more like Wizards of the MOST
...
D&D is fun
Dungeons and Dragons is every bit as nerdy and fun as you imagine it to be. That hardly seems like a loaded sentence; maybe you'll understand better in a moment:
Dungeons and Dragons, as advertised, is a game wherin the characters you and your friends generate (or have generated for you) are limited only by your character sheets' numeric allegiances (5 Strength, 2 Dexterity, etc. with flowchart correlations to lower functions like skills and abilities that the player adds to dice rolls when determining action viability) and your collective imagination.
The keen player will immediately infer that it is their own fault if the grandiosity of the adventure doesn't stack up with their expectations, and that all limitations beyond that which have been imposed by the game proper (via character sheets and what can only be ultimately barebones story arcs) are those imposed by the party at hand.
At its best, it's a game about solving complex problems with a group of people you care about.
At its worst, it's everything we hate about ourselves and our friends. So just weigh that out real quick.
There is a Correct story arc presented, and your party can stray from that arc, provided your Game Master is prepared to deal with that and your party will forgive Her any missteps.
See that clever little lateral move implied, there? That shift of onus?
The business model is to defer as much of the Burden of Entertainment onto the player as possible while infinitely granulating the process through which violence is conducted, every iteration and revamp of this process (we're up to version 5 now?) seeming dedicated to re-edifying the inevitable need for combat, confrontation, the taking of Space from The Other. Every year more and more rules are laid down concerning what is and is not allowed during these confrontations, precious little gives us a solid framework or layout of what the world at large looks like or how we might contribute to it overall.
Do our characters exist in a dictatorship? A federation, or direct democracy? Are we a republic or monarchy? Can we work to change that? Do we have families? Where are they? Is this a Pangaea world like Earth in Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, or have the continents drifted and left oceans between landmasses that contact betwixt which may be as yet unknown? What do they eat here? Am I beautiful?
Just the kind of thing you'd be punched in the arm for asking. Who cares?
Well, everything is related, and if everything is whatever we say it is, then where does that logic conclude? What isn't possible? Why don't these threads match up? That the game universe, as all others, is a roiling sea of nihilistic chaos and destruction, feels unsatisfactory in a framework governed by spreadsheets.
D&D is not necessarily guilty of any of these charges or any malocclusion it produces really at all. It eludes conviction on all fronts. It sacrifices itself on the alter of player creativity. It crawls to us, desperate: "Please." It wheezes."I am only what you make of me."
Well who the fuck has time for that? Boardgames have rules, big-people no-fuck-around rules, and when I'm playing a good game it's obvious who's turn it is and what I'm supposed to be doing. There is not shortage of rules in the D&D universe, but that's a problem too.
Ahh! Are you lost? So am I, and I've been sifting through manuals for days.
It is whatever comes out of you when sitting down to play, and we betray our Disney-esque programming in our obvious longing for hideous sub-species who are necessarily malevolent to do battle with and squash heroically.
Fuck Goblins. They're ugly and a lower life form and always bad. We attack!
At all turns the question of scope rears its hideous, slavering maw:
If you want something that can be anything, you can't tell it what... not to be?
Can someone check my pulse?
I'm overwhelmed with curiosity. If every game can be whatever I want it to be, then the only limitation is me, and I failed if I didn't make it awesome enough for me. Also, that means that the game itself represents a potentially infinite repository of fun that I may or may not be accurately tapping into at any given time. So any time I alot for D&D is a good investment, because it is (via the possibility, for all intents and purposes) Maximum Fun, and also any moment it is not Maximum Fun is wasted. If one in ten times I spend playing D&D is Maximum Fun then all the rest of it was worth it, because the meta game is vying always to learn how to recreate the Maximum Fun for a Maximum Period, which is limited always by player scheduling and snack/beverage reliability.
So if x represents the minimum possible amount expended,
MFxMP
----------
xEffort = An ideal Dungeons and Dragons game
It all looks perfect on paper, I know, but perfect it is not. Playing D&D is fun because playing make-believe is fun. It's the first game anyone learns and for a few it's the last. If you get invited, go to a D&D party, anyone can do it. This really is one of those situations where latching on to people who are more skilled than you, doing little and contributing where you think you can while minimizing mistakes can truly generate a positive yield reliably.
If, however, like me you find team sports repulsive, you might find the challenge of coexisting with whoever would agree to such an unclean ritual a challenging social puzzle that offered minimal personal risk and real potential for human connection, if in brief spurts.
Play D&D
Saturday, August 12, 2017
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Gilmore Girls, Retrospectively
How can one express?
...
The girls are... well, either you know or you don't. If you don't know, I understand it's my undertaken position to try to explain, but I'm feeling a lot of feelings about this lately and I just need you to be there for me right now.
In preparation for the Netflix revival, a rewatch from season 3 has been undertaken, and we're going to be one season shy by the time the new miniseries comes out. There will be four one-and-a-half hour episodes totaling six hours of instant classic Gilmore Girls.
In the pilot episode, the town of Stars Hollow is fully built and is consistent throughout the series. It's a comfortable happy place where all the problems are very neatly presented and you just don't need to worry about certain types of crime and human behavior pervading the still reasonably plausible little world they've made here. You come to adore the quaint goings on of the little plebs of the GG's small town; we laugh at their inferiority and quixotic personality disorders to feel better about ourselves while simultaneously rewarding ourselves for being so empathetic as to adore the little silly people. It works for me! The nonsense they prioritize as well as the clear and present desperation they exude while struggling through the logic puzzles they entrap themselves within is just gold and serves as ample balm to my ego when I'm sad, sick or just nostalgic for a bizarre but naive and emotionally earnest padded emotional rollercoaster of youth - but you know, without any personal consequences.
