[Film Review] Full Metal Jacket

In Kubrick's golden run from Dr. Strangelove to his death, a time period without token pictures like Lolita in order to make a name for himself, or Hollywood favor-jobs like Spartacus, three movies stick out as the black sheep of his filmography.  Barry Lyndon, one of his most underappreciated, gorgeous, funny, and, yes, boring films he made;  Eyes Wide Shut, a hallucinatory, misunderstood potential-masterpiece that rubbed a lot of men the wrong way by creeping a finger up their patriarchal skirts; and Full Metal Jacket, the film with the iconic first half, and the "not as great" second half.  Much has been said about both sides of Full Metal Jacket, about how the first half is the perfect film, the second half a messy sequence of short stories, and how it was the film that seemed "too late" to make an impact after Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter made the subject not only well worn territory, but ripe with classics.  Full Metal Jacket has a consensus that has never sat quite right with me.  Taken in isolation, the two halves of the film don't have nearly the this/or relationship the film has often been pegged with.  The interpretation of the film as blandly "war is hell" is, likewise, incredibly simplified, especially if you take the parts independently.  Full Metal Jacket is the black sheep of black sheep, in that it feels wide open in showing how the master craftsman sews his seems.

Full Metal Jacket is, much like many of Kubrick's films, a covert dark comedy.  Likewise to A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, there is a thread of humor throughout Full Metal Jacket, but here feels less a relief as it does a broken stitch to a gash.  Clockwork's humor worked to portray the absurdity of the world Alex lived in, and Lyndon used humor as the foil to Barry's picaresque rise and fall.  With Jacket, the humor is revealing.  Twice in the film prostitutes are parading or paraded to soldiers as a streetwise profiteering on the war, both times laced with (admittedly unfunny) humor and rampant misogyny and racism.  What's funny in these scenes is what is wrong, reducing these women and their race to not just objects or less-than-human states of being, but as lightning rods for masculinity to play open mic and to vent.  "Vent" here is doing a lot of work, because they don't just vent with humor, but with physicality.  They think of the Vietnamese in two ways: targets and fuckable meat.  This is mirrored earlier in the film, where masculinity is used to shape young men for war.  The first half of the film is almost entirely quotable, largely due to the insults of Lee Ermey, which range from misogynistic to homophobic, violent to emasculating.  Masculinity is on full display throughout, sometimes between soldiers (the Animal Mother scene, where he and Joker trade insults about how much they have killed, and whether it is enough for the respect of the other) and sometimes to the soldiers, such as in boot camp.  If there is one prevalent theme throughout the film, it is that masculinity is dehumanizing, and reduces us to simplified answers.  When the chopper gunner is asked how he can kill women and children Vietnamese, he retorts "by not leading as much!" and laughing.  

Full Metal Jacket takes these themes famously in two parts.  The first and most famous half is masculinity as something shaping, how it turns men into monsters, some of which play ball and others who lash back, as in the pivotal Gomer Pile shooting scene.  They are to uphold a rigorous manly perspective, one of killing for a greater purpose, of physically overcoming the challenge lest they be girls or worthless (insults interchangeable throughout the first half).  When discussing rifling, the examples used are Lee Harvey Oswald and the Austin Tower Shooter, men assassinating or mass shooting.  Whatever the problem is, harder or with violence is the action.  Discipline, the closest you could get to a positive angle on the training sequences, is considered a method to achieve the previous goals.  "[Lee Harvey Oswald] was 250 feet away and shooting at a moving target.  Oswald got off three rounds with an old Italian rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a headshot.  Do any of you people know where [he] learned to shoot?"  The answer, of course, is the Marine Corp.  "[He] showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do."  

The second half, admittedly, feels more like a true Kubrick film, and this is where I think people begin to break off.  For all the praise that the barracks section gets, it is by far the most direct Kubrick has ever been with his films, sans parts of A Clockwork Orange, which I consider a comedy.  There is no interpretation, no dream-like otherness where we are left to observe.  Just two feelings: isn't this fucked up and isn't this funny.  The section during the war feels far more like Barry Lyndon or The Shining.  The entire sequence is circling a drain, and you are just waiting for it to get there.  We hear boasts and wants from soldiers early on, back at camp away from the action either longing to "get some trigger time" or pridefully talking about how it has affected them.  The only one who seems to embrace the absurdity of the situation is Joker, not coincidentally our protagonist.  Working as a war reporter within the military, he bucks at his editor's insistence they are to write with a bias towards their winning the war.  He wears a peace button but has scrawled across his helmet "Born To Kill", which he is accosted for on numerous occasions.  When he and an eager and green cameraman are sent to the front lines, the first casualties they witness are against women and children working in fields, not soldiers.  Vietnamese soldiers are hardly ever seen in the entire film, and the only one ever seen in close up is a child, a young girl who alone manages to kill three men who we have gotten to know, and the only non-prostitute woman to speak any dialogue.  War in Kubrick's film is not killing people, it is relishing in killing people, in concocting war stories or creating "rewarding" ways to enjoy the war and all of its slaughter.  Vietnam is meaningless in Full Metal Jacket, and focuses not on the horror of war itself, but in the absurdity in its very existence and execution.  The latter half strings together a series of sections rather than points: the cushy side of the war (the reporter camp), near the front lines where deaths are calculated as wins and the threat of an ambush is high, but never seen; the platoon itself, waiting and shit-talking while buying prostitutes and glorifying their kills, and finally the scene with the lone gunman, a young girl by herself who manages an impressive body count against trained marines.  The first half of the film, the same half that talks about "what a motivated marine and his rifle can do" is made a laughing stock and a tragedy all at once.  

