Get Touched Back

TV Review: Fringe, "Reciprocity"

Spoilers ahead. Following Fringe's strong return last week is an episode with a number of problems, or at least enough silly moments to have me rolling my eyes. It is still a good episode but it's probably among the weakest of the season. Massive Dynamic has reconstructed the universe-shattering doomsday device, but can't figure out what it does or how to power it, and it is unresponsive to all input until Peter enters the room and gets a nosebleed. Until now, the doomsday device has kind of been a side project of importance to the series but never thrown around in our faces. Seeing it full constructed in a hangar-sized laboratory raised some concerns, chiefly: why the hell did they build it? The interdimensional arms race only makes so much sense, and the most widely accepted theory seems to be that the doomsday device with either destroy our universe or both. Broyles, Nina, and Peter all insist that they need to understand what it does so that they can combat it, and only Walter is the voice of dissent, pointing out that they are building a doomsday device, and his concerns are dismissed as Walter's usual crazy diatribes. Plus, since it's Massive Dynamic that's running the show and Walter owns it, I don't see why he can't just shut down the operation completely. I can ignore these questions and enjoy the show, but it would be nice if we had more logical reasoning from our major characters.

So anyway, meanwhile Fauxlivia's computer has been decrypted and right afterwards, people identified as shapeshifters start popping up executed with their hard-drives removed. The shapeshifters are still a cool device and the series seems to know well enough to keep them scattered so that we're not getting bored of them. Making them the victims here as opposed to the predators they usually are does dull their teeth a bit, though, and I found myself really missing a cool headlining villain like Newton. Having to review Fauxlivia's data brings once again brings up the newfound tension between Peter and Olivia, but in the end it works to solve as opposed to exacerbate the problem, which is becoming something of a pattern that I hope they don't stretch too thin. Even here I was getting a little tired of the same conversation happening between them.

Also meanwhile, Walter is continuing his attempts to regrow the parts of his brain that were lost so that he can stand toe to toe with Walternate, smartswise. This was a somewhat silly subplot last week and it only gets worse this episode, as after getting assistance from Nina, Walter takes an unlabelled formula which turns out to be ape DNA, and then he starts acting like a monkey. Luckily, this never goes beyond having cravings for bananas and making animal grunts, but it was still a facepalm moment. I hope that they wrap this thing up soon, because it sort of undercuts the implication we faced last season that pre-lobotomized Walter was not a good guy, and it will cement it if he manages to recover his losses and is still doddering apologetic Walter.

One of the major drawbacks of this episode was that it was very focused on Peter and had to thusly lean heavily on Joshua Jackson and his acting abilities. Peter's a weak link on the show for a number of reasons, chiefly Joshua Jackson, but also because he's been written as some kind of genius jack-of-all-trades, which comes back into play here when it's revealed that it's Peter tracking down and killing the shapeshifters. Not only is he a master cryptologist, as he solves Fauxlivia's cipher before Astrid, a team of FBI code-breakers, and even Olivia herself manage to, but he's also an exacting assassin able to overcome shapeshifting cyborg agents even when they get the drop on him. Making Peter more sinister may be a smart move, as I find bad actors have an easier time acting evil (see Sarah Michelle Gellar as the First), but it also threatens to pull Peter back into the centre of the show when he'd been sidelined most of the season by much more interesting characters and plotlines. I guess we'll have to wait and see. This Walter and Peter keep a secret from Olivia thing is dangerously similar to Walter and Olivia keeping a secret from Peter last season.

I'm bashing the episode a lot but it was still better than most shit on TV, and the final fight between Peter and the shapeshifter was more exciting than not. I hope the writers inject a new bad guy into the show soon, though, because as threatening as Fauxlivia, Walternate, and the other Fringe division are, they're pretty much non-entities, and even so are no match for the exacting villainy of earlier foes like David Robert Jones and Newton.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

A Twin Peaks Retrospective

Watching Twin Peaks today, it's easy to see the ways it impacted a lot of television drama to follow, perhaps even moreso in the wake of Lost. A great, solid story, excellent cast and unique style made it, at its best, one of my favourite series. But at its worst, unfortunately, it really really sucked.

David Lynch seems to be something of a take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy. I've heard a lot of criticism lodged at him and it's sometimes difficult to argue with. Not everyone is satisfied coming away from a movie unsure of what actually happened in it. Twin Peaks is a more accessible example of his work in many ways, maybe because it was tempered by the involvement of Mark Frost. But that's just a guess, since I don't know much about the rest of Frost's catalogue except for his more recent and disappointing efforts. Fantastic Four, for example. I mean, geez.

It's true that the series started to fall apart and unraveled with alarming speed after Laura Palmer's killer was revealed. Storylines became increasingly fragmentary, irrelevant, and zany - I suspect the writers mistook the first season's surrealism for absurdity. Nadine gets amnesia and becomes convinced she's in high school; James becomes involved in a murder plot at some remote lavish estate; Ben and Catherine engage in an over-convoluted battle for the Ghostwood development. It suffered too from leaning heavily on the new antagonist, Windom Earle, who had a cool backstory but ultimately was played too flamboyantly insane by Kenneth Welsh. His elaborate metaphorical chess game with Cooper was too long and pointless. Earle became more interesting in the last couple of episodes, when his ultimate motives were revealed and he started directing his ruthlessness at characters we actually cared about. Maybe if Lynch had stayed on he could've been a real hit, but especially when considered in contrast to the earlier villains of the series, he fell way short.

There's a lot of places to lay the blame for why the series deteriorated. The network was eager to give an audience clamouring for the identity of Laura Palmer's killer what they wanted; it was apparently their hands in the pot that ultimately drove David Lynch to leave the show, and it floundered aimlessly without him. Had he just toughed it out and stayed on, maybe we would've been spared some of the lower points of the series. Low points such as the episode directed by Diane Keaton, which quite profoundly sucked despite Keaton's trying so very very hard (you could tell). Of course there's no use pointing fingers now, twenty years after the fact, and Lynch's return on the finale and finishing off the saga with the film Fire Walk With Me, ending the whole thing on a high note. In similar fashion, I'm now going to move on to the good things about the series.

When the reflection of set dresser Frank Silva was accidentally caught in a mirror during the filming of a dream sequence in the pilot, Bob was born. And man, what a stumble-upon. Bob never looked otherworldly; he wore regular clothing, no makeup, and had regular enough features, and yet his seedy grin and wild eyes managed to convey something so sinister and insane it made you believe - or maybe want to believe - that this wasn't a man so much as it was a creature. Ultimately Bob was the villain of Twin Peaks - the Big Bad of the whole show - and it's a mantle he carried well. He appeared only fleetingly, in disturbing dreams and visions, and there was never any elaboration on his character. What he is, what he wants, and what he can do were never explained in any coherent fashion. Defeating Bob never even seemed to be a goal, if indeed it's at all a possibility. He was occasionally thwarted, though to small degrees and at great cost. In the Twin Peaks approach to evil, that's the best you seem to be able to hope for.
 

