I’ve been working my way through Max Payne 3 very slowly and I’m finally accepting that I actually just kind of hate it. I expected it not to capture what I love about the first two games; it’s made by Rockstar Games, more famous for the Grand Theft Auto series, taking over from Remedy Entertainment. They have many strengths as a studio but they’re just not going to make a dream-like, whimsical noir. I was unsurprised when they went with something gritter and more abrasive in its humour. What I didn’t expect was that they’d slather the game in this dogshit 00’s-era Hollywood style, with freeze-frames and handheld cam 24-style splitscreens and shit like that.
And I was deeply surprised that they’d fuck up Max’s character – I could read Max as more cynical and bitter after all these years, but I was outraged that they had him make more jokes and yet lose all sense of humour – especially about himself. Max of the original games could be angry, but he tempered it with self-awareness and a willingness to acknowledge his own absurdity (“Who was I to talk? A brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice?” and “There was no honour in this, no glory. Just me and the gun and the crook.”). There’s often a sense he’s just as amused by everything as he is angry. In this game, he takes himself and everything so goddamned seriously. He can’t give someone the time of day without pissing and moaning about it.
What shocked and horrified me is that this is straight-up a bad game. Like, the gameplay is smooth and elegant, but it’s built on a fundamentally shitty design principle: railroading the player through a particular sequence. MP3 was released in 2012 and this was extremely common for shooters at the time; at its most extreme, this was literal quicktime events (mostly derided), but MP3 falls in a smaller and much more frustrating category of games that want you to play through in a particular way and don’t even signpost it for you.
My taste in video games falls under two extremes: either there is a simple problem with a million possible solutions, or there is an exact sequence you have to get perfectly right. For the former, think of Metal Gear Solid or Left 4 Dead, where you’re given a bunch of tools and an obstacle and you have to think on your feet on how to get through. For the latter, think of Crash Bandicoot, Portal, or Ratchet & Clank, where it’s more about your reflexes than creative thinking. The disadvantage of the ‘million solutions’ problem is that it’s very difficult to program and, I have to say, requires a certain amount of genius to recognise as an approach in the first place (although RPGs have it as a matter of course).
The disadvantage of the ‘exact sequence’ is that, when done poorly, it feels cheap and uncreative. Crash Bandicoot makes it work with a staggering amount of detail – you feel like a marble in a Rube Goldberg machine bouncing around. Portal makes it work by establishing a very limited set of tools in the player’s toolbox, literally in that you have precisely one tool but also in that your world is very limited and has very clearly established rules of physics and ways of interacting with the world, as well as allowing the player all the time in the world to experiment.
Rockstar’s most famous games seem, initially, like ‘million solutions’ games – they did, after all, solidify the ‘open world’ genre, in which you are presented with a big playground and run around in it. But when you look at individual missions in the Grand Theft Auto series, it becomes apparent that they’re actually many tiny ‘exact sequence’ missions stitched together and given space between to collect toys to use in those sequences, as well as the open world providing a few randomised elements.
Like, most GTA missions have to be done in one specific way or they don’t work, and this is most notable in their most infamously bad ones – “Wrong Side Of The Tracks” from GTA: San Andreas is a mission in which you’re on a motorbike chasing a bunch of gangstas standing on top of a train, and it’s monotonously simple if you drive up on the side of the mountain at one point and nearly impossible otherwise, with the game never telling you this.
I notice the older the studio got, the more it leaned in on trying to control the player’s experience and the more older players rebelled. GTA V is infamous for several sequences in which the player is expected to do grunt work that it could otherwise have skipped over, like buying tools for heists. Too much of Max Payne 3 keeps expecting me to play a certain way and not telling me what that way is, expecting me to just go along with it. At the time of writing, I’m stuck on this UNDESCENDED TESTICLE of a level in which, based upon the logic presented to me, I believe I’m being pushed back by a massive wave of enemies, and I need to take cover and get headshots as fast as possible… except they’re also throwing grenades at me that land past my cover and kill me instantly.