On my recent viewing, the first half was certainly more entertaining, but the latter half was the most interesting.  The rigidity and focus of the first half becomes untethered once we are in the war, and all of that simplistic "kill or be killed" becomes distorted as it is used to relate and measure one another.  The film has serious pacing issues because of this division, but it also strikes an important point.  The issue is mostly in just how entertaining that first half is.  Pile's characterization is decidedly cartoonish, a strange distraction in an otherwise realistic section of the film.  Meanwhile, the dreamlike Vietnam scenes fit that mold better, as is exemplified by Animal Mother, a character who similarly speaks in distant, dreamlike speech like Pile did.  There is an unevenness to it all, a feeling that, iconic as the first part may have been, it should have been trimmed down somewhat in order to let the latter part of the film flourish.  In part, the issue really is what they say: it had all just been done before.  Despite how gorgeous the cinematography is during the war scenes, the content feels familiar even as it is doing something different.  The slower energy to this section makes the transition between halves difficult at best, and robs the latter part of the audience participation and scrutiny required for it to work.  Full Metal Jacket is flawed in a unique way, showcasing Kubrick's knack for nightmares but, ironically, seeing him excel at something he hadn't before: entertainment obscuring thoughtfulness.  The emotional impact of the barracks scene is contrary to what our intellect would tell us, but it is hard for us to unwrite what we had experienced there, which was horrifically entertaining.  We know deep down that what that sequence showed was something awful, but we love it all the same.  Full Metal Jacket is a film that will be remembered, but not for what it said.  Rather, it leaves us with an irrational perspective, one of chewing the scenery and enjoying the taste.  A Kubrick film that gets in the way of itself.                    

8.0

[TV Review] WandaVision

This review contains spoilers.
 

There is a certain conceit when watching a film (or, in this case, a TV show) in the MCU that it is about the broad strokes, not the tiny details.  Yes, references and allusions towarads other Marvel stories and characters are littered in the background of every shot, but they hardly serve the narrative that is right in front of us.  The trick with the MCU, and why Infinity War and Endgame worked so well, is that this has always been a very macro story, about the large moving pieces from superhero history coming together into big tent pole climaxes.  It happened in the build up to The Avengers, to Civil War, and obviously to Thanos' big bad pair of films, but a lot of time this means the smaller stories get lost in the shuffle a bit.  For every Thor Ragnarock or Winter Soldier, there was a Thor Dark World or Iron Man 3.  Ant-Man couldn't really hold my attention, and everything I've seen of Captain Marvel makes me not want to watch it, though I imagine one of these days I will.  The individual stories are almost always about set up over their localized conflicts, moving heroes, villains, and magic artifacts to the proper position so that the folks over at Marvel can tell us the story they really want to tell, but which requires the proper set up first.  

I've gone on record saying this worked incredibly well with Infinity War for me, but after Endgame I'm just not so sure I'm interested in this story anymore.  Part of this comes from how long these films have been going on now.  Iron Man released in the waning years of my high school career, a time when The Dark Knight was still one of the best films I'd seen in theaters, when Christopher Nolan felt like a new visionary, and though I was moving into more ambitious (and perhaps less sufferable) territory with Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch becoming some of my favorite filmmakers, I was still incredibly green when it came to some of the more ambitious sides of the medium.  Infinity War and Endgame was the payoff my younger self has been waiting for, but now that we enter a new age of superheros in a time where even the rather great The Boys can hardly hold my attention because of its genre affiliations, I don't see how the straight faced world of the MCU is going to keep me going.  

I have a series of exceptions, of course.  Spiderman has always been a favorite of mine, and I've still yet to see Far From Home but I intend to do so, and if X-Men ever gets wrapped into the MCU, those films will definitely be something I look out for.  But outside of that little has me interested.  

But then WandaVision happened.  WandaVision took the world by storm.  It was bizarre, it was cryptic, it seemed to work along the same lines as Twin Peaks and The Leftovers in the way it played coy with audiences.  But, much like everything in the MCU, it had no faith.

WandaVision starts out well enough, co-opting the multi-camera sitcom into a cryptic look into Wanda's psyche after she lost the love of her life (twice!) in Endgame and Infinity War.  Wanda played the clever but dopey house wife, and the deceased Vision the doting, oafish husband.  The show rode a fine line, where the jokes were hammy and unfunny - threatening to be downright boring - but threading in odd, out of sync scenes here and there.  In the first episode there was a dinner scene straight out of Eraserhead, and it had me intrigued.  The MCU had never worked on this sort of level before, had never toyed with its audience in a way where they were not allowed to properly predict which story this could possibly be leading to.  There was The House of M, obviously, but this was under such different circumstances no one quite knew how this was all going to go. 

It lasted for three or so episodes.  The veneer of surrealism quickly fell apart as the MCU scrambled to explain everything.  Three weeks was enough, they decided.  Any more would threaten to challenge their audience, who was unprepared for such types of entertainment.  Suddenly, we had a government operation interested in living weapons, we had a rough track of what Wanda was up to before she disappeared behind the scarlet wall around the town of Westview.  The show continued a few coy points here and there - Geraldine not being what she seemed, the motivations of S.W.O.R.D. director Hayward in acquiring Vision and the way he manipulated security footage into implying Wanda stole Vision's body - but by and large the show was beginning to turn into a traditional MCU show. 