As is usual of David Lynch's work, Twin Peaks was chock full of hot babes, and their queen was Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne. Audrey's involvement in the plot as a friend of Laura's was pivotal, to be sure, but what I liked most about her was her relationship with the protagonist, Dale Cooper. Audrey and Cooper had an immediate attraction for each other from the first scene they share. Audrey found Cooper fascinating, and came to be an important asset to his investigation purely out of an effort to impress him and insinuate herself into his life. They exchanged flirtations and wistful gazes culminating in a pretty powerful scene in the finale of season 1, in which Cooper came back to his hotel room to find Audrey naked on his bed. Audrey never seemed like a silly little girl with a crush, she was always a capable and self-reliant character, and her feelings for Cooper were never capricious or juvenile - perhaps reinforced by the fact that Cooper shared them. His professionalism and duty always prevented him from taking it anywhere, but that only made it feel more tragic. In season 2 Audrey and Cooper's storylines branched away from each other, and they were both given other love interests (Billy Zane and Heather Graham) to keep them occupied. Watching those romances play out only made me appreciate the quiet passion they shared which was far more meaningful and way sexier, and a testament to the acting chops of both.
 
Twin Peaks followed in many ways the classical structure of a soap opera - the whole series spanned a relatively short period of time, was set in a small town, and involved a number of families. This was probably handled best in the case of the Renault brothers, a French-Canadian family of criminals with hands in illegal gambling, prostitution, and drug running. The Renaults were introduced one at a time, and each was more ruthless than the last. I really love this fashion of shaping villains, it requires patience and forethought but really puts a sense of dread in the heart of your audience. By the time the eldest of the Renaults appeared, we knew this was a man who was very dangerous and depraved, and he lived up to that expectation well. The Renault brothers were only occasionally in the spotlight, but even so, they really emphasized to me how well crafted the earlier series was in contrast to its later episodes. Jean Renault seemed a much more serious and deadly adversary than even Windom Earle who came to monopolize the villainy of the last episodes.
 
The concept of the Black Lodge is introduced as a dwelling place of strange spirits, interpreted in visions and dreams as a minimally furnished room with a checkerboard floor walled by rich red curtains. There's no scene set in it that isn't worth watching. By filming the characters speaking and moving in reverse and then playing the footage backwards, Lynch created an incredibly alien yet recognizable atmosphere, and some sequences within the Black Lodge are extremely unsettling despite having no outright gruesome or disturbing imagery. The Black Lodge was instrumental in making Twin Peaks what it was, and remains one of the most memorable trademarks of the series to this day. 
 
Finally, one of the greatest gems the show uncovered was actress Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer, the dead girl whose murder the series revolved around. Sheryl Lee's not done much since, which is odd, since her performance of Laura is a highlight of the show. Lynch was so impressed that he gave her a second role as Laura's cousin Maddy Ferguson, but Lee's major showcase was the movie Fire Walk With Me that capped off the series and followed Laura in the days before she was killed. Lee brought to the role the winning smile of a popular high school knockout, but also a very impressive portrayal of all-consuming anxiousness and trauma that brought Laura to and beyond the brink of insanity. The movement away from Laura's character in the second season was probably one of the show's more subtle pitfalls.
 
Twin Peaks has often invited comparison, but there's not been anything like it since and I can't imagine there will be any time soon. It's something of an investment to watch, but to those who are wary I say dive right the fuck in, and to those who are having trouble slogging through the last half of the second season, I say steel yourselves and carry on. Finishing the series is its own dark reward.

Where Paradise Ends

Movie Review: Innocence

This review may have spoilers. I guess that depends on what constitutes a spoiler. Innocence isn't really a movie that could be spoiled, but I don't know if just saying that spoils the movie. If I'm already treading on dubious territory, you should probably turn back now.

Innocence, a 2004 film by director Lucile Hadzhilalilovic, begins with a young girl being released from a locked coffin by six slightly older girls in matching white dresses and different coloured ribbons in their hair. They take her in, accept her as one of their own, and explain that this quaint little house in this verdant and idyllic forest is now her home. Details come slowly. There are five other houses in the park, each with their own set of girls. The park is surrounded by a wall; if they try to escape, the girls will be "punished." During the day, the girls learn science and dancing from adult instructors, and at night they are tended to by elderly women. At nine o'clock, the eldest girl leaves the house and goes somewhere, and the rest of the girls go to bed at ten.

There's something about this movie that makes you look for a big reveal. I half-expected it to become a science fiction movie, and at the very least, I thought one little girl was going to get raped. It's called Innocence, for god's sake. But the audience is never let in on the secrets guarded by the girls' caretakers, and it's at times difficult to know whether or not the caretakers know these secrets themselves. We know whatever the girls know, and it's not much of anything.

The park in Innocence is a lot like childhood itself. It seems sinister as often as it seems friendly, and there are rules that are unclear, consequences that are also unclear, and elaborate systems predicated on reasoning which is again unclear. The film focuses primarily and one at a time on Zoe Auclair's Iris, the youngest girl of the house who arrives at the beginning of the film; Lea Bridarolli's Alice, who is near the middle of the age range; and Bérangère Haubruge's eldest girl and junior matriarch Bianca. Each girl is faced with specific concerns - Iris tries to learn the rules and get along with the others, Alice is focused on a dance recital whose winner is chosen to leave the park early, and Bianca is attempting to prepare her protege Nadia to take her place when she leaves for good. But despite their varying goals, they still have many things in common - they have theories about the outside world but are unsure what to expect, they are confused about the elements at play in the park and have no idea what they mean, and they at times resent their virtual imprisonment yet fear moving beyond it.

In one scene Alice ventures to the wall surrounding the park and climbs it to successfully peer over the other side. As she's climbing, it's easy for the audience to get caught up in guessing what she will see, as if this is the scene that will explain the rest of the movie for us. Will it be a dystopian ruin?  Will it be an endless sea? But what she finds is just more of the same. Though they might not be contained to single instances like in the case of Alice, I feel like children face the same revelations as they grow up. Adults walk around like they know something children don't, and we all come to hope that we'll stumble upon whatever secret it is that they know that makes the world make any kind of sense. In Innocence, as in the transition from child to adulthood, the only big reveal is that there are no secrets to learn.

Vacation

Let's Make Sandwiches

October 2006

This installment turned out to be a bit controversial. After two weeks in a row of comics involving explosions, we decided to give explosions a rest, but every idea we had ended with an explosion. So we ended up with this. What we were going for was to personify inanimate objects and equate their relationship to one of predator and prey. Apparently the best we could come up with was a pencil hunted by a pencil sharpener. Unfortunately, setting it in Africa and having one character forcefully penetrate another from behind led to it being misinterpreted as a rape, and the whole comic further misinterpreted as being about the rampant AIDS crisis in Africa.

