Charge Shot!!! Cranston in: An Uplifting Tale

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Charge Shot!!! Turns One

One year ago today we started a blog. You’re reading it right now. Please continue, and thanks.

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A Decade of Dreck #14: The Covenant

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

In retrospect, I'm really not sure what attracted me to The Covenant in the first place. You can rightly for assume for all my Decade of Dreck entries, as well as those of my distinguished bloggers-in-arms, there was at least some sort of reason to pick each respective movie. Whether it be a certain actor, a certain "so bad it's good" element, or maybe a certain bit of infamous dialogue that... oh wait, I literally just remembered why I picked this turd while typing this: "How about I make you my wee-otch?" That's it!

Every now and then, a film comes along with absolutely no redeeming elements whatsoever save one line of over the top, godawful human speech. There is nothing at all redeeming or interesting about The Covenant. Nothing. No good characters, plot, actors, director, setting, special effects, nudity (the curse of the PG-13!), nothing. But for the past three years or so I've been damn curious to finally witness the sheer hilarity that is "How about I make you my wee-otch?".

Like, seriously: how did anyone ever think that was a good idea? That seems like the kind of thing that would have to have been ad-libbed or at least made up on set. If I was a producer and I read this script (which I don't think anyone did) I would have said "No way, Renny Harlin- director of such gems as Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Deep Blue Sea, and eventually 12 Rounds starring WWE superstar John Cena, you can't make this movie, there's just no way, take that stupid line out or you'll get no money from me or any other studio in Hollywood." It had to have been a late addition and Harlin had to have had final cut to get that in there. Or maybe movies are just that bad these days?

The Covenant tries to do for hunky meatheads what The Craft (that poster look familiar to you?) did for goth girls. The premise is that way back in the seventeenth century, the town of Ipswitch, Massachusetts was settled by five families of witches. To be a witch in the Covenant universe means you have all sorts of stupid powers like the ability to float and throw balls of energy at people and stuff. It's lame, I won't get into it, but I think being an actual witch and being able to cast spells using newt eyes and stuff would be cooler. Witches (or warlocks I guess, there isn't a single woman with "the Power" in this whole goddamn movie) first get their powers on their thirteenth birthday (like Jews!) and become much more powerful when they "ascend" on their eighteenth. Basically you have a great metaphor for puberty and coming-of-age right there that I could have written you a pretty good movie about in a long weekend, but no, we'll ignore the implications of this stuff and move right along. Basically these five families' descendants now consist of four high school swimmers at a fancy-schmancy boarding school because one of the families got killed off in the Salem Witch Trials. Bummer. The four guys (consisting of the caveman from 2012 prequel 10,000 B.C., the guy from Friday Night Lights who was also Gambit in Wolverine, the guy from Gossip Girl who no one gives a shit about, and a guy who looks like the bastard butt-baby of Draco Malfoy and Aaron Carter) are all real cool bros and would totally never use their powers for evil, bro. But soon enough, it looks like there's been a string of incidents pointing to the fact that someone's been using the Power for evil! Oh noes!

The movie first drops the ball with a basic scripting issue that is pretty easy to avoid. So you know the stock character of "the new guy/girl"? Basically an audience surrogate so characters have a reason to explain all the ins-and-outs of a particular place or all the details of a character's life story. Think Harry Potter: we muggles would know nothing about wizards and stuff if other characters didn't have to explain even the most basic parts of Hogwarts to Harry; people would just carry on with their daily lives and not have to give the entire history of any goofy thing they happen to do because they're wizards. You basically put in a "new guy" so you can use dialogue to explain things that someone wouldn't normally talk about. The problem with Covenant's use of the "new guy" (or in this case, girl) is that there's an opening crawl that explains the entire history of Ipswitch and witches and all that. We the audience are already entirely aware of the Power and the main characters' use of it and its implications. We don't need them to spend half the movie briefing an audience surrogate when we're already up to speed. In this case, the new girl is Sarah, a public school transfer student from out of town (played by the girl Don Draper sleeps with in the Mad Men episode "the Jet Set" much to my delight) who needs everything explained to her. She's ostensibly there as a love interest for Caleb, our thoroughly dull protagonist but its clear that she's also there to act as outsider and justify constant reiterations of why things are important even though its completely unnecessary for any one with any sort of ability to comprehend a film.

The Covenant also completely messes up its depiction of high school kids. It of course is plagued by the age old "teenagers played by 30-year-olds" problem teen movies have had since time immemorial but that's not half the issue. These are the least convincing teenagers I've ever seen, even if you don't take into account that they don't look like they've been in high school for at least six years. They all hang out at a local dive bar full of townies who don't seem to mind that a bunch of underage, old money, spoiled rich kids take over their watering hole to literally drink nothing but pop. I will tell you from experience that if there's one thing townies hate, it's the rich kids who take over their bar. If there's one thing waiters and bartenders hate, it's a table of people who order one Cherry Coke each and get free refills the entire night without ordering anything else. If there's one thing townie bartenders hate... you get the picture. And yet, the staff of their local dive seems to love these pretty people who fill their establishment. Maybe it's because I was a theater kid in high school but I assumed that if the popular kids were going to a bar, they'd at least get a fake ID and get wasted on vodka Red Bulls. Hell, these kids have magic powers, they could at least Jedi Mind Trick the bartender into serving them.

Also, Draper girl, showing how rebellious and public school you are by putting "I Love Rock 'n Roll" on the jukebox puts you firmly in Britney Spears territory in terms of bad-assness.

In further adventures of Teenagers Not Resembling Actual Teenagers, the cast spends a lot of the time in various states of PG-13-safe undress, revealing multiple characters with multiple tattoos. Now, I'm pretty sure you need to be 18 to get tattoos in this country, and its made pretty explicit that none of the characters have turned that age yet (because then they'd have all their powers) and unless they're implying that they're the kind of witches who would use their Power to trick a tattoo artist into putting a sick tribal marking on their forearm but not the kind of witches who would trick a bartender into getting them a PBR, this is bogus.

There's also the trouble of the use of the Power. Supposedly if has negative side effects like aging you prematurely (think Emperor Palpatine) and making you evil (think Emperor Palpatine). Caleb's 44-year-old dad (Harvard class of '81, meaning that since this movie was made in and was explicitly set in 2006 he would have been 19 when he graduated from college, I counted) is presented as a withered old semi-corpse because of his abuse of the Power. Caleb in particular (because he's soooooo good) warns his friends not to overuse the Power on trivial matters lest it warp their bodies and souls and yet he is clearly show joining in with his buddies in making their car fly over a cliff (at which point the Draco Malfoy look-alike shouts "Harry Potter can kiss my ass!", yeah I know) and lifting a book off a shelf and opening it with magic when he could have just as easily used his hands. Consistency, people!

The movie also fails miserably in creating any amount of suspense regarding who is responsible for a Power-related murder and other mischief involving witchcraft around town. We're first made to think that the brooding Draco Malfoy kid is the one because he complains about Caleb not letting him use his power and wears gloves without fingers but literally within five minutes of meeting him we're all pretty sure that the good-looking new guy with a mysterious past is definitely the culprit (spoiler alert: he's the long lost scion of the fifth witch family). I know it may have been clichéd to have the mysterious stranger turn out to be good but they don't even try here.

We the audience are also assured that there are four remaining families that have the Power and yet we never see or hear about anyone but the four main guys who can use it. Remember, these guys are the descendants of the four families who founded the town. These families have remained in this area for four hundred years and yet the only ones we meet are four teenager boys who are all in the same year at prep school. There's literally no older siblings, cousins, fathers (who aren't rendered old by overuse of the Power) or anyone else who can help out when the bad guy starts his reign of terror. For being such a well-established group of old money families they seem to have to never sired more than one heir in every generation and they've all been male. I also find it strange that witches, which is of course a term for female practitioners of black magic - men are warlocks, are completely represented here by men (boys really). The persecution of witchcraft in the early modern period is viewed primarily as a persecution of women and yet not a single female witch is shown. I'm going to call latent misogyny on this one.

