Citizen Cage: A Brief Meditation on the Merits of Nicolas Cage’s Work

I would watch this movie without the CGI.

This past season on Community, we were treated to a course at Greendale that asked the question, “Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad?” His track record over the last decade and a half has ached for the question, and as Troy puts it in the episode, “He keeps getting hired for some reason and it’s not because of his hair.” Terrible hair or not, Nicolas Cage is a perfectly capable actor who knows what he’s doing even if that means his resume looks bad after the last few years.

TMZ and other sources will no doubt remind you of Cage’s financial troubles, and while that no doubt informs his decisions to accept roles like Drive Angry or both Ghost Rider movies, I don’t believe that in influences the performances themselves. For instance, Drive Angry is an abysmal movie, but what keeps my attention throughout is Nicolas Cage’s performance. It’s by no means deserving of an Oscar, but he’s easily the best thing about it. He’s the brooding dark hero out to get revenge on the cult leader who wronged him—I forget how—who drives straight out of hell. It’s a preposterous concept, and Cage plays it straight and it works. But I don’t think it could’ve worked for anyone else.

36 of his films on Rotten Tomatoes with Tomatometer ratings are rotten, yet 29 of them are all “fresh.” Mathematically, it almost puts him as average at best if we go on ratings alone. Most of those fresh ratings are pre-2000, which is disappointing to see. His golden years were certainly the nineties, where he balanced between the action movies and dramas. Here’s where we got Leaving Las Vegas and Face/Off, Red Rock West and The Rock. There is a noticeable decline in the overall quality of the films Nicolas Cage stars in post-2000, but I don’t believe Cage’s performances do not suffer for it.

For example, in a video that has long since been deleted from the Internet by Sony’s goon squad, a behind-the-scenes featurette for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance reveals Cage’s method for depicting a vengeful flaming skull: he paints his face like a skull and hoods himself with glow sticks. I confess I haven’t seen that movie, only the BTS clip, but that can’t possibly be the work of a boringly bad actor. Over the top for sure, but never dull. You can’t look away from him.

The 2006 magnum opus to over-the-top Crank starring Jason Statham was supposed to star Nicolas Cage and was written with him in mind. It certainly seems to fit Cage’s consistently manic performances. Imagine Nicolas Cage driving through a shopping mall, chased by cops, all the while talking to Dwight Yoakum on the phone.  The fact that someone had him in mind while writing that script of madness speaks volumes about Cage’s performance.

As of this writing, Cage has seven movies coming up, two of which are sequels and one of which is a remake. They’re all over—one’s a cartoon, one’s an adventure, another’s a religiously inspired thriller. In 2011 alone, he put out five movies. He seems to be slowing down in terms of output, and I haven’t seen any of his more recent efforts. Maybe now he’s the terrible actor so many claim him to be. But they’re still watching him. 

Believing in Destiny: Exploring Bungie's Strange New World

Master Chief could have always used a cape.

Destiny is the far future incarnation of our world, evolving with the intervention of alien technology. The old world is wasteland: you find rebirth in Old Russia, where rusted cars litter the landscape and wildlife slowly retakes the buildings that stand on it. A floating orb calls itself your “ghost” and directs you to safety. You have no idea what’s happening, but you’re not supposed to. You’ve been dead for a while.

The premise is hardly new territory. Hell, at times it feels like its older brother Halo. Waves of alien troops descend upon you from spaceships, shouting their strange guttural language. You are one of the select super soldiers tasked with protecting humanity. Only there are a great deal more of you, and you’re supposed to work together.

Here we have the similar gameplay as the Borderlands series, where you go out to explore and shoot the threatening wilds. Each successful hit puts up a number to let you know how much damage you’re dealing, and there’s satisfaction in making those numbers bigger with a headshot. You level up your character through frequent firefights punctuated with minibosses. These early missions don’t provide much variety beyond go to this point and interact with something or go to multiple points and interact with more things, though that might change as the game progresses. Progress seems to move more swiftly in some aspects, however, as you’re not tied to a town hub just to get rid of gear. Within the inventory menu, pressing a button breaks down a given item into “glimmer,” the game’s currency.

My experience has been pleasurable. I don’t stop every few seconds to think how Borderlands might have done something better, so some of those comparisons may be unfair. The controls feel tight and intuitive. Crouching while sprinting makes you slide across the ground, giving you an illusion of security as you scramble for cover. Access to iron sights offers varying levels of shot precision and control. Like the game’s story, a lot of this is nothing new, but it’s virgin territory for Bungie.

Even on the PS3, Destiny is a pretty game. Perhaps it’s simply the size of my TV, but I still like the way the game works. Compared to its predecessor Halo, the colors are earthier but still colorful. Blue lights shine everywhere like K-mart was responsible for the fall of civilization, but it’s not a silly aesthetic. The armor of certain characters appear to have some pseudo-fantasy feel to them, with fur collars and the like. It’s different enough from the gamut of sci-fi shooters to give the world its own unique flavor.

The game won’t be able to avoid Borderlands comparisons, which is a shame. Destiny does a lot that Borderlands and other shooters already did, except that it attempts to do it in a larger massively multiplayer scale. To what end this scale shall manifest is still unknown to me. Missions I’ve played are limited to three players, and though the game makes matches with other players working on the same level, it seems all too random. Whether it succeeds at its MMO-like aspirations has yet to be seen, however, since we’re still in beta. It’s clear they want this to be a social game, not quite like Halo and its matchmaking, but on that grander scale. As of right now, it doesn’t offer that sense of wonder that inspires and encourages exploration that so many MMORPGs offer, but then again that may change. Until then, I’ll continue to struggle with the game’s mechanical identity.  