Bigger Badder Louder Meaner

Part 2 of a Mortal Kombat Retrospective

Only a year after Mortal Kombat's release came its bombastic successor. Mortal Kombat II expanded on the original in many obvious ways, but in general it made the fighting considerably faster, added multiple finishing moves, and movesets with greater variety. The style of the game was darker, and the story more involved, although the serious tone was undercut by the addition of Friendships and Babalities, silly finishing moves that allowed victors alternatives to killing their opponents. Nevertheless, setting the game in Outworld allowed the backgrounds to look considerably more creepy and weird, and even with the joke finishers it stands as one of the more atmospheric games in the series.

The game leaned heavily on the Malibu comic to do its storytelling for it, but established that in the final stages of the tournament, Liu Kang had engaged Shang Tsung and bested him. Sonya, Kano, and Johnny Cage fought Goro, but after Shang Tsung's defeat, the island began to deteriorate beneath their feet, and only Cage was saved due to Rayden's intervention. Though Goro disappeared, Sonya and Kano were recovered by Shang Tsung's forces and brought back to Outworld as they fled. During the chaos, Scorpion confronted Sub-Zero and killed him, then vanished back to the Netherealm, his task complete. Shang Tsung's master, Shao Kahn, was furious as Shang Tsung's failure to win conquest of the Earthrealm, and decided to host his own tournament in Outworld as opposed to waiting another ten generations.

Aside from Sonya and Kano, all the fighters from Mortal Kombat returned, as well as a revitalized Shang Tsung and former hidden character Reptile. Newcomers included Baraka, the leader of Shao Kahn's mutant army; Kung Lao, descendant of the original hero who fell to Goro and a friend of Liu Kang's; Jax, another FBI agent looking for Sonya; Kitana, Shao Kahn's daughter and personal assassin, and her twin sister Mileena. Capitalizing on the popularity of the many secrets of its predecessor, the game also featured three challenging hidden fighters - silhouette Noob Saibot, green ninja Jade, and grey Lin Kuei Smoke. And to round out the bosses, Kintaro preceded Shao Kahn himself.

My friend Derek got Mortal Kombat II for the Genesis and I remember going over and playing the fuck out of it before borrowing it for a very long (inexcusably long) time. Luckily there was no need for a blood code this time. I became strong with Baraka, Mileena, and Reptile, but there were no outright bad characters and they all had fairly diverse movesets. Mortal Kombat II remains my favourite of the 2D sprite era, and it was this game that really got my into the franchise and its narrative, despite being frustrated by its fragmentary and disjointed telling.

I think Mortal Kombat II reached a peak that the series never really got back again even with its stronger late-generation titles. I know lots of fans consider Mortal Kombat II to be the best game in the series, and I've heard it called one of the best fighting games of all time. It was so popular that there were multiple reports of fans breaking into arcade machines and stealing the boards so they could install them on their own arcades and play them at home.

I Will Civilize This Land

Movie Review: The Proposition

I already knew Nick Cave was super cool. Maybe not the King of Cool but easily the Grand Admiral or something. Not only has he enjoyed large-scale musical success even while indulging his less mainstream predilections, but he's also been featured in wicked movies, is a goddamn novelist, is from Australia, and looks sexy even if he's never what I would call "traditionally handsome." Oh and then, it turns out, he wrote a 2005 film called The Proposition, which is nothing if not a cool movie.

The Proposition is a western movie that takes place in Australia. The outlaw Burns brothers are captured by lawman Captain Stanley, who keeps the younger Mikey and sends the older Charlie to kill their eldest brother and depraved family patriarch Arthur or Mikey is to die. The film focuses equally on Guy Pearce as Charlie and Ray Winstone as Stanley, and benefits on excellent actors not only for these two leads but the surprisingly extensive supporting cast as well.

The Proposition is one of what I'd call a modern tradition of westerns, with less focus on grandiose machismo and more on the realism of the brutality of that time, and its effect on those who lived through it. Setting it in Australia at a time when much of the country was still essentially lawless gives it a particular fixation on the line between civilization and the wild, and in an extension of that, the separation of what makes us people as opposed to animals. Captain Stanley tries to bring order to an untamed land, and in his home we see an island of Imperial nicety amidst a harsh and feral desert. His tactics are gruesome, and yet he's one of the more noble characters in the film - which is saying something. Even Emily Watson as his wife Martha, struggling to remain composed, gives into her dark animal impulses when it comes down to it. Charlie, meanwhile, knows the wild well and has lived amongst people who feel no need to be any better than animals, killing indiscriminately as it suits them, and seeks to remove himself to something better. Unfortunately for Charlie, the film proposes that civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It's always hot. There are flies everywhere and in multitudes. The inhabitants in this world almost seem to begrudge their being in it. For a film made by two Australians, it is starkly unsentimental about Australia, indifferent to the cruelty of its history. It easily stands its ground amidst all the other high profile westerns that came out in the past few years.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Movie Review: Enter the Void

I imagine I'm quoting what a number of movie critics have already said, but hardcore weirdo Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void is a film unlike anything else out there. Which sounds like an overblown compliment, but it comes with ups and downs. Expecting anything from it is probably a mistake. If you stop and ask yourself what's going on, you'll probably be disappointed. I have a feeling it's a movie that benefits greatly from heavy drug use, and would recommend it to anyone looking for something to watch for their next acid trip. I would, however, advise against it for people with epilepsy or anything like it, as the bombastically frenetic opening alone will likely hospitalize them.

Once you get past the main titles it grinds to an incredibly slow pace. The film is told entirely from the first-person perspective of Oscar, a low-level American drug dealer living in Tokyo and played by Nathaniel Brown. While he's still alive, the cinematography emulates human vision with a number of details that sell it well, the camera properly jostling and frequently "blinking," and shortly into it we are treated to a sequence of Oscar's drugged out hallucinations. After musing with his sister, Paz de la Heurta's Linda, he travels with fellow junkie and best friend Alex played by Cyril Roy, and Alex explains the philosophy of life after death according to Tibetan Buddhism. The spirit lingers and observes until it is reborn. Afterwards, Oscar walks into a drug bust, everything goes to shit, he dies, and his spirit lingers and observes.

What follows is two hours of stream of consciousness storytelling. Oscar, or whatever it is that remains of him, files through memories, spirals into surreal flashes, ruminates on his life and the lives of his friends, and we watch him do it. There's a lot of down-time, repetition, and psychedelically kaleidoscopic light shows. Scenes flow into each other with the same jilted rhythm that thoughts do. At some points the audience is presented with imagery that reminds us of an earlier scene, and then see that earlier scene immediately repeated. It's disorienting at times, but worth experiencing.

That said, Enter the Void doesn't escape all criticism. While it tells a story in a spectacularly unique way, the story it tells has very long portions that aren't that interesting. It's made worse by leading man Nathaniel Brown, who isn't actually an actor and it shows. His delivery of inner monologue felt like watching a Youtube video. The flashbacks manage to remedy that by casting two pretty phenomenal children, Jesse Kuhn and Emily Alyn Lind, to play the young versions of Oscar and Linda respectively - these kids have incredibly demanding, highly emotive roles and perform them so convincingly it can be upsetting. Though his flashbacks reveal a great depth in Oscar, this never comes across in Brown. Ultimately the premise - an exploration of the death of a life shaped so heavily by death - is cool, but all the characters kind of suck (with the exception of scene-stealing and underused Alex) so it's difficult at times to give a shit about them.