One last thing, The Covenant is probably the most hilariously unintentional homosexual movie since Top Gun. There's a locker room scene where our swim team heroes spend a good five minutes completely naked, staring each other down and making macho threats, Iceman style. There's also a scene where I think the school's headmaster tells Caleb he has to fuck the mysterious new guy, at least that's what I read into it.

At the risk of crappy local film critic punnerey, I would rather be burned at the stake than sit through The Covenant again.

The Covenant is ranked #31 on the Rotten Tomatoes Worst 100 list with 3% freshness. Its RT page can be found here.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob - Week 36: Queens of the Stone Age

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

I went into a music store this week. But not just any music store. I made a trek to a member of that fabled endangered species - the "independent" music store. I was nervous, of course. Most of the music purchases I've made in my lifetime have been classical music CDs gleaned from browsing the "pretentious" section of Barnes and Noble, or ordered over the Internet. For this project, I've been obtaining most of the music from the CDs of friends or the public library, or streamed from websites such as Grooveshark or Lala. But I want to be a music snob, and bitching about the decline of independent music stores seems to be an important part of that.

The store smelled of vinyl and incense, and the walls were decked with posters of bands I had never heard of. As I strolled in, I noticed a cluster of three or four true Music Snobs standing around the cash register, some of them employees, clearly discussing music in hushed tones so as outsiders could not listen in. None of them so much as looked in my direction. I was not made unwelcome, but clearly I was not one of them.

I tried to play it cool. I even made a slow amble through the used vinyl section of the store, pretending to contemplate a purchase (as if I had any way to play those records). But I finally settled on two used CDs - Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, and Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. But as I sauntered up to the cash register, my heart was racing. One of the Music Snobs left the posse and came to take care of my purchase, and I convinced he was going to see straight through my facade.

I had a quick waking nightmare in which he laughed mockingly at my musical choices, refused to sell them to me. I imagined him calling over his Music Snob friends to belittle what I had so naively attempted to buy, not understanding the stigma of purchasing Pink Floyd, on a compact disc, of all formats! He would launch into a sneering tirade, ending with the statement that "Your kind is not welcome here", and I would be cast out of the independent music scene to languish in the Kmart electronics section buying teen pop and soft rock for the rest of my aurally miserable life.

Instead, he nodded and said, "That will be twelve bucks." He went back to rejoin the Music Snob conversation almost as soon as I had the bag in my hand.

So I escaped, and while the Music Snob hadn't complimented me on my impeccable taste, neither had he derided my choices. I'll consider this a draw.

Though maybe he would have respected me more if I had purchased those albums in vinyl...

WEEK 36

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Queens of the Stone Age

WHAT I KNEW BEFORE: Not a whole lot, beyond the initial background I gleaned from reading my co-bloggers' work on Them Crooked Vultures. At some point in my life, I've played some of the Queens' songs on either Guitar Hero or Rock Band, but my memory of this is hazy enough that I remember neither the specific song nor the actual game.

MY LISTENING: In between the turkey, football, family and holiday travel, my listening was rather light this week. I listened to Songs for the Deaf (2002) every day this week, excepting Thanksgiving day, which I took off. I listened to Rated R (2000) twice and Lullabies to Paralyze (2005) once.

WHAT I LIKED:

The Queens of the Stone Age are epic in the best sense of the word. Practically every note feels like Josh Homme popping out of the speaker and repeatedly punching you in the face. In a musical world that seems to be marked by detached minimalism and subtlety, the Queens of the Stone Age hearken back to the stadium rock era of the 70s and 80s. The tone is never constant, shifting between grimy blues ("God is in the Radio"), to loud, sinister anthems ("Mosquito Song") to a few poppy endeavors ("Another Love Song"), but the result is always a sonic giant of a song. Every time Josh Homme's vocals came in backed up by a chorus of about one thousand multitracked versions of himself, I was ready to stand up and sing along. It's good to know that hard, bombastic rock is still alive and well in the world today.

Most of the songs are primarily driven by a few riffs, which I think works very well for what the band is trying to do. The riffs are simple, but not so simple as to offer no surprises, and Homme manages to draw all the possibilities he can out of them. The result is a sound that is very easy to immerse oneself in. What could have come across as repetitive and tedious instead assumes the perfect amount of small variations to keep the riffs sounding fresh, even across some lengthy six and seven minute songs.

I really liked the rhythm section of the band. Though constantly in flux, there is always a great sense of drive from the drums and bass that allow Homme to do his thing atop a monstrous groove. Songs for the Deaf is the perfect album for pumping up the volume and driving down the interstate with the windows down. You'll find yourself drumming along on the steering wheel. I did.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:

While the vocals work for certain songs, I wasn't as big of a fan of the songs that degenerate into high pitched screaming. "You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" and "Six Shooters" are two of the more egregious transgressors in my mind. In other songs, the vocals simply didn't matter to me a whole lot. It's not like my Smashing Pumpkins week, in which I actively attempted to tune out the lyrics. Rather, they just seem irrelevant and almost petty compared to the gargantuan riffs of the instruments. In fact, if the Queens of the Stone Age were to make an entirely instrumental album, I'd be first in line.

In fact, my biggest problem with the listening this week is that it was just too heavy for this time of year. This week I was busy, sleep-deprived, and rather stressed out overall. These are not the ideal conditions to listen to Queens of the Stone Age. Neither did the band represent the familial bliss that is supposed to accompany Thanksgiving. I think I would like their music more on a lazy summer day, or on a meandering roadtrip. This week, it just felt like a mountain, something too massive for me to even partially climb. I'll have to return to base camp for another attempt at summit later on.

WHAT I LEARNED:

I learned that the band should really just be called "Joshua Homme and His Friends". The lineup for Queens of the Stone Age is notoriously changing and filled with tons of guest appearances. Homme himself is the only constant to play on all the albums. He is also in some other bands that are not named "Queens of the Stone Age", but as far as I can tell they're all really just the same thing. In fact, any time that Homme makes music with at least one other person, I'm pretty sure it could qualify as the Queens of the Stone Age.

I also learned that some holidays are not meant for in-your-face hard rock and Thanksgiving is one of them.

FUN FACT OF THE WEEK:

Homme apparently likes to pick fights with people in public. In 2007, he made some disparaging remarks about Ozzfest. Sharon Osbourne responded with, "I hope he gets syphilis and dies. I hope his dick fuckin' falls off so his mother can eat it."

Stay classy, Sharon.

FURTHER EXPLORATION WOULD ENTAIL:

Well, there's still the band's first album, Queens of the Stone Age (1998), and their latest effort, Era Vulgaris (2007). Aside from that, there's all sorts of other bands that Josh Homme has been in, including ChargeShot!!! favorite Them Crooked Vultures, and something called The Eagles of Death Metal, which is already worth listening to from the name of the band alone. Homme and ex-bassist Olivari were also both formerly members of Kyuss.

Best Song You've Heard: "No One Knows"

Best Song You Haven't Heard: "God is in the Radio"

Next Week's Artist: Willie Nelson

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A Decade of Dreck #13: Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

I have… no words.

I walked into this Decade of Dreck thing with my eyes open. I saw the list. I didn’t expect any of these to be worth the time it would take to watch them or to write about them. I just thought I’d watch some bad movies, I’d crack some jokes at Matthew Perry’s expense, and then I’d call it a day, our readers at least mildly entertained.