We watch the development of Rory in concert with her actresses' progressing maturation into womanhood, and here again is gratification in feeling like we somehow contributed to the rearing of somebody any parent would be proud of without having to actually do anything. It's a princess story, is what it is; Rory Gilmore is the scrappy smalltown tomboy who's serious about education and somewhat inherits all the backing and support of a set of millionaire grandparents. These grandparents offer payroll allowing her to attend an extremely distinguished finishing school which sets her up for lofty post-secondary goals, but as in real life priorities shift and in finding her footing Rory makes the mistakes necessary to learn who one is and ultimately strike out at the world as a collected and composed Young Professional. She's gorgeous, but she doesn't know it. She loves intensely but with caution, and her always-appropriate curiosity is juxtaposed by her mother's untempered abandon and fits of passionate poor decision making. So really there's something for everybody all the time, the middle ground where these two meet keeps them in balance and each gives the other a fixed point in the universe around which they might revolve. Hijinks beset them as well as real tragedy, but there is no rape in Stars Hollow. It's like 9/11 never happens and things are pretty much solid on the East Coast.
Not to say certain characters don't wind up having relatively crappy lives, and not to say that a conscientious observer might conclude that certain characters are the way they are because their upbringings were objectively just awful, but room is left for younger, more tender viewers to whom this might not occur to let those subtly dark themes slip by. We get that it was hard for Lorelai and Lane in that we get that it was hard for Cinderella to have to do all the cookery and washing up for her evil step-sisters, but there is room to linger over what's entailed in what we know about the respective characters histories (much less endings) and think: "Fuck."
And speaking of endings, the series didn't, not properly. They sort of left things open for a new season, but this was during the time that downloading was really becoming a thing, and I'm not sure they really had any idea how many people were watching at that point, and there's no real reason why they would. Netflix brings back what people watch, and I still remember the thrill of hearing the two were joining forces while silently steaming at having spent paper money, Christmas money, at an age when those two things meant quite a bit, on a box set (which is admittedly now somewhat scattered).
I remember being told by a friend that Gilmore Girls was the first show ever erected by an advertising conglomerate as a result of market testing on the tone, tempo and nature of what is acceptable for mothers and daughters after school with regards to susceptibility. If you imagine how pleasant and fast an advertiser needs to give you thirty seconds of voiceover about why you could really use a particular brand of cleaning agent, that's the speed and rhythm of a good amount of the conversation in Gilmore Girls. They want you pliant and supple when you are delivered to the commercial, already lulled into their language and nature, anesthetized and eager to be told. When the advertiser speaks to you, it is easier to imagine they are your friend in some sinister way, but watching the show without commercials is like all the glory of getting drunk without getting hosed with a bar bill later. But you know. Emotionally drunk.
Watch Gilmore Girls.
...
The girls are... well, either you know or you don't. If you don't know, I understand it's my undertaken position to try to explain, but I'm feeling a lot of feelings about this lately and I just need you to be there for me right now.
In preparation for the Netflix revival, a rewatch from season 3 has been undertaken, and we're going to be one season shy by the time the new miniseries comes out. There will be four one-and-a-half hour episodes totaling six hours of instant classic Gilmore Girls.
In the pilot episode, the town of Stars Hollow is fully built and is consistent throughout the series. It's a comfortable happy place where all the problems are very neatly presented and you just don't need to worry about certain types of crime and human behavior pervading the still reasonably plausible little world they've made here. You come to adore the quaint goings on of the little plebs of the GG's small town; we laugh at their inferiority and quixotic personality disorders to feel better about ourselves while simultaneously rewarding ourselves for being so empathetic as to adore the little silly people. It works for me! The nonsense they prioritize as well as the clear and present desperation they exude while struggling through the logic puzzles they entrap themselves within is just gold and serves as ample balm to my ego when I'm sad, sick or just nostalgic for a bizarre but naive and emotionally earnest padded emotional rollercoaster of youth - but you know, without any personal consequences.
We watch the development of Rory in concert with her actresses' progressing maturation into womanhood, and here again is gratification in feeling like we somehow contributed to the rearing of somebody any parent would be proud of without having to actually do anything. It's a princess story, is what it is; Rory Gilmore is the scrappy smalltown tomboy who's serious about education and somewhat inherits all the backing and support of a set of millionaire grandparents. These grandparents offer payroll allowing her to attend an extremely distinguished finishing school which sets her up for lofty post-secondary goals, but as in real life priorities shift and in finding her footing Rory makes the mistakes necessary to learn who one is and ultimately strike out at the world as a collected and composed Young Professional. She's gorgeous, but she doesn't know it. She loves intensely but with caution, and her always-appropriate curiosity is juxtaposed by her mother's untempered abandon and fits of passionate poor decision making. So really there's something for everybody all the time, the middle ground where these two meet keeps them in balance and each gives the other a fixed point in the universe around which they might revolve. Hijinks beset them as well as real tragedy, but there is no rape in Stars Hollow. It's like 9/11 never happens and things are pretty much solid on the East Coast.
Not to say certain characters don't wind up having relatively crappy lives, and not to say that a conscientious observer might conclude that certain characters are the way they are because their upbringings were objectively just awful, but room is left for younger, more tender viewers to whom this might not occur to let those subtly dark themes slip by. We get that it was hard for Lorelai and Lane in that we get that it was hard for Cinderella to have to do all the cookery and washing up for her evil step-sisters, but there is room to linger over what's entailed in what we know about the respective characters histories (much less endings) and think: "Fuck."