There were aspects, here and there, of interesting developments.  Vision quickly came to realize not all was what it seemed, and sought answers.  Wanda became quickly pregnant, and even more quickly gave birth to twin boys, one with her powers and one with the powers of her brother.  Her brother, as well, seemed to come back from the dead, albeit with a different actor than before.  Each one of these things had interesting possibilities tied to them.  Vision's search for answers showed the darker side to what Wanda had done to this town, of the suffering those imposed by her spell were going through, and of the futility of his ever leaving, lest he be destroyed.  Vision was up against a couple of potential threats: the threat that Wanda was doing something terrible, and the threat that he wasn't, strictly speaking, real.  Wanda's kids managed to force themselves to grow up to roughly the 10-12 year old range, allowing them to find their powers and question this world for themselves. Wanda's brother, QuickSilver, was most bizarre of all.  After the release of Endgame, the question on every fan's mind was: where does this go next?  The most obvious answer seemed to be into the multiverse, the concept that the MCU exists in multiple universes (or, at least, can, since most of it predominately takes place in one).  The potentialities of this mechanic could lead to the recently acquired X-Men franchise and Deadpool to be woven into the MCU without much ret-conning.  Whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen, but Marvel wasn't against teasing it.  The recasting of QuickSilver was with fan favorite Evan Peters, who played the character in the X-Men prequels.  QuckSilver was one of the few characters that seemed to be allowed between franchises, showing up in Winter Soldier and in X-men: Days of Future Past not far apart.  Scarlet Witch herself is a bit of an ambiguous figure, being both apart of the greater Avengers plotline as well as X-men (the House of M storyline WandaVision is largely based on is traditionally thought of as an X-Men story, and Wanda herself is a mutant).  Showing the other QuickSilver in an MCU property brought about a lot of speculation. 

WandaVision, by its midpoint, had lost its most interesting edge, but had brought up questions about self with Vision, built up potential plotlines by introducing Wanda's kids (who have quite a lot of stories in the comics), and by creating a bridge between the defunct X-men franchise and the MCU.  But, as is Marvel's passion it would seem, none of this went everywhere, and the show quickly fell apart.  QuickSilver, it turns out, was just a brainwashed actor, an insincere tease at what everyone wants but without commitment.  S.W.O.R.D. director Hayward rebuilt Vision using some of Wanda's powers, allowing for Vision to come back sometime later, probably in a movie, so Vision's third fucking death doesn't have to matter, and Vision doesn't have to wrestle very much with the ethical quandary of Wanda's actions.  Wanda's kids where destroyed with the rest of her vision of Westview (although we do get teased they could exist somewhere, potentially in the multiverse, during the post-credits scene, which may be the only exciting thing to come from this finale).  Worst of all, somehow, is that Wanda's obvious atrocity in her holding hostage and torturing - whether to her knowledge or not - of a whole town gets swept under the rug with a shrug, "you were grieving.  We get it."  This being the MCU, repercussions could come somewhere down the road - potentially leading to Civil War 2, which believe it or not I think would actually be a relatively good idea - but it could just as easily ignore the whole affair.  

The show died for me, in particular, on the eighth episode.  Now that the big bad guy (who really did very little up to this point, when you really think about it, as most of it was still Wanda) was out and about, Wanda was walked through her past where she was able to see where all of this came from.  Some Hydra experiments involving her powers, and her powers coming forth during the bombing of her home were all fine, but the MCU, unable to let anything just be inferred, decided to explain away why she chose sitcoms.  It couldn't be that they were simply a source of comfort, simply an idealistic American viewpoint that this country uses to standardize its beliefs and work through its least controversial troubles (some outlier episodes notwithstanding), no, it turns out Wanda's dad had a collection of American sitcom DVDs.  My complaints range from the insulting implication to the nit-picky.  On the latter end, Wanda isn't that young.  These DVDs did not exist when she was a child, anywhere.  On the former end, who cares?  She didn't need an explanation, because we have all seen and fallen into sitcoms before.  We know why we watch them.  We know why they are a source of comfort, at least on the level WandaVision is willing to work on.  It's bloat at best, condescending at worst.  The fact a show that attracted viewers in part on its mysterious execution went on to explain even that which needed no explanation is profoundly disappointing.  The MCU's attempt at something ambitious ended in one of the most traditional MCU outings yet, and I just can't care anymore. 

 

      

 

5.0

[TV Review] Fargo - Season 1

 

Fargo as a TV show seemed like a hard sale from the get-go.  Though not to all, the idea of adapting some version of the Cohen Brothers' classic 1996 film seemed at best a cash in, at worst blasphemy.  There were a few that thought of the potential of such a thing, sure, but for the rest of us this looked like another creative dead end in an industry that had long since given up on original ideas.  It's old hat now, but the show worked, and worked magnificently.  Fargo doesn't follow the film's plot, nor does it take place in the same location, but it does find itself threaded through some of that film's loose ends.  Instead, Fargo takes place in 2006, in Bemidji, Minnesota, where one Lester Nygaard finds himself in a hospital with a broken nose after being harassed by his old high school bully.  

The Cohens' always seemed to be operating in the periphery of American folklore.  America as a nation is incredibly young, missing a lot of that deep (though retaining the horrific) history that has been smashed and reassembled into myth and slivers of storytelling.  But that doesn't mean it isn't without its own folk tales.  Fargo, the film, was more closely related to parables about greed than the crime genre it espoused to be inspired by.  But even there, a quaint and modern paradigm acted as the foundation to what Fargo had to say.  It was about a man struggling with his used car business, who needed money and chose the wrong path in order to get it.  He invited evil into the world, but his reasoning was understandable and empathizing even as it was disagreeable.  

Likewise, Fargo the show has an element of folklore to it.  Lester Nygaard, in the hospital and feeling pathetic, talks to the man sitting beside him in the waiting room.  The man beside him happens to be Lorne Malvo, a hitman for hire who has more in common with the manifestation of evil than he does any human soul.  The yarn Fargo spins here has to do with a man who has been pushed over one too many times, a sociopath that is more a force of nature than a man, and the quaint, small town cops caught in the midst of something they cannot understand.  But Fargo the film isn't the only Cohen Brother's film the show takes from.  Most notably, elements from No Country For Old Men have found a welcome counterpoint to some of Fargo's more amusing and humbling aspects.  Lorne Malvo is so obviously a mirror of Anton Chigurh (down to full scenes stolen wholesale from No Country) it is almost embarrassing, but a stellar performance from Billy Bob Thorton saves the entire thing and makes the character one of the defining aspects of the show.  Where the combination shines, however, is in its themes.  