Superbabies was the first movie that made me question our wisdom in doing this.

How to sum this bullshit up? Well, the premise of the first Baby Geniuses (which I have also seen) is that babies have innate knowledge of the secrets of the universe, but they can’t talk to adults, only each other. This knowledge is lost when the babies get old enough “cross over.” Some people suspect this (somehow?) and want to translate the baby speech to exploit their knowledge. It was a pretty thinly-veiled excuse to use computers to make babies look like they were talking – even in the first movie, which was slightly better-received than this one, it was clear that the premise of Talking Babies worked better in a thirty-second advertisement than for a ninety-minute feature film.

All of this is sort of shoved out of the way for Superbabies, which primarily focuses on a legendary baby named Kahuna who drank some sciencey shit that stunted his growth – he’s a baby, but he’s like seventy years old. Also there are some other babies. They’re not important. Kahuna could have done everything without them. They’re so unimportant that the babies on the cover of the DVD and in all the promotional posters are not even the same fucking babies that appear in the film. The most remarkable thing about these supporting babies is that one of them has a dad played by Scott Baio. This movie should be called Scott Baio is 42… and in a Shitty Movie.

Anyway, Kahuna lives to thwart the schemes of the evil Bill Biscane (an embarrassed and embarrassing Jon Voight, looking as much like someone’s grandma as ever). Biscane wants to take control of the world by making them watch a TV show with a guy dressed as a frog in it, and since the frog’s pants look like the Matrix it will totally work, except Kahuna foils his plans. The end. The only other plotline of consequence involves jailbait trying to woo other jailbait. I guess that’s the kind of stuff that sells tickets?

Everything in Superbabies is done poorly. Everything. There’s some truly abominable CG and stunt work, and as I mentioned before virtually every character except Kahuna is ultimately inconsequential. How this thing was made is a mystery, how it avoided going direct-to-DVD is a mystery on par with Stonehenge. There’s nothing else to say about it.

Finally, any movie with this many babies in it instantly brings to mind images of awful, overbearing stage parents who would do anything to see their scion on any screen, anywhere, no matter what they have to do to get there. For you, gentle babies, I can only hope that by the time you turn 18 any of the money you were paid is still waiting for you somewhere.

Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is ranked #6 on the Rotten Tomatoes Worst 100 list with 0% freshness. Its RT page can be found here.

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The Art of the Album: The Beatles – Yellow Submarine

What You Need to Know: The Beatles had virtually nothing to do with the Yellow Submarine film and its accompanying soundtrack album. Ignoring the musical direction of The Beatles, released a scant eight weeks before, the film continued in the psychedelic vein of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour.

The first half of this album is comprised of Beatles songs, only four of them new - “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need Is Love” being the double dips. Of these four songs, three were drawn from the Pepper/Mystery Tour-era discard pile, with “Hey Bulldog” recorded later and not specifically for the film. Combine that with the fact that voice actors did the heavy lifting in the actual film, and it’s hard to imagine a Beatles project with less creative input from The Beatles.

The second half of the album is George Martin’s original score for the movie – it’s pleasant but unremarkable, and I’m ignoring it for the purposes of this write-up.

The Songs You’ve Heard: Ignoring “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need is Love,” you may not be familiar with any of this music unless you’ve seen the Yellow Submarine movie recently (and you probably haven’t).

The Songs You Haven’t: Two of the Pepper castoffs on this album belong to George Harrison, and all things considered I would gladly trade “Fixing a Hole” or “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” for either of them. “It’s Only a Northern Song” was George’s characteristically sarcastic dig at Northern Songs, Lennon/McCartney’s publishing company – given that Northern Songs eventually sold the publishing rights for The Beatles’ songs out from under them, his ire was well-placed. The song itself features some of the same trippy sounds as “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and other songs from this era, and is bolstered by one of my more favorite McCartney basslines.

His “It’s All Too Much” is nearly-but-not-quite majestic, and is overlong by at least two minutes, but for all that it’s still a good listen, and another commonly-overlooked highlight of his Beatles era.

“All Together Now” is a goofy singalong in the style of “Yellow Submarine,” but it’s a throwaway track if ever there was one. The real reason to listen to the Yellow Submarine soundtrack is “Hey Bulldog,” driven by a great piano riff and backed by outstanding performances from the entire band. Even if you have seen the movie, you may not know this song – it was cut from the original American version for some reason, though it was restored for the 1999 DVD release – but it’s worth hearing. Go listen. Now.

Why I Like It: A commonly-held perception of really good bands is that their throwaway material is better than the best work of lesser bands – to an extent, that holds true here. Nothing on this album, with the possible exception of “Hey Bulldog,” can really be considered essential, but that this material represents what they were throwing out in 1967-1968 is impressive.

A rare remaster-related side-note: If you buy this one, I recommend you pick up 1999’s Yellow Submarine Songtrack album. The original songs are still there, but George Martin’s original score is swapped out for the other songs that appear in the film. This makes it a killer Beatles sampler album, but it’s also notable that the tracks on the Songtrack are new mixes, whereas the remastered albums mostly use the original mixes done in the sixties.

The problem with using the original mixes, at least for the stereo versions of the albums (and therefore, given that the mono versions are limited editions, the canonical version of The Beatles’ catalogue), is that no one had a stereo system for most of the sixties. The band devoted most of its time and effort to the mono mixes, leaving the stereo mixes to be done in a few days by some low-level EMI scruffs.

The result is a pretty off-balance sound by today’s standards – if you can, get some good headphones out and listen to “Hey Bulldog” from Songtrack and then the same song from the Yellow Submarine remaster. You’ll mostly hear the sounds of missed opportunities – the entire catalogue could have stood a good, modern remixing to go with the remastering. Though I guess if they’d gotten it perfect, no one would have a reason to buy the albums all over again in a few years.

Desert Island Tracks: “Hey Bulldog,” “Only a Northern Song,” “It’s All Too Much”

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Girls Don’t Understand Football…Videogames

I like sports.

I like video games.

Why is it that, no matter how hard I have tried, I cannot bring myself to like sports video games?

As I discussed last week, I can barely call myself a casual girl-gamer (if I bash you over the head with reminders of my femininity, I apologize in advance). Sports, however, are a different matter entirely. I played sports growing up. I watch televised sports at least once a week. I love baseball, and basketball and football are growing on me every day. Under the right circumstances I have even been known to enjoy a televised game of soccer, lacrosse, hockey, or volleyball. So why -- with my gaming/sporting combination -- don’t I enjoy playing these sports as video games?

My boyfriend owns every Madden game of the last 10 years, and several other satellite franchise titles as well. He’s also been known to venture into the occasional NBA live or MLB 2Kx games. He assures me that they’re quite unique enough to justify the $60.00 price tag, but when I ask him what specifically appeals to him, I find his answers unsatisfactorily vague.

“It’s so realistic!”, “it’s just fun!”, “they’re great games!”, or inevitably “you’re a girl, you just don’t understand.”

That last argument is perhaps the most valid. I have a feeling there weren’t many girls pre-ordering their midnight copies of Madden10 this last fall.

I don’t hate sports games in the same way that I rage about war-shooters; my relationship with Madden is much more inquisitive. I’m not one of those purists who preaches about how Kids These Days should spend more time outside playing the real sports these games are emulating, and I know plenty of very physically active Madden-indulgers. I just want a better handle on the true nature of the appeal. I have some theories, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all wrong. 