And speaking of endings, the series didn't, not properly. They sort of left things open for a new season, but this was during the time that downloading was really becoming a thing, and I'm not sure they really had any idea how many people were watching at that point, and there's no real reason why they would. Netflix brings back what people watch, and I still remember the thrill of hearing the two were joining forces while silently steaming at having spent paper money, Christmas money, at an age when those two things meant quite a bit, on a box set (which is admittedly now somewhat scattered).
I remember being told by a friend that Gilmore Girls was the first show ever erected by an advertising conglomerate as a result of market testing on the tone, tempo and nature of what is acceptable for mothers and daughters after school with regards to susceptibility. If you imagine how pleasant and fast an advertiser needs to give you thirty seconds of voiceover about why you could really use a particular brand of cleaning agent, that's the speed and rhythm of a good amount of the conversation in Gilmore Girls. They want you pliant and supple when you are delivered to the commercial, already lulled into their language and nature, anesthetized and eager to be told. When the advertiser speaks to you, it is easier to imagine they are your friend in some sinister way, but watching the show without commercials is like all the glory of getting drunk without getting hosed with a bar bill later. But you know. Emotionally drunk.
Watch Gilmore Girls.
The Vampire Siries (I should have just said Vampire Diaries)
This show hooked its hands under my armpits and lifted me up off the ground like a surprising new friend who's amiable enough but a little too emotional. You hang out with them anyway, because that can be exciting and fun when it isn't bad.
I'm not caught up to the current season, I'm breaking into the sixth (6th), but I feel like we can call this one. All the beautiful people have such complicated problems, and they're all in conflict with each other and all of their claims are so emotionally just. You find yourself texting the acronym "TVD" to people and putting the word "so" in two capitol letters, multiple times, within the same message.
It's not scary at all. It's not even creepy, like an utterly straightfaced Buffy that asks fewer questions and puts more emphasis on coiffed hair and killer outfits. And the outfits are super killer.
I'm just never watching it and thinking: "I wish I was not watching this." The best part about the show is that I don't yearn for it, you can take this in at any pace, devouring or left alone for weeks at a time, and it's always just chock full of feelings. There's just always more turns, events unfold to reveal more history and we get to jump between multiple storylines with a large enough ensemble to keep it interesting when pairings get shaken up. It's late highschool/early college period vampy drama on the right side of complicated. As someone not usually inclined I couldn't help but scoff and say to myself things like "Well, that's a ridiculous plotline. But obviously you would want to get the magic immortality ring and use its abilities to stage a distraction for the werewolf-vampire hybrid, so I bet Mary is going to meet up with Greg, oh! He's going to tell her that Sally is a vampire now! OMG!!!1!"
If you can't let yourself get swept up in crap like this, you may have lost something, and you might invest in trying to get it back. This is harmless fun in massive supply and if you've tasted the delight of BBC soap opera and need more you might be surprised how much stuff there is out there aimed at this audience but created by the same people. It's weird that the vampire that remembers before America was a thing wants to scam on some highschool girl, but I'm watching it, so what does that make me? To be fair, though, it's only because he's exploring a connection from her to an equally antique undead woman he used to love and must suppress with arcane magicks for totally serious reasons with far-reaching implications. If we could ever tie off the vampire craze, I suppose The Vampire Diaries could be the way to do it. There's clearly respect due to the Anne Rice-verse here, and we're sort of meant to assume an Eduardian/Lestat cross. It's the show I think a lot of people wanted Twilight to be so badly they made those movies into a match for their needs. This is a re-roll of that, with the shiny element taken out and a few others put in. If you need still more after this, the spinoff series The Originals awaits, so #showhole will not pervade your entity entirely upon finishing. There is hope.
Watch The Vampire Diaries.
This show hooked its hands under my armpits and lifted me up off the ground like a surprising new friend who's amiable enough but a little too emotional. You hang out with them anyway, because that can be exciting and fun when it isn't bad.
I'm not caught up to the current season, I'm breaking into the sixth (6th), but I feel like we can call this one. All the beautiful people have such complicated problems, and they're all in conflict with each other and all of their claims are so emotionally just. You find yourself texting the acronym "TVD" to people and putting the word "so" in two capitol letters, multiple times, within the same message.
It's not scary at all. It's not even creepy, like an utterly straightfaced Buffy that asks fewer questions and puts more emphasis on coiffed hair and killer outfits. And the outfits are super killer.
I'm just never watching it and thinking: "I wish I was not watching this." The best part about the show is that I don't yearn for it, you can take this in at any pace, devouring or left alone for weeks at a time, and it's always just chock full of feelings. There's just always more turns, events unfold to reveal more history and we get to jump between multiple storylines with a large enough ensemble to keep it interesting when pairings get shaken up. It's late highschool/early college period vampy drama on the right side of complicated. As someone not usually inclined I couldn't help but scoff and say to myself things like "Well, that's a ridiculous plotline. But obviously you would want to get the magic immortality ring and use its abilities to stage a distraction for the werewolf-vampire hybrid, so I bet Mary is going to meet up with Greg, oh! He's going to tell her that Sally is a vampire now! OMG!!!1!"