No Country For Old Men is cut from a similar cloth as Fargo, a fact more notable if you've seen the Cohens' first film, Bloodsimple, which feels like a natural melding of the two.  Both are films that involve greed allowing for greater violence to infect the world around them.  Their most notable thread, however, is in their sense of nature.  No Country For Old Men is a somewhat ironic title, because it isn't that the world has moved on from the peace of old folks' past, it is that human nature is simply not being obscured any longer.  The great threat of Anton Chigurh isn't some new form, exactly.  Violence and cruelty has always existed, it was just that we thought that was behind us now.  For Fargo, the force of nature is chance, more than anything else.  Chance has brought coincidence into an already unhinged situation, where plans have gone awry and bodies are beginning to pile up.  The kidnapping doesn't go as planned, the ransom finds itself with a few more, irreconcilable kinks in the wires.  It is no coincidence, however, that chance also plays a part in Anton Chigurh's character.  Chance, chaos, and all that may entail is the natural state of the universe.  It is empathy and kindness that allow us to carry on through it.

Nature is evil in so far as it allows horrible things to happen, not that it is inherently something to be fought against.  In a Cohen Brothers' film, nature and evil are things to withstand, to survive your way through, and part of that has to do with letting go of lofty ideas and careless gambles.  People, when they do not heed their own limits and the value of others, allow for nature to intervene.  Fargo's Lester is not a good man.  He may be immediately empathetic by being meek and spineless, but his character is one of selfishness.  Lester's invitation towards nature to come blowing through is an act of chance.  He meets Lorn Malvo because he is weak.  Just because he doesn't fight back doesn't mean he doesn't have resentments, and is the harboring of those resentments that prevents him from saying "no" outright to Malvo when asked if he wants Malvo to "handle" his ex-bully.  It was the slightest of nudges, but it led to a torrential downfall.  Malvo is the evil of nature, but Lester is the evil of men who have lost their empathy.     

 

 

 

9.0

[Film Review] Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond

 

Andy Kaufman is a comedic legend.  He was a surrealist, a provocateur, a meta-comedian that seemed to discomfort as much as he made you laugh.  The man was strange, seemingly from another planet, but not out of touch.  During a time of heightened attention on sexism, he reconstructed himself as a sexist wrestling villain.  He created a persona where he would only ever wrestle women, wagering money to any woman who could defeat him in a match.  He spouted sexist rhetoric and was often hostile to his audience, drumming up their hate.  It was somewhat controversial at the time, but in a way somewhat genius and relevant: he made a cartoon of sexists while creating an effigy to be destroyed.  That relevance is key to what Kaufman was.  He was weird, he was anxiety inducing, but he had a reason to be so.  It always seemed he wanted to disrupt the ways we take for granted our consumption of media, social norms, and empathy.  He challenged the passivity of everyday life, forcing you to reckon with something you could not easily identify, but you could always feel.  

In 1999, Jim Carrey, coming off a string of highly successful comedies and a dramatic role that had begun to shift people's perceptions of the ubiquitous comic, was in a dark place.  The success he had so long chased had become a reality, but success does not necessarily fix you.  What followed, ostensibly, was an existential crisis, the kind that shatters you to pieces and forces the slow process of putting yourself back together.  It was in this shattered state that Carrey decided to play his idol Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, and to do so remaining in character on and off the set for the entirety of the shoot.

The story is infamous at this point.  Carrey was said to have harassed his coworkers, to have been completely uncontrollable while in character.  Rumor had it his behavior on set was captured on film in behind the scenes footage, but it was not until a few years ago that the rumor proved to be true.  Jim and Andy, a documentary by Chris Smith of American Movie fame, takes a very subtle eye towards what happened not just on set, but with Jim Carrey himself.  Carrey appears as the only talking head for the entire film, bearded and in a suit, looking far closer to Alan Moore than to the iconic actor.  Likewise, Carrey is extremely reflective and revealing, but it all comes through a haze of doubt.  

The trick to Jim and Andy is that, much like Kaufman himself, it is hard to completely grasp what is real and what is not.  Carrey is relatively forthright about his insecurities, his selfish ambition, his criticism of the industry that made him a star.  It feels as though he holds nothing back, and as though he has nothing to lose, but in so being he starts weaving a myth for himself.  Threading his worst tendencies with his incredible talent, Carrey creates an image of a broken man, a person who has been chewed up and spit out by fame, and lives underneath an unending and blinding spotlight where his form is undiscernible.  In this state, Carrey seems to have come to the conclusion that there was no form to begin with, a rather privileged conclusion when one does not have to worry with the basic necessities and stresses of living.  This seemingly damning self-portrayal feels far more refreshing than it does outright bad.  Carrey truly seems largely transparent, letting you peer into dark corners and cracks in his ego, but even as he reveals so much he often times seems to cower behind a certain mysticism.  When Carrey says he was possessed by Kaufman, you struggle to believe him.  It feels like a psychological disassociation rather than a true belief, but with Carrey and his various and often unrestrained mystical beliefs, whether or not he believes it blurs with whether that outright matters.  The truth of what he did and who he is is still there, albeit bent into a particular shape.  

Smith doesn't just portray Carrey and his shenanigans on set as they are.  He proposes questions, many of which seem to bring about questions of their own.  Repeatedly, people praise Carrey's general mannerisms and behavior as distinctly Kaufman.  He seems to be pulling this off.  But as you get further into the documentary, discrepancies pop up.  Certain things Carrey does while in character isn't so accurate to Kaufman as a person.  His hostility to wrestler Jerry Lawler is in opposition to how Kaufman treated him in real life, which was often as a cohort and friend.  Likewise, Carrey's brand of Kaufman behavior is without purpose, without that underlying truth being uncovered.  It is openly hostile and destructive, with little merit to any of the wild behavior he exhibits.  One could easily come out of this documentary feeling Carrey was an asshole more than a talented actor. 