Now, I know I’m not the greatest gamer in the world – at best, medium reflexes. But I am pretty good at figuring out what a game is trying to train me to do. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of my favourite games because it immediately trains you to keep close to your allies (but not too close) and constantly scan the area, both visually and aurally, for enemies. Gears of War is a weakly designed series, but it essentially trains you to keep your head down and attack diligently. Metal Gear Solid is fun as fuck because it trains you to study your surroundings, plan a strategy, and then execute it both quickly and with a willingness to adapt.
The various Grand Thefts Auto hold up because they do train you, even as the gameplay’s execution tends to be weak. I particularly love the gang warfare sections of GTA: SA, in which you take, defend, and maintain territory. On a macro level, they’re exercises in diligence; you use free time to build up resources like guns and skills, you move quickly when your territory is attacked, and you studiously make your way through enemy territory. On a micro level, you keep your distance to try and take out enemies from afar, using cover and moving efficiently. This kind of thing is all over the games; you’re strongly rewarded for committing to many smaller things, like side jobs, to build up cash and weapons for the main missions.
As far as I can tell, Max Payne 3 is training you to read its goddamned mind and work out the exact sequence for each particular level; this is similar to the design of the original games, but ironically the improved technology (like far superior AI) make it harder to determine what actions the game wants from you, and I don’t find this very fun. I don’t mind getting frustrated at a video game when it’s clear what I’m supposed to do and I’m just doing it badly; I get extremely frustrated when the game withholds its own objectives and I feel like I have no control over what happens to me.
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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A bunch of games I played and how they make me feel.
Yeah, I'll take a fucked up concept with everything on it, please.
Department of
Conversation
WHat did we watch?
Samurai Cop
This might be one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. This is the movie all those arch, ironic filmmakers are trying to make, and they can’t quite get there because they lack this movie’s sincerity. On my NCIS article, Lauren remarked that one thing that makes that show rancid is its total disinterest in people outside the protagonists – none of the minor characters have any life to them. This is the exact opposite, overjoyed at everyone who comes on screen, who is in turn overjoyed to be making a goofy action flick. In big ways, there’s both the enthusiasm and number of the villain characters; diverse in race and gender, but also in how they play their characters.
It really struck me when the black detective kissed the Belligerent Chief on the head and ran away – he’s not just the Black Comic Relief, the actor is genuinely putting effort into coming up with funny things to do and funny ways of delivering lines. Everyone in this movie is bringing their A-Game, no matter how little talent they actually have. I really noticed this with the action scenes; even by the standards of the day, they’re low in scope, but they’re also clearly pushing their budget as far as they can, which makes them endearing.
This even goes as far as the script – there’s a sincere, very dumb attempt to explore the nature of policing, separating the Japanese gangsters from honest businessmen as well as characters recognising and adjusting to each other’s tactics. Samurai recognising the code of silence, starts offering criminals protection to rat on their friends; the criminals wiping out Samurai’s friends and lovers feels like an honest escalation.
The New Eve
A simple French movie about a neurotic, impulsive woman who falls in love with a married man. What’s interesting is that the movie completely lacks her neuroticism or impulsiveness; a scene gets in, does what it’s supposed to do, and gets out. The filmmaking is invisible without being dull. It’s kind of like the movie is an outlet for everything the movie considers evil, which is weird because it’s also completely nonjudgemental of her.
Kill List
As much of an anti-thriller as Nic Cage’s Pig, but in the exact opposite way. It has a solid pulpy premise – down-on-his-luck merc Jay takes a job killing a list of people for a client – but instead of amping up tension consistently, it’s more about laying out the psychology of these men. Protagonist Jay looks like an ordinary dude at first glance, but he quickly reveals a complete inability to deals with any problem using anything but violence; the few times he ever finds himself in a situation where violence would definitely make the situation worse, he’s stuttering and confused.
(The one exception being his attitude towards his son, where he’s nothing but loving)
The first act of the movie is essentially a very gritty domestic drama which implies this kind of thinking is embedded in working class thinking – there’s one scene where he and his friend quietly mock a bunch of middle class Christians in a restaurant before Jay gets up and violently threatens them. As he sinks further into the violence of his task, he reveals a greater and greater capacity for violent revenge.
