Thoughts on Knocked Up

You're all capable of heading over to Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic and finding out that, much like Judd Apatow's last film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up is an excellent comedy and a generally better than average movie. Saying that Knocked Up was a funny movie and one that I enjoyed seeing really doesn't help anybody, because most of you have already heard it from a number of other people.

I will say that while it's similar to 40-Year-Old Virgin, the two are very different films. The humor in Knocked Up is more refined. The obscenity has more edge while seeming less extreme (any time you can get the 50 year old women behind me in the theater laughing at masturbation jokes, you've done something right), and the situational aspects are handled superbly. I loved the scenes between Alison and her higher ups at E!, granted, I love pretty much any scene with Alan Tudyk.

However, without Steve Carell's sincere, personable screen presence, the storyline and schlock elements don't come across with the strength of 40-Year-Old Virgin's. Don't get me wrong, I love Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd. They added a lot to 40-Year-Old Virgin and they do a wonderful job in this film, but neither has the presence of an experienced leading man that Carell has. Part of this relative deficiency may be attributed to the fact that there isn't as much of a moral as 40-Year-Old Virgin had. The inherent irony of 40-Year-Old Virgin in the manner in which Andy's friends were telling him that he was "putting the pussy on a pedestal" when he had stopped giving a damn and society was the one forcing it up there wad delicious to me. Knocked Up just lacks that sort of message more than anything.

I'd like to take some time now to discuss something else, though, and that is what makes these two films so much better than the majority of mainstream comedies . I've heard a few people refer to some of the more mediocre movies of late as being in the spirit of the screwball comedies of the 30's and 40's. While they may have been written to replicate aspects of this amazing era of cinema, I feel that Judd Apatow's previous two films are much more in the spirit of these great films than the mimickers that flood the markets.

There are a few main reasons that I say this. One thing is the overarching style. Most Screwball Comedies derive much of their comedy from the interactions of realistic characters and those that are larger than life and the antics that ensue when these groups come together. Knocked Up has this, with Ben and Allison being, with the possible exception of their occupation, realistic people surrounded by friends and family that are just too crazy to be real. The fundamental problem is very real, but the pit stops along the road to its resolution can only be called zany.

The biggest thing that Apatow does and most comic directors fail to do, however, is to speak in the language of our time. Most comedies that try to mimic the old screwball ones try to hard to remain in their language. They're like the King James Bible in that way. While the language and situations of the Screwball Comedies or the 30's and 40's spoke excellently to their generation, trying to transplant that exact mindset into more modern situations just seems fluffy and weak.

In their time, many of the Screwball Comedies had strong topical elements. They often gave a cast a strong eye at class relations and gender roles, and people frequently forget this when trying to pay them honor. They focus on the farce and the romance and forget that there was still often a relationship to be shown. In the meantime, both 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up try to show how modern society relates to sex and the awkward standards (typically doule standards at that) that exist.

The concept of virginity as something to be ashamed of, the idea of having sex with a stranger as opposed to raising a family with one. Even in the visual department, while most people are perfectly comfortable with blatant sex in movies, a half second clip of a baby crowning is enough to disgust most people. Apatow is trying to make us think about sex as a part of sexuality and how human sexuality fits (or doesn't fit) into human society.

It's the willingness to be confrontational, both ideologically and within the narrative, that makes films like Knocked Up superior to your average fast talking comedy. It's also what, in my opinion, makes them the true legacy of the golden era of the Screwball Comedy.

Also, the scene where Pete and Ben are tripping on 'shrooms in Vegas is the best comic scene were drugs or alcohol are used to further the plot since the scene The Philadelphia Story.

Why Even Non-Anime Fans Should Check Out Cowboy Bebop

Anime is something I generally try to stay away from. This is mainly for two reasons:

One is the fact that, due to my love of video games and the fact that I'm studying Japanese, I'm always wary of being mislabeled as a member of that group of people. You know the ones. Those kids who are obsessed with anime and run around talking about how wonderful Japan is and spouting out random Japanese vocabulary without knowing what it means or anything else about the country outside of its pop-culture.

