Art House in the Middle of the Street #0: The End's Not Near, It's Here

The end is here. The Earth is one continuous, blighted landscape. Fossil fuels are as distant a memory as the great prehistoric beasts from which they originated. The wastes are ruled by marauding psychopathic biker gangs. Either that or a somewhat minor culture blog is calling it quits. I can't quite remember.

Ending a feature mid-stream as I'm doing with Art House is a somewhat disappointing resolution. Then again, I really only proposed the thing so I could have an excuse to watch a Janus movie every week. And because I still own the box, I could ostensibly keep doing that. Chances are, though, that I probably won't.

Why not? With a few purely enjoyable exceptions (Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast), the movies contained in "Essential Art House" aren't what you'd qualify as "easy watches." They can be agonizingly slow (Ozu's Floating Weeds) or terrifyingly sere (Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain).

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A Fourth of Fireworks

I hope you had a delightful Fourth of July.

If it was a good one, I bet you didn’t have to work. Perhaps you caught up on some sleep. Cooked a real breakfast for once. Who has time to cook bacon and sausage and then cook your scrambled eggs in the pan still glittering with bacon-sausage residue? On the Fourth of July, you do.

Maybe you watched some television that you’d never allot time for: Law & Order reruns, History Channel specials on how states were formed, that new buddy-lawyer show starring Zach Morris and a short guy, a sporting event. Crazy contract fights have left baseball and hockey as the only popular American sports not locked out – and they don’t play hockey in this heat. Oh, the Women’s World Cup, you say? Yeah. Have fun with that.

By about mid-afternoon you were likely planning for a get-together. You were throwing one, your friend was throwing one – it doesn’t matter. You found a shirt that looks good and won’t make you sweat too much. Picked up the beer/soda/BBQ chicken/deep-fried-whatever. Grilled, tossed the old pigskin, and socialized in ways not afforded by office cubes or retail counters or telephone lines.

Then night started to fall. Lazily, as summer nights tend to do. What better way to cap off the day than with some fireworks?

[Author’s Note: There’s an outside chance your Fourth of July was not this delightful – you had to work, you hate freedom, or you aren’t from the United States and couldn’t care less. You can still hit the jump and read about fireworks. Just pretend you had a patriotic day filled with safe drinking, relaxation, and brightly colored explosions.]

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Sunday Reading: How Success Killed Duke Nukem

So Duke Nukem Forever came out. That’s right, the game that took over 14 years of development across multiple studios is finally on store shelves. You can pay $60 dollars for it. The general consensus, however, is that you shouldn’t.

Almost every review of DNF cites the painfully visible seams in its patchwork structure. Three years of development here, an engine upgrade there, a new level designer brought on here, another batch of ruddy textures there.

This is unsurprising, given how long the game took in coming. Clive Thompson’s 2009 Wired article, “Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem” chronicles its Sisyphean development process.  A mix of perfection and George Broussard’s too-deep pockets forever prevented DNF’s release. Thompson writes:

“Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.”

Looking at the Duke Nukem character now, it’s hard to imagine why someone would fight so hard to keep him on top. But in the late 90s, Duke’s Grade-E humor and interactive environments set bars few games had reached. Being in the lead is addictive. I can see why Broussard wouldn’t want to give that up.

Thompson wrote his article almost a year before Randy Pitchford and Gearbox Software announced their grand plans to ship the unshippable game. Reading it now, it’s an excellent primer for the glut of scathing reviews that hit the Internet this week. With its unique trials and tribulations documented, how could anyone expect anything of this game?

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Album Review: Bon Iver - "Bon Iver, Bon Iver"

I'm midway through Neil Gaiman's American Gods right now, and I just finished a chapter involving a mysterious stranger in a charcoal gray suit. The man's not invisible, but anyone who looks at him immediately forgets anything about him - what he looks like, his name, what he's just said - the moment they look away. Paradoxically, though, he has the ability to implant an idea deep within peoples' subconscious, one that they'll be urged inexorably by even if they can't remember its precise nature.

I kept thinking of him as I listened to Bon Iver's new "semi-eponymous" album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver: the album manages to be utterly elusive and yet completely indelible. Songwriter Justin Vernon writes songs that twist and turn, piling on melodies, harmonies, and unexpected instrumental textures until you can barely remember where the song began.

It also sounds like nothing I've ever heard before, including For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver's first wildly successful record. It is, however, a completely worthy successor.

