It’s fascinating how works that upend a genre tend to reinforce it. That applies in two ways to The Breakfast Club, John Hughes iconic 1985 film about five students and the day they spend together in detention. The first is internally, in that the film, which otherwise aims to deconstruct teen stereotypes that had become popular in films, ends with one girl hooking up with the guy who has been abusing her all movie, another dropping her alternative appearance for something more conventional, and the smart kid doing all the actual work instead of getting laid. This makes the film a particularly fascinating example of people missing the ending and the overall point. Now I will grant that the movie is more complex in general than this characterisation of the ending makes it out to be; the movie is genuinely engaging with these cliches and the ending is more like a button than a conclusive statement; The Breakfast Club is more interested in raising questions than in answering them.
Nevertheless, I do find myself thinking of people who missed the point of American Psycho or Goodfellas, who romanticize the characters despite where their stories end and what they feel. I take it as obvious that the fans of TBC are engaging in something much more emotionally healthy; the interesting thing about the movie is how it makes therapeutic behaviour and empathy look ‘cool’. John Hughes strikes me as a writer who used screenwriting as a way to process emotions; I’ve heard stories of him constantly writing in notebooks (which is funny in comparison to how professionally he seemed to take filmmaking itself).
It’s fascinating to me how the ending is the most important part of a story for a storyteller, but is perhaps much less important to your average audience member. Human beings are drawn to things that feel good, and we’re quite good at editing out anything that threatens our motivations, especially when the motivation is preservation of the ego. I think now of fellow 1980’s teen film Heathers, which neatly avoids this problem by having the climax be even cooler than the setup. The thing everyone takes from this film is how good it feels to express how one really feels, to reveal that one is more interesting than one appears, and to connect to another human being.
The second interesting thing about this film’s upending the teen drama genre is how the teen drama genre then immediately soaked it up and incorporated its ideas into its structure; all the basic ideas of this film have become part-and-parcel on the genre as a whole, from the jock who is trying to live up to his dad’s expectations to the geek pushed to succeed to the popular girl trying to fit in. What’s particularly interesting is how The Breakfast Club finds many more and more interesting ways to make these types complex than the things that followed; I’m particularly struck by the way he tracks the characters emotions to a level that he really doesn’t have to, such as showing us Andrew laughing at Bender’s jokes very early in the film (and trying to hide it), or how we get almost all of Allison’s personality without even a word of dialogue for the first hour.
The teen drama continues to try to replicate the pleasure of this film today, even when it doesn’t realize it; I am reminded of how superhero comics continue to factor in the psychological and practical realism of Watchmen even when they explicitly reject the pessimistic tone (often especially then). It’s an assumption – one admittedly universally true across multiple generations, as Molly Ringwald reports – that to be a teenager is to be misunderstood and categorized at the expense of self-expression. Few films have replicated its loose structure – alternating between conversations that get deeper as the movie goes on and the characters, as PJ O’Rourke put it, goofing off – preferring the solid, predictable, and superficially satisfying feeling of something being specifically achieved every scene as we get to a clearly demarcated Climax.
In retrospect, this makes the movie feel – and I feel deeply embarrassed to say this about a John Hughes film – more punk, given its comfort for no easy answers at the end. One may check out the TV Tropes pages for the film, which reliably list various viewers’ grievances with the film and speculation about what it was saying. Many of them accuse the film of having a brighter view of the characters and their endings than was intended (and in some cases, darker); the ambiguity is the point and your discomfort with that is your problem. But I do believe these people are in the minority, and for most viewers, the refusal to come down in pure judgement on any of the characters is part of the appeal – part of the reason it was so wildly successful.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Six
This is a filmed version of the stage show, with six singers representing the six wives of Henry VIII arguing over which of them had it worse through the medium of pop music. This feels very much in the spirit of Horrible Histories in terms of mixing comedy and education – although my boyfriend filled me in on every historical inaccuracy in the show, including inaccuracy-by-omission, like Jane Seymour starting out as a mistress. This is part of the show explicitly acting as historical revisionism; not in the sense of lying, but in the sense of clarifying the stories we tell. The climax is Catherine Parr arguing that they reject the definition as Henry’s wives and the competitive/comparative nature of it in favour of defining themselves by what they do.