The other is simply that, like most American TV, most anime just isn't that good. Sure, it's often times novel and occasionally refreshing when you're used to American television, but compared to itself, it's comprised primarily of the same sort of mediocre derivative trash that we suffer through. However, just like some American television is just too good to miss, every now and then, there's an anime series that's a real gem. Cowboy Bebop is one such example.

To the anime loving public, and indeed, to more than a few of you who may be reading this, Cowboy Bebop is nothing new. You're already well aware of just how good it is, but there are a lot of you who most certainly need to give it a chance, and it's my mission now to explain to you why you should. The best way I know how to do this is to lay out in a straight forward fashion what Cowboy Bebop is, and what it is not.

Cowboy Bebop is a short series. It's only 26 half-hour episodes (or sessions). Cowboy Bebop is not a strongly connected narrative. With the exception of a few two-part episodes, each session is its own self contained story. What narrative there is is entirely character driven. When the series begins, we meet these characters, and their attitudes and dialog let us know that they have a past, but we don't know what it is. Over the course of the series, hints are dropped and information is revealed so that you begin to understand why they've chosen the paths they have.

Cowboy Bebop is not a space opera. It isn't epic or grandiose in any sense of the word. There's no climatic struggle between good and evil going on, and while the characters may be larger than life at times, they aren't out of the ordinary for the world they inhabit.

Cowboy Bebop is a space western. While it doesn't directly address the issue, it strongly shows the struggle of justice and injustice and the blurry line that forms between the two as one exits civilization. It's a story that shows how the pursuit of freedom affects people.

Cowboy Bebop is also about the ideals of jazz lived out. Its characters live within a thin set of rules that are made to be stretched and toyed with while new ideas are moved between freely.

Cowboy Bebop isn't preachy. There's none of the monologuing about honor, justice, friendship, or meaning that you find in so much mainstream anime. The Bebop's crew lead individually sketchy lives without any apology.

Cowboy Bebop is subtle. Through depiction of action, and not by words, it shows how people living outside of law and society cling to a law of their own making, no matter how fragile.

In many of these characteristics, Cowboy Bebop is a lot like Firefly, another show I'll probably write about later, even though most of you know and love it. Though completely distinct in style, their purpose is in many ways similar. The most important quality that both seem to share, though, is their desire to use their visual nature to show you their purpose instead of shouting it at you through a megaphone.

With its incredible sense of style; enjoyable characters; first rate soundtrack (Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts are an amazing band and some incredible music was composed for this series); and even a near perfect dubbing (with very few painfully translated lines), Cowboy Bebop is a series that can be watched and enjoyed while missing all of these elements. I know that I probably watched the entire series twice before I picked up on just how nuanced the whole thing is. But, as is always the case, the whole subtle depth to the series is what makes it a true classic and something worth every discerning person's time.

See you later space cowboys...

Why the Wii and DS deserve your respect

I'd like to state right now that I'm not writing this to be an idiot fanboy and declare Nintendo the winner of the current console war. I don't own a Wii of my own for a reason, and it's the same reason I don't own a PS3 or a 360. The software isn't there, and most of the software that would make me buy any of the systems for myself isn't even in the pipeline. I also know that nothing I'm going to say here is revolutionary. It's all stuff that I'm sure has been said before, but I've talked to a number of people lately who still didn't get it, so I'm going to throw it out there for anybody else in that boat.

I am writing this to try and explain some of what makes these two systems so popular with the general public. It's not Nintendo's hype. They've talked about how they're revolutionizing the way people play games, but the people who are important in this discussion haven't heard any of that rhetoric; it's all aimed at jaded gamers who've been screwed for supporting Nintendo two generations in a row now (though much more by the Gamecube than the N64).

What really makes the Wii and the DS so amazing is the same thing that made the mouse amazing. It's the shift from instruction to interaction and the elimination of the whole hurdle of perception that comes with it.

Those of us who are long time gamers may not get this. Playing a game with a controller is the most natural thing in the world. Yet, to a computer enthusiast, so is manipulating Linux through the command shell. To the uninitiated, both are incredibly esoteric and don't do anything to ease you into the process. There are very few people who start playing console games as adults for this very reason. As children, we're more open to ideas that don't make logical sense, so learning to manipulate a distant character through arcane series of button presses isn't as hard to cope with. To somebody who has lived sufficiently long though, the concept begins to grow ridiculous.