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Album Review: Beastie Boys - "Hot Sauce Committee Part Two"

Let's get this out of the way early: I'm as happy as you are that the Beastie Boys are back. From the probably not ironic party-hardy Licensed to Ill to arguable creative high water mark Paul's Boutique and on to their latter years, where they alternated between a groovy Boho jazz sound and attempts to recapture the clowning atmosphere of their biggest hits, the Beastie Boys have remained cultural fixations, if not always for the music they were recording at that moment. Adam Yauch (MCA), Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), and Michael Diamond (Mike D) have consistently displayed a laudable willingness to make their fans happy, either by touring incessantly, releasing fan-shot live DVDs, or offering post-modern takes on their greatest hits. And the Boys have done all of this while still exorcising their creative demons, continually putting out albums that pushed their signature sound forward in one way or another.

Their new material, however creatively satisfying it must have been to record, hasn't always been all that much fun to listen to. 1998's Hello Nasty was probably the last time the band really captured the attention of the wider public, and the monster-movie sonic pranksterism of "Intergalactic" deserves all the accolades it's received.

The best one can say about the Beastie Boys' late-period material is that they don't sound like they're going through the motions. A cursory listen to their last proper album, 2004's To the 5 Boroughs, might've left you with the impression that the band had recaptured their former glory. Sound-wise, the album managed to channel the insane sample casserole of Paul's Boutique without arousing the ire of every music publisher on Earth. (It just sounded like they were using a shitload of samples.) Lyrically, though, the album felt a bit tired. Though the Boys sounded righteously indignant on album centerpiece "An Open Letter to NYC," they sounded more like three unmistakably talented veterans goofing off at their home studios.

So when I heard that the long-delayed Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 1 would finally be released as Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, I proceeded with caution.

Was my wariness warranted? Or should this old horse just stop saying neighs?

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When “Silly Remake” Met “Wait, What?”

My previous life as a student in the art of screenwriting left its mark on me. I always think about the dramatic structure of a film. I’m constantly worrying about the “want” or “need” of a character on television. And, most loathsome of all, I still peruse the trades every week. Reading sites like Variety, I’ve learned all types of stupid things I wish I could unlearn. Did you know that the new Pirates of the Caribbean is going to have its international premiere at Cannes Film Festival? Or have you heard about the arena show Batman Live? It all sounds like pretty rough stuff, but that all pales in comparison to what I read today.

Bradley Cooper is in talks to star in a remake of The Crow.

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We're as Sad as Hell and We're Not Gonna Take This Anymore! - R.I.P. Sidney Lumet

By now any of you out there with any sort of connection to the wider world will have heard the news that legendary director Sidney Lumet passed away this weekend at the age of 86. He leaves behind one of the most solid and astonishing filmographies of any Hollywood director in the past half decade. 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, the list goes on. Lumet established himself as one of the best directors for confronting capital i Issues through the use of cinema. And yet he never won an Oscar (except for a lifetime achievement award from the Academy a couple years ago, which is nice I suppose).

By far the most iconic and oft-referenced of Lumet's movies is 1976's television satire Network. Owing much to Peter Finch's famous-for-a-reason "Mad as hell" speech, you see this one get brought out every couple years or so at Oscar montages, and like I said, it's famous for a reason: it's so damn good.

Network is centered around the story of Howard Beale, the primetime news anchor at "UBS" the lowest-rated network in the country. When he receives the word that he's been fired, he suffers what seems to be a nervous breakdown; or is it a prophet's revelation?

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #9: Loves of a Blonde

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

What a wonderful world we see in Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde, a seminal artifact of the Czechoslovak New Wave. It's a world where a shoe factory owner lobbies a Czech colonel to station his troops in the factory town so that the girls who work in the factory will have men to love them. (The women, after all, outnumber the men sixteen to one in the town.) Where three army stooges argue like little boys over how to approach a table of cute girls. Where a soldier sees a girl putting a tie on the tree and says, "If you keep doing that, you'll dress up the whole forest."

There aren't even any stunning beauties to intimidate us. Forman's film evinces the same free-form quality as the works of Godard or Truffaut, but there's nary a supermodel or foppish midcentury Bohemian in sight. Instead, we get a bunch of grubby, homely teenage girls working at a shoe factory during the day and hoping to find love at night.

Brigitte Bardot would probably vomit. Too bad for her.