If you can't let yourself get swept up in crap like this, you may have lost something, and you might invest in trying to get it back. This is harmless fun in massive supply and if you've tasted the delight of BBC soap opera and need more you might be surprised how much stuff there is out there aimed at this audience but created by the same people. It's weird that the vampire that remembers before America was a thing wants to scam on some highschool girl, but I'm watching it, so what does that make me? To be fair, though, it's only because he's exploring a connection from her to an equally antique undead woman he used to love and must suppress with arcane magicks for totally serious reasons with far-reaching implications. If we could ever tie off the vampire craze, I suppose The Vampire Diaries could be the way to do it. There's clearly respect due to the Anne Rice-verse here, and we're sort of meant to assume an Eduardian/Lestat cross. It's the show I think a lot of people wanted Twilight to be so badly they made those movies into a match for their needs. This is a re-roll of that, with the shiny element taken out and a few others put in. If you need still more after this, the spinoff series The Originals awaits, so #showhole will not pervade your entity entirely upon finishing. There is hope.
Watch The Vampire Diaries.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Jingle Most of the Way
You know what movie I don't want to watch all the way through? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jingle All The Way, the cringingly funny Christmas classic that Netflix offered up for a 20 minute thrill. I think it's funny that he's threatened by his disgusting hipster liberal intellectual neighbor, who is decidedly a villain and a demon upon closer inspection (as are they all), but overcomes him with good old-fashioned American hatred and head-down dogged determination. Nevermind that our protagonist is emotionally unavailable and his wife is drowning in a manicured, ticky-tacky mental prison of her own demise, her deep-seated loneliness and depression are no match for what I'm sure is another in a long string of promises and false lessons from our silk-shirted huckster hero. There's nothing that can get some stupid toy into the hands of a needy child quite like the pure intensity of the reddest Austrian you know, and as symbols of devotion, protection and dedication go, action figures might as well do.
It strikes me that we open on Arnie desperately grasping at straws in his sales job spouting flatly empty promises to who need ridiculous and impossible things, and telling them that they're his #1 priority because they simply cannot be told that they aren't. Whether he's reading that correctly or not, he has to bend to their every whim, because the consequences for not are unthinkable. As with the toy, Arnold's wife will take his child away if he doesn't somehow pull off this Christmas miracle. Nevermind that he wastes his life buried in paper behind a desk shouting into a telephone while micromanaging spreadsheets. It's common practice for his assistant to hold up and flip through signage to communicate messages to him because the idea of having adequate time between phone calls to speak like a human isn't realistic. He bleeds desperation and pressure, everything about this strikes me as a comic dystopic outtake from a much better movie, something in Brazil's B-reel. It's far too sympathizing for me to decide he's an asshole ten minutes later.
Nevermind that he slaves this way to feed and clothe the family he's decried for neglecting. Motherfucker I am out here feeding you, is that not perfectly clear? The man is a lion; he laughs at hobbies and personal reflection. He needs money, because that's how his family interprets love. Do you see where they live? In 2015 that kind of area is gated when built. 2016, sorry.
Whatever. There's some goofy shit and he's so loud and it's awesome when people fall down. Everything about this is fucked, the essence of consumerism and an absolute boiling point of misdirected intention intersecting at a terminal endpoint that would give any sane person a nervous breakdown and force a total reevaluation of priorities, which his family seems to demand but likely might not accept. You cannot tell me it would have meant the same to that kid for his Dad to have been home with him all that time rather than scouring the malls all hours like some verminous post-apocalyptic scavenger. He needs it Christmas Day. Bitch you need to be thankful Christmas came at all, there'd be no presents for three Christmases if I knew the legitimacy of my contribution to my family after 8-10 hours a day of pressure-cooker sales 50 weeks out of the year was ultimately proved worthy by whether or not the right toys were under the tree.
The movie is about misplaced values. It's about putting too much emphasis on the wrong things, and I agree that their family would have been better off in a smaller, shittier house, with fewer toys, and more time for the father to be around making stuff with the son and doing family projects. If the point of the movie is that Arnold needs to stop grinding away at the wrong things and focus more on the important stuff, family love and enjoyment, I support that entirely. I'm imagining Arnold learning his lesson here and staging a Jerry Maguire walkout, demanding to know "wchooos camin' wit meh?!" He loves, he looses, he loves again, he has heartfelt realizations about his deepest issues and displaced priorities and focuses on his artistic side. They move out of the suburbs and into a lower rent community, but Arnold is working with a not-for-profit and finding he doesn't miss his suburban now that what he does with his time means real change for helpless people.
I wonder how pleased his wife and son would be then. Maybe they'd be amazed at the openness and warmth of their new patriarch. Or, it could be that this man wasn't the gripping acquisition-driven man his wife married, that she liked nice things, and took pride in having the kind of house and accouterments that comes with a successful husband who knows how to close and just wants to spend his free time loving the people he sacrifices all his free time for. I wonder if it ever occurred to these people that they got more out of telling Arnold that he was fucking everything up than they would from having him smiling and blinking from across a coffee table every night, asking them what they wanted to do. Particularly if that meant a hit in quality of life, and little Jordan or whatever his name is didn't get to have his clearly brand-name shit. There's a benefit not often perceived by young people to having their AND-1s and crisp preppy stuff, those who don't have it recognize it the most and those who are also at this level often take it as a baseline for prospective playmate material. But that's none of my business. You don't need to be rich to give your kids a good life, but I do understand the impulse to try to give them the best. The movie tends to reassure us this guy is an asshole repeatedly, and I'm like, yeah. He is an asshole. I don't want to hang out with this guy. But they tend to attract and raise people like these, for whom I have little sympathy as well. The whole thing gestures toward a cultural ouroboros nobody can benefit from, elbowing me in the ribs and going, "THAT guy doesn't know how to work the system." It's a broken, garbage system, and I don't agree with working it, and I don't admire people who do. So. In letting go of the emotional bonds Jingle likes to tug at we can all take pleasure in giggling at Sinbad shrieking.