Although, all of this seems secondary to the desire to put on a show; it’s one of those tightly-choregraphed things where every second – every comedic pause – is sweated out (it reminded me of “The Simpsons Variety Show Smile Hour” and the underlying joke of it being over-rehearsed). Once I got into this spirit, I had a lot of fun, the songs are good, and the jokes are funny (funniest being Anne of Cleaves, who realises mid-song that actually she got a pretty sweet deal and starts lording that over the other queens the rest of the show).
Red vs Blue, Season Two, Episode Five
Love how easily Andy has slipped into the dynamic.
“You know, I feel that I’m gonna regret this, but I feel even more that I just don’t care. And I’m actually kind of interested to see how this turns out.”
“I think I need a translator just for Caboose.”
“The burning plains are next to the freezing plains?! I bet there are some pretty wet plains inbetween.”
There’s a great runner of Simmons struggling to stick to attacking the Reds instead of the Blues.
“Remember to change your underwear at least once a day. Tucker, that goes double for you.”
“What? I’m the cleanest guy here.”
“No, it goes double because now you’re in charge of changing Caboose as well.”
“I hate you.”
There’s a very 8 Bit Theater subversion of badassery when the monster the characters have to fight turns out to be a cow, which is long dead.
“Clearly Griff has become so stupid, he’s mixed up the sounds for pain and happiness!”
WALL-E
To be honest, I liked this even less than I did when I saw it in cinemas. It’s the beginning of Pixar becoming incredibly self-indulgent, which mostly works on a spectacle-level – I’m still awed by the first act on a destroyed Earth, even as much of the animation draws more attention to itself than the story – and not so much on a story one. Much of it is bloated and weirdly-paced, and the story is weirdly lazy for a movie setting itself up against laziness. What really irks me is that the emotional underpinning feels untrue; I’ll concede that outsourcing your work to AI and suffering physical and mental degradation hits harder now than it did in 2008, and I do respect and empathise with the Protestant work ethic that underlies the morality here, but I feel like it misses the actual causes of the problems its highlighting on both a systemic and individual level.
Technology isn’t inherently and accidentally making people lazy; it’s a conscious, malicious effort on the part of big corporations to squeeze every last dollar they can out of people. People aren’t just infantilising themselves and coddling up to technology for fun, but because it’s the only release or source of pleasure they have – they’re simply too tired to do otherwise (I throw parents who give their kids tablets onto this – I don’t like it either, but what else can they do, especially when they’re poor or working class?). And even when it comes to the people like this – say, people who use gen AI to ‘draw’ – it doesn’t feel like the story you tell about them. It’s not quite self-satisfied, but the facile nature of the solution – to simply show them there are cool things out there – irks me.
Granted, I’m coming at this from the depths of ‘fuck the Protestant work ethic’; I’ve found doing less work and allowing myself to rest more often has improved the actual work I do, for one thing (an individual version of the four hour work week), and I strongly question to value of hard work in itself without a specific goal. Pixar points to a different direction; it’s always about the result and the community one builds, visible in the way the product is made just as much as what the characters do and say (this has some of the most spectacular Pixar images of all time – my favourite is Wall-E and EVA dancing through space with the latter using a fire extinguisher).
I’ve always been cooler on WALL-E than the general consensus as well. This really is the pinnacle of Pixar’s self-satisfied period, following this with Up and Toy Story 3. Wonder as we get deeper into the company’s reliance on sequels (Toy Story 5 coming soon!) if anybody there feels like the portraits on the wall are getting cartoonier.
As with many films I like, I can spot the flaws; one of the biggest ones with regards to WALL-E is its fat shaming. But I think that the film remains relevant, especially in how it appears ahead of the curve in associating environmental destruction with proto-AI technology.
