.  I know that it’s irresponsibly dorky to keep comparing the movie and the cartoon - the movie is quite entertaining and visually sumptuous on its own, but it’s definitely worth seeing both versions.

Some Reviews

Mike Kelly, “Day is Done”
At the Gagosian Gallery

Well, ol’ Mike Kelly’s arts are pretty big here. I imagine that a lot of people will compare “Day is Done” to a haunted house, and they’re right, it’s kind of like a haunted house. Kelly takes photographs from yearbooks from the 80s, blows them up, then re-stages them with his friends. He is also obsessed with goths, so many of the pictures are of 80s vampires and assorted morbidities. The pictures encircle a frenzied mixed media installation which involves some pretty hilarious video pieces (mopey 80s vampire working at what looks like a real estate agent's office, pasty-faced ghoul stumbling through a bush) and amusing works of sculpture, many based on poorly-designed high school stage sets. It got to be sensory overload about a third of the way through (also, the gallery does not boast a bathroom), but it’s probably worth a trip some time real soon, before it closes. Bring your own grease pencil so you can circle the differences between the pictures!

Issue Project Room, on the lovely Gowanus

I went to an experimental fiction reading here. All the pieces were pretty good, but the space was especially interesting. Issue Project Room is a converted silo, staffed by extremely rude hipsters, on the Gowanus canal. It features an enormous wrought-iron gate before which guests are invited to stand for an hour or so while the hipsters ignore them (S. Grant and I happened to arrive at the same time as one of the readers, who was LIVID and had been waiting for a long time in very cold weather – the hipster who unlocked the gate barely apologized, so you can imagine how they treat the normal guests). It also features a robust $10 cover charge and a delightfully unprofessional, under stocked bar that offers beer (wait, actually no beer) and wine for the same low prices found at Le Cirque. The reading space is upstairs in the silo next door - readers are allowed to use an interior staircase, the public is invited to go outside. The actual space is quite lovely, a huge round room with what looks like a nice a/v setup and a fine upright piano, and the rest of the building looks like it would be an amazing place to live and write, say, postfeminist fiction in which the heroine is named “Cervix.” Hear me, O Internet, and strike down the hubris of these hipsters! Let them realize that their rad hangout would be more rad if they knew how to act!

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

More like Harry Potter and the New Russian. For me and E. Hastings, Victor Krum absolutely made this movie (actually, I thought it was the most skillful and least boring of the movies – although the rumors you hear that it is impenetrable to those who haven’t read the book are extremely true). Try watching the movie and imagining that whenever he is not onscreen, Krum is in a disco wearing a transparent vinyl shirt, hijacking cigarette trucks, beating people to death with tire irons, drinking tea while holding sugar in his mouth, playing dominoes with a guy who is wearing one of those shirts that lacw at the collar, etc. His touching gift to Hermione as he returns to Durmstrang for the summer? An eightball and a $100 bill.

Return to the Pumpkin Truck

Courtesy of the inimitable Andrew Porter:
A News Story About Creed
In all fairness it is not actually about Creed, my favorite band, since Creed broke up, but it is about the violent antics of soulful frontman Scott Stapp. It is easier for a fully-laden pumkin truck to pass through the eye of a needle than for a wrathful man to get into heaven, SCOTT.

Porkchopolis Now, Redux

Much to my initial delight and eventual horror Josh Kogan has resurrected the cartoons from Bullseyeart.com in a new site, www.magicbutter.com.  So once again, after about four years, you can access Porkchops, Miss Muffy and the Muff Mob, Rat Chicken, Internet the Animated Series, etc.  The only problem is, he’s charging $4.99 a month for it, which is perhaps retarded, perhaps not.  Obvy almost every ironic post-college hipster can afford five bucks a month, and clearly I waste way more than $5 a month on, say, inedible takeout, gum, etc., but there’s a huge mental block to spending this kind of money on a site subscription.  He promises two new cartoons a month, but again, it stings that we now must pay for what used to be free.  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth!