Let me outline a few things that I don’t understand:

First: The realism argument. So what if your CG football players look almost like their living, breathing counterparts? How does that make the controls you push and the strategies you employ more enjoyable, especially when little has changed about the actual game-play? When Mario went from side-scrolling to full 3D, the mechanics dramatically changed. But in sports games, most of the additions come in the form of sideline animation. Is it really that cool to see chubby coaches screaming into their headsets, flashing carefully drawn fat-ripples that abide by the laws physics? Is it really worth the money to watch the shirtless white guy in the crowd wave the D-FENCE sign? All of the advertisements tout the game’s unsurpassed believability, but that’s inevitable as our graphics-technology advances.

Second: As mentioned above, the game mechanics are undeniably similar year-to-year, with only a few exceptions. This argument can be made for many intra-genre titles – all Final Fantasy RPGs follow the same basic direction/enter/cancel commands – but I believe the differences in other games are dramatic enough to compensate (i.e. the stories, the characters, the role of magic, etc. are unique to each release). Sports games don’t have different plots or different goals or different challenges. You play to win games, and then championships, and then to break records, and then to get into the hall of fame, and that never changes.

Third: What is the advantage of re-investing every year, as opposed to every third or fifth year under the assumption that the changes are cumulatively significant?

After asking around, I have compiled a few responses:

In some ways, it’s about the competition. Like in fighting games, the gamer can assert his or her superiority over an opponent in a way that few would dare in the physical world. Also as in fighting games, learning the correct button combination maximizes victory over an adversary, either real or imaginary. That makes sense to me. Everyone loves to win.

But that’s not enough, because sports games don’t appeal to all sports fans. Plenty of people hate soccer and love FIFA. Plenty of baseball fans never touch a 2k-anything.

I don’t think sports games appeal to pure gamers, sports fans, or even the overlap of both. I think it’s deeper than that. I think sports games appeal to the statistic memorizing, fantasy sports-playing, sometimes screaming manager-fan.

I mean no judgment here. I indulge in fantasy-baseball myself. But the designation of “owner” is what first gave me this hint – I don’t think boys play sports games because they want to pretend they’re out there actually playing them, I think they play because they want to pretend they’re in control of them. I believe it is the fan that screams, “I would have totally done that differently,” at the TV that makes up the primary Madden fan-base.

Finally, fans that dream of control can test their theories on games that don’t carry any physical relevance. You can pick your players, build your franchise, plan your plays, and control your future, validating or refuting your choices with simulated success and failure. Not only can statistic-crazy bookkeepers furiously study their numbers, they can create them. The challenge lies in the thrill of bringing a terrible team to long-lasting glory, inducing an irresistible sense of pride in your managerial prowess. For those of us that dream of control, here is the perfect virtual experiment.

But just when I feel comfortable in my understanding,  a Madden10 commercial graces my television, taunting me with a training montage of real football players training their finger strength for the controller, suggesting that this game is about pretending to be an athlete. I just don’t know what to believe anymore!

These games make billions of dollars each year, and they are the most rapidly growing division of video games in this country. I am perplexed, and the explanations I’ve gathered aren’t quite substantial enough yet.

When I first started musing this over, my guy-friends shrugged me off by telling me I was over-thinking it, which has limited my research significantly, but by now, reminding the reader that I’m a girl is just beating a dead-horse. DUH I’m over-thinking it! That’s what we do! We rage about stuff we don’t understand!

I hope that someday I’ll meet that patient, articulate sports-gamer who will show me the light of understanding. Until then, I wait in fem-ignorance, and invite you all to contribute to my discussion.

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Book Review: The Wheel of Time – The Gathering Storm

In a genre that is not known for its brevity to begin with, The Wheel of Time is perhaps most notoriously ambitious of all epic fantasy projects. Author Robert Jordan cranked out eleven books since the first volume was published in 1990, all of which span at least 600 pages. The story is epic in the truest sense of the word, featuring a continent-spanning conflict with evil forces, and a cast of (literally) thousands.

The general consensus is that the first five or six Wheel of Time books are great reading. But as things got more complex, Jordan began to falter, and by the tenth book, the formerly fast-paced series had succumbed to a narrative slump. His most recent book hinted at a return to form, and fans hoped that Jordan had found his stride once again. But unfortunately, Robert Jordan was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis in 2006, and he passed away the following year at the age of 57, his magnum opus unfinished. Burgeoning fantasy author Brandon Sanderson was chosen by Jordan's widow/editor to wade through the mountains of notes and outlines that Jordan had left behind, and salvage what he could. The Gathering Storm is the first of the final three books in the series. The book combines scenes Jordan had written before his death with chapters by Sanderson based on Jordan's notes. 

Charge Shot!!! writers Andrew Cunningham and Chris Holden have been reading the Wheel of Time since well before blogs existed. Now they're collaborating to provide their thoughts on the latest installment of the series.

Chris: Well, to begin, let me stress that if you have never read a Wheel of Time book, The Gathering Storm is not the place to start. The book does its best to try and fill the reader in as to what's been going on, but the twelfth volume in a series is not a good place to jump in by any means. That being said, the book manages to pick up its predecessors' pieces to create a surprisingly well-structured plot arc. Too many books in the Wheel of Time series have abrupt endings without any sort of finale, as if Robert Jordan had simply run out of ideas and called it a day. But Sanderson, undaunted by twenty years worth of set-up, has tightened the narrative, provided some much needed momentum, and written some of the most satisfying conclusions to a Wheel of Time book since volumes 5 or 6. 

And amazingly, the plot makes sense, despite the change in authorship. I am very impressed that a new author was able to continue the story so seamlessly. Robert Jordan's meticulous plotting provided the necessary set-up for a lot of the events in this book, but Sanderson's ability to dive right into Jordan's world, as if he himself had been writing about it for decades, is nothing short of remarkable. 

Andrew: The book is a much tighter one than the last few in the series, though it's hard to say whether that should be attributed to Sanderson or not - the number of plotlines that need to be resolved before this series can end would demand concision from any author. Either way, Sanderson isn't a liability here, and he picks up right where Jordan left off.

One of the series' primary obstacles as it winds down is that its primary characters have been scattered to the winds - few of the people that the books follow around are actually in the same place, so to forward their storylines the books have to jump back and forth between places. Combined with Jordan's penchant for looking at events through the eyes of secondary and tertiary characters as well, the books were spread thin and it was hard to get anything done.

In The Gathering Storm this method has been eschewed for a more direct focus, primarily on Rand and his attempts to unify warring nations under his banner, and Egwene in her quest to mend the rift in the White Tower. Perrin, Mat, Aviendha and others make appearances, but this is mostly to set them up for things that will happen in the next books (one also gets the impression that Sanderson was compelled to write for Mat to satisfy fans of the character, since his chapters are entertaining adventures that do little to forward the plot). The focus on fewer characters may disgruntle some fans, but it helps the book to have the well-structured plot arc that Chris pointed out.

Chris: Yes, I was sort of underwhelmed with the Perrin and Mat plotlines in this book, but I appreciate the fact that Sanderson is trying to narrow the focus a bit. Elayne does not make a single appearance in The Gathering Storm at all, a fact which I hadn't even noticed until Andrew pointed it out to me a few days ago. Her plotline had always been one of the least interesting, and (unlike Perrin and Mat), I was not sorry at all to see her story swept aside in this installment. 

What I found most interesting about the two central plotlines of the book is that they both dealt with human conflicts. Egwene is trying to end the Aes Sedai civil war, and Rand is trying to form a temporary alliance with several nations (and the invading Seanchan Empire) to combat the Dark One. But the Dark One himself is conspicuously absent in this novel. There are signs that evil forces are at work, and there are a few confrontations with his Forsaken minions, but the central conflicts in this book are humans fighting humans, as both Egwene and Rand struggle to prove that they are worthy of the leadership roles they have been forced into. I think this sort of thing gives the series a bit more depth than the average Good Guys versus Evil fantasy epic; not all of the good guys in the Wheel of Time are necessarily on the same side, which makes for a more interesting story.