Which ends up completely turned on its head when it turns out in the big twist that he’s been targeted by a folk cult. It implies his violence is rooted in the very birth of humanity, and far from being expression of an individual morality as he seems to think, it can be co-opted by forces greater than him very easily. Not a great climax, not a Great movie, but definitely interesting stuff.
Man, one day I would really like to see the version of Kill List everyone else does. Jay’s violence is rooted in him being a moron, which is pretty apparent early on (that restaurant scene in particular) and the twist is obvious in its basics and even predictable in its particulars. The execution is decent — a certain facial expression is great — but so what? It’s still watching a dumbo suck at his job for two hours.
Heartily seconding Samurai Cop, but I’d push back on the idea that Kill List isn’t “amping up the tension constantly” — there’s a sense that something is Deeply Wrong, in scenes like the first appearance of the cult sigil and the approach to editing and scoring. And I remember the assassinations getting progressively gorier, or at least ending on a really nasty one before we move into Folk Horror Land.
There’s a difference between “amping up the tension” and “things are getting progressively more fucked up” – Kill List has an increasing sense of horror, but no specific sense that an action is going to have terrible consequences.
Can’t argue with that, but to me it only makes it scarier. The violence is one thing, the arbitrariness of it is way tenser to me.
You’re forcing me to draw a distinction between something being scary and something being tense, and I have to defer to Hitchcock – Kill List is operating on mystery, and it effectively draws horror out of that. I’m thinking of suspense, where we know exactly what could go wrong. Compare to Reservoir Dogs, where every turn and reveal only makes me ask “OH MY GOD WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN HOW ARE THEY GONNA GET OUT OF THIS?!”
Cause for Alarm!
Writing this up for this week’s Streaming Shuffle, but I’ll go ahead and say that Tristan was right, this is terrific and unbelievably tense.
To Live and Die in L.A.
Gritty and bleak and stunning to look at, with fantastic colors and plenty of post-apocalyptic L.A. cityscapes with the setting sun lighting up the smog until the sky is downright infernal. Some incredible violence here—swift, brutal, visceral, and often game-changing. William Petersen makes for an incredible asshole.
More of The Shield, both episodes and commentaries
I’ve given up on taking notes, but I’ll throw in that there’s a bit on one of the S3 commentary tracks where we learn that some viewers were pissed about Lem knocking Vic’s hand off his shoulder when Vic asked him (again) about the stolen money. This was oddly good for my mental health, because one of the weirder—and inexplicably more distressing—things my anxiety attaches to when it’s really revved up is the idea that I’m too defensive of my favorite characters. (Intellectually, I realize that even if this is true, it’s not that big a deal, but that doesn’t make it any less stressful. If anyone is considering developing an anxiety disorder, I personally wouldn’t recommend it.) But I have never hit this particular high/low of “any character even slightly rebuffing my preferred character is Wrong.” So it’s actually kind of nice to know that even at my most partial, I still can’t be as thoroughly up a character’s ass as the old FX message boards were up Vic Mackey’s. Yay for me and my relative nuance!
The “Slipknot” commentary bit about David Rees Snell accidentally running into a metal pole during one scene—”DING!”–keeps making me laugh just thinking about it. Also still laughing about (and agreeing with) my wife’s rightly enthusiastic reaction to Ronnie’s beard: “Ooh, now it’s Hot Girl Ronnie Summer.”
Out-of-context conversation during viewing: “Look at him in that suit. You know, Fifty Shades of Grey starring David Aceveda? I am not opposed.”
Ronnie’s dry, pissed query about how they’re only splitting the (non-burnt) money three ways now, right?: iconic. And Ronnie and his outrage about dry-cleaning Oriental rugs!
Tons of great Dutch and Claudette material in the back half of S3. The two of them defending each other and backing each other up always gets me right in the heart.
Grant has pointed out that the big Strike Team argument in the S3 finale is like the Shane-Tavon fight, where Shane just can’t let it go, and I think there’s also an interesting inversion where it’s like that but with Shane in Tavon’s shoes this time: asked to mend fences to keep the team together and willing to try it, then confronted with the fact that the person he’s trying to assuage clearly believes he’s in the right. The moral weight and right-wrong balances of it all are completely different, but the structure is the same. Replaying the dramatic sequence in a totally different key works really well.