Taco Time at Local Lime

Not made with real scorpions.

This past week, I had my cyclical lust for Mexican food, and while the Little Rock area has no shortage of south-of-the-border cuisine, we decided on something slightly different. Enter “Local Lime: Tacos &nd Margaritas,” the brainchild of the same folks that brought me my second favorite LR burger joint, Big Orange. I think there’s a theme.

On their website, Local Lime touts their menu as “crafted by our chefs, from scratch, using original recipes and prepared with premium ingredients (sourced locally whenever possible).” While tacos are advertised on the sign, they also pride themselves on their salsa selection which goes a step beyond the mere red and green options you might get at the average Mexican joint. Here, you pick your salsas from a menu of six options. We voted on the “Tres Chiles,” “Verde Tomatillo,” and “Mango Papaya.” I confess our waitress told us which was which, but by the time I had started dipping their “naturally gluten free” tortilla chips I had lost track of which was which. All three were good, though the Tres Chiles was different due to its soup-like temperature. I’m still unsure of how I feel about that.

The fist-sized tortillas had the appearance of handmade and not factory-spat, which was a good sign. I ordered the lunch special “Local Carnitas” taco plate containing “slow-roasted pork, pickled onion, cojita cheese, red pepper crema, [and] cilantro.” The tacos had a surprising sweetness and little bit of heat that made me lament the fact that the tacos were no bigger than my palm. But a restaurant of this sort is not the place to gorge, and the cilantro lime rice and black beans were filling. You will pay a higher premium than the average Mexican restaurant, but the quality of what you get makes it a worthy investment.

The restaurant’s overall aesthetic is very similar to its sister location Big Orange with its artisanal light bulbs and modern attitude. The while padded stools at the bar looked like props from a Cold War spy movie. They were probably very comfortable. My own seat, however, was one in which the back arm rests are a single bar shaped into a U. I didn’t care for it, though I suppose I could’ve just exchanged the seat for the one next to me.

Next time, I’ll remember to do that. 

Image credit: Local Lime.

Your Song Sucks: What Troubles Me About Katy Perry's "Birthday"

This party apparently had two cakes.

Maybe I’m biased. Though I find Katy Perry aesthetically pleasing, I find most of her musical catalog aurally repugnant. In fact, I can’t summon a single song of hers that I can enjoy. So already I approach her single “Birthday” with skepticism and disgust after recognizing her vocal work from the get-go. She’s a capable singer, I’ll grant her that. But even though she collaborated with four other writers, the song couldn’t be any less boring or formulaic.

The lyrics aren’t subtle in the least: “Pop your confetti / Pop your perignon / So hot and heavy / ‘Til Dawn,” and later, “So let me get you in your birthday suit / It’s time to bring out the big balloons.” This isn’t to say you shouldn’t write songs about sex; Prince established a music empire solely on lyrics of lovemaking, and it’s one of the oldest subjects sang about since we discovered that our vocal cords make pretty noises. But at least make a half-assed attempt to be clever about it. The word “party” is used in that vague way that suggests more than cake and ice cream, Also, the fact that the speaker wants the subject to “pop” two different things that produce two substantially different substances makes me concerned for both parties.

The speaker is also ambiguous about her relationship to the subject. One might be quick to assume that they’re in a girlfriend-boyfriend pairing, but the opening lines suggest something far more complicated: I heard you’re feeling / Nothing’s going right / Why don’t let me / Stop By,” and later, “You know that I’m the girl that you should call.” The second passage suggests that the subject has a harem of female acquaintances that he could select from. Why would a girlfriend tell her boyfriend he can call he when he's in Frowntown? But the speaker insists that she has what it takes to turn his proverbial frown upside-down.

In spite of the speaker’s good intentions, the chorus makes me want to fall on my sword:

Boy, when you’re with me

I’ll give you a taste.

Make it like your birthday everyday.

I know you like it sweet,

So you can have your cake.

Give you something good to celebrate.

So make a wish.

I’ll make it like your birthday everyday.

I’ll be your gift

Give you something good to celebrate.

It reads like the death rattle of a metaphor. Here she uses the birthday analogy in almost every configuration uniform to the North American tradition of the birthday party. We get cake eating, wish making, gift giving—the three primary pillars stand firm even though it feels like Miss Perry and her writing collective are somehow picking up the pillars and beating me senselessly with them. Maybe that’s why the song falls apart.

After the vaguely Daft Punk-sounding bridge, Miss Perry says, “Happy Birthday” in a way that sounds like an attempt to emulate Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” It’s not true enough to the original to make me confident that it is in fact what she’s going for, but I’m distracted by it. I’m bothered by it.

I find the melody problematic. In spite of the song’s upbeat disco tempo, we’re left with a dull and ultimately unsexy background to supposedly sexy lyrics. The way she sings the last two words on certain lines like “’Til Dawn” and “’Stop by” feels discordant with the melody as it doesn’t quite keep up the song’s rhythm. This happens enough times that it’s noticeably awkward and feels as though they just gave up when they got to the final lines of those stanzas. The notes also sound as though they don’t offer the temporal finality that we expect from the end of a stanza. But it’s been a while since I took a music theory class so I can’t eloquently or accurately articulate what it is about the song that makes it so boring, so you’ll just have to cope with that. In a way, it looks constructed with the sort of ease of Lego, yet looks like something a three-year-old might put together with a Duplo brick: it technically fits but looks clunky and unsophisticated, and is less fun to step on.  