“Technology isn’t inherently and accidentally making people lazy; it’s a conscious, malicious effort on the part of big corporations to squeeze every last dollar they can out of people.” Well said, indeed; the film, however, would be rather heavier if it really portrayed big corporations as evil as they were/could be. I’d like to think (hopefully!) that the film is more effective by taking a more subtly subversive route.
I accuse Goody Tristan of violating the Protestant Work Ethic! Your point about corporate influence is solid, but it comes down to individual choice and free will (hey, more Protestantism) to me — you don’t have to do this stuff just because it is easy and you are tired. You have a choice. The movie is about WALL-E developing free will and intriguingly says this only happens through his connection to another, I like that a lot.
It’s weird that I often think about WALL-E as one of my favorite Pixar films, but then I have to realize that it’s purely because of the robots-only first act, which has a real, achy beauty to it. One the humans get involved, it’s worse and more conventional (those don’t always go together, but they sure do here), and the fat-shaming part has always bothered me.
Heh, Anne DID get a sweet deal! (She also seems as far as European nobles go to have been a decent person, including looking after Mary and Elizabeth.)
Nashville – I feel like this was one my biggest cinematic blind spots, and one that I found a little daunting to approach as I don’t always seem to click with 70s Altman as much as I’d like to. Happily I thought this was pretty incredible though, such a fascinating ensemble of weirdos and nightmarish people in a film full of life and funny, odd moments. Crazy that the cast largely wrote their own songs! Not sure if the most hilariously awful character was Geraldine Chaplin’s reporter (bonus points for feeling like a well-deserved insult to the entire British people) or Keith Carradine’s utterly shameless bastard singer-songwriter who goes missing rather than tell his own bandmates that he’s leaving them and phones up another woman before Lily Tomlin has even left his hotel room. Great film and I’m really enjoying filling some Altman blind spots recently, this will continue!
Live Music – loopy electronic folk music in a wood workshop, hell yeah. Headline act played guitar and violin (and looped both), support layered a ton of intruments on top of each other into a gorgeous soundscape (but was a little tainted by technical issues, always a possibility when dealing with that much tech) and a friend did their second-ever solo set as the opener and played piano with cool glitchy delay FX, really great.
Seinfeld, S6 – “The Big Salad”, George is even more of a nightmare now that he has a little confidence. Kramer’s ridiculous subplot in which he became an accessory to murder, sort of, stole the show a little. But also Jerry finding out that his girlfriend previously dated Newman, possibly Wayne Knight’s best episode thus far. And the girlfriend was Nancy from Groundhog Day!
Woooo live music! Hilarious it was literal woodshedding.
Ha! I’ve never heard this term before, but that is funny.
It’s a cool venue because there is STUFF everywhere – crafted wood stuff, old books, loads of labeled containers. Kinda looks like a music venue designed by Wes Anderson. The only venue where I can take photos of the performers with my phone camera / lack of skill and they come out looking actually good!
Marty Supreme – Superlative stressor, it’s a Safdie all right. The movie follows its own lead seeming to swerve between scenes and tone to satisfy whatever need is right in front of it. This disguises a more subtle map of American exceptionalism: Marty tries the self-made route, then sells out to corporate interests, then has to rely on the military to bail him out. If Marty can leave this kind of mess in his wake for his single-minded goal, what is the generation to come going to be capable of?
One thing that struck me on rewatch is that Marty doesn’t just single-mindedly pursue success, he keeps passing up better opportunities because they don’t meet his narrow definition. He could have gotten promoted at work, he could have sold ping pong balls, the big game he destroys half of New York trying to get to is the same on he turned down.