Speaking of which … Tavon breaking down in his hospital bed is one of the most devastating Shield scenes for me. The way his (completely accurate!) self-assurance crumbles and he just starts weeping as Lem and Vic gradually convince him that he hit Mara is unbelievably painful. Thank God for his S7 appearance, because leaving him curled up on his side crying, convinced he’s violated all his ideas about who he is as a person, is so bleak.
Danny gets a handful of much-needed wins by the end of this season, and I love watching it. She basically spent all of season two taking it on the chin, so it was really lovely to see her get her feet under her again, have a successful undercover assignment, get bumped up to P3 again, and enjoy some fun and flirtation with Taylor-the-fence. Another example of Shawn Ryan’s “you have to let your characters win sometimes” position paying off.
I have this take that 80s cinematography is generally harder-edged than 70s stuff, it still looks good (especially compared to dreck now) but is colder somehow. But Robby Mueller embraces the edge while still making it vibrant, it isn’t 70s but the best possible 80s that is its own majesty, there was no one like him.
It isn’t ’70s cinematography, but I had to actually double-check that when I started this capsule write-up, because I loved it so much that I briefly thought it had to be. Which is the highest compliment I can pay. But yeah, “vibrant” is definitely the word.
And that’s before they discovered digital cinematography and literally turned all the colors colder.
Mueller’s greatest accomplishment here is finding a transitional “look” between the darker reds and muddier browns of the 70s and the lighter pastels of the 80s, which is fairly consistant with how the movie integrates not just the look, but the mis-en-scene and repositioning the camera in terms of blocking in away that imitates different eras. I got to ask Friedkin about the film’s look (and why he hired Mueller in the first place) and he said that he wanted a more classical approach to the action, as opposed to the use of long lenses, zooms and hand held work that defined THE FRENCH CONNECTION and SORCEROR. Fritz Lang was his primary influence, although the signature action setpieces, color schema, and use of musical score show the impact of 70s and 80s trends. He didn’t say much about his earlier, ahem, exposure to Mueller’s work, But he did say that during the interview process he was convinced that the DP was on the same page as far as the look he was going for and conveyed the knowledge as to how to get it in the most efficient way possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) – Well made but under-successful attempt to adapt Wilde’s famous novel. Even taking into account that the book itself tamps down a lot of Dorian’s sins, there is just no way that a Hollywood studio movie is going to delve even a little deep. Plus the lead, Hurd Hatfield, is not very good at all. But the production does include excellent Oscar-winning cinematography and design, including a stunning contemporary work to play the role of the picture at the end of Dorian’s life; and strong performances by George Sanders, well suited to Wildean bon mots, and Angela Lansbury. (Fun fact: Hartfield became a life long friend to Lansbury and introduced her to her second husband.)
Kojak,”I Would Like to Report a Dream” – A spiritualist has nightmares about impending murders, and warns the cops, but it’s too late. At first the door is open to the possibility that the woman really is psychic but it becomes clear that information she gets while in a trance with the murderer is leaking into her dreams. The second season ends with this unpleasant and even grim slog. Guests include Ruth Gordon, who never finds much rapport with the cast, and Andrew Robinson, clearly being typecast after Dirty Harry.
M*A*S*H. “A Full Rich Day” – Another letter home from Hawkeye, but this time sent as a tape recording. Hawkeye details a Lieutenant making the doctors operated on his sergeant at gunpoint, a Turkish soldier mad to get back to the war, and missing Luxembourger. The first thread is very serious business, the others less so, and the whole works nicely, even if nothing makes much sense.
Frasier, “Burying a Grudge”/”Seat of Power” – In the former, Frasier learns that Martin’s ex-partner has cancer, and works to get the two to reconcile. Nothing special here but the grudge is slowly played less for laughs and more for pathos. In the latter, Frasier and Niles try to fix a toilet and then are forced to hire a plumber, who turns out to be Niles’ old bully. And whose brother was Frasier’s old bully. An effort to eat your cake and have it too, by at once getting Niles to analyze why his bully was a bully and having Frasier get his revenge. Which is it, people, respond to bullying with more violence or with understanding? John C. McGinley is Niles’s bully.