For a movie that goes all out in so many ways, it feels like it's holding back in some key ones. Enter the Void is full of what seems to be unsimulated sex, and while there are frequent and explicit suggestions that Oscar has been romantically involved with both his good friend Victor played by Olly Alexander, as well as his sister Linda, we never see any of these sexual encounters, and in a stream of consciousness we would. There's also no gay sex involving Oscar's hardcore gay drug dealer Bruno (Ed Spears), including the sex scene he's involved in. We got one guy-on-guy blow job that's obviously fake, which I guess is something, but again: this is a film flush with graphic sex, but the rule seems to be only so long as it's a penis going into a vagina it's not related to. Blame international censorship complications or whatever, but this isn't a movie that's going to get wide release, so they might as well just go all out.

I'll say that Enter the Void is guilty of trying a bit too hard, but it can't be offhandedly discounted despite it's shortfalls. It's a really cool movie that merits viewing (if perhaps not owning), and I can see it being the inspiration for a better film later. Which might sound like a dick thing to say, but regardless, Noé has achieved something very interesting here that deserves to be paid attention to.

The Death Slot

When Fringe first came out, it was frequently called a clear imitator of X-Files, and this wasn't an unfair comparison. The setup was very similar - a branch of the FBI focused on strange and unexplained phenomena - and also virtually every episode blatantly took elements from X-Files, even going so far to at one point show clips of the episode they were ripping off in the very scene they were doing it, so they obviously knew what they were up to. Still, it was better than most stuff on TV, and the resources of Fox allowed them to have very good production values and some of the best effects on network television. Yeah, Joshua Jackson couldn't act his way out of a speeding ticket, but the talented ensemble cast surrounding him generally made up for it, as did newcomer Anna Torv as leading woman Olivia Dunham. By the end of the season, Fringe had really come into its own. Still a follow-up to X-Files in many ways, Fringe's focus on a parallel universe has strengthened it considerably, and allowed it to go places X-Files never did.

Season three has been the best so far. Every episode has been pretty strong, and they seem to have adopted a good formula of keeping shows episodic monster-of-the-week storylines while still addressing the overarching concerns of the series. When Fringe was moved to the Friday night slot traditionally reserved for shows Fox was trying to sabotage so they could cancel them, everyone assumed the worst, and that the first episode in that slot was called "The Firefly" reminded everyone of Fox's dubious treatment of good shows. Nevertheless, Fringe had the highest ratings of any show last Friday. We'll have to wait and see if this momentum keeps up, but Fringe is a great show that deserves an audience now more than ever.

TV Review: Fringe, "The Firefly"

"The Firefly" was well done, and a good episode to pull in new viewers, as it retraced much of the show's history and lead-up to its current story arcs, made better by including the Observer, a recurring character of mysterious origin and perhaps dubious intent. It also featured guest star Christopher Lloyd, playing his usual typecast of crazy old man, and it was fun to watch him play one alongside fellow crazy old man John Noble. Lloyd played Roscoe Joyce, a former keyboardist in Walter's favourite band of his teenage years, Violet Sedan Chair (I was expecting another mad scientist) who was visited by his son despite his son being dead for twenty years.

Though the Observer was occasionally positioned as the antagonist, it was really an episode with no villain, which can be difficult to pull off. Luckily, the episode sort of lay blame on Walter himself, and brought back to the surface Walter's conflict between a sincere love for his son, and guilt about all the negative ramifications he caused to save him. So it was an emotional, Walter-heavy episode, but as John Noble is probably the best actor in the cast that's not a bad thing. We also revisited the complicated relationship between Olivia and Peter, and Peter seemed to make some first steps towards a reconciliation despite Olivia's hesitations. Though this exchange depended on Joshua Jackson's stunted emotive capabilities, it wasn't very demanding so he still handled himself all right.

Like several other episodes this seasons, "The Firefly" was preoccupied with causality, and though it was handled better (or at least cooler) earlier in "The Plateau," it still kept things complicated enough for us to appreciate that the characters couldn't predict what will happen next, but simple enough for us to trace back the cause as we see the effects. It was lighter on action than usual, but the climax was still engaging.

Finally, in a slight bit of trivia, Walter at one point employed a pair of glasses with a red and blue lens, and then claimed that they were an invention of his friend Dr. Jacoby from Washington state, effectively suggesting that Fringe is set in the same universe as Twin Peaks. Maybe the series will end with Olivia rescuing Cooper from the Black Lodge.

Frank Sinatra

Celebrity Mug Shots

Seduction & Adultery. New Jersey, 1938.

This was a thing you could charge people with in New Jersey in 1938. Some woman that Sinatra fucked claimed that he had done so under the promise of marriage, and that she had previously been, to quote the FBI report, "a female of good repute." The charges were dismissed when it turned out she was already married. Good repute, indeed.

A Kafka-esque Experience. That's a Compliment.

Movie Review: Annie Hall

It's interesting what today's standards of romantic comedy are at, considering what they came to follow. Or are these not considered romantic comedies? Are they instead comedic romances? Annie Hall is a funny movie, even silly at times, yet it's still a serious one; a frank but fond examination of what I think is a very modern relationship, in a way that most modern movies about relationships are not.

It begins by breaking the fourth wall. You are being personally addressed, essentially told how the movie will end, and then taken on a somewhat non sequiter journey that seems almost anecdotal. Every scene could begin with: "there was this time where..." It makes the abstract breaches in the narrative feel not like breaches but rather tangents. This movie isn't just for you the viewer, but you the audience, who not only are spoken to, but on occasion rise out of the crowd and into the screen to address him.

I seem to be gushing which is strange; Annie Hall's not going on my top ten or anything and isn't even my favourite Woody Allen movie, but watching it for the first time in 2011 probably means something that it may not have in 1977. Anyone could name ten recent rom coms with forgettably straightforward plots, obvious writing, absolutely no bite and nothing to say. And Anne Hall at least has something to say. Maybe "better to have loved and lost" is an old sentiment, but Allen applies it to the transitory nature of life in general and maybe reminds us that while romance is important, it's not everything. Love is great, but it's fickle, nerve-wracking, frustrating, and self-contradicting. Still, it is pretty great.

A lot of this movie is a vehicle for Woody Allen to voice his observations on the American culture of his day and his frustration with social interaction in general, but it benefits from Allen's talent for getting his points across and tell a good joke while doing it. It's also another addition to the pile of love songs for New York City he's made, though it seems to be of a secondary concern to him here (as opposed to some other films of his). But the strength of Annie Hall is I think that it was also Allen's chance to indulge a desire to experiment with form and storytelling, using elements that could fail with ease but that he manages to pull off. Though it occasionally verges on masturbatory, sometimes watching someone masturbate can be pretty hilarious.