An X-Wing Maneuvers into a Fruit Bowl: First Impressions of the X-Wing Miniatures Game

Andrew Crivilare: "Yeah, but if they touch, ya know....stuff happens."

Somehow I got two of them on my tail. I’m on my own—far away from the fleet. We exchange misses for some time. They seem just as green as me.

Such is the scenario that played out in my mind when I took Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing Miniatures Game for a spin. I was outmatched against Sam’s two TIE Fighters, but my X-Wing had the advantage of durability and firepower. Still, her fighters were quick and evasive. The Star Wars-themed minis game is a quick and dirty combat game that is no doubt made more exciting with bigger ship collections.

It’s one of those rare games that’s especially friendly towards newcomers. They give you the average set of rules for a FFG product (as in a lot), but they were also so gracious to include a “Quick-Start” ruleset. Follow its instructions closely and you’ll get the basics down after one session. Given that they’re all I’ve played with so far, I’ll stick to talking about them.

Proprietary 8-sided dice forego numbers for symbols to resolve combat: red dice giveth hits and green dice taketh them away. The game provides dials for each ship so the player can select how their ship is going to move according to cardboard rulers that determine both distance and direction. Players pick their moves at once and move in order according to pilot skill. The more skillful, the faster you’ll move. However, your piloting skills come at a price: you have to wait to attack. While the rule balances out the static initiative of faster pilots, I can’t rationalize why the better pilots are worse shots. A few more games may settle this.

The game round is punctuated by four basic phases: plan your path, execute it, attack your opponent, and check for victory. Players collect damage cards as they sustain hits to their ship, which is a simple way to illustrate hit points.

The game makes a point to separate the pilot from the ship: starfighters have their own stats as do their pilots. Included with the core XMG set are two named pilots—Luke and Biggs—and several nameless ones. The Quick-Start rules mandate that you stick to the nameless ones for the sake of simplicity, which makes sense. Symbols alien to the Quick-Start rules appear on other pilot cards. I’ll get around to reading the rest soon.

In a move that reminds me of the board game Last Night on Earth, FFG included several other cardboard pieces, such as asteroids and a shuttle. After a quick glance at the full rules, it’s clear that FFG sees players’ creativity playing a part in the game’s longevity. Already included at the end are a couple of missions that complicate the game from an outright dogfight to a structured sortie. I applaud this move, which is to be expected given my high praise for FFG in the first place.

The inaugural game played out like this: 

It took us some time to get used to the maneuver patterns that are available to our ships. She scored some hits on me early on. For a long while, it was a slow awkward dance across our dinner table. At one point (pictured above), our ships nearly collided. While the rules make no adjudication about collisions in space, it's a hell of a thing trying to accurately place the rulers so movements are correct. Most of the time, I was able to evade her shots and she mine, but, despite my advantage of a shield, her shots connected and my nameless pilot was lost in a galaxy far, far away. 

An Orgy of Lights and Sounds: Making the Rounds in Tunica

There’s something to be said about casino advertising. Billboards present happy victors with their wads of cash in each hand. In lieu of past winners, you’ll see instead scantily clad women holding the same cash. “Loosest slots!” the billboards shout. They entice you to come to the smoke-smelling orgy of lights and sounds. I’m not altogether convinced the advertising is necessary.

It’s hard to tell if the people are having a good time. Looks of desperation and despair seem more commonplace than expressions of genuine glee. My parents seem like they’re having a good time. But the overall tone here is less than joyous. A man drags a woman in by the arm playfully but with purpose. A wife offers a despondent husband words of encouragement or chiding. It’s neutral at best.

Penny and nickel slots make the perimeter around the card tables. The residents of card tables seem more determined to win with studied strategies or pure luck, like gambling is more of a skill than I’m led to believe. You hear more cheers and general shouting in the center. Off in a corner sits the very exclusive high limits tables that I would love to sit in but never play. I imagine contestants from the World Series of Poker wearing sunglasses like armor, going to battle with arms of bluffing and observation. I never see anyone enter or exit that room.

This is the third time I’ve gambled at a casino. Logically, my past two experiences would have shunned me away from the practice, but this is a family get-together and I give it another go. I’m met with better luck than before. Slot machines throw free games my way, and with these free games bigger pay outs. In goes five dollars, out comes thirty dollars. Sam sits next to me, eyes wide and mouth open with a slight grin. Her luck hasn’t come yet. The Miller Lite I’m clutching was “complimentary” according to the server. Free or not, it’s there to calm my nerves and kill the stress of winning. I can climb so high but fall quickly with a loose rock.

Later, another set of free games. Bigger pay out. I’ve put in more than five dollars, but I’m still ahead. I go to the automatic cashier and finally notice the pamphlet about treating gambling addiction. It’s like reading the health warnings on packs of cigarettes. The casinos wouldn’t put this literature out if someone didn’t come and say something. I’d like to see the numbers on how many look into this treatment via a pamphlet. One casino even sponsors its own treatment facility.

Sam hits her stride. She ratchets up thirty dollars. Meanwhile, I sink twenty into a few machines. My mind starts calculating the spending in the last twenty four hours. I want to make sure I’m on track to stay ahead. I think I am. I hope I am. After the twenty dollars is officially gone and the machine tells me there are no more credits after the number dropped in forty-cent increments, I stand up. I don’t know what etiquette there is in gambling, but I assume getting up from a machine you’re not playing is one. I also feel freed when I stand, knowing that I won’t open my wallet and grab another five or twenty to feed the machine. I watch as Sam’s stride slows.