NBA Basketball – Watched most of Lakers-Nuggets and saw what might be the start of a storied run by Luka and LeBron. Watched enough of Mavs-Warriors to see that the Mavs are probably going to regret trading Luka.
Oh, I love the bully episode, but especially McGinley trying to articulate why he bullied Niles. Maybe it’s just his performance but you see the logic of “You were a nerd and an easy target” even if, y’know, you really shouldn’t bully people.
Live music — Marc Ribot is generally classified as jazz but he’s always worked in the freer parts of his genre while pushing the envelope into punk and noise and fusion with his guitar. So I didn’t feel odd hearing sounds from other places at Friday’s show — other guitarist Ava Mendoza’s sandblaster sheets calling up Ted Falconi in Flipper; an absolutely monster drone evoking Th’ Faith Healers even as drummer Chad Taylor let loose inside the riff in jazz time while holding the groove; bassist Sebastian Steinberg bowing the sound of the thinny from Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass while the other players constructed a canyon of thunder and gunfire; Ribot and Mendoza inverting the guitar (anti-)heroics of Brett Guerwitz and Greg Hetson in Bad Religion’s “Generator,” with Ribot laying down gut-piercing blues before passing off to Mendoza, who went all the way out into the universe, not getting lost like Guerwitz but exploring places never mapped. The band closed with a song I’ve heard before — an Albert Ayler cover? — liquid riffs joining and separating, ecstatic in their intertwining. But the other reference was an ongoing reread of Octavia Butler’s Parable Of The Sower and its narrator’s insistence that Change is God — the band, especially in the early going, would shift off grooves and find new riffs, following Ribot’s direction but inscrutable to the audience. At one point Ribot and Mendoza gnarled together while Taylor and Steinberg forsook their instruments for handclaps, where were we going? What was next? Shaping and being shaped by change is the condition of life, Butler’s protagonist says, and it was a gift to be part of this band’s shaping.
Live music, part 2 — went to a restaurant/club for a friend’s birthday, the restaurant had a live salsa band that was quite good, lots of people on the floor in the front. The club in the back is Not My Scene but was fun for a bit, more Latin music that I had no context or language for but was fun to move to, until the DJ hit a series of slower songs that he did not have the sense to move off of, I may not be a club person but I can tell when a vibe has shifted. Oh well, still a good time even if we left early (old).
Looney Tunes — took the nephews to the final screening of classic cartoons at the art house theater, they do this every February break as a service to people looking to put their kids in a room for a little while and there were many young people here, great to see it. (The old people next to me who brought their phones out after literally every short should be ground up into paste, kill yourselves you stupid fucks.) Mostly Bugses — I don’t think Hillbilly Hare gets a lot of air time and it’s great, Rabbit of Seville of course rules, but there were a lot of Chuck Joneses (and two Tasmanian Devils) and no early Bugs. Jones’ “Feed The Kitty” also screened and while this is a classic it hits at Jones’ great strength (facial expressions, the bulldog is magnificent here) and great weakness, he never got over his need for cuteness. Except when he had Daffy to work with, Duck Amuck remains untouchable.
Woo live music! Do you know where the club was?
A place called La Fabrica, apparently it is quite the hot spot!
Wooooo live music!!
Wooooo live music part 2!!
The Zone of Interest – Maybe by sheer accident a grotesque parody of the kind of modern prestige TV we talk about here, as well as contemporary art’s tendency towards stillness, mundane, quotidian detail, and humanization of evil. Not as powerful out of theaters but still seismic. This is one of the rare Holocaust films to explicitly put German fascism in the context of colonization and the settler-farmer utopianism in Germany of the early 20th century, which people like the Hosses pushed to its most logical and awful extent.
I Saw the TV Glow – finally getting to this, I really wanted to see it when it got a very belated UK cinema release but it ended up being just after I moved house and had other stuff on my mind. I wonder if I might have gotten a little more out of it in that environment – it’s one of those movies that takes a big swing in its third act and needs the viewer to be totally on the right wavelength to follow it, and I wasn’t quite there, unfortunately. Curious to revisit in a year or so though, the vibes are impeccable.