Watch the parade scene and the warehouse scene in Jingle All the Way.
You know what movie I don't want to watch all the way through? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jingle All The Way, the cringingly funny Christmas classic that Netflix offered up for a 20 minute thrill. I think it's funny that he's threatened by his disgusting hipster liberal intellectual neighbor, who is decidedly a villain and a demon upon closer inspection (as are they all), but overcomes him with good old-fashioned American hatred and head-down dogged determination. Nevermind that our protagonist is emotionally unavailable and his wife is drowning in a manicured, ticky-tacky mental prison of her own demise, her deep-seated loneliness and depression are no match for what I'm sure is another in a long string of promises and false lessons from our silk-shirted huckster hero. There's nothing that can get some stupid toy into the hands of a needy child quite like the pure intensity of the reddest Austrian you know, and as symbols of devotion, protection and dedication go, action figures might as well do.
It strikes me that we open on Arnie desperately grasping at straws in his sales job spouting flatly empty promises to who need ridiculous and impossible things, and telling them that they're his #1 priority because they simply cannot be told that they aren't. Whether he's reading that correctly or not, he has to bend to their every whim, because the consequences for not are unthinkable. As with the toy, Arnold's wife will take his child away if he doesn't somehow pull off this Christmas miracle. Nevermind that he wastes his life buried in paper behind a desk shouting into a telephone while micromanaging spreadsheets. It's common practice for his assistant to hold up and flip through signage to communicate messages to him because the idea of having adequate time between phone calls to speak like a human isn't realistic. He bleeds desperation and pressure, everything about this strikes me as a comic dystopic outtake from a much better movie, something in Brazil's B-reel. It's far too sympathizing for me to decide he's an asshole ten minutes later.
Nevermind that he slaves this way to feed and clothe the family he's decried for neglecting. Motherfucker I am out here feeding you, is that not perfectly clear? The man is a lion; he laughs at hobbies and personal reflection. He needs money, because that's how his family interprets love. Do you see where they live? In 2015 that kind of area is gated when built. 2016, sorry.
Whatever. There's some goofy shit and he's so loud and it's awesome when people fall down. Everything about this is fucked, the essence of consumerism and an absolute boiling point of misdirected intention intersecting at a terminal endpoint that would give any sane person a nervous breakdown and force a total reevaluation of priorities, which his family seems to demand but likely might not accept. You cannot tell me it would have meant the same to that kid for his Dad to have been home with him all that time rather than scouring the malls all hours like some verminous post-apocalyptic scavenger. He needs it Christmas Day. Bitch you need to be thankful Christmas came at all, there'd be no presents for three Christmases if I knew the legitimacy of my contribution to my family after 8-10 hours a day of pressure-cooker sales 50 weeks out of the year was ultimately proved worthy by whether or not the right toys were under the tree.
The movie is about misplaced values. It's about putting too much emphasis on the wrong things, and I agree that their family would have been better off in a smaller, shittier house, with fewer toys, and more time for the father to be around making stuff with the son and doing family projects. If the point of the movie is that Arnold needs to stop grinding away at the wrong things and focus more on the important stuff, family love and enjoyment, I support that entirely. I'm imagining Arnold learning his lesson here and staging a Jerry Maguire walkout, demanding to know "wchooos camin' wit meh?!" He loves, he looses, he loves again, he has heartfelt realizations about his deepest issues and displaced priorities and focuses on his artistic side. They move out of the suburbs and into a lower rent community, but Arnold is working with a not-for-profit and finding he doesn't miss his suburban now that what he does with his time means real change for helpless people.
I wonder how pleased his wife and son would be then. Maybe they'd be amazed at the openness and warmth of their new patriarch. Or, it could be that this man wasn't the gripping acquisition-driven man his wife married, that she liked nice things, and took pride in having the kind of house and accouterments that comes with a successful husband who knows how to close and just wants to spend his free time loving the people he sacrifices all his free time for. I wonder if it ever occurred to these people that they got more out of telling Arnold that he was fucking everything up than they would from having him smiling and blinking from across a coffee table every night, asking them what they wanted to do. Particularly if that meant a hit in quality of life, and little Jordan or whatever his name is didn't get to have his clearly brand-name shit. There's a benefit not often perceived by young people to having their AND-1s and crisp preppy stuff, those who don't have it recognize it the most and those who are also at this level often take it as a baseline for prospective playmate material. But that's none of my business. You don't need to be rich to give your kids a good life, but I do understand the impulse to try to give them the best. The movie tends to reassure us this guy is an asshole repeatedly, and I'm like, yeah. He is an asshole. I don't want to hang out with this guy. But they tend to attract and raise people like these, for whom I have little sympathy as well. The whole thing gestures toward a cultural ouroboros nobody can benefit from, elbowing me in the ribs and going, "THAT guy doesn't know how to work the system." It's a broken, garbage system, and I don't agree with working it, and I don't admire people who do. So. In letting go of the emotional bonds Jingle likes to tug at we can all take pleasure in giggling at Sinbad shrieking.
Watch the parade scene and the warehouse scene in Jingle All the Way.
Friday, December 4, 2015
T's Take on The Last Hunga Gamezz
So, yeah.
If you saw the first of the two last Hungry Games, you don't need me. If you care at all you'll have seen it and liked it, or you're just a bad person who can't pleased.