Aside from the room, we don’t pay much for this visit to Tunica. We get a complimentary voucher for the Buffet Americana for the supposed long wait we have to get checked into our room. My parents cover our dinner at another buffet at another casino, and my dad slips us each twenty five bucks to feed the slots like it’s a petting zoo. Both buffets reflect of the tone of the casino floor: neutral. But they’re buffets, AYCE, and you’ll need that nutrition if you’re going to sit at a slot all day. 

Unconventional and Improvised Weapons, The Sequel: A Review of The Raid 2

Now with less subtitle!

I was at friend’s apartment when his roommate emerged from his room with a face of satisfied exasperation. “What did you watch?” my friend asked. “The Raid,” the roommate said. Only a couple months later, the movie showed up in the Redbox near my apartment. I rented it, and then never returned it. They charged me full price for the movie. I was okay with that.

The Raid 2 I will be returning to the Redbox, but I hope to buy it later. As a sequel, it does everything it should: expands the scope of the film by upping the blood, multiplying the cast, and leaving the setting of the original. There are moments in the first movie that might make you cringe, but there are scenes that could make you outright queasy. And there’s a lot of them. For instance, in the The Raid, there’s a part where our protagonist Rama hides behind a wall from a machete-wielding thug. Suspicious of what might hide behind the wall, the thug stabs randomly. One stab grazes Rama’s cheek, and Rama must then wipe the blood off the blade as it’s retracted not to give away his presence. It’s a scene that works on multiple levels, but most importantly the fact that this is a wound that people can relate to. It’s not a terribly deep cut, and the pain is familiar enough that it might recall a memory to a previous cut. Cue the cringe.

None of that occurs in The Raid 2. The violence here is gritty but borderline fantastical compared to that of the original. It seems outrageous at times, but it’s mesmerizing to watch. There’s a scene in which a woman wearing sunglasses armed with two claw hammers takes out at least six men with Japanese daggers. The camerawork is intimidate since we’re on a subway train, and the woman makes liberal use of the claw side of the hammer. As you can guess, blood comes out in buckets during this scene, and it lasts all of about a couple minutes. The sounds, the close-ups of hammer claws buried into necks are harder to watch than in the first movie. Then again, The Raid 2 is more dangerous. The stakes are higher.

The Raid 2 is an immediate continuation of the first film. The traitor of the first film is seen at its beginning, and Rama is convinced to assist a cop with infiltrating a mob. His only qualifications for this are that he can kick a metric ton of asses and that he came out mostly unharmed from the titular raid of the first film. Of course, the cop makes a deal Rama can’t refuse: he’ll protect Rama’s wife and son. The wife is pregnant at the beginning of the first film. Rama is established as a family man both in trying to retrieve his gangster brother and saying reserved goodbyes to his pregnant wife. The family man angle is turned against him in The Raid 2, which makes Rama’s plight all the more engaging.

There’s even a running theme of distant fathers throughout the movie, as Uco vies desperately for his gangster father’s approval, a shabby hitman wants to reconnect with his son, and Rama stays in quiet contact with his wife. Due to this desire to introduce more plot and conflict, the film suffers at time in its pacing. At nearly two and a half hours, it’s a gamble to increase the exposition in a film that about dudes beating up other dudes, and the moments of downtime takes away that breakneck pace that we get in the original film. Also, dad conflicts are too convenient for a movie like this, but it helps to emphasize Rama’s concerns about staying alive long enough to be a dad.

Beyond fatherhood, Rama also evolves in fighting style. He takes on the persona of Yuda, a young hood who ends up in prison kicking the crap out of someone. He then befriends Uco, the heir of a crime family in Jakarta, in an attempt to infiltrate Uco’s syndicate. When not fighting, Rama comes across as an earnest worker doing the best that he can. However, when locked in combat, he becomes more brutal, nearly sadistic, than we see in the first film. In The Raid, he’s fighting for survival. In The Raid 2, there’s something else. It’s never clear if this propensity to violence is merely him maintaining his façade of Yuda, but it’s clear that we have a different Rama than in the first movie.

In spite of the film’s iffy pacing, The Raid 2 must be praised for its cinematography. Color palettes are played with in a noticeable and intriguing way. One setting in particular is saturated with red, giving the impression that the film is culminating to a bloody conclusion, which is accurate. That camera work has its moments of shakiness but it’s never in a nauseating way. There is, however, a car chase that does some bold moves with camera work in which the camera seems to fly into the passenger seat of a car but from a great distance in front of that car. A moment like that car chase reminds me why I was excited about the movie. The Raid 2 is the bigger, badder sequel that we thought we wanted. It’s still immensely fun to watch, but in trying to make more plot, it loses the charming relentlessness of the original. 

Pokémon’s Balls: The Cruelty of Choice in Pokémon

Just like what I played, but redder.

The original Pokémon was a simple game. Simple graphics, simple mechanics--it was a game that pushed the boundaries of the JRPG genre by rethinking the role of the player: no longer a member of an adventuring party, now the sole adventurer. Building up and optimizing your party was the entirety of the game. Simply put, you wanted to be “To be the very best.” You wanted to be a Pokémon Master.