Justified, season 4 episodes 1 and 2 – I was going to check out Shogun before I got back to this but I fall back on TV when I don’t have time for a movie and the first episode of Shogun is practically feature length so I kept putting it off. Good to get back to this though, I’m immediately feeling a lift over season 3, which I was lukewarm enough about that I might have given up on the show if people hadn’t kept saying this season was a lot better. Thank you, people! So many fun new characters immediately dropped into the mix and the central mystery is fascinating right from the start.
My favorite of the year but that turn is shocking and (heh) really sinks in, I was almost disappointed and then loved that.
Yeah it makes bold choices and I respect that! Definitely felt like a big step up from World’s Fair to me without losing the unique “nobody else could have made this” edge. I’m just not quite on their wavelength… Yet.
Animal Control, “Ducks and Penguins”
Uh… I don’t know if I was drunk or what, but I barely remember this episode. Something to do with Shred and Frank having to find a penguin and bail out Emily, while Patel and Victoria go to Canada for some reason. I think I need to watch it again.
Elsbeth, “Foiled Again”
Matthew Broderick is a killer on this week’s Elsbeth! Also, he plays one on the show. Heyo.
Anyway, he runs a really expensive high-end college prep service– to the point of “We’ll guide your child’s entire life, including from toddlerhood, to shape them to get into an Ivy League school”– only now he’s getting loads of early-admission rejections of his clients from Baden University (which I guess, being an Ivy and in NYC, is our stand-in for Columbia here).
Turns out, the new Dean of Admissions at Baden is an alumnus of his program, and he resents having his entire life diverted into interests he didn’t care about because his parents wanted to send him to an Ivy at all costs. He’s adept at recognizing applicants who went through Broderick’s program, and he’s rejecting them all. So Broderick kills him. Clever in method and in diverting suspicion… but not clever enough for Elsbeth.
Also, her son Teddy is visiting again, and the case makes Elsbeth wonder if she didn’t do enough to prepare him for success. And Michael Emerson’s evil murderous judge is back at the end to let us know that he knows about the reopened murder case and that their business together isn’t over. Dun dun dunnnn!
Going Dutch, “Once Upon a Twice Christmas”
Apparently this town has a celebration of “twice Christmas,” which started when they couldn’t celebrate actual Christmas during WW2 because they were occupied. So they celebrated it in March after being liberated, and now celebrate it twice a year. Col. Quinn is annoyed by this, but Katja is having a party so he promises to try to be on his best behavior. Then Captain Quinn isn’t invited at all, and Katja bluntly tells her she doesn’t like her because she’s a people-pleaser. So Maggie does the normal thing here, crash the party to prove she’s not. And Abe (Abraham?) is upset because he doesn’t get much chance to talk to his stepson now that the divorce is close to being final, so Elias tries to fix that for him. Elias has continued to be one of the better per-minute characters here. Solid episode.
Common Side Effects, “Lakeshore Limited”
Hmm, I didn’t find this episode as funny as the first one, which has me wondering if it’s going to be more of some kind of thriller than a comedy. It still has its funny moments, though, and the story is intriguing enough. I’m hoping it ends up taking more of a turn to comedy. What I see on social media indicates the people watching it like it a lot more than I do so far. But I don’t dislike it; I just didn’t find this episode as funny as the first, and it’s left me with more questions about what the show’s going to be.
Also, I finally finished up my The Shield DVD commentary watch, including the bonus features around the final season and final episode, and the bonus disc. I dunno what else there is to say about this show. It’s all worth it. There are some funny commentary moments for sure.
white lotus. I’m afraid we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns. Maybe there just aren’t that many different types of insane rich people. It’s time to up the game. Add some magical realism. Add some sci-fi. Season 4: white lotus Macondo, with concierge Aureliano Buendia (nth generation descendent of the original). Season 5: White Lotus mars. They can turn this season around if a monkey murders someone. Season 6: white lotus charleston (gemstones crossover).
I like all the pieces. Arnold Schwarzenegger junior is great as a douchebag. Jason Isaacs is great. Goggins is great. The thai employees are great. (I’m waiting for the nice guy incel to snap and start some murders). But it just needs a little extra, like a monkey with a gun.