Wait.
What we're seeing in this fourth iteration of a jonky euphemistically feminine dystopia wherein the mincing, fashion and art-focused cultural swine of a neo-doofus, nega-liberal populous allows the enslavement of entire swathes of humanity (districts, as you will come to know them) in favor of the special indulgence of the .00001% because they're just sort of weak artsy lady-people who don't even understand things like whatever. They care about aesthetic and poetry and culture and literature and all that other artsy-fartsy idiot stuff that dangerous Intellectual people indulge in when society runs away with itself. It's not even discussed that this one district in more than a dozen(?) exists entirely in a state of tireless pandering to and worship of its most elite members, nor how crushing and oppressive and bitter, heartless, cruel that regime might be to serve from the inside. I would rather have found this entire sequence to events to have been viewed from the perspective of a janitor in a government building than the Great Miss Everdeen. The parallels are appropriately cutting, the requisite pomp and circumstance are offered to the title Hunger Games wherein young, supple, reasonably attractive combatants are sentenced to assassinate one-another in effectively sentient, deadly environments that resemble any sort of Truman Show that could possibly make any sense at all. We are all Katniss, of course, in that we are thrown by society into impossible circumstances, ill-equipped but convinced that humanity alone can save us even in a harsh wilderness of predatory instinct and industrial construct.
I should alert you to a spoiler here. The Whatever'th Hunger Games are even announced by title, only to have that illusion dumped at the first opportunity and allow a will-they-won't-they un-pissing contest between noncombatants Petra Malark and Whatsits Thorsbrother. There is zero chemistry, at all, and everything is just fine I guess. Good talk bruh.
It's a political documentary, and it always was. There happened to be some high points early in the production, but there might be in just such an uprising. The author and perhaps the movie production crew took far too much/little care in creating a believable end to the successful pundits of a newly run revolution. The wartime champions, the ones that will win you an empire; the Churchills... they're not fit to rebuild & they don't want to. It's best to let them to their cabins, to their solace, to their lovers and their comforts and whatever ease therapy might provide them. Unchallenged and without the need of the common man, their relevance evaporates and they are suddenly and horrifically Real People. You don't want to look at them any more, and are horrified by your repugnant reaction to them.
Imagine that: if the 300 Spartans just sort of waited it out and killed their way through the million or so (I don't know about history) human beings thrown at them. Imagine if that worked. And then it was just like, "Okay, Leonidas. Just... go home." So he did. And he won. And it was over.
And he did a good job. But, like, you still gotta go to the market on Sunday. So, here's Leonidas at the market.
And then he goes home again and eats the food from the market.
Thanks for watching.
*credits*
I just walked away from this IMAX climactic opus, this ultimate peak of the four-part masterwork that's been stealing my imagination for what feels like a rival to the fucking Harry Potter series, and I'm just... I walked out of that theater feeling ultimately unresolved. I felt completely cheated, and completely hollow, and like none of it was really worth anything, and that the people who could possibly benefit from my having suffered this ordeal would be the unseen masses who were supposedly fought for in all of this. The wholeity of humanity at this point consists of violent revolutionaries and cultish, slavish pundents who only exist to serve a ruling class that now rejects and despises them, rather an inversion of the former rather than a reformation of true meaning.
I rather think we might have spared a half minute to delve into that than spent still more forlorn long-shots and meaningful looks between would-be lovers. In retrospect, it feels like a lot of people had to die for Katniss's pride. It feels more true that she'd have been tackled and strung up there with lascivious old Patriarch in the end, figures like herself rarely escape martyrdom (sad but true). Her negligence in leaving Snow to be torn and bludgeoned apart by the masses was a particularly hideous and unforgivable breach of the humanity to which Katniss would appear to want to have represented. My eye was immediately drawn to the canny use of resources in this critical moment of execution (one must always appreciate an instance of Two Birds with One Stone) but certainly not to its dedication to her character or really the subject matter at hand. Her inflexibility is both the thing establishes her as the best thing since sliced bread in this oppressed world and a tragically wounded and irredeemably broken person capable of and perpetrating crimes just as morally bankrupt as her competitors. I had rather hoped that more of her detrimental reflexive tendencies might be addressed, overcome, that she might learn her perspective was in some way incomplete and worthy of reappraisal.
Nope! Don't worry, you didn't need to do this at all. You were exactly right, all along, there was never a point to anything the opposition believed, and you're entitled to leave them to suffer at the hands of whatever the most savage individual(s) might have to offer you in the assailants' moment of ultimate passion and the criminals' moment of ultimate vulnerability.
Just do whatever you want to the bad guys.
They're bad.
Snow was laughing because Katniss had become him, and learned (without understanding) that all the morality she'd been clinging to all this time evaporates in the face of individual gain & the grasping for safety. Once consequence had been removed, she wouldn't do her enemy the condolence of a relatively painless death. She wanted him to be destroyed, utterly, because it was a fitting message to the attentive remainder of humanity. It has been said that a populous can be judged by its treatment of its captors, and if Katniss intended to make the point that intolerance cannot be tolerated, she communicated rather a conflicted message given that it contained wanton cruelty in and of itself. How is a public stoning less barbaric than a Hunger Game? At least Katniss was given the opportunity to procure her bow and arrows. Dude was tied to a stake and like a thousand people bumrushed him.
Thank God the rule of law has been restored.