The party wasn't a collective of ragtag adventurers but strange animals with special powers doing their master’s bidding. The game stressed the term master in a peculiar way. This was not a master-to-slave relationship but a master-to-pet. However, a Pokémon Master was not merely the master of his Pokémon but a master of training, a master of the very concept of Pokémon. It’s no surprise, then, that a premium item is called the “Master Ball.”

Pokémon came out in the U.S. in 1998. I got Pokémon Blue for Christmas along with a Game Boy Color. I was absorbed quickly into the Pokémon zeitgeist. I had games, music CDs, a trading card game, a board game--it was an intense obsession for a ten-year-old, but one that quickly fizzled out. The multimedia juggernaut was like propaganda espousing the virtues of becoming a Pokémon Master. Even the compilation of Pokémon-inspired tunes was called 2 B. A. Master.

Mastery is the theme of the game. You don’t just play to the end. You play to conquer the system. Fight and train them with other Pokémon. Capture with Pokéballs. Many small steps up to the conclusion. Despite its simplicity, it’s not a game I ever fully understood when I played it. At ten, I mashed the A-button on my Game Boy so rapidly and forcefully that it’s any surprise that the button didn’t just fall out of the device. I saw the menus flash and ignored them. I was too impatient. I wanted to see my Blastoise send a barrage of bubbles from his shell-mounted cannons. Early on, the game explicitly suggests that you switch out your Pokémon so they all get a piece of the action and earn experience points. But I wanted my Blastoise to be the best. He was my prized turtle tank.

Near the game’s end, you encounter a unique Pokémon: Mewtwo. Unlike other Pokémon, there’s only one of him, and he himself is a clone of another unique Pokémon who’s never seen in the original game. He’s powerful, maybe even a game changer if you can snag him, but it’s extremely difficult unless you have a special item. I never caught him. Just as unique is Mewtwo is the special item in question: the Master Ball. Most Pokéballs could be busted out of by wild Pokémon, even Pokéballs that were designated “Ultra.” And while you could capture Mewtwo using an Ultra Ball, it required patience and precision. You couldn’t knock him out or he’d be lost forever, but you had to drop his health bar to a sliver. Otherwise, you used a Master Ball.

When you’re given the Master Ball, you’re told it’s the only one of its kind. You can use it to capture any Pokemon, but once you use it, it’s done used. I don’t remember what I caught with my Master Ball, but I know damn well it wasn’t Mewtwo. The game poses one hell of a choice to you for a game intended for ten-year-olds. It’s as if the makers were saying, We’re going to give you this special item, but we’re not going to tell you what you should specifically save it for . . . we’ll let you screw it up. It’s not a choice you get terribly early in the game, either. One of the earliest choices, however, seems more heinous.

As is the choice with every Pokémon game to date, you have to pick a Pokémon that will be your first. The three main elemental Pokémon: a grass-type, a water-type, and a fire-type. They are rock-paper-scissors incarnate--the fire-type is vulnerable to the water-type and so on. Every time, no matter what you choose, your designated rival picks your weakness. While it is certainly a way of encouraging the player to not only diversify their party, it suggests a futility in choice. No matter what you pick, a bigger obstacle awaits. It was frustrating then. It’s somehow still frustrating, even though I haven’t played Pokémon since I was twelve. No matter what I did, my rival would pick my kryptonite just to throw it at me every once in a while. But that’s why you choose other Pokémon to take care of that.

In the current generation of video games, choice is mechanically built into games. The Witcher series of games is a tragic love letter to the very idea of choice: whole levels are opened and closed based on a few difficult choices. The Mass Effect trilogy emphasizes how your decisions will affect the endgame. But none shares the audacity of Pokémon's forced choices. Those are games intended for adults who are used to critical thinking; Pokémon's for kids still working on that skill. Perhaps Japan's standards for maturity and critical thinking played into the design decision that granted ten-year-olds the responsibility of deciding what to do with a high-value item. Or maybe it was just a weakness of my own decision making skills at age ten.

In the anime, Pokémon’s main character selected his fighters with the phrase, “I choose you!” Pokémon Mastery was a series of choices. Good choices or bad, it didn’t matter. You either had a good payoff or a dire consequence. I defeated the Elite Four, the final bosses of the game, but even as the game credits rolled I didn't feel the game was done. Mewtwo was unconscious in a cave somewhere and not in my service. I had achieved victory, but no mastery.

Burger Lab: Experiment #1

This past week, I had a burger craving. I didn't want a fast food burger, and I didn't want to put up the scratch for a burger at one of the classier joints here in town, so I decided to Build-A-Burger. Kroger is just a five minute walk from our apartment, so I took a trip to pick up a few of the necessary items. I stuck to the basics: Kroger-brand hamburger buns, 73% lean ground beef, and Kraft Deluxe American singles.

I considered truly making this an experiment, grabbing what spices and ingredients I could find in our tiny kitchen and infusing it with the ground beef. I'd made Ernest Hemingway's manburger a few months back, but the recipe called for all things exotic in the land of the burger like red wine and relish. But, like all good experiments, I needed a control group first. I went completely plain.

No salt, no pepper. Nothing at all in the burger patty except the meat itself. I formed three patties out of the one pound of hamburger meat. Two I wrapped in parchment paper and placed in Ziploc bags in the freezer. The third was mine that day.