Andrew: Interesting that you should mention human conflicts, because the Wheel of Time books have mostly been about human conflicts lately. The first three books in the series were much more Tolkien-esque, man fighting against dark creatures, unnamed invaders, things out of old stories - certainly things that were undoubtedly on the Evil side of the conflict. Starting in the fourth book, the series started trending more toward political conflicts between different nations and races, with increasingly rare instances of the Tolkien-esque fantasy of the earlier volumes.

I didn't miss Elayne either, because there are entertaining human conflicts and boring human conflicts. Elayne had been scheming to get her kingdom's throne for maybe five or six books, and the wait was truly interminable. Hundreds and hundreds of pages we read of royal intrigue, and in the end the outcome could have been more effectively summed up by a Wikipedia article. Urgh.

The human conflicts in The Gathering Storm are interesting because they're just as much about internal conflicts as external - Rand must contend with his growing paranoia and doubts about his ability to handle the destiny placed upon his shoulders, and Egwene has to keep it together in the face of overwhelming adversity. Interesting as that is, though, I really hope the next two books spend some more time with the fantastic instead of having all the characters politicking all the way up to the Last Battle.

Chris: I did find myself missing the supernatural elements of the series. It's a shame, because the prologue hinted at a major attack from the Trollocs (the orcs of the Wheel of Time), but that threat never materialized. Mat's adventure with some evil metaphysical forces was fairly creepy, but ultimately it felt more like a half-hour Twilight Zone episode that occupied an awkward place in the narrative, never really leading anywhere.

As a character, Rand was very engaging. His sanity has been in a slow decline since the beginning of the series, but this is the first time his dwindling grip on reality manifested itself in very serious and dangerous ways. The Rand in this book has changed significantly from the Rand of earlier volumes, but the changes are well-written and believable - after all, being destined to save the world would put quite a bit of pressure on a person. Egwene, on the other hand, I found a bit too perfect. She remains the sole calm and collected woman in the entire White Tower, and every other character who meets her immediately develops a respect bordering on worship. Egwene seems to cope with her struggles a bit too easily, and her enemies are a bit too incompetent, but I suppose that's the price we the readers must pay to have this series wrapped up in a timely manner.

Andrew: I don't think either of us has had quite enough time to really evaluate whether this book is objectively "good" or not, but since it's the twelfth in a long-running series that most people already have an opinion about it really doesn't matter too much.

What I can say is that this is the most eventful Wheel of Time book that we've seen in more than a decade. Unfortunately for Robert Jordan, the pace of his narrative and the pace at which the books were published had slowed to a crawl in recent years - both of these factors sapped the momentum of his story. With The Gathering Storm, Jordan and Sanderson work to get a little of that momentum back, and if Sanderson can stick to his schedule - the thirteenth book is due out a year from now, with the fourteenth and final volume out a year after that - the series should end with a bang instead of a whimper. If you’re still wading through the latter half of the series, take heart! There appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

I was entertained enough by this book that the urge to keep reading would distract me from things I was doing during the course of my day. This is the same way I felt while reading the early books in the series - if for no other reason, Jordan and Sanderson should be commended for recapturing that feeling.

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A Decade of Dreck #12 - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THANKSGIVING:

A DUNGEON SIEGE POEM

'Twas Thanksgiving Eve. In the airport lay I

To catch my direct flight to BWI

I had packed my carry-on luggage with care

In hopes that I would pay no extra fares

As I sat at the gate, I exclaimed, "Oh heck!

I must watch a film for the Decade of Dreck!"

I pulled out what Netflix had shipped without fail:

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

I proceeded to watch Uwe Boll's horrid flick

And at first all I could respond with was "Ick!"

And because I had viewed this in a public place

I felt rather dirty, an awful disgrace

I hoped no others noticed the film that I'd seen,

Tried to block others' view of my laptop screen

Ashamed, embarrassed, paranoid and forlorn

Like a dirty old man sitting there watching porn.

Thus did the following two hours commence.

As the film unfolded, making absolutely no sense.

It began in the middle; its ending fell flat

And most of the plot points felt just like old hat

Starring Jason Statham of B-movie fame

As a man known as "Farmer", with no other name.

The British accent lays thick on his voice

A boomerang acts as his weapon of choice

He loses his son when attacked by the "krugg"

(these are orc-like creatures, acting as thugs)

They destroy his farm and imprison his wife

Farmer vows revenge and takes off, bent on strife

Ray Liotta plays the evil magician

Overacting the effeminate role with precision

And what should appear to my sleep-deprived eyes

But a paunchy Burt Reynolds, who leads the good guys!

Replete with these actors of the second rate

In the Name of the King is quite worthy of hate

A nonsensical plot and piss-poor dialogue

Made completing this movie rather a slog

But despite some poor edits and a director from hell

Certain scenes in this movie still work rather well

The battles are over the top and quite bold

Even though they're as if written by a twelve year old.

We have medieval ninjas careening off trees

Half-nude wood nymphs swing on vines with great ease

Exploding monsters of flame launched from a trebuchet

Fight scenes so silly, you'll be shouting "Hooray!"

This Dungeon Siege Tale will win no awards

But the viewer will certainly never be bored

Yes, the actors are hams and the plot is a mess

Why Boll cut forty minutes is anyone's guess

But it's just so campy that it deserves to be seen

This belongs on Syfy or late-night TV

Did I like it? I don't think that anyone could

But this movie is almost so bad that it's good

So before I knew it, the film was complete

And I boarded my plane to go home and eat

But I thought to myself, ere I flew out of sight

"That movie sucked, but those were some awesome fights."

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is ranked #49 on the Rotten Tomatoes Worst 100 list with 4% freshness. Its RT page can be found here.

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The Christmas Canon: The Annual Return to my Holiday Favorites

Admittedly, I'm a sucker for the cheesy and the melodramatic pretty much any time of year. But, by virtue of me having just eaten my fair share of turkey, it is now officially the Christmas Season. And Christmas Season is that most wonderful time of the year in which the schmaltzy and sentimental become acceptable within pop culture. The soft rock radio station in my town has shifted to Christmas carols, gaudy light displays are going up at houses across America, and old holiday movies and TV shows are making their annual return.

Regardless of religious affiliation, every person has their own holiday favorites to which they return year after year. Whether it's that particular corny Christmas carol, or that television holiday special, or even a tried and true classic tearjerker of a film, the cultural touchstones of December give us something to look forward to each year. The fact that these things can only be enjoyed within a limited timeframe only serves to make them that much more special.

I myself have five classics that I go back to each December. You will never be able to convince me that there is anything wrong with any of these choices. I try to be a fair critic as to most of the material I choose to write about, but there are times when tradition and childhood memories outweigh any sort of critical judgment. That's not to say that any of these works are bad, but just to serve a caveat that my holiday blinders are on as I discuss these favorites.

1. A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS

The amazing thing about A Charlie Brown Christmas is that it should have been a disaster. Cartoon characters quoting lengthy passages from the Bible? Real children doing the voices? But this short TV special straddles the line perfectly between naive charm and wry humor. The youth voice acting (many children did not understand the very lines they were reciting) helps to ground the show in a childlike sense of wonder. The thin plot, in which Charlie Brown frets over the true meaning of Christmas, is just corny enough to suit the needs of the holiday season. (Spoiler alert: It's about Jesus.) The message could come across as tedious or preachy, but instead when Linus' timid voice quotes the Gospel of Luke in the climactic scene (with the definitive "that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown), I get goosebumps.