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Revisiting the Simplicity of Baseball Cards

This Saturday, a very important announcement about the baseball season was made: The Chicago Cubs announced that youngster Andrew Cashner would be their 5th starter for the 2011 season, pushing veteran Carlos Silva off the 25-man roster. This is just one of the tidbits of information that flashes across the bottom of your screen while you watch Spring Training games on MLB Network. Why was I fixated on this one, then? It was because I recognized the name "Carlos Silva" from a 2011 Topps baseball card I had just opened.

That's right, at Spring Training this past weekend, I picked up a couple of packs of baseball cards, and I've been hooked ever since. Organizing them by collector's number, constructing fantasy depth charts on my table top, you name it, the whole nine yards. In fact, right before I heard the news, I had shifted Silva's card from my "good starters" pile to my "garbage starters" pile. And it looks like Cubs GM Jim Hendry's decision justified my classification.

Opening these few spring packs made me realize how much I missed baseball cards. I have binders full of the stuff at home, compiled between the years of 1989 and 2003, but once they're in the sleeves, you very rarely take them out and play with them like you do when you open a new pack. Part of the reason that baseball cards are so much fun is their permanence: they actually exist, cardboard and ink. Sure you can get stats and pictures of baseball players online, but it's very different from opening up a new pack of baseball cards. It's kind of like the difference between settling down with a cup of coffee and the print version of the New York Times, and paying a reasonable price for the New York Times' digital subscription.

So, has the death of print journalism coincided with the decline in popularity of baseball cards? I don't see how there possibly couldn't be a connection.

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Sunday Reading: The Final Fantasy VII Letters

Talking about old videogames can be problematic. The industry’s rapid technological advances often make maintaining retain proper perspective difficult. Since many of us played games in our childhood, our fond memories of certain titles are often wrapped up in nostalgia completely unrelated to the game itself.

Writing for Paste, Kirk Hamilton and Leigh Alexander grapple with nostalgia in The Final Fantasy VII Letters. Discussions of Square’s revered Playstation RPG regularly spiral into needless Aeris-mourning and debating the merits of full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes. Hamilton is only just now playing the game for the first time (it’s available for download on the Playstation Network), and Alexander considers it one of her favorite games of all time (she too recently replayed the game on PSP). Their letter exchange will attempt to address the game’s context as well as its lasting legacy.

Why is it so highly regarded? Is our praise rose-colored or does the game still hold up?

The feature is only two letters in and I’m already hooked. Alexander introduces the experiment and extols the design of Midgar before Hamilton even starts his playthrough. “It was very different for its time, agree?” asks Alexander. I agree. FFVII did away with kings and queens, princes and princesses. Its opening gambit pit you against a corporation. That was new for a genre whose two biggest franchises had the words “fantasy” and “dragon” in their titles.

Hamilton’s response comes about six hours into his playthrough. He’s digging Midgar for its gritty aesthetic and for the uniqueness of the design:

“What's more, all of the backdrops appear to be unique, which is refreshing after going through the constantly recycled 3D assets of today's games. I can't interact with the items in the restaurant in Wall Market, but they are unique and inform the world. I can pick up one of a billion identical loaves of bread in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but who the hell cares?”

That’s the best defense of FFVII’s style I’ve read yet. Be sure to follow this feature. I know I will.

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Album Review: The Strokes - "Angles"

The Strokes have always been a nostalgia act. Problem is, now they're a nostalgia act for themselves. When the Stroke debuted in early 2001, they sounded like they'd stepped directly out of a time machine bound from the late 60s, when proto-punk acts like Television, the Velvet Underground, and Richard Hell were (not) ruling the airwaves. Frontman Julian Casablancas' songs were always more tuneful than those of his musical forefathers, but they surely shared the same DNA: clipped guitars, tinny drums, those mumble-sung vocals.

But unlike those that came before, the Strokes got big. Really fucking big. I distinctly remember seeing the video for "Last Nite" so many times on MTV (!!!) that I can still remember how many times Fab Moretti hits his drum mic before he knocks it over (3). NME and the rest of the histrionic British music press helped the album rocket to number 2 in the U.K. and number 33 in the States. What was intended as an invocation of good times three decades past became a soundtrack for a new generation's adolescence. The band followed the album up with Room on Fire, a similar-sounding but nonetheless very good record, in 2003.

And then things got weird.

First Impressions of Earth was at best a slight evolution in the Strokes' sound, at worst a muddled, schizophrenic mess, but mostly just weird. Angles takes one more step into crazytown.