Spraying down a thin layer of canola oil on a skillet, I let it heat at medium-high. As soon as I dropped the uncooked meat onto the skillet, the sizzle let me know I was in business. Four minutes seemed an ample time to let it cook on one side. Then I remembered the inherent problem with using the skillet: the hot splash of grease that bursts forth like a small stinging fountain. Spots of sepia dotted the white surface of the stove, forming a silhouette around the pan. I cleaned as I went, unable to cover it because there was no lid for the skillet. I was focused--determined to cook a basic burger.

Four minutes up and I flipped the burger with difficulty. My spatula did not slide under the burger as easily as I had imagined it would, so it pushed it up to the edge. Pangs of panic shot through me as I dreaded pushing the half-cooked patty onto the stove, causing further mess and inconvenience. Finally, I gritted my teeth and used my free hand to negotiate the patty onto my spatula, hot needles poking at my skin.

Four more minutes. Almost home. The outside was black and brown, but mostly black from the skillet. I wondered if it wasn't as cooked as I had hoped. I wondered if I'd be missing a day or two of work because of a burger blunder. What joy.

Three minutes in and I took a slice of cheese I had at the ready and blanketed the burger's naked surface in processed yellow. Heat made the slice wrap itself tighter across the surface, almost to the point where the four corners touched the pan. By that point, the final minute passed and it was time to enjoy the product of my labors. Bun opened, I lay the burger down. Juices ran down the bottom half of the bun. The top half set itself on top like it was destined to stay there. I dug in.

The charred black from the skillet made the burger crunchy but not inedible. I saw that the burger was pink but reasonably cooked, so it was unlikely to cause me much grief in the following days. Overall, I was satisfied. I'm easy to please when it comes to my burgers. But there is more to be done in burger science, a frontier not yet fully discovered.

Chris Evans' Beard is Neatly Trimmed in the Post-Apocalypse: A Review of Snowpiercer

Let's play Count the Hatchets.

I often gauge the quality of a movie on how much it keeps me from breathing. The death of brain cells from lack of oxygen might play into that, but this is not a self-diagnosis of brain damage. To get lost in a movie so deeply so as to forget to do such an involuntary action as taking a breath is a hell of a thing to experience. It's a reminder that you're watching something special, maybe even important.

Snowpiercer is special. Usually when a movie captivates me so fully, it happens midway through. Peckinpah's Straw Dogs stopped my breathing in its final act as Dustin Hoffman defends his domicile from the horde of angry drunken Englishmen. The Evil Dead remake of 2013 had a similar effect. The original Old Boy's famed hallway fight didn't even let me blink. Intensity that locks you in and refuses to release you until it decides--that's what these movies share. That's what Snowpiercer has. And a lot more.

Snowpiercer is the marriage of South Korean film sensibilities and French graphic literature. Director Bong Joon-ho, best known for his monster-movie-with-a-message The Host, extracts some fine performances from Chris Evans, Octavia Butler, and Jamie Bell. All of whom play passengers damned to the back of the train carting the remnants of humanity for eternity. Song Kang-ho, lead from The Host, and Go Ah-sung portray a father-daughter pair of drug addicts. Their relationship is genuine and heartwarming without verging onto the sentimental. The strongest performance by far comes from the villainous mouthpiece for the front of the train--the upper crust of society--played by Tilda Swinton. She brings a religious zeal to her character that really drives home the idea that there's a spiritual necessity for an established class system.

It is in this class system we find our strongest conflict: back vs. front, lower class vs. upper class. Out of this conflict, we get some mesmerizing fight sequences. The progression almost plays out like a video game: the ragtag group of caboose dwellers must make their way through several train cars, each one with a different purpose and aesthetic. Their first destination? A prison car. The next? The water treatment car. The further up the line, the cleaner and brighter the cars get. The contrast between rear and front emphasize that the front folk live in a facade, completely oblivious to the plight of the rear.

The first push towards the front immediately reminded me of Old Boy's hallway fight: tight quarters and improvised weapons. Only here, the close quarters are emphasized with tight shots convulsing with the train rumble and the desperate push towards control. Here's where I stopped breathing. The tension builds as we see the characters go through a routine we've already seen play out twice. We know things are a little different as they've dragged barrels out from the rear. When the timing is right, the revolt goes off like a short fuse.

There is some philosophical meat to chew on, and nothing terribly subtle. Thinly-veiled allusions to order and necessary placement appear as if they're meant for meditation but in truth feel more like glorified elements of foreshadowing. That's not to say that they're intellectually unstimulating. In spite of their overt presentation, the ideas of class and order are expressed in bleak but uncertain terms. In keeping with a dystopian spirit, those in control may be brutal but not completely malevolent; they believe in order and its need to keep things in line. It's hard to sympathize with those at the top, but we're not meant to.

In accordance with the Netflix method of rating movies, I give Snowpiercer four stars ( * * * * ), meaning, "I really liked it."

A Tale of Two Snakes: Adjusting to a New Voice from an Old Face

To complain about Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes' length would be to beat a dead horse, so I won't even bother to pick up a club. It's a tight game, one that's pushed the series further from top-down sneak 'em up gameplay to tactical shooter mechanics that rivals most military shooters on console. The story is compelling, and they waste no opportunities in terms of getting you up to speed. Didn't play side-story game Peace Walker? That's alright. The loading screens are rife with context. Not that it will do you much good. This is a Metal Gear Solid game, after all.

That being said, what little story you do get is good. It's intense. It's much darker than its predecessors, even more so than Metal Gear Solid 4's theme of an aging soldier who may or may not be knocking on death's door. You get some unexpected social commentary with Guantanamo Bay stand-in Camp Omega. All in all, it's clear that Metal Gear Solid is doing some growing up. 