Color me dissatisfied with this interpretation of justice. I rather hoped I'd paid to be uplifted by this fantasy world, but the only thing that made any sense at all was to just let it fizzle out once the remaining combatants had slunk from the chessboard to take up with their comforts while the New World Order organizes and implements itself. A sensible society would either put Snow to work or execute him humanely; what Katniss allows is an unthinkable treachery that goes beyond poor taste and into the territory of truly evil. I'm not interested in her position, however emotionally just a viewer might perceive it to be; the type of society where one person gets to decide that another is torn to pieces on live television is precisely the thing you've built yourself to oppose. YOU MAY NOT TORTURE PEOPLE TO DEATH. Also, you shouldn't do it on primetime for capitol and political gain. No more may you enjoin others to do the same, and walk away as though allowing and endorsing such a thing is not to confer complicity in it.
So once Katniss has had her Princess Peach removed from the plotline she is free to be inhumanly cruel to a person who repeatedly showed restraint when in a position to destroy her, utterly disregarded the democratic process which she herself has just instilled, undermined the principles of her new world order before even bothering to produce any stable template or mode of conduct to replace the at least functional one which she has just caused to implode, and vanished to the countryside without a word of explanation.
If this ending is unsatisfactory, you may possibly sense my point.
If you saw the first of the two last Hungry Games, you don't need me. If you care at all you'll have seen it and liked it, or you're just a bad person who can't pleased.
Wait.
What we're seeing in this fourth iteration of a jonky euphemistically feminine dystopia wherein the mincing, fashion and art-focused cultural swine of a neo-doofus, nega-liberal populous allows the enslavement of entire swathes of humanity (districts, as you will come to know them) in favor of the special indulgence of the .00001% because they're just sort of weak artsy lady-people who don't even understand things like whatever. They care about aesthetic and poetry and culture and literature and all that other artsy-fartsy idiot stuff that dangerous Intellectual people indulge in when society runs away with itself. It's not even discussed that this one district in more than a dozen(?) exists entirely in a state of tireless pandering to and worship of its most elite members, nor how crushing and oppressive and bitter, heartless, cruel that regime might be to serve from the inside. I would rather have found this entire sequence to events to have been viewed from the perspective of a janitor in a government building than the Great Miss Everdeen. The parallels are appropriately cutting, the requisite pomp and circumstance are offered to the title Hunger Games wherein young, supple, reasonably attractive combatants are sentenced to assassinate one-another in effectively sentient, deadly environments that resemble any sort of Truman Show that could possibly make any sense at all. We are all Katniss, of course, in that we are thrown by society into impossible circumstances, ill-equipped but convinced that humanity alone can save us even in a harsh wilderness of predatory instinct and industrial construct.
I should alert you to a spoiler here. The Whatever'th Hunger Games are even announced by title, only to have that illusion dumped at the first opportunity and allow a will-they-won't-they un-pissing contest between noncombatants Petra Malark and Whatsits Thorsbrother. There is zero chemistry, at all, and everything is just fine I guess. Good talk bruh.
It's a political documentary, and it always was. There happened to be some high points early in the production, but there might be in just such an uprising. The author and perhaps the movie production crew took far too much/little care in creating a believable end to the successful pundits of a newly run revolution. The wartime champions, the ones that will win you an empire; the Churchills... they're not fit to rebuild & they don't want to. It's best to let them to their cabins, to their solace, to their lovers and their comforts and whatever ease therapy might provide them. Unchallenged and without the need of the common man, their relevance evaporates and they are suddenly and horrifically Real People. You don't want to look at them any more, and are horrified by your repugnant reaction to them.
Imagine that: if the 300 Spartans just sort of waited it out and killed their way through the million or so (I don't know about history) human beings thrown at them. Imagine if that worked. And then it was just like, "Okay, Leonidas. Just... go home." So he did. And he won. And it was over.
And he did a good job. But, like, you still gotta go to the market on Sunday. So, here's Leonidas at the market.
And then he goes home again and eats the food from the market.
Thanks for watching.
*credits*
I just walked away from this IMAX climactic opus, this ultimate peak of the four-part masterwork that's been stealing my imagination for what feels like a rival to the fucking Harry Potter series, and I'm just... I walked out of that theater feeling ultimately unresolved. I felt completely cheated, and completely hollow, and like none of it was really worth anything, and that the people who could possibly benefit from my having suffered this ordeal would be the unseen masses who were supposedly fought for in all of this. The wholeity of humanity at this point consists of violent revolutionaries and cultish, slavish pundents who only exist to serve a ruling class that now rejects and despises them, rather an inversion of the former rather than a reformation of true meaning.
I rather think we might have spared a half minute to delve into that than spent still more forlorn long-shots and meaningful looks between would-be lovers. In retrospect, it feels like a lot of people had to die for Katniss's pride. It feels more true that she'd have been tackled and strung up there with lascivious old Patriarch in the end, figures like herself rarely escape martyrdom (sad but true). Her negligence in leaving Snow to be torn and bludgeoned apart by the masses was a particularly hideous and unforgivable breach of the humanity to which Katniss would appear to want to have represented. My eye was immediately drawn to the canny use of resources in this critical moment of execution (one must always appreciate an instance of Two Birds with One Stone) but certainly not to its dedication to her character or really the subject matter at hand. Her inflexibility is both the thing establishes her as the best thing since sliced bread in this oppressed world and a tragically wounded and irredeemably broken person capable of and perpetrating crimes just as morally bankrupt as her competitors. I had rather hoped that more of her detrimental reflexive tendencies might be addressed, overcome, that she might learn her perspective was in some way incomplete and worthy of reappraisal.