La Mileena

Cool Shit: Painting

Painting by Maria Sunderland

I've seen a great deal of Mileena fan art and most of it sucks, and I even made some back in the day (which sucked, but I was young), but I thought this one was particularly cool. There's some other good stuff in the rest of the artist's Deviantart gallery.

Sel

Let's Make Sandwiches

October 2006

Frankie was on the phone to Sara while she was cooking, and the cap came off her salt shaker, to which she exclaimed "Ah! My salt exploded!" I particularly enjoyed the expressive smiley face on the guy's shirt, and I recall it being my idea to make him speaking in French, because watching a French guy get hurt is funnier.

Crown of the Earth

Alliance Zone Review: Teldrassil
Night Elf Starting Experience 

Character: Prince Danothen, night elf arcane mage.
Level Span: 1-10
Theme: Enchanted treetop woodland

Aside from the cataclysm, night elven society has been going through severe upheavals in the wake of Wrath of the Lich King. The novel Stormrage told the story of Malfurion's return from the Emerald Dream, and the subsequent ousting of Fandral Staghelm from the Cenarion Enclave when he was revealed as the source of Malfurion's imprisonment in the first place (that's what all that morrowgrain was for). Meanwhile, ancient highborne magi have come out of hiding and rejoined the civilization who exiled them. In Cataclysm, it is these highborne whom you play as when you start a mage. Additionally, night elven druids have traveled to Gilneas to deal with what was essentially a problem they created - the worgen - and have given shelter to the Gilneans who were forced to flee their homeland.

The night elves have suffered a very tumultuous period following a ten thousand year status quo, and just as things started to settle down, these changes shifted things again. Unfortunately, the night elf starting experience reflects these changes in absolutely no capacity. I touched on this briefly in my earlier Cataclysm review: Shadowglen and Teldrassil have exactly the same narrative they had when the game first came out five years ago. A bunch of quests have been removed, and several have been improved with mechanics to make them less annoying or easier, but the goals are all the same. The same problems, the same villains, the same outcomes. It's like no time has passed at all. The sole new quest is the last one of the zone, but at that point it's really too little too late, and it smacks of being a very last ditch effort to make the questline seem meaningful.

I think it's ridiculous to ask players to repeat the same material over again when they had to revisit it anyway. But that principle aside, there's a ton of new lore to go over and it isn't even touched on. As a night elf mage, my character should be possessed of a history fundamentally different than any other night elf class, but the play experience is identical, aside from a sentence or two from the mage trainer that actually tells him nothing. And the reasons why the highborne have been accepted back into the fold aren't explained at all. We're made to assume that Mordent Evenshade appealed to Tyrande to allow the highborne to return, but that's based on "A Cautious Return," a quest we would've had to do on other characters, which doesn't even show that hypothetical meeting. We just witness Mordent's conversation with Sentinel Stillbough, and then after Cataclysm, there are highborne everywhere so... I guess he made a good case?

There's a whole lot of new material to work with, and Teldrassil was the perfect opportunity to exploit it. Had Teldrassil been used as a vehicle to relate it to the players or even involve them in it, it would be a much more interesting zone. And that some of those chances are actually going to good use elsewhere somehow makes it more frustrating. Why not use the return of the highborne to create, say, a splinter group of night elf radicals, perhaps loyal to Staghelm? Or as a chance to elaborate on the harpies as potential powers? Or use Malfurion's return to focus on the Nightmare in the Emerald Dream as a possible source of evil (beyond the very tangential extent that it does)? For an expansion that seems to be blowing all its remaining villains in one go I really hope at least one guy is thinking ahead. But it always seems that if it's not about humans or orcs, it doesn't really require any attention.

Teldrassil did not fill me with confidence about approaching the other beginner zones. I was looking forward to starting a new gnome and troll, and now I feel like I shouldn't get my hopes up. From everything I'm reading and everything I'm feeling, Warcraft fans spend a lot of time these days feeling stupid for being Warcraft fans. Beating the final quest of Teldrassil on my night elf mage was one of those times.

Goro Lives!

Part 1 of a Mortal Kombat Retrospective

Mortal Kombat has been a franchise near and dear to me since it first came out in 1992. In anticipation of the new game to be released in April, I've been thinking a lot about it. Almost twenty years later, it's easy to divide the series into eras, each with its own greatness and no shortage of pitfalls. In a world where there's Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, Mortal Kombat as a showcase of brutal violence loses much of its relevance, and it's hard to argue with people who see no reason to pay attention to anything since the early days. And although this may prompt a chuckle or scoff from a reader or two, I've always thought Mortal Kombat's universe to be a very dark and rich one. It's very rarely had a flawless execution, I'll give you that, but it's always had cool characters with solid backgrounds doing horrifying things to each other.

At the Tottenham Community Centre there was an arcade for Mortal Kombat, and while my experience with video games wasn't extensive, it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I saw one guy execute Sub-Zero's spine rip fatality, though, and thought the game was awesome. The use of sprites and the short videos for the character's biography was a lure that hinted at something spectacular. Of course playing at the arcade was a disaster. I tried to get the hang of Rayden but never even made it to the mirror match. It wasn't until later that I got the port for the Sega Genesis that I had the time to get good at it. My character of choice became Sub-Zero, but I came to be alright with Kano, as well.

Mortal Kombat became a principle title in a growing controversy over violence in video games. While this was part of its allure, the great bonus features and many secrets of Mortal Kombat were probably more talked about by its fans. For a long time, the secret character Reptile was little more than an urban legend, and as these were pre-Internet days for me, I couldn't confirm or deny it until I read an article in a Sega magazine telling me how to fight him, but I never got the chance until the home port. The home versions on both the Genesis and the SNES were censored to have no blood and less gory fatalities, but luckily the Genesis version had the blood code (down, up, left, left, A, right, down).

The seven fighters were great. Bruce Lee's influence was divided between archetypal martial artist Liu Kang and movie star Johnny Cage. FBI agent Sonya Blade was tracking scarred thug Kano. Sub-Zero was out to assassinate Shang Tsung but was haunted by the spectre of the ninja he had murdered: Scorpion. And then of course there was Rayden the Thunder God. Then there were the two iconic bosses: four-armed half-dragon Goro, who has become one of the most recognizable characters in gaming, and shapeshifting sorcerer Shang Tsung. I liked the setup between them - the monstrous and terrifying minion and then the sinister mastermind.

The limitations of the medium meant that the story had to be delivered in snippets, during biographies and story splashes before you pressed start, and in character endings when you beat the game. It was told in a more coherent fashion in the comic book released in conjunction. It took a little work to get to know it, and at the time it wasn't nearly as elaborate as it became. The tournament of Mortal Kombat was held once every generation, and through it, the conquest of our world could be achieved by evil, extra-dimensional entities, represented here by Shang Tsung. If these outworld forces won the tournament ten times in a row, they would be free to conquer Earth. The shokan prince Goro had won nine already, making this one the deciding factor. The seven fighters were the final champions of our world, lured or brought by force to Shang Tsung's hidden island citadel. Not much to it, but these were just the first steps in a gruesome, ongoing legacy.