The framing of the film, however, creates an explanation.  Carrey talks quite a bit about how after the movie he realized that his life didn't improve, it didn't change, it was simply on pause.  He had temporarily stepped out of being Jim Carrey, but he had to return, and what he returned to was still the broken man he had left.  There are elements during his Kaufman time that illuminate this.  In a sort of weird, unhinged psychological twist, Carrey as Kaufman would often berate Jim Carrey, yelling about how all he wants is attention, about how insecure he was, about how much of a coward he was.  Carrey's acting, his mental exploration through this character seems to at times shatter in favor of a full on breakdown.  The film's structure is also not that of a redemption arch, where Carrey comes out fine.  If anything, Carrey comes out now as a more placid version of the broken Carrey around the time of Man on the Moon.  "I have no ambition", Carrey states, staring dead eyed into the camera.  The darkness inherit in the film is difficult to grasp.  With reality seeming to bend ever so slightly in the film and Carrey's portrayal of what happened, the reality of everything comes into conflict with the desperation at play.  Performance, it would seem from this film, is something that takes from you more than it gives.          

 

 

 

7.5

[Film Review] Friday Night Lights

 

 

Someone once said that storytelling is creating a memory for the reader.  It is obvious when we think about it in hindsight.  Every memory we have is a story constructed by our brains to capture the essence and importance of a given event, whether that be good or bad.  Sports, much like most games and most live, in person actions, are a form of storytelling.  The sports story has had a rocky history, mostly due to how tradition gives us certain expectations we want met: it is either a story of overcoming great odds, or a story of the attempt being good in and of itself.  It is the difference between Rudy and Rocky, about attaining the seemingly unattainable, or otherwise learning something about yourself along the way that made the defeat in the end worth it still.  These two types of sports stories, however, are extremely restrictive, and have created a pattern within the "sports film" genre that has been lambasted and bored out of significance in the greater medium.  Many have convinced themselves that the sports story simply has no other avenues, but that is only true if you keep the focus on the game as it is meant to be played, not on how the game is actually approached, the culture that surrounds it, and all that it touches and effects.  Sports movies are not a dead genre, they have just found their best works on the periphery.  Films such as Big Fan stick out particularly well as examples of how the sports movie doesn't have to be about a game being played, per se.  The culture itself is enough to hold our attention.  

Friday Night Lights needs no introduction, thanks in part for its critically acclaimed TV show adaption.  But the movie is more than worth a look.  I, myself, am not a big sports fan.  I enjoy watching Baseball and Hockey, and I can get by watching Basketball if the situation has a game as its pivotal focus, but I've never been much of a fan of Football.  In part, this is because I grew up in "Football Country", parts of the south and midwest where the sport takes on a religious significance.  Texas and Oklahoma, in particular, seem to exist on a moral currency of how the Big Teams are doing this year.  OU, The Cowboys, OSU, UT and Texas Tech are all big names you are likely to hear or see the iconography for just about anywhere you go in these states, and the effect on a less-than-sports-minded person is to block it all out.  For those in the game, however, it is something else entirely. 

The toxic nature of sports, the bittersweet mix of the game itself and the pressure and judgement involved in those who play it, particularly young men who aren't just proving themselves, but ironing out and relying on it for their entire futures, is one not looked at nearly as much as it should be.  Friday Night Lights follows a small but traditionally successful high school Football team from Odessa, a tiny, shit-hole town in West Texas known for Football and being a shit-hole town in West Texas.  There, Football is the most important thing in the world.  There is nothing better, nothing more important, and teens within the sport dedicate their young lives to the game.  There is a point midway through the film that punctuates this well.  Three of the players are out shooting rocks with a shotgun after a recent defeat, talking over their youth.  "I don't feel seventeen, do you?"  One of them asks.  "No, I don't feel seventeen."  The other responds.  "Pull," a rock flies through the air.  There is the percussion of a 20 gauge exploding, the full force of the pressure they feel being shot into the sky in a hail of destruction.  Everywhere these kids go, there is pressure to succeed.  A sheriff pulls up to a 7-11 where two Football teens are eating breakfast before school.  The sheriff asks "You gonna win state?" with a cold glare through aviators and a tapping of his own state championship ring on the wheel.  "Yes, sir."

Friday Night Lights doesn't hate the game, but it realizes there is more than just winning and losing at stake.  For a lot of these kids, abuse is the answer to defeat, or somehow worse, no future at all.  The only people who remain in the town are those who never made it to the big leagues, people fixated on their teenage days as though that was their last shot, dumping that same pressure on their kids.  "You got one year, and then it is all gone."  Multiple teens hear some variation of this message.  Most of these kids are poor, with next to no prospects for getting out of this town or making any sort of life for themselves outside of the sport.  This makes any sense of failure a life changing affair, something that could haunt them for the rest of their lives, sealing their fate.  

Football is given more than reverence here.  It is a virtual religion, and these kids, dealing with ailing mothers and sometimes coasting on physical talent alone are riding a razor's edge.  I don't much care for the sport, but even I get exhilarating watching the game when it is on.  There is something primal about the violence of it, the field control, the quick plays.  Friday Night Lights is a sports story not about the game being played, but the game being beloved.  It is a dark portrait of what we put kids through when they play a game they are supposed to love with the pressure of their entire lives being held in the balance, of an industry that grinds up male physical talent and takes very few all the way.  At one point, a talent agent asks a player if he loves the game, and he hesitates.  He glares at the man, unable to speak for a second, before his mother answers for him.  Love the game?  Why should that factor in?  This is about the future, about a career, about getting out of Odessa and finally being able to provide for oneself and ones loved ones.  Who cares about love when this is the last chance out of a dead end.  