Also I attended an MLS match, and Canada’s Jayden Nelson is either an incredible player about to have an mvp season or the portland timbers are just world historically bad. It wasn’t fun to watch him dismantle portland in the rain but if I think he would be fun to watch in a match with no rooting interest. I will cheer for him if canada plays the USA, assuming the world cup even happens (the u.s.-canada-mexico co-hosting deal seems like less and less of a good idea for our neighbors.)
I went with the five year old daughter and she is developing a strong preference for the women’s team. I asked if she had fun despite the rain and losing and she said “No. Why would you want to watch a bunch of boys play soccer.”
Me, encouraging my daughter to be anti-patriarchal: “yeah, this is cool.”
Me, when my daughter doesn’t want to watch men’s sports with me:
https://images.app.goo.gl/TnuTWr1tPJcuJt3J7
I think México and Canada are going to be fine with the World Cup. You want a real mess, look at the current plans for the 2030 tournament.
More I’m concerned the U.S. will have troops inside or a visa ban with Canada and Mexico, which would make many things about cohosting difficult.
If the 2030 3 continents fiasco works they should do away with the concept of a host nation. Have the group stage in different countries around the world and then the elimination rounds on the same continent +/- one time zone.
Once you’ve reached the golden umbrella stand or eats pbjs in white shirts types, it’s all downhill from there. It doesn’t sound like Enlightened was this judgmental of other people.
The Willoughbys – Ploughboy’s pick for family movie night – and a pretty good pick! Netflix animation could be some of my favorite if it would resist spending time in the long shadows of Pixar and Dreamworks. Because absent a house style, the animation itself is really great. Particular highlights: a baby that moves in about half the number of frames as everybody else, and every time a character interacts with a road which always results in an immediate multi-car pile-up, usually with a bus flipping. It has an appealing elasticity to its physics, and the same is occasionally – though not often enough – applied to its storytelling. Also Martin Short and Jane Krakowski as a narcissistic married couple? This must be applied to live action television at once.
I liked this one too.
SATURDAY
Robot Dreams
First time. Agreeable, discreet and visually extremely pleasant. A bit predictable but its earnestness and aesthetic/narrative commitment won be over. Turns out there’s really no downside to playing “September” over and over either. Very much geared towards children, and valuable in that sense for what it teaches regarding friendship. The titular dreams are the movie’s one big gamble and it pays off really well. I should really check out the director’s previous black and white silent movie, Blancanieves.
Pulp Fiction— For the 5,000th time (the first three were over a single weekend in 1994), but this time with my daughter. She’s become very squirrely about movies recently (her act of teenage rebellion), so I felt the tension in the long takes and buildup in a way I never had before — was this the moment when she would say “this is boring!” and leave? But no! QT has always been the master of extending tension to the breaking point and resolving it exactly one nanosecond before the audience loses patience, and this was no exception.
Also,the first season of Severance, which both was good and shows why I don’t make time for much modern television. It’s about the best you could do with a high concept prestige miniseries with bootstrapped mysteries but great actors (especially Tramell Tillman) and writing which treads water for half an hour each episode before building to a strong but fundamentally ambiguous conclusion that resolves nothing. It would be wrong to say the show has nothing to say, but Ursula LeGuin said it before most of these people were born and it only took her 8 pages.
I am pretty sure I know what you’re referencing, but I’m amusing myself imagining Severance is an adaptation of the Le Guin story from the temporal/positional perspective of a tree. What a twist!
Hahaha I feel seen with these criticisms of modern television. (Maybe you should check out my list – I will never steer you to Treading Water But Prestigiously.)
I watched Pulp Fiction again a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a long time, and for as fun and stylish as Tarantino’s movies are, I feel like I’ve developed an even deeper appreciation over time for what this movie is doing.
What did we play?
Mad Max – really enjoying this. It’s your classic open world game but the Max lore is a lot of fun and the car stuff feels like it has a real weight and speed to it. The wasteland feels well-designed to feel barren and bleak but not empty, there are plenty of locations to visit and weirdos to meet. Plenty of challenge too – it took me a bunch of attempts to successfully take down a convoy (sadly only featuring normal-sized vehicles, it remains to be see if this game contains any War Rig-style behemoths) and assaults on various strongholds need some forethought if only to take out snipers in advance of a full frontal assault. Feels like some of the loot-gathering subquests might become repetitive over time but so far it’s just a nice game to hang out in which is a mixed blessing because I have other stuff I should be doing, whoops.