Jesse's Junk

A Misadventure

Friday. I'm on my way home, standing on the crowded subway, and at this point it would be just after four PM. Coming up on Dupont, one stop before mine, a woman brushes past me so she can get off. As she does, she grabs my junk. This is not an accident. She cups; there is pressure. I'm wearing a winter coat which she had to reach under.

This is mostly just exasperating and confusing. I look around to see if anyone had noticed, particularly at a girl sitting in front of me and if she raised her head, would have direct line of sight to my crotch, but she's looking down at a DS and she, as well as everyone around me, makes no indication that she had seen anything unusual. So I look over to the woman who had done the deed, as she's still standing at the door, and after a few seconds, she turns and looks at me, meeting and holding my gaze, but with an expression so neutral it makes me momentarily second-guess that it hadn't been an accident. Then the door chimes, she leaves, and I am left still perplexed on a crowded subway to ponder what just happened.

This woman had a very innocuous appearance. She was wearing a long black winter jacket and one of those puffy winter hats. She was carrying a shopping bag. She had glasses. I'd guess she was in her sixties. She looked like any number of old women you'd see at church. She has successfully re-validated my suspicion of everyone. I'm sorry I can't give a more thorough description, and so can't help you avoid the same strange confusion that accompanied the incident. My advice, then, is just keep your eye on everybody, because you never know.

That photo I grabbed without asking from this guy's Flickr.

2011!

Cool Shit: Photograph

Photo by Rene Johnston of the Toronto Star

The first Toronto homicide of 2011 happened at two in the morning on New Year's Day near Queen and Portland. This photo accompanied the Star article for it, and I thought it looked pretty awesome.

Where Do They Keep the Water?

Movie Review: Walkabout

James: "Yeah, Pam? Australia has the cutest animals in the world."
Pamela: "Australia has the most poisonous animals in the world."

My familiarity with director Nicholas Roeg is limited to The Witches and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and while I guess these are both weird movies, Walkabout is weird on a whole other level. It sets its tone early with a disjointed prologue that climaxes with a man taking his two children - a teenage girl and a very young (I'm thinking seven or eight) boy - out for a picnic in the middle of nowhere, and then tries to kill them. Upon failing, he blows up the car and kills himself. His children flee into the outback.

Walkabout is very clearly trying to tell us something but exactly what that is is up for discussion. The white children are woefully unequipped for the journey ahead of them. The older sister attempts to take charge but it's clear she has no idea what she's doing - she at one point feeds her brother salt to stave off his thirst. So at first you'd think it's a statement on how the advances of modern society produces incapable people, or that while we might call the aborigines primitive, they at least know what they need to teach their children. Something like that. But later, when an aboriginal boy stumbles upon them while on his walkabout and takes them under his wing, scenes of him killing a kangaroo are juxtaposed with quick shots of a butcher preparing a loin, which I thought was to suggest that the advances of modern society have not advanced us far beyond our neighbours at all. That's reinforced, to a degree, by a couple of scenes comparing the courting rituals of the aborigines and white people. Then the final scene hints that the movie was about something else altogether, not a comparison of the two civilizations but rather just the story of the children's walkabout itself.

That's my only real criticism of the movie - it at times seems to want to be heady, and whenever it does it's just confusing. Maybe I should get stoned and revisit it. But Walkabout has an interesting story, surprisingly compelling characters despite having relatively little dialogue, and it's gorgeous. The film lingers frequently to consider the beauty of the outback, and pauses to focuses on its many adorable inhabitants. So frequently, in fact, that the few creepy scenes seem very stark and quietly disturbing. It's a good movie that merits a second watch.

All That Rises

Horde Zone Review: Vashj'ir

Character: Layla du Lac, undead assassination rogue.
Level Span: 80-82
Theme: Sunken night elf city.

Vashj'ir was the first zone I played after installing Cataclysm and it was immediately jarring just how linear it was.  By only a few quests in I knew I had to be paying attention. The entrance quest to Vashj'ir involves getting on a mercenary ship and sailing under the command of Legionnaire Nazgrim into the Great Sea to lay claim to a piece of land raised by the cataclysm before the Alliance does. But as the ship nears the island, it is attacked and eventually wrecked by a sea monster called Ozumat and the ship's passengers are thrown overboard into waters teeming with naga. You are saved by a Broken shaman named Erunak Stonespeaker of the Earthen Ring, who bands you with Nazgrim and a handful of other survivors. What follows is a desperate battle for ground against the naga led by insidious sea witch Lady Naz'jar, as she attempts to lay siege to the Abyssal Maw, Neptulon's elemental realm of water.

Undersea zones have been talked about by fans for a while, and the developers were luckily mindful of all the potential problems such a zone would present. Early quests reward players with permanent zone-specific buffs that allow them increased speed and water breathing, and soon after, underwater mounts. While the steps taken to make the zone fun are great, the addition of a third axis can take some getting used to, and it was frequently difficult to tell how far my character was from her enemies. While this can be frustrating for any class it's particularly troublesome for a rogue, whose combat is so dependent on her position relative to her foes. It's easy, too, to not notice hostile units come up on you from either above or below, which can prove dangerous in crowded areas.

If you're sick of the naga, you're probably not going to like this zone, but if you're in the camp who liked the naga when they first appeared and don't think they've ever really gotten proper treatment then you'll like Vashj'ir, as it's all about the naga and is full of them. Peppered throughout are deep sea murlocs, gilblins - which are ocean-dwelling goblins (and are kinda stupid), and an array of underwater wildlife of surprising variety. The place looks pretty great, if a bit by the book - giant coral reefs, expansive ruins draped in seaweed and moss, as well as two huge stationary urchin-like creatures whom characters can travel inside.

The naga have gotten substantial attention at times before, none moreso than Zangarmarsh, but never with the same kind of attention to detail. It almost feels like Lady Vashj was wasted, as Lady Naz'jar has much more presence as a villain throughout, including a short (and pretty awesome) flashback questline explaining how she and her forces came to Vashj'ir and what they hope to do there. Although maybe she seems like a better character because Naz'jar seems to be doing a better job. The Horde forces fight a losing battle, and even though your character is victorious in her quests, they are small victories that only set Lady Naz'jar back, but not enough to thwart her. Eventually, in a climactic submarine battle, she is successful in breaching the Abyssal Maw, forcing a confrontation in the dungeon, the Throne of the Tides.

Legionnaire Nazgrim was a surprisingly good character considering he's pretty much just another grunt. Players may remember seeing him at Conquest Hold back in Grizzly Hills when he was just a sergeant - he gave a lot of the Voldrune quests. Though determined, he also sees the hopelessness of the situation and muses frequently in quest dialogue that he thinks this will end in failure. There is less to Erunak than Nazgrim, though Erunak plays a more important role throughout. Two other interesting characters are the undersea demigods, Nespirath and L'ghorek. These are giant immobile urchin-like creatures who Naz'jar is trying to corrupt to use against Neptulon, and the player attempts to free them. Despite resembling beings who might be affiliated with the Old Gods, Nespirath and L'ghorek are more benevolent entities. Though your interactions with them are limited, they are apparently a preview to a similar third creature who is to be a boss battle in a later dungeon in the Abyssal Maw.