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Charge Shot!!! In Depth: Nicktoon Housing

Think back to the cartoons of your childhood. Where does your favorite character live? If you grew up in the early nineties the answer to that question may bring more than nostalgia; it may bring unease. Craig’s recent post on Nickelodeon’s plans to re-air some of their classics got me thinking about my favorite childhood cartoons. I was always deeply affected by the bizarre home life of my favorite characters. Every show seemed to feature likable protagonists in unconventional homes. The strangeness of the housing situations of the early Nicktoons (and some shows on the outer rim of that programming chunk) speak to an immensity of creativity and a willingness to experiment that was hitherto unheard of in television. If we dig a bit deeper into the original lineup, we can see the progression and eventual decline of nonconformist and nontraditional housing in cartoons!

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Nickelodeon Banks Late-Night On Your 90s Nostalgia

In case you missed it on your social media feeds yesterday, allow me to inform you that this fall Nickelodeon will revive much of its 90s programming in a late-night block dubbed “The ‘90s Are All That.”

Entertainment Weekly broke the story with comments from senior VP and general manager of TeenNick Keith Dawkins. “At the time, we were completely devoted to that audience ages 9, 10, and 11. It was ground-breaking and for the young viewers, a powerful and pivotal time in their lives. Those kids who are now 22, 23 and 24 want to bring that back.”

Hey, I’m 24! I’m one of those kids! I spent a good portion of my pre-adolescence watching Nickelodeon. The combination of charming animation and kid-friendly live-action all fell under an offbeat umbrella that spoke to an age group still willing to embark on flights of fancy despite being increasingly aware of the looming “real world.”

In fitting with my generation’s freakish dependence on our inner children, I couldn’t be more excited.

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My Song of Ice and Fire

It's a good time to be a Song of Ice and Fire fan. Not only does the HBO series based on the books premiere next month, but yesterday the estimable Jordan Pedersen kindly informed me today that the fifth volume in George R.R. Martin's epic saga will be released on July 12th of this year. I, for one, am stoked. 

For those of you who are not nerdy enough to know what I'm talking about, A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the more successful fantasy series of the past ten years. George R.R. Martin is a former television screenwriter who wanted to rebel against the strict time issues of the boob tube by writing a good, old-fashioned multi-volume saga featuring a cast of thousands. There have been four installments, each one widened the scope and sweep of the story. 

A visit to any bookstore will reveal that there are far too many multi-volume fantasy sagas currently in the works. But A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the better ones for a large number of reasons: Martin's history as a screenwriter gives him a knack for good dialogue, the cast of characters is large but each personality remains vividly distinct, even the "evil" characters are humans that invite empathy and, most importantly, the high body count keeps things interesting. No character is immune to a possible early demise, and while gruesome, the violent nature of the plot keeps the reader on his toes. Any one of these characters could die at any moment with little warning, and often many of them do. 

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A Treatise Concerning the 2011 Academy Awards and the Continuing Retrenchment of the Tastes and Values of the Middle-Aged in Cinema Culture

Another year, another Oscars.

I've always been a great fan of the Academy Awards. Maybe it's because I've never felt at ease in the overly-macho, chest-thumping world of the NFL (or maybe it's because my team never wins) but the Oscars have always been my Super Bowl. I buy lots of beer, spread out the chips and salsa, and all my rowdy friends are coming over to try and calculate who will that the most little naked men home with them.

Of course, any film buff will tell you that the Oscars are a sham. Half the time the Academy votes for the wrong film, the other half of the time they vote for an obvious bit of Oscar bait clearly made to inspire the old fogies to accolade it with the title of Best Picture. And then sometimes you get a pretty good movie year chalk full of perfectly fine movies but the whole event is muddled by the oftentimes self-important ceremony of the whole thing.

This year borrowed liberally from the latter two categories, which I suppose ranks it somewhere in the middle of the eighty-three years of Academy Awards.

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Going Out While Still On Top

The White Stripes broke up on Wednesday, or at least they broke up as much as a band that hasn't released new material in four years can break up. Their website announced that the group was calling it quits, "for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way."

This is a nice sentiment, particularly because Jack White could easily write a dozen short riffs, get a drum machine with Meg White's face pasted on it, and call it a new White Stripes album. While few would argue that the band's last album, 2007's Icky Thump, was their best, it's safe to say that the White Stripes never released a bad record, let alone an embarrassing one. I'd be willing to be money that a new White Stripes release would sell reasonably well, so it's refreshing to see the duo opt to not continue. 