Golden Axe – Sega Genesis on Nintendo Switch Online
Finished it. A solid hack and slash, with great presentation, though it clearly suffers from being a scaled down version of an arcade game early into the system’s life cycle. Some cool sections, like the one where you fight on the back of a giant eagle, though it sort of cheats by having static visuals. Also, the final boss is super cheap, and can use super attacks much more liberally than the player can. Got him anyway.
Golden Axe II – Sega Genesis on Nintendo Switch Online
Also finished it. Pretty much the same game as the first but better, down to the final boss being cheap and using supers all the time. It’s also a prettier game with tighter controls, with levels in a lava-filled cave and a tower high in the sky being highlights. A solid improvement.
Golden Axe III (Sega Genesis Classics) – Nintendo Switch
A much, much better game so far. With branching paths, cooler levels, much better music and new characters. The panther man is great to play with, shame all his supers looks like shit. Highlights so far include a great graveyard level, a fight against one of your possessed partners, a great level scaling a mountain and fighting an eagle man, and another fight on the back of a giant eagle, with moving backgrounds this time. Only problem is that I made it to the sixth level out of eight and the level select mode (which I’ve been using in these games to restart at the point where I ran out of continues) is extremely finnicky to unlock in these games. Very funny that me finishing this game depends on whether or not I’ll be able to pull off a particular combination of buttons on a menu screen.
F-Zero 99 on Nintendo Switch
What will I remember for longer: my one win this week (a smooth drive that resulted in another Classic mode win, and my first overall in Port Town) or the nerve-wracking race on Big Blue that featured some of my best driving and ended in fourth place, less than a second off the winner and would have been my first win in Big Blue in 99 mode (I’ve won it in Classic)? Only time will tell.
More Grim Fandango. Out of the first area and our background in nutty 90s adventure game logic is very handy. This isn’t the worse offender in that regard, and it helps that the whole world of the game is pretty silly.
I really need to start making use of “undescended testicle of a [blank].”
This does seem like the absolute worst kind of game railroading, where it’s just hands-off enough to act like you have significant options … and yet never follows through. (I agree that Portal is really good at creating an on-rails experience that still feels free, specifically because the time generally lets you experiment and gives you space to figure things out, and those actions are your own.) Just reading this has put me in the mood for an immersive sim.
My relationship to on-rails games (whether they be straight-through series of events like Portal or “open world” sets of puzzles with solutions like GTA mentioned in the article or Myst-style games) was upended when the much-missed pico highlighted this passage from Life: A User’s Manual:
From this we deduce something that is without doubt the ultimate truth of the puzzle: despite its appearances, it is not a solitary game: each gesture that the person completing the puzzle makes, the puzzlemaker has made before him; each piece that he chooses and re-chooses, that he examines, that he caresses, each combination that he tries and tries again, each blunder, each intuition, each hope, each discouragement, have already been decided, calculated, and studied by the other.
The bad version of that is feeling like the puzzlemaker is choking you with your own collar ala the Max Payne 3 description. But when you test an idea in a game and it works and it feels like the creator(s) are standing there on the other side of a door waiting for you with a big grin, what a great feeling.
Citation: https://www.the-solute.com/georges-perecs-life-a-users-manual-year-of-the-month/
Year of the Month update!
And March is going to be Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 4th: Lauren James: The Most Dangerous Game
Mar. 10th: Sam Scott: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Mar. 20th: Cori Domschot: Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 27th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Here’s how we’re wrapping up February:
Feb. 27th: Cori Domschot: Hidden Figures
Feb. 27th: John Bruni: Jet Plane and Oxbow
And in April, we’ll be movin’ on up to 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, or books!
Calling The Lodger for March 24th.
How about the 3oth so we can run it alongside John’s take?
Ooh, somehow didn’t pick that John was doing the movie. I’ll do The Birth Of A Nation on the same day then.