 

 

 

8.5 

 

[Game Review] The Top Ten Games I Didn't Finish In 2020

 

As with any year, there were a ton of games I started but stopped.  There's many reasons why, but one of the rules I have for this blog is that in order to write a review on something, I have to finish it (with few exceptions here and there).  Unfortunately, this leaves a lot of games I want to talk about, but simply can't in the right conscious.  I wanted to write one of these last year, but couldn't bring myself to do it, in part because these intros always feel so canned and insincere.  This year is not really an exception in that regard, but with the pandemic and a 6-month lay off earlier in this year, there are plenty of games I'd love to talk about but don't necessarily see myself finishing anytime soon.  It isn't that I don't want to finish the games below - quite a few of them I am still playing on occasion - it is that, for posterity's sake, I'd like to run through them, what I liked or didn't like, and why I didn't manage to finish them this year.  I want to remember, and finished or no there is still a lot to say.  The games below are not in any particular order, but they are the top ten unfinished games that left the most impression on me, good or bad.  

 

 

Final Fantasy VII REMAKE

The long awaited remake to one of gaming's most cherished entries was finally released this year, and mostly to a mixed reception.  People generally liked the game, some loved it, and plenty of people didn't like it much at all.  Final Fantasy VII REMAKE is a frustrating game.  It takes place over the first third or so of the original, elaborating on roughly 10 hours of gameplay into a 40 hour RPG.  With that comes a lot of filler.  REMAKE had a lot of things I really liked - voice acting, great graphics, a revamped and far more fun combat system, a greater focus on the parts of the plot that felt a little quickly run over in the original - but it still stands as a stretched game.  Too often the game sends you to a place full of time-waisting side quests or long, unnecessary hallways full of enemies to stretch out its playtime.  The changes to the original game's plot, as well, allude to something potentially interesting, but somewhat muddled in this entry.  A lot of discourse about this game is about the ending, something I've gleaned a lot about but do not know outright, so a review is simply unacceptable.  That said, I have difficulty convincing myself to return to a pretty, fun, but bloated game that amounts to 1/3 of an experience I've already had.  I'm in the middle on this one. 

 

 

Infinifactory

  

Zachtronics' followup (in a sense) to his cult classic Infiniminer, Infinifactory has you placing blocks a la Minecraft in order to build a conveyor belt system that constructs odd looking mechanical parts.  Some of you may be grinding your teeth at that description, as Minecraft was heavily influenced by Infiniminer.  True, Infinifactory is not a rip-off of some Minecraft mod, but neither is Zachtronics simply returning to an obviously profitable design.  Infinifactory is simultaneously simple and complex, allowing for some real creativity in how you get these components to lock in with one another to answer the puzzle's riddle.  Infinifactory is a blast, and is probably the most palatable of Zachtronics' infamously esoteric puzzle games.  Just about anyone can get into Infinifactory if they give it some time, and the block-placing mechanics make it the most immediately fun of all of his games.  Infinifactory is a game I will finish in the future, a game I loved my time with, but life happens (and friends), and I didn't have much time to invest in its mechanical brilliance, choosing instead to play The Forest with a friend.  Expect a review on this game in the future sometime, whenever I finally return to it. 

 

 

Devil May Cry

I will be eternally frustrated I didn't stick with Devil May Cry until the day comes when I finish it.  Truth is, I tried Devil May Cry three times, and each time I couldn't stick with it past the first handful of levels.  I tried on PS2 twice, and once (the farthest I ever got) on PC.  There were several things that got in my way, but one in particular made playing and learning the game a chore.  The yellow stone system, where spawning from a checkpoint uses up an item (otherwise forcing you to start the level all over again) was beyond frustrating for a player trying to learn.  Granted, the game is rather short, so you are meant to play this game more than once.  But when you need to spend your currency to upgrade Dante, and some of that currency is spent also stocking up on orbs to make the game more manageable for a learning player, what we get is a game that is harder for newcomers and easier for veterans.  Systematically, Devil May Cry is pretty severely flawed.  But as far as gameplay goes, Devil May Cry is an absolute blast.  Combos and quick dodges are a lot of fun, and ever since Dark Souls I have desperately wanted to get into the spectacle fighter genre, but, though Devil May Cry was the start, I can't help but feel it is not made to be your first game in the genre.  As much as I don't want to write about Bayonetta before finishing this game, it may just be the best choice.

Divinity: Original Sin II

 

Hells bells do I want to finish this game.  Across platforms, I have roughly 100 hours in Divinity: Original Sin II, but I've yet to finish it.  My first 50 hours or so never had me leave the starting "tutorial island", because I couldn't help but go back to the start, messing around with different class builds.  Original Sin II has one of the most expressive class RPG mechanics I've ever played with.  On the last playthrough I did with a friend, we managed to hybrid every class once or twice over, but managing that amount of creativity comes with a strong sense of how the internal mechanics work.  It is easy to build your characters out of being able to progress through the game.  I've yet to meet anyone who has either beat Divinity: Original Sin II or played without having to, at some point, start over.  Original Sin II is an absolutely fantastic game, but one that seems hellbent on making you really work to finish it.  I've managed to get halfway through the game, but without ample amount of time to dedicate to it for a month or so, finishing it is a veritable impossibility.  I'm not sure I will ever finish it, but contradictorily I think it might be one of the best RPGs I've ever played. 