Nope! Don't worry, you didn't need to do this at all. You were exactly right, all along, there was never a point to anything the opposition believed, and you're entitled to leave them to suffer at the hands of whatever the most savage individual(s) might have to offer you in the assailants' moment of ultimate passion and the criminals' moment of ultimate vulnerability.
Just do whatever you want to the bad guys.
They're bad.
Snow was laughing because Katniss had become him, and learned (without understanding) that all the morality she'd been clinging to all this time evaporates in the face of individual gain & the grasping for safety. Once consequence had been removed, she wouldn't do her enemy the condolence of a relatively painless death. She wanted him to be destroyed, utterly, because it was a fitting message to the attentive remainder of humanity. It has been said that a populous can be judged by its treatment of its captors, and if Katniss intended to make the point that intolerance cannot be tolerated, she communicated rather a conflicted message given that it contained wanton cruelty in and of itself. How is a public stoning less barbaric than a Hunger Game? At least Katniss was given the opportunity to procure her bow and arrows. Dude was tied to a stake and like a thousand people bumrushed him.
Thank God the rule of law has been restored.
Color me dissatisfied with this interpretation of justice. I rather hoped I'd paid to be uplifted by this fantasy world, but the only thing that made any sense at all was to just let it fizzle out once the remaining combatants had slunk from the chessboard to take up with their comforts while the New World Order organizes and implements itself. A sensible society would either put Snow to work or execute him humanely; what Katniss allows is an unthinkable treachery that goes beyond poor taste and into the territory of truly evil. I'm not interested in her position, however emotionally just a viewer might perceive it to be; the type of society where one person gets to decide that another is torn to pieces on live television is precisely the thing you've built yourself to oppose. YOU MAY NOT TORTURE PEOPLE TO DEATH. Also, you shouldn't do it on primetime for capitol and political gain. No more may you enjoin others to do the same, and walk away as though allowing and endorsing such a thing is not to confer complicity in it.
So once Katniss has had her Princess Peach removed from the plotline she is free to be inhumanly cruel to a person who repeatedly showed restraint when in a position to destroy her, utterly disregarded the democratic process which she herself has just instilled, undermined the principles of her new world order before even bothering to produce any stable template or mode of conduct to replace the at least functional one which she has just caused to implode, and vanished to the countryside without a word of explanation.
If this ending is unsatisfactory, you may possibly sense my point.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
T's Take on FATAL ATTRACTION
I hate to say it, but don't impregnate strange women. Michael Douglas is just slimy enough to be perfect for this role. A grown man with a wife and son sleeping with a business associate is wrong for (at least) four very big reasons. And then, no protection? Talk about flirting with disaster.
The whole thing feels very overblown to me. Baby or no, I cannot believe this woman felt honestly that her course of action could lead to anything but a massive explosion of hate and drama. Some women want that, I'd discovered in my life, but they also tend to be very easy to spot.
This was a horror movie more than a thriller, if you ask me, with everything about it blown out of proportion to chill us to our bones. People like this woman tend to be in jail or a psychiatric facility by the time they're thirty-six. For her to just snap and self-destruct at the notion of rejection, well... While I cannot speak to the plausibility of it, because indeed, it is the plausibility of such a scenario that makes it so bone-chilling, the likelihood is rather slim. Like, one in five hundred thousand, minimum.
Movies made for the express purpose of revealing the destruction of a family are things I rarely frequent. With So I Married An Axe Murderer, it was a goofy foray into unbelievable silliness, touching briefly on the idea that you never really know who somebody is. Fatal Attraction shoves misery in your face for an hour and a half. It was like watching Audition. I guess I'm glad I saw it, if only because I know what people are talking about now, but I'll probably never watch it again. I was grateful for the semi-happy ending, though, which is to say the only person who died was the insane lady.
It was fine, I guess, for an unpleasant movie that went out of its way to be weird and unnerving.
Don't watch Fatal Attraction.
T's Take on SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER
What a delightfully dark movie. It reminded me of Envy, with that intentionally uncomfortable tinge of loathing and desperation. I liked Envy, just like I liked Axe Murderer, because I respect a filmmaker who doesn't care whether their viewers feel uncomfortable.
That was meant as a compliment.
Mike Myers does his best to be entertaining, which can be compelling and distracting moment to moment. I can see the director waving his hand at Mr. Myers and saying, “Just do something funny.” It felt unfair to leave the guy hanging with ballerina prancing in the quad at Buena Vista park for a solid two minutes while Ms. Cardboard offers the same cryptic open-ended statements we come to expect.
It's his winsome, pure enthusiasm that carries him through performances like this, but the guy just falls flat sometimes. It's not his fault. The movie leans on his personality too much. We just cycle back to the same two notes the whole movie through, which is enough, but barely. Jim Carey, John Candy, Robin Williams, whoever – we can't just throw these people into a movie and let good intentions carry them through. Mixing slapstick and mothers-kissing-friends fodder with the notion of brutal serial axe murdering is an uneasy combo at best, and shifting back and fourth between touching “take me seriously” romantic sequences and the abusive drunk Scottish father screaming at his child and wife made me wince more than once.
I like this movie. I honestly do. However, it feels conflicted, and that conflict muddies the fun I feel like we were supposed to be having here. The bits that included Mike's cop friend were hilarious, and the trip to Alcatraz was perfectly uncomfortable. Bryan Cranston absolutely nailed his role – the guy had me rolling. The spoken word segments were a lot of fun too, and the beat generation references made me feel comfortable and warm inside. All in all, it's a win. I can't really imagine another way it could have come out.
Watch So I Married An Axe Murderer
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