The Bride Came C.O.D. – When oil heiress Bette Davis is about to elope with nightclub singer Jack Carson, airplane pilot James Cagney arranges with her father (frog voice Eugene Pallette as the least Texan Texan ever) to fly Bette to Amarillo for $100 a pound to pay off debts. Hilarity wants to ensue, but while there are some funny and some good performances, this never really comes together as either romcom or screwball comedy. Davis and Cagney are fine but I never buy for a second she would fall for him. And possibly the most famous scene here, Bette falling on a cactus, actually happened entirely by accident and was made part of the movie! No wonder Bette hated making this movie!
Stranger Things, “Sorcerer” – the “midseason finale” – i.e. the last of the first batch of episodes that dropped at Thanksgiving – runs over 90 minutes and there’s maybe 10 minutes here that could have been cut out. That’s how stuffed – almost but not quite overstuffed – the episode is, and the last 10 minutes are through the roof intense and seem to set up the last four episodes well.
The Practice, “Vanished” – 18 years after their son vanished, supposedly kidnapped and murdered by a man who would convicted of child molestation, parents come to Bobby and beg his help in suing the newly released convict for wrongful death, in hopes of finding the son’s body. But there are a huge number of twists and turns in the two-parter, including the discovery that the son was alive the whole time and raised by a friend of the molester. By the time we get to the end, the level of far-fetchedness has really stacked up, but the execution of the story is very well done. And the question of whether maybe society goes too far in its treatment of molesters almost comes up. Patricia Wettig appears as the adoptive mother, Broadway regular Joanna Gleason as the accused’s lawyer. There is also a plot involving Jimmy’s gambling that just isn’t very interesting, in part because we know now there are no repercussions but mainly because it feels like they were running out of things to do with Jimmy.
Doctor Who, “The Invasion,” parts 1 to 4 – This fairly long serial is partially lose in its original form, so we have two animated re-creations here and two of the original episodes. A megalomaniac tech millionaire is plotting to take over his industry and the world with the help of still-unidentified aliens, and naturally it’s up to the second Doctor. And to a newly formed agency called UNIT. Fun stuff though it of course drags from time to time like most of the long serials.
Fraiser, “War of the Words” – Freddy is in the finals of the national spelling bee (strangely held in Seattle when the real bee is never held outside Washington, DC), and wins, only someone spots Frasier unconsciously mouthing the letters along with Freddy and he loses the trophy. This is an odd one because it’s not sure how handle Freddy’s complicated reaction to losing, but it ultimately works. In part because of Niles remembering his own near-victory in the bee and his realization that winning the title didn’t matter, only the spelling did. It’s the sort of thing that only Niles could possibly say and mean it.
Live music — Tarbox Ramblers at the pub, with a keyboardist sitting in on the roots/blues. Great stuff, the band remains tight as hell and they brought out an old tune, “Night Train To Chelsea,” that I haven’t heard in a while and is a beautiful little folk tune, a wonderful surprise.
Bills vs. Broncos — god dammit.
Trading Places — Merry New Year! And once again, you have to hand it to John Landis, the ISIS of filmmakers in terms of body count, because he showcases Philadelphia so well here and is always using the camera in service of the comedy while not being static, the guy had incredible juice back in the day. But he also had Eddie Murphy, perhaps at his peak here, he is funny from the second he appears.
Collateral Damage — Colombian terrorists kill Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife and kids so he vows REVENGE. The terrorists were originally scripted as Libyan and the film was set to be released on October 1 2001, and this is a film that feels like it fell off the edge. Andrew Davis is directing but he is not in Chicago and so much of this stuff is basic, Davis can’t handle the regular jungle like the urban jungle — this doesn’t have the blustery charm of Commando or the sleek edge of the coming Bourne movies, it’s just a mush. And it is a huge mush politically, the CIA is technically “bad” and “massacaring people” but this just gets a scolding from Arnold. The movie takes a twist that makes it less tasteful but more interesting at the end, it’s still not enough to make it decent. Tons of Guys and Dudes though, Johns Turturro and Leguizamo are in country and Miguel Sandoval and Harry Lennix are FBI, Elias Koteas is the CIA honcho and Cliff Curtis is EL LOBO, but best of all is Jane Lynch showing up out of nowhere as a fed at the end and getting her neck snapped, this is hilarious to me.