Dungeon: Throne of the Tides

The action of Vashj'ir culminates in a battle to secure the entrance to the Abyssal Maw, which the naga win. Just as the characters are about to regroup, the leviathan Ozumat grabs Erunak with its tentacle and pulls him in. Nazgrim follows in the hopes of saving him. Nazgrim is then found just inside the dungeon entrance and commands you to find Erunak and free him, and kill Lady Naz'jar.

The dungeon is engaging enough. Aside from Commander Ulthok the bosses are all significant characters from the Vashj'ir storyline, and the fights are generally straightforward but demanding - you can learn the mechanics with ease but you need to be paying attention. All round, the dungeon serves as a good conclusion to Vashj'ir. The only problem I had with it is that the final battle with Ozumat is disappointingly easy - you find Neptulon under attack by Ozumat and must protect him from waves of murlocs and faceless, after which Neptulon gives the party a buff that makes them all but invincible, at which point you turn on Ozumat. You can lose key members of your party to the waves and still survive the fight with Ozumat, and as a rogue, it's impossible to attack Ozumat from behind, so you can't employ your more devastating strategies on it. But at least it's a fight with a lot of weight to it lore-wise, and Neptulon's involvement makes it epic enough in the greater scope of the Vashj'ir story.

Kick

Let's Make Sandwiches

October 2006

As our success began to runaway with us, the usefulness of Let's Make Sandwiches on a larger scale was quickly noticed by several international espionage agencies. And while I'm contractually and legally bound not to reveal which agencies they were, I will say that they were Interpol, the CIA, and the Shin-Bet. We began incorporating codified imagery for use by agents in the field. Unfortunately, due to the spastic content of the strips and the poor quality of the art, our contracts dissolved when several agents misinterpreted our strips and were consequently executed. In retaliation, they cut the tips off Frankie's fingers, and put out a contract for my head. Last I heard, it was up to $150 million in uncut diamonds.

This was the first of many many Let's Make Sandwiches to feature explosions. I enjoyed this one in particular because I got to draw both a poof cloud and a person exploding. I was reading a lot of Jhonen Vasquez at the time, and may well have totally copied that explosion from one of his comics. It was my idea to have a guy get kicked and then explode, and it was Frankie's idea to have that guy relating a flashback in which he explodes and thus disappears in a puff of logic.

I Know Drug-Real from Real-Real

Movie Review: Phantom of the Paradise

Anyone in Winnipeg (apparently and inexplicably) knows Brian De Palma's 1974 horror musical Phantom of the Paradise like the back of their likely cold and idle hand, but I, having not plumbed deep into the dark well of horror musicals, wasn't terribly familiar with it and had little idea what to expect.

I knew it was a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, but it also borrows liberally from Faust and other pieces of horror literature. It tells the story of William Finley as Winslow Leach attempting to liberate his music from the hands of hot-shot music producer Swan played by prolific musician Paul Williams. As Winslow fails, he becomes progressively more disfigured, until finally he's hot a horrific scar on his face and can't sing or speak anymore. Adopting the costume of the Phantom, Winslow launches into a campaign of revenge on Swan, but Swan seduces him into writing music he will use to open his long-awaited club, the Paradise.

I claim to ostensibly understand the 70s cheese horror musical, but the one I like and base that claim on is very easily the most famous example, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I'm not an expert by any means. Phantom of the Paradise is a cool movie with a lot of style, great costumes, decent music, and is pretty funny, making it easy to see why it has accumulated such a large cult following since its release. My major criticism of it is that it hops back and forth from serious to silly from scene to scene, and I feel that had it shifted its focus more to either, it would've been a better film. The film also suffers from a fairly atrocious leading lady, Jessica Harper, who can't seem to act for shit, but there's not a whole lot to her character, Phoenix, to work with. And then there's her consistently terrible dancing. Like, Elaine Benes terrible. I found this youtube clip to show you just what I mean. If you want to hear the music you'll have to turn up your speakers, it's mixed very very low.

She dances like that more than once. Getting over it is pretty easy as Phoenix isn't really in the movie that much. She is displaced by Beef, played by Gerrit Graham (perhaps recognizable to some as a recurring Star Trek actor) as the lead singer of the Swan's show. Beef is a fun character, his overblown macho stage persona contrasting his flamboyantly effeminate backstage personality, plus he's always got great costumes.

Fantastic elements crop up slowly through the second act and third acts, although the revelations tended to fall a little short of the earlier implications. Swan seems like a much more powerful villain than he turns out to be, and is defeated with such ease that it's surprising no one managed it before. There are a bundle of plot holes and characters making obviously stupid decisions, but the playful atmosphere of the film makes those drawbacks easy to ignore. It's a fun movie to watch, especially in a theatre with a bunch of people.

Snakes

Let's Make Sandwiches

September 2006

This was, and would remain, one of my favourite installments of Let's Make Sandwiches. I don't really remember putting it together but it more than our first one set the tone for what we were going for: complex characters with deep emotional resonance. 

Chicago

Let's Make Sandwiches

September 2006

It's the fall of 2006. York's student-run newspaper, the Excalibur, really really sucks, and among its worst offenders are the collection of not very funny comics at the back. The saving grace of Excalibur's comics, the hilarious Chudley Pie, hasn't been around for I think almost a year, and with few exceptions, every week is a disgrace.

Enter acclaimed demoniac Frankie Garofalo and I. We decide that the crudely drawn two-panel comic Frankie drew and taped to his wall is better than this shit. I re-draw it, submit it, it's published, and Frankie and I are now celebrated comic auteurs.

Let's Make Sandwiches was met with widespread critical praise and catapulted us both to the pinnacle of student newspaper stardom. It all fell apart quickly, I with my prostitutes and Frankie with his sandbags full of cocaine, but we shone brightly before we fizzled out.

Frankie had originally drawn a dinosaur-like monster but I'd been watching a lot of Samurai Jack and so re-imagined it as some kind of Genndy Tartakovsky octopus monster.

The Innkeeper's Daughter

Warcraft Review: Cataclysm in General

So here's how zones have come to be structured. You get a breadcrumb quest from a call or command board within a city, you follow it to an outpost in the zone. This outpost has a couple quests to get you acquainted with what's going on, introduce conflicts and the forces at play in the area. You do a few rounds of questing, then are moved on to a new outpost elsewhere in the zone, that expands upon your actions at the earlier outpost. Usually you move from a town or substantial settlements to staging areas and camps. Another few rounds of quests. This goes on maybe four or five times. You're always moving, there's little backtracking, and one thing follows from the other. Most questlines have unique mechanics at some point in them, and you find yourself frequently participating in large scale battles and joining notable heroes against powerful foes. Structurally, World of Warcraft is the best it's ever been. It's actually fun to quest - you're reading your quest log again, and the scale of the story as you experience is pretty cool. You feel like you're impacting the story much more than before. So there is all that. Unfortunately, there's still a lot to complain about.