To amp up the maturity levels, Hideo Kojima sought out some Hollywood talent for his cast of battle-hardened characters. Enter Jack Bauer himself: Kiefer Sutherland. The growly son of Donald now voices Snake as opposed to fan favorite David Hayter who, for many people, is the voice of Snake, whether Solid Snake or papa Naked Snake. A lot of folks weren't happy, especially Mr. Hayter himself, and understandably so: Hayter's gravelly intonation was Solid Snake. It only got more gruff when Solid Snake aging sped up in MGS 4, and it felt right. Hayter is Snake.

It's jarring to see the face of a character who is recognizable, regardless of polygon count or texture detail, but instead hear the voice of another, a voice that doesn't quite fit. For over fifteen years, gamers have consistently had the same voice for Solid Snake since his delivery unto a 3D canvas. Why change it now?

It's already evident that MGS V is a game of change. The game is a transition for the main character from protagonist to antagonist. Already, there's a tonal shift between MGS V and its predecessors. In spite of its depressing content, MGS 4 keeps the razors from the wrists with moments of the comedic and bizarre. A gun dealer who looks oddly like Dennis Rodman in Simon Sez with a pet monkey in silver hot pants? MGS 4 is abound with Koijma-san's signature quirk. In the brief window of MGS V, we don't get that with the exception of his Frankenstein-esque, anachronistic iDroiD, but even that is easy to overlook. No guardsmen with diarrhea, no roller skating grenadiers. For a Hideo Kojima production, it's all very straight-forward. 

This is a prequel, of course. Post-origin story, pre-epitaph. This is us seeing Anakin tossed into the lava pit. This is us seeing the hero become the villain. We need to see why Naked Snake becomes Big Boss and why Big Boss becomes hellbent on renouncing his allegiances with private army and a giant robot. Heavy moments are bound to happen. Kojima needs an actor who can handle some emotional weight, and disappointingly maybe Hayter's not cut out for it. 

It's still weird, though. It's like seeing a friend you knew as a kid but didn't see again until after puberty struck: voice is deeper and attitude is different. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's for damn sure a weird thing. Kiefer Snake is definitely different from Hayter's Naked Snake. Kiefer Snake's seems more haunted, more weighed down by crises. I need more time with Kiefer Snake, but Ground Zeroes is, by all means, a glorified demo. 

Wondering About Wiz: A Review of Todd English P.U.B. in Birmingham, AL

Todd English P.U.B. in Birmingham, AL, is attached to a Westin Hotel, which is in turn attached to a Sheraton (which we stayed at). A whole cluster of city blocks are connected by veins of skywalks, no doubt to shelter travelers from the sweltering summer sun of the American South. Because we refused to expose ourselves to the heat after a productive day of sightseeing and museum meandering, we had few choices: Casey’s Sports Bar and Grill, the Atrium Café, or Todd English P.U.B. Casey’s looked hopelessly bland and the Atrium Café looked rich for our blood. So, we navigated the labyrinthine corridors that led from our hotel room on the 15th floor of the Birmingham Sheraton to the very trendy Todd English P.U.B adjacent to the Westin’s lobby.

My first impression of the P.U.B was tainted by the presence of what I imagined was a wedding rehearsal dinner—tables guarded by wine glasses, guests in business casual attire, the nervous atmosphere of a time before the knot gets tied. It elevates a location to a level of sophistication it otherwise doesn’t enjoy. When we returned the next day to dine, I saw behind the curtain.

Now you might notice that not only pub an acronym. If your next question is "Why?", take comfort in knowing that much of this review will be spent on meditating that very question with regards to the aesthetic and philosophy of the restaurant itself. First thing’s first, though: let’s talk about that name.

"Todd English P.U.B." is no doubt a play on the phrase "English pub." But it’s taken a step further. No longer is pub just a word, but now it’s an acronym that stands for Public Urban Bar. Now, any English major or anglophile worth their salt can tell you that pub is a shortening of the term public house. Bar here now just seems redundant since a bar tends to be a necessary factor in a pub setting. Urban, it seems, is unexplainable. I suppose it is located in an urban environment, but there isn’t anything about this place that is distinctly urban. Oh wait. The servers wore T-shirts. Maybe that was the urban element.

The interior decorating doesn’t shout urban, unless urban can be interpreted as an American imagining of an idyllic pub in the United Kingdom. It doesn’t have to be England. It could be Scotland. Hell, why not Ireland? We have a couple of fake dartboards painted on sheets of metal that appear to have dents on them. That’s like an English pub, right? They do darts. Or how about our placemats? We put a bunch of quotes because we’re intellectual, too. We printed them in old-looking typefaces because that’s what an English pub’s printed quotes would look like: fresh off the Gutenberg printing press.

I'm not a stickler on service. You can insult my lineage back to medieval Poland and if you give me good food, I'll still give you a tip. But the service that evening in Todd English P.U.B. was, to borrow very English, very trendy terms, shite and bollocks. After we were sat, we waited a good while before we were asked for our drink orders. In the interim, we subsisted on the complimentary cup of popcorn that the hotel compound seemed hellbent on serving to everyone and Sam left to get ibuprofen from the lobby of the Westin. She took said ibuprofen and returned in time to join me in a game of "Who's Our Server?" in which we craned our necks to figure out who the culprit was. Waiters and waitresses all buzzed by our table avoiding eye contact. It was like Clue except ideally we'd be fed in the end and not dead.