Collateral Damage was one of the last Arnie films I got around to when working through his catalogue of destruction and while it isn’t my least favourite of his films, it might be the least memorable.
Yeah, it is very generic and sloppy — Arnie just sort of gets to Colombia, fucking Commando was more logistically sound here. It feels like a half-assed Jack Ryan story but Clancy too would be better on the details and intrigue. I like Andrew Davis a lot but he was on snooze mode here.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More
The title short may actually be my least favorite of the bunch, though it has one of the set’s most perfect instances of matter-of-fact artificiality: characters matter-of-factly rotating a box to reveal a side painted like the backdrop, and then sitting cross-legged on that to “levitate.” The captures the handcrafted charm and beautiful show-your-work-ness of Wes Anderson as well as anything–it’s all like embroidery that is somehow just as neat and cunning when you flip over the hoop–but it’s so up-front here that I can see why this level of exaggeration of his own technique was kind of stylistic dead end for him, good for these shorts but not for anything feature-length. All the same, it’s fascinating to see him pushing everything as far as it will go here, including the hyper-stylized dialogue. And the other stories have more of a sense of life as well as a sense of style, maybe because they’re all partly horror, and horror gets at the idea that there’s something uncontrolled and uncontrollable beneath any amount of order and fussiness.
Night of the Juggler
This week’s Streaming Shuffle, so I’ll only say that this is a wild, grimy ride through 1980 NYC.
A Child Is Waiting
A John Cassavetes film Cassavetes disavowed–reasonably so, since it does indeed feel a little more like producer Stanley Kramer’s work than his, but there’s some good stuff here. One of the bones of contention between Kramer and Cassavates was whether or not institutionalization was the right thing for the kind of children in the picture, but it’s hard for me to weigh in on that from here, since I have no idea what resources were available at the time–what public schools offered, what types of home care were available, etc.–and also have no idea whether an institution as genuinely compassionate as Burt Lancaster’s here ever existed in that time either. Was it all Titicut Follies? (And of course it doesn’t help that the school here, probably accurately, includes a largely undifferentiated population of students who I suspect would often have competing needs.) There are still dilemmas here that make sense to me as someone in various marginalized communities, like the value of a place where you’re normal vs. the value of feeling accepted in a wider setting.
But if I put all the social problem-solving to the side because I simply don’t know enough about the context, there’s some good human drama here: Judy Garland’s crumpled, sad-eyed idealism that expresses itself only as passion and pity for one selected boy vs. Burt Lancaster’s restrained compassion and interaction with the community as a whole. (This all reminds me somewhat of how I react to Wings of Desire.) One of the smaller but more stinging parts of the critique of how Garland has come to to this job to feel better about herself is how we never see her teaching anyone music until after she finally sets aside her close attachment to Reuben; she wanted to be an angel, not a teacher, and Lancaster’s POV is that maybe they need a teacher more, that these kids deserve an education and the opportunities and structure and expression it provides.
Gena Rowlands has a small role here that she’s unsurprisingly excellent in. The messier, more human force of her performance and the naturalism of most of the ensemble child actors (actually recruited from a hospital in many cases) are the parts of the film that feel most like Cassavetes.