In this age when many artists manage to stretch their fifteen minutes of fame into fifteen years, when long forgotten celebrities start popping up on reality television, it's nice to see some figures who willingly choose to end their career before senility or overexposure sets in. It certainly doesn't hurt that the White Stripes have a handful of platinum albums to provide a good financial cushion (and that Jack White has a seemingly endless supply of other bands to fall back on), But the band is breaking up, not due to internal acrimony or somebody's death, but because they said all that they need to say and now they're done. The number of major acts who do this are rare enough that I can probably go through them all in this one post. 

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Going Off The Grid

I normally try and go "dark" at least once a year. I'll choose a day, usually when I'm on vacation, and set aside my phone, iPod, laptop, and whatever other electronic devices are in my life at that moment, then go twenty-four hours without using them. Nor will I go on the Internet or receive communications from anyone else's machines.

What always surprises me every year is how easy it is to put everything aside. I consider this a good sign. True, twenty-four hours is not a lengthy amount of time, but I don't find myself missing the constant texts, the perpetual music, or the gnawing anxiety of unanswered emails. The hardest part about going dark last year was refraining from checking Wikipedia to clarify the rules of a board game.

It's a nice thing to do every once in a while, if nothing else just to prove that I can. We hear so much about how bad the Internet is for us - it's killing our attention span, it's devaluing our friendships, it's making us bad writers, it's sealing us up in a self-serving solipsistic blogosphere, et cetera. All these things may be true, but I'm growing just as tired of the histrionic screeds against technology.

Case in point: I read an article in my (analog) newspaper this week about the Maushart family. The matriarch, an aspiring writer named Susan, decided that her family was too addicted to technology, and she pulled the plug on the Internet for six months. You can read about the family here; apparently, a book is in the works.

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Game Review: 3D Dot Game Heroes

In the Olden Days for which our society spends so much time yearning, you were often dumped into a game with little to no explanation on how it worked or what you were supposed to do. Climb this structure and save a pixelated girl from a barrel-tossing monkey. Eat these dots until there aren't anymore, and then repeat ad infinitum. Run to the right until you get to the castle.

Absent are the layers of tricks that games have learned to make you think you're doing something other than pushing buttons while staring at a flashing screen. Nowadays you can't sign up for a digitized grand adventure without also signing up for tomes of middling writing and cutscenes long enough to put Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings special edition DVDs to shame.

Silicon Studio's 3D Dot Game Heroes remembers those days well, and it hearkens back to them with a vengeance. Equal parts The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest, 3D Dot brings that old-game feel to a new adventure, and it does it in a way that pays homage without feeling derivative. Well, not entirely derivative.

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2010: The Year in Music

Years are such an arbitrary way to bracket our discussion of pop culture. Sure, lots of stuff happens in 12 months, and that's certainly a substantial enough time period to allow you to discuss trends, movements, and other stuff that takes more than a few weeks to unfold. But lots of stuff happens in 11 months or 13 months or maybe even in a month. And unlike the movie industry, which has the Oscars to shape its release schedule, popular music lacks any real kind of ceremony to dictate when artists or labels should release their albums (the Grammys simply do not count).

But, unfortunately for the chronologically contrarian, years are pretty much all we've got. After all, it's much easier for everyone to have a conversation about a given period of time in culture if they agree on what that time period is. And isn't the conversation really what these year-end retrospectives are all about?

So, let's talk about what happened this year: the good, the bad, and, um, the Ke$ha*.

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Chair Exec Says “No” to Ender’s Game Game

When I first read Ender’s Game, I thought, “Man, being in the Battle Room would be so cool.”  I knew in my deep down, however, that I’d never get to experience that sensation myself.  In high school, I filled that zero-G hole in my heart with laser tag and multiplayer videogames, but it was all a step removed from the excitement of Battle School’s game.

My mixed feelings about the book’s creator aside, I still think aspects of Ender’s Game would translate well to gaming.  A few months ago, Rob reviewed Flotilla, an indie title that channeled the Command School combat simulator.  But developers have yet to tackle the Battle Room.

It was looking like Chair Entertainment – the developer behind the excellent Shadow Complex, which shared lore with Orson Scott Card’s novel Empire – would be the ones to finally bring the Battle Room to life, but Chair’s Donald Mustard recently admitted that the project was cancelled.

"We have and had an amazing design for the Ender's Game game," Mustard told Joystiq. "…one of Epic's primary objectives is to create original and unique franchises. I don't know that Ender's Game fits into that strategic objective anymore." 

It looks like parent company Epic Games would rather have Chair banging out beautiful iPad games than working on licensed properties.  I guess that’s okay, but who’s going to build my Battle Room?

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