The menu was a collection of modernized pub favorites--burgers, tacos, et cetera--but given that special Todd English touch. What that Todd English touch is I can't quite tell you except pretentiously presented bland food boldly branded with TE before the title. Feeling some Mexican food? Try our TE Tacos. What makes the TE Tacos? They have "wiz." Cheese Whiz but not all share the wiz that makes the TE Tacos oh so TE. A few items are simply branded with Todd's name, like "Todd's Fish & Chips." It's got aioli, just like the TE Tacos, so maybe I'm getting somewhere.

I'm a simple man with simple tastes, so I forewent anything with Todd or TE attached to its name. I ordered the “Pub Burger,” which surprisingly wasn’t the “P.U.B. Burger” in a rare show of restraint for the establishment. An old standard, the fanciest things about it were its “brioche bun” and “fatty fries” (or potato wedges, as we plebes call them). The server asked me if I wanted cheese or bacon. I voted both, with a choice of cheddar. When our food arrived (timely, surprisingly enough), I was presented with my burger atop not a plate but a wooden paddle shaped like a cricket bat with a piece of parchment paper to cover the surface. Cricket bats, as you might be aware, are narrow, not the optimal space to eat anything on at all. Fatty fries came in a small metal pail like one might put peanuts in. The burger was underwhelming, even more so given its $12 price tag. Never before had I been so bored with a burger with bacon on it. I found myself getting distracted by the toppings, thinking that maybe they were to blame for the burger’s poor performance. In truth, it was that “8oz. all beef patty” itself. What happened? I whispered to the burger before I finished it. Expectedly, I received no response.

Zach Braff and His Cannibalized Kickstarted Movie Clone

Sheldon skips a couple centuries for this one.

I rented Garden State during a lonely period in my life. It got me into the Shins and indie comedies that weren’t 100% ha-ha. I connected with Andrew Largeman, Zach Braff’s emotionally numbed protagonist, or at least envied his medically induced serenity. At the time, I counted it among my favorite movies, somewhere between any Tarantino movie and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven’t watched it since.

I remember the trailers for it. The goofy daydreaming doctor on Scrubs made a movie and it was quirkfest with Natalie Portman as MPDG. It had a quiet quirkiness that made it alluring to the misfit who wants nothing more than to seal their ears in headphones, listening to acoustic rock from the Pacific Northwest.

A little over a year ago, Braff caused an uproar by coming out and asking fans to fund his next movie via Kickstarter. The beef most people had about it was, “Why’s Hollywood coming in and asking for some money for a movie?” The assumption was that, if the movie needed to be made, Braff himself had the connections to ring in Hollywood or indie investors and make it happen. The way it looks, he did but he needed some extra scratch to boost the production up. It looks like he succeeded. Enter the trailer for the movie.


When I first saw it, I had forgotten it had existed. Seeing Braff’s mug yelling “Dammit!” at the beginning of the trailer gave me hope. And slowly that hope slipped from my fingers. The Shins jangling on acoustic with some melodic woo-wooing immediately evoked Braff’s last effort; indeed, many credit him for growing the Shins’ audience, so it’s understandable that he’d throw them a bone again—or they’d throw him one. It’s not clear just yet. And then we get a slow motion shot of children running down a road while James Mercer’s singing confirms any suspicions you might’ve had that the Shins were doing the soundtrack. Not a terrible thing to hear, mind you.

But then half of the spoken lines in the trailer hit the rim but never quite make it through the basket. As Braff’s character learns that his father’s going to be “laid up” for a while and needs someone to watch his dog, he laments, “There’s so much bad news, all at once.” It could be his delivery or the maudlin importance of the words themselves, but comes in like a speed bump. And then Braff tells his daughter to pick a wig that is “unique and amazing—like you,” as if he wants us to remember weirdo Natalie Portman with a fetish for the unique in Garden State.

It doesn’t stop there. Kate Hudson drops the truth bomb about how “Your boys will remember this time for the rest of their lives. It will shape who they are as men.” Braff serves up a truth taco to younger bro Josh Gad: “We both spent our entire lives wishing we could be something great. And now we’re finally called upon to do something that requires some actual bravery.” And then, to ice the truth cake, Braff says, “When we were kids, by brother and I used to pretend that we were heroes—the only ones who could save the day. But maybe we’re just the regular people, the ones who get saved.” Again, it may all just be the way the lines are delivered—with more gravitas than the words deserve. But it’s ham-fisted.

Finally, it hit me: I’ve seen a lot of this before. The Shins soundtrack, “unique and amazing” people, Zach Braff as a struggling actor with dad issues, people shouting at the elements, Jim Parsons in period garb—he’s done recycled his first movie. It’s one thing to say that Zach Braff has a distinctive flavor to his work, but from what it looks like just from the trailer, it’s all he’s got. I don’t think I’ve got the taste for it anymore.

It’s unfair to dismiss the film as a Garden State for the West Coast, trading suburban New Jersey for glitzy LA, based solely on the trailer. But for a moment, I wondered if there might be merit to the tired Hollywood method of film production. Could the fact that the script is fifty shades of meh be the reason why he couldn’t secure more funds in Hollywood? They churn out crap by the shovelful, but they know their audience. They’re not targeting the art house crowd with a Katherine Heigl flick. Who’s Zach Braff’s audience? Maybe it's not me anymore. His fans gave him money, so surely them at least. But others? Maybe it will be crap. But to those who funded it, it will be unique and awesome crap.