The humor is never laugh-out-loud funny, but so cute that you can't help but smile at Charlie Brown's pitiful Christmas tree, at Schroder's numerous attempts to play "Jingle Bells", at Snoopy's garish holiday decorations. As an added bonus, the soundtrack is some of the best Christmas music you'll ever hear, from Vince Guaraldi's jazzy version of the classics to the children singing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" at the very end.

2. HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS

No, not the horrendous Jim Carrey flick. Let us never speak of that again. I'm talking about the old animated TV special that you can still find somewhere on television on any given Friday night in December. My family had a recorded copy of this on VHS, and I try to find time to watch it every year. As a kid, I tuned in for the slapstick humor, but as I grow older, I find myself more and more impressed with Doctor Seuss' clever rhymes. The highlight is when the Grinch discovers the true meaning of Christmas ("It came without ribbons! It came without tags! / It came without packages, boxes or bags!"), a meaning that is remarkably similar to Linus' lecture to Charlie Brown. Like A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Grinch's anti-materialist holiday message is corny and old-fashioned, but that doesn't make it any less effective. I'll take a room full of friends and a slice of Roast Beast over packages, boxes or bags any day.

3. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

This one is a little divisive. If you're like me (that is, you have good taste), you consider this movie an undeniable holiday classic, a masterpiece from both Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart that impeccably paints a man's life through thick and thin, and portrays the true power of family and friends. But I also know a fair number of people who despise this movie. They know who they are.

I've heard the complaints. The movie is corny and old-fashioned. Bedford Falls is so Edenic as to be boring. George Bailey is self-pitying. The ending, while uplifting, is unrealistic. But how can you not like George Bailey? How can you not find yourself rooting against the original Evil Banker, Old Man Potter? (Especially after this recent recession, bankers are great go-to bad guys).

In addition to being eminently quotable, It's A Wonderful Life still manages to make itself emotionally affecting over sixty years later, if you let it. I have great memories of forcing my friends to watch this in college, watching George Bailey's life unfold over a bottle of Christmas champagne, and trying to hide the fact that I was in tears by the time he discovers that "no man is a failure who has friends". In fact, It's A Wonderful Life perhaps sums up the Christmas Experience in America better than any other work - we all hope our friends and family will be there to support us in times of need, but we also hope that they'll be there with a big basket of money.

4. A CHRISTMAS STORY

This one is also divisive, and TBS's recent decision to air this for days at a time has caused some (not unfairly) to issue cries of "overrated". I have one friend who refuses to watch the movie at all. But I've been a fan of Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB Gun (with a compass in the stock) before it became a phenomenon of basic cable. A Christmas Story carries a slightly different, more irreverent holiday message - your family may be crazy, but you have to love them anyway.

This movie also has the distinction of scaring the shit out of me when I was a child. The scene were Santa Claus laughs at Ralphie's Christmas request and kicks him in the face is enough to make any child terrified of That Jolly Old Elf. But any fears and worries are quickly placated in the amazing scene where Ralphie beats the crap out of the despicable bully Scutt Farcus.

5. A CHRISTMAS CAROL

The literary holiday classic. Whether reading the Dickens novel or appreciating any one of the numerous stage, television, and film adaptations, this tale of holiday redemption is undeniably powerful. Like other choices on this list, it has become so ingrained in our cultural conscience as to become a cliche, but if you overlook the slight fact that it has been done and redone to death, the narrative still carries a lot of weight. Again, we have that good old-fashioned anti-materialist message, as we learn from Scrooge that Christmas is only a fun holiday if you let it be fun, and no one is too old or grouchy to have a good time. Poor Tiny Tim's disease in the vision of the future treads perilously close to kitsch, but the story is back on track by the time Scrooge runs to the window and discovers that the spirits "did it all in one night!". Whether on page, with muppets, or in song, this is the original Christmas classic.

RUNNERS UP:

Some of my friends are big fans of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. This is a deserved modern classic, but the Holden family's National Lampoon movie of choice is and always will be the original Family Vacation to Wally World. I'm just not sure I have room in my heart for two Chevy Chase vacation flicks.

Finally, I also realize that Rankin-Bass claymation holiday specials are quite popular in some households. Somehow, I never grew up watching these, and now as an adult I can't quite understand the appeal.

Perhaps that's how holiday traditions work - we like these works more out of seasonal childhood nostalgia than because of their actual merits. But maybe, like Scrooge, there's still a chance for us to break out of our shackles and find something new to appreciate in the holiday season. This Christmas (or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, et cetera), take a look at one of your old childhood holiday favorites. But try to ignore the cliches and watch it as if you're watching it for the first time. I guarantee you won't be disappointed, and if you're lucky, you might even discover the true meaning of the holiday season.

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Jurassic: The Hunted is…well, it exists.

Jurassic: The Hunted confounds me.

I’m a huge fan of dinosaurs.  I’m pretty sure I could pronounce Pachycephalosaurus before I knew how to read.  I was the oldest non-paternal male in an audience for the live arena show Walking With Dinosaurs.  And dropping Jurassic Park in conversation is a sure-fire way to grab my attention for at least twenty minutes. 

All that said, I’ve never not been a fan of games that paint dinos as the enemy.  It’s just common sense if I’m controlling a human avatar.  Dinosaurs, confused by my presence, would most likely attempt to eat me (the carnivores, anyway).  My mammalian fight-or-flight reflex would kick in and I, if armed with a firearm, would do my best to fight back.

Turok, despite its lackluster performance as a franchise, has somehow cornered the market on games about Dudes Who Fight Dinosaurs.  (Did his being a Native American somehow excused the wholesale slaughter of these beasts?  It’s not like he was using every part of them.)  As a grade-schooler, I remember logging hours in a dinosaur safari game that was kind of like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter with dinosaurs – you haven’t lived until you’ve bagged a T-Rex.  Oh, and then there’s Trespasser.

With none of these titles (including Turok, I’d argue) achieving long-lasting success, it’s confusing that a game like Jurassic: The Hunted exists.  Even more obfuscatory, none of the major sites had really heard of the game until after it hit shelves (the industry equivalent to movies that aren’t given early screenings for critics).  The whole situation is sort of comical. 

But now there’s a demo on Xbox Live.  Oh boy.

If Jurassic: The Hunted has anything to offer, you won’t find it in the demo.  All that’s available is Survival Mode – a poor man’s Nazi zombie mode, except instead of fending off undead Germans you’re warding off bloodthirsty velociraptors.  You start behind a stone fortification, armed with a pistol and a stationary turret.  The raptors, apparently too lazy to simply leap or climb over your six-foot-tall wall, claw furiously at one of several boarded entryways.  Your goal: keep the dinos at bay, keep your entryways boarded up, and hold out as long as possible.  It’s all rather paint-by-numbers.  There are plenty of games doing this, and they’re all doing it better. 

What intrigues me about the game is all of the stuff not in the demo.  I’ve managed to glean a lot from Internet research and a hilarious Giant Bomb Quick Look.  Did you know that if you fly a plane into the Bermuda Triangle some kind of magical electric storm will transport you to some Island That Time Forgot?  One inhabited by vicious creatures from the Cretaceous Period?  It’s true!

I’m ironically enamored with two details of the J:tH universe.  First, dinosaurs leap out of time portals.  Allow me to elaborate.  You’re not just some dude (named Craig Dylan, by the way…sigh) wandering around the Lost island bumping into dinosaurs.  These fuckers spawn from holes in the time-space continuum.  If anything has ever made less sense, let me know.  Where are they coming from?  I couldn’t dream this shit up.  I played a lot of make-believe on the playground (yep, I was one of those kids), but I think if you’d asked me to pretend that raptors were climbing through tesseracts to eat me I’d call you an idiot and go join the football team.