A Question of Astonishingly Small Import

So I was flipping through the NYT Sunday magazine and I came across a two-page Banana Republic ad – it’s one of these teaser things that leads to a website done in the style pioneered by BMW if I’m not mistaken. Its ostensible hook is that a beautiful girl has lost a mitten and will end up knocking relatively inexpensive suede boots (made in Macau) with the scruffy gentleman who finds it. The mitten, by the way, is actually a GLOVE, advertising copywriters, since it has FINGERS.
Anyway, the ad is kind of interesting but what I am actually posting about is that the female protagonist appears to be Jenny Mollen, Angel’s werewolf girlfriend from season five. I searched the internets but did not get confirmation.
It's this link for those who are interested.

"It Look Distinctly Ordinary and Chair-Like."

Well, what a brace of episodes. Last Sunday I was traveling so I got to see the previous two weeks of Rome back-to-back.

TRIUMPH
As everyone knows, the best part of a Roman triumph was the fact that in the general’s chariot rode a figure representing THE FUTURE, who stands behind the general jabbing him in the small of the back and whining. The Romans conceived of the future as springing up behind people and surprising them – in Roman thought, you travel through time facing backwards, able to see the past spread out before you but blind to the future. This makes our metaphors and metonyms for time seem kind of stupid, huh?

Anyway, Professor von Future does not appear in this episode, and also the production budget severely constrains the triumph itself. Caesar’s spectacle is intimate rather than earthshattering – it should be like nine Rose Bowls happening during Mardi Gras while President Bush orders bible-addled shock troops to fire nuclear warheads and the longhairs; instead, it is more like two Shar Peis fighting in a wet box.

THE SPOILS
Oh, man, Vorenus! What are we going to do with you? Also, Pullo kills like nine guys without even getting up or opening his eyes. Until you have seen a dude get SO MAD about the 13th that he impales another dude with a giant barbed skull-mace, YOU HAVE NOT LIVED! It was like all my Warhammer 40,000 fantasies come to life on the small screen. Plus, the non-gladiatiroal parts of the episode were amazing, and bravo to Octavian for trying to help Pullo.

Some Good Movies and also a Remark about Real Time

Well, one good movie is The Cooler, which is a delightfully lurid Vegas casino story. Like many movies about Vegas it leans pretty heavily on luck and gambling metaphors. This really doesn’t bother me since Las Vegas, like South Africa, seems to be a land without need of metaphor. William H. Macy gives a performance with no errors as Bernie, a man whose portion of ill luck is so generous that it literally overflows. Alec Baldwin, an apoplectically evil casino owner, employs Macy – he also pays off a cocktail waitress (the accurately-named Maria Bello) to seduce Macy to keep him onboard. Also, Burger from Sex and the City hangs around representing the casino’s new-school investors, who disapprove of some of Baldwin’s business practices (like breaking people’s shins with a specialized shin-breaking maul, and also kicking pregnant women). Until you’ve seen Alec Baldwin foaming at the mouth opposite William H. Macy’s characteristic reserve, and until you’ve seen Maria Bello doing pretty much whatever she likes, you haven’t seen this movie. Which is very good.

Another good movie is Dummy, which is not quite as serious as The Cooler, nor as entirely successful, but has many things going for it, such as being hella funny and featuring Adrian Brody. Adrian Brody plays a ventriloquist (and does all his own ventriloquism: piano playing, pickle-juice drinking, ventriloquism: he’s a triple threat!), Mila Jovovich plays a punk who calls herself Fangora (perfectly, even better than her role in Resident Evil), and Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter plays Adrian Brody’s mother. The plot is insubstantial but sweet, but the best scenes belong to Brody and Jovovich. Although you may doubt her acting credentials Jovovich proves that her range extends beyond shaving the side of her head and fighting the Umbrella corporation – she’s believable, compelling and subtle as an American punk. Dummy ultimately doesn’t hold together and the end is a little disappointing, but if you don’t expect The House of Mirth then you will be delighted. If you do expect The House of Mirth then you should probably just watch that, yo, although the Gillian Anderson version was basically incomprehensible to me.

Also, I’ve been watching Real Time with Bill Maher while writing this and Joe Scarborough just a) implied that waterboarding wasn’t really bad enough to be considered torture (what, pray, should we consider it? A schoolboy jape?) and b) screamed and yelled at the ex-president of Ireland when she implied that if the US wanted to set an example of freedom, it should let UN inspectors into to our Global Coercive Questioning Resort Centers.