 

 

Assassin's Creed

Before Cyberpunk 2077 came out, I was a good third through Assassin's Creed.  I may return to it one of these days, or I may just skip it in favor of the sequel, the game I've historically liked.  The first Assassin's Creed game is probably best known now for simply starting the famous Ubisoft series, paling in comparison to its followup games and feeling generally clumsy.  This isn't entirely wrong, but I was surprised playing it recently that it is a lot more fun than I remembered it being.  Sure, it is still hella repetitive, sure it has a relatively simple plot, and sure it is sincerely dated, but it still captures that core aspect of climbing shit is fun.  It is a heavily imperfect game, a game that had a lot of ideas but didn't quite develop them for whatever reason.  I'd like to look at more games in the series, as I have traditionally not liked them.  I feel a new appreciation for them now, but time will tell if that holds up far into the series. 

 

 

Europa Universalis IV

Europa Universalis IV isn't really a game you beat.  Despite over 120 hours in the game, I still don't feel qualified to talk about it.  EUIV isn't just a strategy game, as you've probably heard.  It is a history simulator, and that is key to getting what this game is about.  EUIV can be incredibly difficult to get into if you aren't used to this type of game, or you simply don't really know what it is.  EUIV has a monstrous amount of multi-hour tutorial videos, some by the Paradox Studios and some by the fandom, but even watching 100 hours of these won't properly prepare you for actually playing the thing.  The best way to learn, unfortunately, is to play with a friend who already knows how to play.  The game is little more than a map and a thousand menus, and your understanding how to play this game - not even playing the game well - is reliant on your ability to anticipate what actions you want to make, and where to find the menu for those actions.  It is a pretty specific group this game is aiming at, but if you are one of those people you may never need another game ever again (except, perhaps, one of Paradox's other grande strategy games).  I love EUIV to death, but going in depth as to what makes it great is a daunting task.  Maybe sometime in the future, but I couldn't manage that now, even as I played it a ton early into the pandemic.  If It sounds interesting however, I strongly recommend bashing your head against it for a hundred hours.  

 

 

Into The Breach

Rogue-likes are pretty much made to be on a list like this.  I hardly ever finish any of them, but I usually like them.  It has, admittedly, taken a lot of effort to filter them out of this list, but Into the Breach is the exception because, despite starting this game sometime in 2019, I still find myself firing it up and playing it for a week.  The game is dressed up as a Pacific Rim style kaiju game, but in reality it is simple tactics.  Into the Breach takes the tactics style RPG of Final Fantasy Tactics and X-Com and turns it into a rogue-like, perhaps the perfect genre for it.  It acts as a sort of "reactive chess", where the opponents moves are telegraphed ahead of time, and you have to create a response.  A time travel macguffin is wrapped within to explain away the rogue-like necessity is happening, and that does actually serve the game's immersion, but all of that would not be anything if the game weren't any good.  It is pure strategy, with randomness more or less about weighing loss in a particular situation, not necessarily to screw you out of a win through chance.  Into the Breach isn't a perfect rogue-like, but it fulfills my itch towards strategy games without the daunting task of having to play hundreds of hours in order to properly beat them.  Well, in the end I suppose it did, but that has more to do with my lack of skill than anything.  I still play this to this day, so it is likely I will beat it eventually, and can give it the proper focus it deserves. 

 

 

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

 

I still don't know what to make of Xenoblade Chronicles 2.  I got some 10 hours in before I dropped it in favor of . . . Batman: Arkham Asylum?  It is hard to remember totally when I first played this game, but I recall it being sometime before The Witcher III.  Regardless, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is just fucking weird.  It is anime as hell (downright campy in how it plays to anime norms, such as overt sexism - a literally objectified busty woman is a main character, acting as the spirit of a sword - and embarrassing, virgin-esque references to sex), and it plays like an MMO but single player.  The game is game-y to the point of annoyance.  There were aspects I liked about the game, such as the world they built where all land is simply the back of giant monsters, but I couldn't make heads or tails of this game.  Combos could be fun at times, but it all boiled down to "button mashing" the game.  I'd like to return to the series - perhaps from the first Xenoblade game or Xenogears - but probably not for a long time.  

 

 

Her Story

Her Story was simply a game I didn't spend enough time with.  Her Story is more a database of videos than it is a game, but in simply being a collection of videos it creates the game in the player's head.  I don't know if anything external ever happens to validate your understanding of what is going on with these interview tapes, but what I saw made the story sound incredibly interesting.  It is a game I desperately want to play, but just don't know how or when to go about doing it.  It is yet another example of a game I wish I had the free time I had over the summer to really dig into.  I imagine this is an inevitable play at some point, but I cannot dedicate much time to it now, even with its short gameplay.  The concept, of delving into a library of information and piecing together what is there, is precisely the kind of game I would love.  Hopefully I will return to this one soon.  

 

 

The Room (1-3)

The Room's first three games are very different from the other games on this list because I actually beat them.  The Room is essentially those flash "open the box" or "escape the room" games, but on a touch screen device.  Played on a phone or a tablet, The Room showcases why games such as Myst could be built for the platform, if someone with the proper chops would.  The Room isn't a bad series of games, but it is often times obvious, and that can be frustrating.  There are clever puzzles here and there, but generally your go-to reaction of pinch, push, or pull (as the touch screen allows) on any given tactile surface is pretty much what you do.  Puzzles usually act in parts, firstly finding the puzzle "board" and then finding the key as to how to finish it.  But the key is almost always found on accident by simply interacting with the game the way you would expect to.  When I play a puzzle game, I generally want it to be puzzling.  As a near contradictory point, sometimes the games can be too obscure.  Many surfaces look interactible, but end up requiring a very specific way of approaching them, or not being interactive at all.  It is the modern day "pixel hunt" of past point and click games.  The Room is all concept, little follow through, but that doesn't mean they aren't fun.  They just aren't that fun.  Largely why I didn't end up reviewing them during the year was a lack of things to say.  For the most part, I've said everything in this one paragraph, making for a rather anemic write-up if this was a post on its own. The games pass the time, but aren't going to truly challenge you.