Second (and I couldn’t figure out if this was available in the demo), using adrenaline grants you the ability to see a dinosaur’s vital organs, highlighting them for your targeting ease.  Time slows down a la every game since Max Payne, and you get to pop a few caps in the animal’s liver.  Honestly, it looks like a heartburn commercial, the way the organs light up in red and orange.  I understand that developers use things like adrenaline to justify their Unique Game Mechanic, but I’ve never seen it give someone ultrasound vision.  That’s just weird.

You may have guessed it by now, but Jurassic: The Hunted does not appear to be a good game.  The wet paper bag of a story, the boilerplate demo, the glowing dinosaur organs.  It’s a recipe for disaster, which may explain why Activision released at the budget $39.99 price point.  I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with how the industry’s pricing standards affect how a game’s content is judged (see Joystiq’s arithmetical Halo 3: ODST review), but it’s worth noting that Activision released this budget FPS day and date with its golden egg-laying hen Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  Apparently, they’re not worried about competing with themselves.

Which begs the question: who is this game for?  As far as I can tell, no one’s clamoring for a time-travelin’, dino-shootin’, Call of Duty-controllin’ mess.  Anybody who wants to shoot dinosaurs is probably still playing Turok on their N64.  Any kid worth his weight as a burgeoning paleontologist should be playing games like Dinosaur Adventure 3-D or Dinosaur Hunter.  I’m fairly certain the only people who will buy this game sans irony will be holiday-shopping grandparents duped by the terrible title into thinking they’ve picked up something with the Jurassic Park license – the same people who are currently being swindled by the marketing geniuses behind Band Hero.

Kvetching aside, I’ll be purchasing this game the minute it drops below twenty bucks, which should be any day now.

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Happy Thanksgiving from Charge Shot!!!

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She Made Me Watch Dancing With the Stars

I don’t often watch reality television (or anything approaching it) of my own free will. Under the influence of my college pals, I had some fun watching the ridiculous Survivor. During the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, we watched the ridiculous American Gladiators. Kid Nation was good possibly child labor law-violating legally questionable at best clean fun. Other than those small diversions into the field (and with two of those three shows long-cancelled by now), I’ve rarely sallied forth into that dirty little subgenre of television.

Even more distasteful to me than reality television is celebrity reality television, the Hogan Knows Bests and Scott Baio is 45 and Singles of the world, the ones where the entertainment industry throws a lifeline to the dregs of C- and D-list actors and actresses who live off of syndication money and DVD sales and haven’t actually done anything of note in years in years. Watching fallen stars wander around in a confused, delusional haze while cameras follow them around? Not for me.

Odd, then, that I consented to watch ABC’s Dancing With the Stars with my girlfriend this season. There’s not much here that I like, in theory – celebrities, dancing, having to devote two to three hours each week to watching a single show (the difference in time depends on whether I elected to watch the results show or just hear the summary afterward) – but against my better judgment I actually found myself enjoying it, if not exactly looking forward to it.

My horrible, true story, after the jump.

For those of you unfamiliar with the premise: In Dancing With the Stars, a number of the aforementioned celebrities are paired with professional dancers. Each week, the celebrity/dancer pair learns a new dance routine, and must perform it in front of a panel of judges. Said judges – the old one, the gay one, and the girl – each assign the routine a numerical score out of ten. During and after the show each night, viewers are given the opportunity to vote (via email, text, Internet, whatever) for their favorite couple. These scores are tabulated, and then in the results show the next night, the couple with the lowest total score is eliminated. Repeat until you have a winner.

The tried-and-true elimination format is the bedrock of the show, but what distinguishes it from many reality shows is its attitude. Most elimination-based shows revel in the rivalry of it all, pitting person against person in elaborate alliances and schemes. Reality shows thrive on negative energy – bringing out the worst in bad people brings in the best numbers, it would seem.

Similarly, reality shows with panels of judges often follow in the footsteps of American Idol, with the judges being some of the awful-est, bitchiest, craziest people on television. They take their positions as “judge” as literally as possible, and spend all of their time judging everybody everywhere all the time.

DWTS has some pretty fierce competition. Its judges don’t lack personalities or eccentricities. And yet, the negativity that so pervades the reality space is conspicuously absent. Competitors hug and laugh with each other, right down to the finale. Winning and losing is done with grace, and contestants are almost universally humble and thankful to their fans. Judgment is passed, and it is sometimes harsh but generally fair and always constructive. In an area of television usually populated with trash, the folks at Dancing With the Stars actually inject some genuine class into the proceedings.

Another high point is the bold, brassy band that plays all the show’s songs. Their range is impressive, and in all the weeks I watched the show I didn’t hear a sour note. Plus, they seem to be having a damn good time.

It’s not all sunshine and roses – most notably, co-hostess Samantha Harris is frustratingly clueless in her attempts to question the participants and fill air time. Still, I found myself pleasantly surprised by this show. By the finale, the whole show has taken on the air of a big televised party where a bunch of have gotten together just to have some fun. That ain’t so bad.

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The Art of the Album: The Beatles – The Beatles (White Album), Disc 2

What You Need to Know: The sessions for The Beatles were when things began to look bad for the band’s solidarity. This is in part because of the presence of John’s new girlfriend Yoko Ono being in the studio with the band every second of every session, and in part because of the band’s recently established Apple record label, which by all accounts was a complete wreck of an organization from Day One.

External stress can’t account for everything, though - by all accounts the people in the group were becoming harder to work with. George Martin, the band’s producer since their very first album, abruptly left the sessions to go on vacation, and  Geoff Emerick, The Beatles’ engineer since Revolver, announced that he was unwilling to continue working with the group midway through the sessions. Ringo himself left for awhile during the album’s recording, leaving Paul to drum on “Back in the USSR.” Most of the factors that led to the band’s eventual dissolution can be traced back to the sessions for The Beatles.

The Songs You’ve Heard: Let’s kill the elephant in the room first – maybe you haven’t heard the bizarre avant-garde tapestry of noise that is John and Yoko’s “Revolution 9,” but you’ve definitely heard of it. Maybe listen to it once so you know what it’s like, and then don’t listen again.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can talk about the real songs – the second disc of the White Album is a bit more obscure than the first, but “Revolution 1” is a slower version of the band’s earlier “Revolution,” which was the B-side of the “Hey Jude” single. Other familiar faces here are the raucous but ultimately-inconsequential “Birthday,” which has been played at every college birthday party since 1968, and Paul’s loud, messy “Helter Skelter,” which challenges his Beatles image just as effectively as does John’s “Julia.”

The Songs You Haven’t: One of these days I will get over the part of this where I say “well, it is hard to say what different people have heard and what they haven’t.” Today is apparently not that day.

George’s “Long Long Long” and “Savoy Truffle” are both excellent compositions from him, the former being a very soft, quiet number and the latter being a louder, goofier one about Eric Clapton’s love of sweets. It’s really too bad that they limited his input the way they did, because his songs are consistently this album’s highlights.

Paul’s “Honey Pie” and “Mother Nature’s Son” are another pair of softies, and while pretty they’re ultimately just fluff. “Honey Pie” in particular is the sort of pseudo old-timey, showtuney stuff of his that gets really tiresome after awhile.

One of the two best songs on this disc of the White Album is John’s “Sexy Sadie,” which began life as an attack on the Maharishi the band had visited earlier that year – word on the street was that he made a pass at one of the females in their party. The other is “Cry Baby Cry,” another of John’s willfully obscure songs – regardless of what its words mean, I think it’s nice.

Why I Like It: I consider the second half of the White Album to be inferior to the first half, though it may just be that “Revolution 9” ruins the average for all of the other songs. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some great stuff here, though.