Edge of Darkness
Sometimes propaganda totally fucking rules, actually. This WII movie about a Norwegian village resisting Nazi occupation has aged like a fine wine, and it’s a Hollywood film in 1943 that nails some leftist principles and stylistic approaches that filmmakers still struggle with getting right today. It’s about communal resistance rather than One Bold Hero–yes, the movement has a (good-looking, charismatic) leader, played by Errol Flynn, but the film is very much an ensemble handing out moral dilemmas, dramatic stands, and effective actions off to everyone, including multiple well-developed female characters and multiple older characters. The climax comes when almost every single named character in the resistance is about to be executed, and even the no-names get to act heroically. A retired teacher refuses to allow his home to become barracks (and the movie doesn’t shy away from the retaliation he faces for that, including his own horror and sadness at it, so it feels honest). A priest mows down Nazis from a belltower. All in all, not optional.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
For Movie Club, and also not optional. As some great philosopher surely said, give me beautiful women committing murder and I am happy. This is beautiful to behold even outside of Russ Meyer’s fondness for deadly, scantily clad go-go dancers: Varla’s black costume and dark hair against the stark, unyielding white of the salt flats is an indelible, comic book-style image. Tura Satana is spitting venom all throughout this, crackling with intensity in a way that camera rightly loves. Pure, raw star-power. Lori Williams is good as Billie, too, bubbly and enthusiastically pro-pleasure; Susan Bernard is the perfect, vulnerable doll among the Amazons (when she finally turns killer, it feels like she should grow a foot taller). As fresh and energetic a movie as anyone has ever made.
Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury
Chris wrote this up many months ago as part of Deep Dive Docs, and it had been on my list since then. I’m glad I finally watched it: it’s an interesting, unusual story (you presumably can’t go wrong with “up-and-coming punk band signs with a Christian label, suffers for it, has a major auto accident, and then three out of the five members become Orthodox priests, but the band is still together”), and Luxury’s music is very appealing to me, whether they’re in their more punk stage or their more mellow later years. There’s a very beautiful bit in here about bassist-priest Chris Foley conceptualizing communion as a metaphor for art, and that will stay with me.
This all unfortunately wound up leaving a bitter taste in my mouth, though, because I loved the bits of Luxury we heard, and I was so pleased that this 3/5 priesthood band had had songs that–despite all members of the band being straight and cis–leaned into queer subtext and were sympathetic towards trans people. And then I looked up the lead singer and found his insufferable blog, which included complaints about the legalization of same-sex marriage, and he has a whole solo song about how baffling and awful it was, and then a whole song with Luxury about the degenerate society that would lead to something so shocking as a tourist guide to gay bars (gasp!). And I have absolutely no patience with how this guy, and to a (possibly) lesser extent his bandmates, deliberately didn’t say anything about this during the documentary (made by another bandmate) because he was still happy to soak up the cultural cachet of being cool and edgy enough to have included subtextual queerness. (He’s willing to say on camera that it’s accidental; he’s not willing to say he disavows it, not when he knows the audience this is trying to appeal to won’t be on his side. Coward.) I honestly feel a bit used and misled about all this.
Good music, though, sincerely. And that communion bit.
And some Inside No. 9, but this was already so long that I’ll save that for Tuesday.
I found the non-stop Dahl narration a little exhausting watching the Henry Sugar shorts as shorts so I’m not sure how well I’d cope with the fully stitched-together version that seems to now be an accepted part of Wes Anderson’s feature-filmography (at least according to Screen Drafts, which I’m assuming you’ve also been listening to!)
Feel like I owe the Anderson things I haven’t enjoyed quite as much (these, Isle of Dogs, Phoenician Scheme) a second shot at some point, given how completely I love the best bits.
Yes, the Screen Draft is what prompted me to pick this up! I can see it being a little exhausting all together, but I was vibing with it enough that it worked for me (though I suspect multiple films with this approach wouldn’t). I really need to fill in my remaining Anderson gaps: still haven’t seen Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited, and The French Dispatch.
Ooh some enticing gaps to fill! Everything up to Grand Budapest I’ve seen multiple times, everything after that just once. I mostly agreed with their ranking (for once) although I’d probably have bumped Bottle Rocket and maybe French Dispatch up a couple of spots, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr Fox down a couple. It was a really great draft, I love it when everyone gets a bit emotional.
I liked Phoenician Scheme a lot because I just let it be silly and trivial, which is what disappointed me about the Dahl shirts and even Astrroid Coty a little after the non-stop deep character work of his middle period.