Nintendo is changing this. Much as the mouse (and, thus, the Graphical Operating System) opened the world of computing to the masses by creating a more intuitive sense of navigation through physical motion and interacting with data, the WiiMote and the DS's stylus based controls allow gamers interact with a game in a way that makes logical sense. If I tap the bubble, it pops, if I swing my arm, my character swings his bat. It's a direct correspondence of motion that has been missing in the past and that has left the unexposed scratching their heads in confusion.

This is a trend that should have been noticed years ago, as this sense of intuition is the exact same reason that DDR and other Bemani style games were such a cross over success all around the world. When you eliminate the curve of learning how to play a game instead of just playing it well, you open up its appeal to a market that traditional games can't even imagine.

This is why the Wii will continue to sell well, and will probably dominate the console sales market, much as the DS has (in Japan, the number of DS's is about to surpass the number of Playstation 2's, an incredible feat considering the market saturation and age of that old juggernaut). Despite these strong console sales, though, Nintendo won't post the profit numbers of either Microsoft of Sony, because their hardware to software sales ratio won't look at all similar once the two traditional game makers big war horses come out to play in the coming years. The type of people who buy just a Wii aren't going to buy all of the games that we consider "good". Whereas 90% of 360 owners will buy Halo 3, I'm willing to bet that only somewhere around 40% of Wii's will be accompanied by copies of Metroid Prime: Corruption, maybe less. It's all in the demographics.

The shift is important, though, as the Wii's hardware sales, and the sale of it's casual and "non" games, will be staggering, and it will make other companies take note. As time goes on, the system will become refined, and video games will become truly main stream. Temporarily flagship genres such as the RPG will fade back into cultdom as the video game console is brought into the open and multiplayer gaming makes a shift back from the internet back to the living room (with online elements still in tact, I'm sure), the entire demographic of gaming will shift.

I'm certainly not proclaiming the death of traditional videogames. There are some experiences, especially the more cinematic ones, that benefit little from a truly interactive control style. The biggest system sellers of this generation, and more than likely the next, will remain in the style to which we are accustomed. But the winds have begun to blow, and those of us interested in the industry, seriously or casually, need to be prepared.

Work

So, I'm at work right now. My boss is out, as he usually is, and I've got no real projects to work on until he gets back, so I may as well let you kiddies know what it is I'm doing this summer.

I'm working as an IT intern for Trustar Federal Credit Union in glorious Int'l Falls, MN. Because this is a small town with a stagnating economy and shrinking population, nobody that needed computer work actually had the money to pay me themselves. As such, I'm actually working here through the workforce center, and instead of making $9-10 easily for as many hours as they need me, I get the privilege of making minimum wage for a maximum of 32 hours a week.

The main IT issues they have here deal with a piece of software that they run pretty much the whole organization through and that only two people in the office really understand at all (fortunately, one of these two people is my boss). Because he's always running around fixing people's problems, I've had no time to learn a damn thing about this service and have been pretty much relegated to sorting through old paper work and running the odd wire through dropped ceilings (along with whatever grunt work anybody else in the building needs; I am an intern after all).

Another thing that's bad is the paperwork, at least in the IT department. We offer dial-up internet access and email to credit union members, and I spent a large chunk of my first two weeks trying to sort through that paper work to see what was out of date and make sure everything was together. It wasn't uncommon for me to find a member's records in two year increments in three or four different places, meaning I had to meticulously comb through them all to compare dates, find out if they were still connected, determine if some of the unowned accounts belonged to them during past periods of connection, and then clean out the superfluous, supposedly unused accounts. Any time I did this however, I got calls the next day from 70-year-olds who had signed papers to permanently disconnect a year ago wondering why they didn't have internet access!

That's pretty much over with, now. I gave my boss, Keith, the list of out of date accounts and owners and told him that the final calls were up to him. Now I've got no projects, so I'm using work time to do things like, well, this, and to start learning Visual Basic under the premise that I need time to write up some completely unnecessary VBA Macros for some Excel spreadsheets to help saving the accounting folks all of five minutes every few days. I guess I shouldn't complain, though. I mean, I'm getting paid right now, and nobody knows the difference (yet).

edit: I removed my complaints about the security because I am a bit paranoid about the world of the web. Suffice it to say, it's terrible.