The White Album is where The Beatles respective solo careers really began. You can hear bits of All Things Must Pass in “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Long Long Long,” and some of the schmaltz that Paul turns in (“Honey Pie,” “Martha My Dear”) point to the frustrating mediocrity that would be his trademark for the next few decades. You can hear some of John’s political songs take root in “Revolution 1,” and the sparseness and emotion of Plastic Ono Band is heralded by “Julia.” You can even hear Ringo’s lack of ideas in “Don’t Pass Me By.”

Previous albums were recorded as a band. You can usually pick out a Paul song from a John song from a George song by the lead singer, but collaboration was frequent and the resultant songs were really the work of a very talented group. The Beatles, for better or worse, is more the work of four individuals than the work of a band.

Desert Island Tracks: “Helter Skelter,” “Long Long Long,” “Sexy Sadie”

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Mopping Up Culture Vomit: Thanking the Geek

My Friday night, circa 2000: home from school by 3:30, on my computer until 6, dropped off (naturally, by my mom) by Wild Card at 7. She didn't cook me dinner because we usually ordered a giant greasy pizza.

Wild Card hosted weekly Magic: the Gathering tournaments. MTG (nobody called it that) now holds a fond place in my heart, but at that time it was just something the geeky kids did. I didn't have a burning passion for Magic; I just couldn't play sports (I couldn't even play Magic all that well), and there was nothing better to do on a Friday night.

Except maybe playing Zelda: Majora's Mask on the N64. Damn the haters; I loved loved loved that game (and yes, Water Temple 2 was impossible without a guide).

But I wouldn't trumpet my "taste" in video games at the time. Give eighth-grade me a pulpy story and some magic, and I'm there. Final Fantasies 4-10 (Japanese numbering, naturally), Chrono Trigger, Xenosaga; give me your tired, your weak, your effeminate weirdo main characters. I might have even teased some engrossing narrative out of Pokemon (Ash is weird and effeminate enough).

Same rules applied to television and movies. I don't think I truly enjoyed a live action movie without Chewbacca in it until I discovered (gloriously, like Indiana Jones discovering the ark of the convenient sans face-melting) Kevin Smith early in my high school career. I dwelt almost exclusively in the realm of giant robots (Evangelion), big-titty Japanese dream girls (Evangelion), and weirdo effeminate main characters (Evangelion). Tenchi, Ranma (was that his/her name? Whoever the main character was in the show where the guy turned into a girl and the dad turned into a fucking panda), and Goku were some of my other besties.

I played Pokemon cards. I had bad skin. I was chunky and poorly-dressed. One time, perhaps for the sake of completeness, I tried to get into Dungeons & Dragons (when it was still called AD&D and TSR hadn't started calling itself Wizards of the Coast). That I was unmoved is either heartening or even more pathetic.

Why the sudden onslaught of geek-nostalgia, you ask? A basement-cleaning, naturally.

So I found the Magic cards. And the issues of Animerica (only the most popular professional American anime magazine of the 1990's!). And the Pokemon-card guide book.

And just like the sentimental cheeseball I am, I smiled wistfully.

I am not ashamed of my geekyness. Because, even though I don't wear Boba Fett t-shirts anymore, my geekyness is at the core of my personality. I'm a youth leader at a local church, and our last discussion group was about expectations for college. I argued that college should be the place where you embrace your inner geek (or attempt, in vain, to push it away with frats and Coors Light). It's the place where you find people as geeky as you (even if they're not geeky for the same reason). Maybe you don't call it geekyness; maybe you call it passion.

On this Thanksgiving, I give thanks for my geekyness. It's what makes me self-aware. It's what makes me thankful I can talk to girls. It's what makes me passionate about something other than professional sports.

Be thankful for your geekyness. Because if you're not a geek, you're just another turd in the cantaloupe patch.

Jordan Pedersen went stag to the homecoming dance that followed that picture. But look at those adorable chubby cheeks.
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Movie Review: Ninja Assassin

My younger brother Drew is a student at British Columbia's Simon Frasier University. About a month ago, I received this cryptic Facebook wall post from him:

"I saw Ninja Assassain [sic] at the VIFF [Vancouver International Film Festival] today. Best movie ever."

Drew and I have similar enough movie tastes to the point where if he recommends something, I'll give it a chance. If he refers to a schlocky ninja movie from the Wachowski Siblings (Larry's a woman now, right?) as the "best movie ever", it's likely that it's at least worth seeing.

Little brother did not disappoint me. There's been a serious dearth of ninja movies in recent years on this side of the Pacific...in fact I can't think of the last ninja movie I saw. I don't think there's been a straight-up ninja movie in this country since Ronald Reagan was president and that's a damn shame. What have our nation's 11-year-old boys been doing for entertainment? Jenkem? Ninja Assassin is the best thing to happen to the boyhood sleepover in twenty years: just add some Mountain Dew and Cheetos and you've got yourself a party!

Ninja Assassin has a plot as straightforward as they come. Raizo, played by South Korean pop star Rain, is a ninja assassin (aren't all ninjas assassins?) who rebels against his cruel sensei (Sho Kosugi!) and begins a one ninja war against his clan. There's also a couple of Europol agents (one of whom is American for some reason) trying to track down the ninjas but that's really not important. What is important is that the ninjas fight and bleed a lot.

Ninja Assassin might be one of the goriest mainstream movies I've seen in a long time. The blood is unfortunately mostly CGI and this, a couple of slow motion fight scenes, and sequences of children brutalizing each other make it bear a striking resemblance to 300. In spite of it's computer generated handicap, the sheer absurdity of the ninja kills more than makes up for any newfangled technological interference. Limbs are lost, blood spurts for record distances, and heads are cut in half if they aren't severed entirely. It's great. If someone tells you this movie looks crappy or that it has ridiculous dialogue, don't listen to them: throw down your money for a matinee and prepare for the most blood-soaked hour and a half of the decade.

Having said that, you should be warned that the script is atrocious. It was written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski (who had a run on Amazing Spider-Man that started out pretty good in 2001 but ended in 2007 with Spider-Man becoming the magical avatar of the Spider God and making a deal with the Devil to save Aunt May's life in exchange for erasing his marriage to Mary Jane and retconning all the sitcky situations Straczynski had written the series into over the years- like Peter revealing his secret identity to the public during Civil War though supposedly this was editor-in-chief Joe "the Enemy" Quesada's doing and wasn't really his fault) in the span of just two days. Comic nerd ramblings aside, this all just means that whenever a character says something that isn't "You have dishonored our clan!", "KILL HIIIIIIIIM!", or "HAI-KIBA!" it's practically a war crime. Do your best to try and ignore the police procedural subplot and anything that doesn't directly involve katanas, shurikens, or kusarigama; you'll have a much better time that way.

Before I say anything else, this movie deserves big props for a discussion of fourteenth-century Muslim historian and traveler Ibn Battuta.

When I saw this movie at a midnight show, my friends and I sat in front of a row of about 3 or 4 young Asian women. I was a bit surprised to see a group of girls out so late to see a hyper-violent B-movie, and then Rain took his shirt off (and took his shirt off, and took his shirt off, and took his shirt off...) and the squeals became audible across the entire theater. The Wachowskis seem to be doing their damndest to make Rain a crossover success in the United States, he's something like the Asian Justin Timberlake for lack of a better description. Maybe this and Speed Racer aren't the best means of bringing the Korean hunk into the American consciousness but I still think this movie ruled. Though for all of Ninja Assassin's merits, Ninja Scroll remains the best ninja movie of all time.

If the sound of a ninja movie is of any interest to you, get yourself to Ninja Assassin: it's like a throwing star of awesome right in your jugular. Now if only this was the movies's theme song...

Final verdict: 56 Congos Continue...