I thought Asteroid City was incredible, ambitious and broke a ton of new ground for him. Then Phoenician Scheme felt like a massive step back (and very much “seen it all before” given the heavy similarities to Life Aquatic) even though it had some very fun stuff in it, but without the pressure I put on it first time around I might have a better time just enjoying it as a fun romp.
Shadows and Fog — I enjoyed this more than I expected. I had seen it many years ago and remembered nothing except that John Cusack wasn’t very good in it, and that is true. Also, strangely, Malkovich isn’t very good in it either, although he gets better near the end when he’s talking to the baby. I think both of them are trying declaim because they think it makes sense in the milieu. But the picture works because it contrasts this absurdist humor against gorgeous shadows and deep blacks straight out of Murnau. It’s certainly not Allen’s most successful integration of serious and humorous notes in a single film. But this one is worth it for the cinematography alone.
The Naked Gun (2024) – rewatch. Both the Lonely Island guys who have directed nail cinematic grammar from 80’s action, 2010s/2000’s pop concerts and videos, and lousy 2000’s/2010’s Liam Neeson actioners and this is genuinely hard to do, here exemplified in the “cool” opening scene and the climactic confrontation getting deliberately undercut after a big push in from the camera. (“You punched me in the tummy!” The last word here is such a funny word choice, turning Danny Huston’s evil tech billionaire into Winnie the Pooh.) Neeson should probably stop doing action movies after this not only because he’s 70. Frank Drebin Jr. is the perfect parody of his lonely and secretly depraved killer heroes from Taken and beyond, with Neeson growling about 2000’s controversies or saying with perfect despair, “I had five more [chili dogs] that day.” Anderson has the deadpan sincerity for this too and Danny Huston sounds more and more like John Huston. “So, Ms. Spaghetti, do you like jazz?”
What did we play?
Further adventures in Red Dead Redemption 2, I’m still slightly awed by the scope of the open world here but also reluctant to get too invested in it for fear of losing all of my free time. In the last week I’ve been mauled to death by a mountain lion, stolen a stagecoach and won a fair amount of money at the poker table.
Oh yeah and I also went to a birthday party that turned out to be themed around a game of The Traitors, which was great fun. We completely failed to identify any traitors and they walked away with the small cash prize. I was murdered “in plain sight” during one of the challenges – the guy organising the event had planned it well to ensure that all of the people banished / murdered would still have plenty to do. Really enjoyable.
The family has been trying out Stardew Valley: The Board Game, a cooperative table version of the video game that soaks up the rest of my family’s spare time. I have resisted it myself, it looks like work in the beginning and then empty repetition once you get to a certain point – but the design and vibe is really appealing, so I thought maybe limiting it to finite chunks of tasks might bring me into their pixelated world.
The design is appealing and there’s a wide variety of actions, each with their own mechanics, that mimics the various paths you can take in the video game. The difficulty is the main bugaboo after a few plays, in that you can play through fairly quickly if you’re not thinking too hard but likely will fail a few goals, or if you strategize well it takes a lot longer but you’ll easily beat it. Especially if you have four playing it, achieving all goals can be done with a couple rounds to spare if you’re coordinating your actions with the other players (not all but many resources can be traded and some are pooled among all players).
Fortunately, the difficulty is also easily customized. My wife and I attempted to win in a 2-player game (already possibly tougher due to fewer total actions) with 3/4 the usual amount of rounds. We came up just a bit short, partly due to some bad luck and partly due to being too cavalier with a couple resources.
So it suffers from the usual non-legacy cooperative board game issue of relying enough on chance to create new circumstances that you can get dealt a too-easy or impossible game. But there’s also a lot of chance to turn that luck (usually in your favor) that if you like the aesthetics and mechanics, it’s a pleasant enough way to spend time.
Stardew Valley
The video game version, so we have full Stardew representation in our comments section! I have achieved Perfection on a couple different farms at this point, which means I haven’t played it in a while, but it had been long enough that I could finally dip back in and start a new farm without feeling like all this was old hat (indeed, I’d forgotten some of my best techniques to maximize my progress, so I’ve been forced into a more laid-back approach). Currently hoping for a good melon crop.