What Makes Chrono Trigger so Amazing

In recent months, I've realized that if I actually want to consider a career in game design (a real career, not the sort people who go into game design programs outside of DigiPen wind up in), I need to consider what makes a good game. Chrono Trigger has been my favorite game probably since my first hour with it back in...oh...1998? It makes as good a starting point as any.

For those of you reading who are video game dorks of my magnitude (of which there are few), I think that the simple reminder that it was worked on by both Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii should really be enough. Most of you don't know what that means, though, so I'll go into some depth.

Hironobu Sakaguchi is the father of Final Fantasy. I'm sure that most of you have at least passing familiarity with that name if nothing else. The Final Fantasy series is the global de facto series for Japanese Style Role Playing Games. Epic, cinematic stories of a small groups struggle for personal freedom and the fate of the world are what really defines the Final Fantasy series.

In this case, the important aspect is the personal one. In order to involve the players in the game, the Final Fantasy series has, starting with entry 4, tried to emotionally attach the players to the characters they are in control of. Everything is about the tribulations of the protagonists, and if they didn't have their own reasons to be on their quest, nobody would do anything about the world's crisis (granted, the world would rarely be in its sad state of affairs without the player characters' actions in the Final Fantasy series, either).

Yuji Horii, on the other hand, is the creator of the Dragon Quest series. Even more popular in Japan than Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest takes a vastly different approach to story telling. With few exceptions, the characters in Dragon Quest games take a back burner to the world the games take place in. As you explore the world, you get to know its citizens as you help them to put their troubles to right. While the plot may have reasons for you going to each place, as soon as the next town needs your help, the overarching quest takes a back seat to the immediate needs of the world's common folk.

Slowly, trends emerge and it's made apparent that whatever being or force you were out to put to rest is the same one responsible for everybody else's troubles, but you as the player want to beat him not because of your characters' vendettas, but because he, she, or it is posing a menace to a world that the designers have shown you is worth saving.

Simply put, Chrono Trigger combined these elements. The cast is colorful, fleshed out, and ingrains itself within you. Each member has his or her reasons for wanting to be a part of the journey, but each character's personality and goals are also deeply ingrained in a place that you have visited. Their quest isn't for their own behalf, so much as that of their time. While they have their own personalities that you grow to care about, they aren't out to save the world to fulfill a personal grudge, they're out to do it for the people and places close to them. Because of this, in caring about the characters, you necessarily come to care about the world that is so dear to them.

There was no way this game would have been a failure, even without the joint direction of these two incredible individuals. An amazing score that first introduced the considerable talents of Yasunori Mitsuda to the world at large, an innovative combat system involving combination attacks and area of effect attacks that others have been failing to improve on ever since, one of the first uses of the New Game+ concept along with over a dozen endings to make said New Game+ worthwhile, and some of the best art of the SNES era would have easily cemented its place as one of the great games of the 16 bit era. Ultimately, though, its success and legacy as an RPG can't be contributed purely to these superficial facts.

What makes Chrono Trigger the enduring classic and the gold standard to which modern J-RPGs are still compared is is the simple fact that, by working together, Horii and Sakaguchi make you care about the whole package more than you knew a game could. And it is in your love of these characters and the world they so desperately want to preserve that the incredible bonuses become even more awe inspiring.

In case you didn't already know, I'm a loser

So, I've got a blog. But, I'm not really a blogger, because I don't expect anybody to give a damn about what I think. This is just here so that I have someplace to let people know my thoughts about movies, music, games, TV, and to keep up do date on important goings on in my life. I haven't been very good at keeping up with folks, so here's a way for you to maybe keep up with me.

I hope that my ramblings are of amusement to those of you who read this, and more importantly, I hope it sparks some dialog. If you're intrigued by anything I have to say, please, for the love of God, email me or catch me on AIM (assuming I actually know you and you're not some creepy ass stalker who gets his or her jollies by reading random people's blogs).