 

 

Some of these games I will likely return to (or continue playing), but for now, this is them, and I have left my record.  I really don't like writing these things, but hopefully I will appreciate it sometime later, when I'm curious as to what I played in 2020.  At the very least, I may have created a reference point for a future write up.  Until then though, I'll just keep playing.    

[Film Review] Tenet

 

You can almost see a Christopher Nolan film coming a mile away.  The way he blocks his shots, the usage of practical effects over CGI, the grand mystery of what the hell his films are even about until you've finally seen them, and, as the most recognizable part of his brand, the high-concept narrative for him to drape blockbuster shenanigans over.  Christopher Nolan is one of those few filmmakers who has managed to carve out a niche as an American Auteur With A Budget, a rare breed post-90s.  One of the things most people look forward to with his films is being able to see money actually spent on something original rather than an adaptation of one thing or another.  It is an exclusive club, one with very few if any modern directors in it.  Whenever a filmmaker like Nolan, or Tarantino, or Fincher makes a film, it tends to feel like an event.  Christopher Nolan, more so than those other two, really likes to play the ambiguity game with his film's plots.  In a way he is a lot like J.J. Abrams, preferring trailers to tease and to be an experience and for a film's plot to be a relative unknown until you have your ticket in hand.  And, much as many will probably dislike this, Nolan is a lot more like Abrams than he is Fincher.  

Christopher Nolan wants to challenge his audience to keep up with him.  He wants to propose a mechanical concept, an idea of how something works for which he has built a plot around, usually bathing you in exposition for the first half hour or so until you're swimming in so much information it can be easily misunderstood as "intelligent".  That isn't quite the slight it sounds: it isn't that Nolan's films aren't smart, it is that the way his films go about explaining themselves isn't particularly smart.

Tenet's plot has been called confusing and complicated, dense and challenging, but this is a bit seeing the forest for the trees.  Tenet plays out in a confusing, complicated way, but the plot is actually incredibly simple.  For all intents and purposes, Tenet is really just a second-rate James Bond film with a kink.  You've got a bad guy hellbent on destroying the world (with less motivation than one would find in a Bond flick), and a group of secret agents practicing espionage to thwart him and figure out his grand plan.  The trick with a Christopher Nolan film is that the plot isn't really what anyone goes to see his movies for.  The main character, called just Protagonist, is little more than a suit and the occasional witty comment.  The conflict is, ostensibly, to thwart the bad guy, but a majority of the film's running time revolves around explaining and then showing (with great flair) the mechanic Nolan really wants to sell you on.  Nolan's films are event films, they are a trick.  The Prestige was a damning film he should have never made, because it basically outs him as the magician he is.  There is a lot of slight-of-hand in Tenet, but next to zero substance.

And that isn't all bad.  After all, one can find enjoyment in a well done action film with interesting set pieces and concept, but Tenet is all concept, to a headache inducing degree.  Many will tout the complexity of this film's concept, about how intelligent you need to be to grasp it, but the truth of the matter is the concept isn't all that complicated, it is just how Nolan decided to explain it to us.  The first hour or so is a rush of scenes and quick dialogue exchanges, interlaced with explanations and exposition.

Below are mild spoilers, but I will not give away the ending.  Nolan obviously intended you to figure all of this out by watching the film, so make the decision as you see fit.

The trick to Tenet is that some objects are found to act in reverse time.  If you see a bullet on a table that has been "inverted", so long as you will drop the bullet, it should come flying off the table and into your hand.  At least, that is how it is first explained to us, confusingly.  More accurately, there is a human-made radioactive substance that can invert objects and people to move backwards in time instead of forwards.  If you were inverted, the whole world would look to be going in reverse.  If you saw someone inverted, it would look like only that person was going in reverse.  It takes about a full hour or longer before this concept has been explained to you, with Nolan preferring to drop elements of the concept out of context with lengthy suppositions from characters as to how this all works.  This element, it turns out, was sent back in time so that no one in the future could  destroy the past with it (which does not make any sense, as they can destroy the past in the past which is literally the plot of this film).  The element can be constructed into something confusingly called the Algorithm, which apparently does the actual destroying.  The Algorithm was sent to nine different locations in the past, and our antagonist is after the final piece. 

Between the quick paced scenes and the way this concept is explained to us, understanding what is going on in the first hour or so is quite a lot of work.  It is completely possible without straining yourself too hard, but it will still come with quite a lot of effort.  The effort itself isn't really the problem, it is more the inefficiency of the effort and the lack of payoff once you do understand what is going on.  There are some truly cool action scenes throughout - just about the only saving grace, really - but the plot boils down to cliche once you look at the beats of the story and not the trickery.  And that trickery is particularly frustrating, revealing its mechanical complexity in the most confusing way possible.  The first half hour is spent wondering how and why someone made bullets that go in reverse time.  There really isn't a reason for it, frankly.  There is a slight explanation that would spoil too much for my liking, something that also explains slightly why someone sent the Algorithm back in time as well.  Perhaps one day I will do a more thorough review spoiling the ending of this film, but until then suffice to say I didn't like it or its implications.  If it isn't too much of a spoiler, think "closed time loop".

Christopher Nolan has a talent for most aspects of film, but writing has never been one of them.  Sometimes he strikes the right balance between movie magic, interesting characters, and substantial plot (usually when his brother co-writes), but more often than not they are roller coaster rides designed to look intelligent rather than be intelligent.  I'd love to see Christopher Nolan direct a movie he doesn't really want to film, something not written by him but still with a talented scribe behind it.  As it is, Nolan is M. Night Shyamalan for the college bound.     

 

 

 

6.0