Excellent game for listening to podcasts.
TV Prime Time Draft
My friend Scott and I drafted fantasy line-ups of prime time scheduling! This was a good time, and it was interesting that we reflexively took different approaches (I had a couple of “I want this for counter-programming or to fill a genre/approach gap in my line-up” choices, but mostly I was playing to have the most me TV network possible; Scott committed to the artistic perfection of theme nights, with my personal favorite of the bunch being Trashy Soap Sunday bringing his viewers Melrose Place, Dynasty, Dallas, and Landman. There was also Difficult Men Monday, Sci-Fi Saturday, and a run of workplace sitcoms on Wednesday.)
If I could easily paste Excel tables in here, you’d get our whole schedules, but I can’t, alas, so I’ll just note that of course I nabbed The Shield and that I’m very pleased with back-to-back Rome and Deadwood and my Sports Night/NewsRadio block. And my Freaky Friday, my one solidly themed night of weird TV, with four anthologies, Twin Peaks, and The Leftovers.
I did some TV-network draft like that 15 years ago or even more… back when I did a lot more drafts like that. I don’t remember much about it, other than that my teammate convinced me to take Survivor in the first round as a network tentpole, and this was back when it only had 20 seasons.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
Played the demo at a Best Buy midweek. It ends after the first boss. First impressions:
– Feels a lot like a redo of MP3, which is fine by me since I never finished it. It looks and sounds way beyond what I’m used to though, and it definitely like to try it again.
– The first thing I’ll do when I get the full game is remap the scanning so it’s not the X button, because my muscle memory makes me press it every time I want to shoot a missile.
– That’s a shiny, beefy screen on the Switch 2. I don’t want to say the screen alone justifies the price tag (it doesn’t for me), but it’s worth something. The joycons feel firm and chunky too, in a way the ones for S1 never have.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles – Well, grinding and developing characters can get a little repetitive. On the other hand, the classes you can get can be really fun (a dual-wielding ninja!) and the story seems like it’s gonna be really good from the limited perspective I have so far, a much more morally ambiguous jockeying for power a la Game of Thrones instead of the typical black-and-white good-vs.-evil I’ve come to expect from video game RPGs.
All my friends and classmates less one raved abut The Breakfast Club. When I finally saw it, I did not care for it. And understood why that friend didn’t like it either. His mother worked on the same campus as the high school, and he happily ate lunch with her. Which is to so, he got along with his parents. And I got along with my mom. Neither of us related even a little to the charactets’ endless war with their parents.
Very thoughtful piece. I am a disliker if not full hater, there is a lot of good stuff here and you’re very acute about the emotional space the characters get to inhabit. The physical space is a huge part of this for me as well, Hughes uses the library incredibly well and this makes the characters seem like real people instead of archetypes. And that’s the problem! Because the ending reifies the same realness that I don’t like — the jocks are cool, everyone wants to be pretty, the nerd is a tool — making these classifications the point more than the emotions. It’s blinkered acceptance thinking it’s profound, compare to the much more open-ended and inviting Dazed and Confused, which lets stereotypes play out and be accepted but in a more casual way.
Year of the Month update!
Coming in February, we’ll be looking at 1957, including all these movies, albums, books, TV, yadda yadda.
Feb. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Throne of Blood
Feb. 6th: Gillianren: The Story of Anyburg, USA
Feb. 13th: Gillianren: The Truth About Mother Goose
Feb. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Incredible Shrinking Man
Feb. 20th: Gillianren: Our Friend the Atom
Feb. 27th: Gillianren: Sleeping Beauty’s Castle
And there’s still time to sign up for January! Here’s some of the movies, albums, books, TV, and games you can write about.
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez: Tim and/or Fables of the Reconstruction
Jan. 23rd: Gillian Nelson: The Golden Girls
Jan. 29th: Cori Domschot: Jewel of the Nile