Questing and levelling is fun, and the game as a whole has reduced the compunction to grind significantly. But there's still a whole lot of it. I don't throw up my hands every time I have to retrace my steps, but the same dungeon run once a day for two weeks isn't that fun - and dungeon grinding is the funner of grinds. We start talking about dailies and reputations and professions and it's absolutely mind-numbing. But these grinds are necessary now even to casual players if you want to stay competitive in any arena of endgame material which has been made so much more casual-friendly. But it's cheating - it's a trick to keep players playing the same thing over again so they can play new stuff when it finally comes out. And when finally it does come out, there's a new grind with it.

For example, archaeology. What the hell kind of profession is that? When it was first announced, Blizzard called it a profession you could focus on "in your downtime." I had no idea what they meant then, and I have even less of an idea what they mean after bringing archaeology up a few levels. It can't help but create downtime. Every other profession allows you to make something of use to you: equipment, enhancements, toys, reagents, et cetera. Archaeology allows you to make vendor trash - and fairly cheap vendor trash at that. Ostensibly, the reward is the lore, which should actually make it the profession I get behind. But the thing is: the lore tidbits that accompany each piece of vendor trash, while fun, don't leave my character with anything they can keep. So really, I can fully appreciate that reward by going on Wowpedia and reading it there. Completing it in game offers me nothing extra except, I guess, a minor sense of accomplishment? For tabbing out and blogging while my character flies between digsites?

Oh I know, I know. What about Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds? The Innkeeper's Daughter? That adorable little baby raptor skeleton? And yeah, these are sweet items that anyone would want, but you stumble upon them based solely on luck. In another profession, if you want to be able to make something, there is a clear path to making that happen. If you want to make elixir A you must gain reputation with faction B. It's a grind but at least it's a grind with a finish line. You want the Bones of Transformation, just dig aimlessly. Don't have a night elf digsite? Better dig at some other one until one opens up. You might get it. Maybe not, though. Just keep digging.

The endgame grinds are just so tedious, and it's made worse by the fact that questing has been refined into such a smooth experience with good pacing; when you break 85 and finish questing your zone dry the game slows to a muddy slog almost immediately. You have to work hard on the same material over and over before you're outfitted to enter heroics and hold your ground. Then you have to run the same heroics repeatedly before you're outfitted for raids. It doesn't ever stop.

But the focus was split into many different things, this time, with an emphasis on endgame but a revisit to all the mid-level content we've all slogged through on all our different characters in the past. And the revisited zones are great. Questing's come a long long way since World of Warcraft and it shows. Zones that have gotten the full treatment are incredibly well done. Unfortunately, a whole lot of zones haven't. Now, I haven't had the chance to play through everything yet, but I've quested a few zones of varying levels, started a couple of new characters, and I'm shocked by how half-assed some of this is. I'll compare.

I started a night elf mage and found the Shadowglen to be virtually identical to its earlier incarnation. Iverron is still waiting for someone to cure his poison after five years. I kept on playing expecting a phase to come in, announcing that the cataclysm had occurred and all that, but no such luck. And things don't improve once you finish up in Shadowglen and go to Dolanaar. The starting experience has been tweaked to be a little more streamlined, but it's essentially the same, and I was incredibly disappointed with that. Especially when the new race/class combinations encouraging players to start new character, it felt ridiculous to be running the same quests over again.

Darkshore has been completely overhauled, and it's wicked (which is even more impressive considering how boring it used to be). It's got a really solid story that keeps you moving and interested. Several elements have been added to make it much easier to travel through, and the quests are varied and fun. There's still the staple "kill x murlocs" and "find x dirt clumps" or whatever but the numbers are generally smaller and they mix it up enough to keep it exciting. Once I finished it, I was surprised at how much fun it was, and was optimistic about the new expansion.

So then I hopped on a Horde character and played through Arathi Highlands. I had very high hopes for Arathi and maybe I did it to myself, but I was again severely disappointed. Some modest improvements and indication that time has passed. But the quests are all completely identical. The quest hubs are arranged so you're generally not going to the same area multiple times, which is nice, but still, there were no quests here I hadn't done before. You have NPCs telling you these are the same quests you've done before. It's maddening. What's more is that the prevalence of elementals in the area and the impact of "The Princess Trapped" questline made Arathi ideally suited to be of importance to the elemental war raging after the cataclysm, but the quests here are so untouched they may as well have been left alone completely.

I wasn't expecting every single zone to be redone. Everything since The Burning Crusade is tolerable. But what I had thought we were going to get with Cataclysm was a revamp of every old world zone, and that's not what we got. Blizzard is still capable of making a good game, that's very clear, but what's also clear is how cheap and flippant they can be with their own material, and they're high profile enough at this point that there's not really an excuse for it.

True Inspiration is Impossible to Fake

Movie Review: Inception

It's been half a year since Inception was first released in theatres to very loud and widespread praise. Since the film's home release last month, I have seen it a second time, and so was able to approach the subject again and decide for myself whether or not that praise was merited, or if there was anything to the criticism that has been lodged at it.

It is still awesome. There are movies that come along once in a while that can't help but stand apart from everything around them. They have a uniqueness to them that can't be mimicked without being an obvious rip-off. It's never any one thing, but Inception has a very specific way of telling its story, and I imagine this method is now one that will be irrevocably tied to the film.

Inception's premise isn't entirely unique - movies have been set within the human mind before to varying degrees of success. But in more recent examples that come to mind, that we are watching scenes play out in a dream-realm is a surprise (what a twist!) to the audience. Inception never attempts to fool us. In the first scene, as we see a botched extraction play out, the premise of the film is laid out for us in clear terms. The various accompanying elements are explained retroactively, but the story takes advantage of a newcomer to the business to exposit everything organically.

Director/writer/everything Christopher Nolan found in Inception a great way to have his cake and eat it too, and while he exploits that a lot, it's still fun to watch and I'm glad he did. It's a science fiction that never really feels like one - the technology behind extraction isn't explained and we don't really need it to be. We know what it does, we don't need to know how it works. Slow motion, which has become an action movie stylistic staple, is used here as a narrative device. It shows us surreal imagery that we can take literally. It essentially involves magic and ghosts but is never fantastic. It's a heist movie that can still be a heist movie and involve bombastic action sequences and explosions. The time that Nolan put into this film's conception is very clear.

In usual Nolan fashion, everything goes to shit, the stakes keep getting higher, and the situation becomes more desperate with every scene. This would all fall flat without a great cast to back it up, and it seems impossible to walk down a corridor in Inception without tripping over an A-list actor. Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb leads the band of extractors, and masters the art of being on the verge of insanity under a veil of professional reservation. Ellen Page is Ariadne, a rookie architect who immediately sees Cobb's destabilization, and becomes the second lead in a subplot to uncover the mysteries of his past for the protection of the team. The team includes point man Arthur played sexily by Joseph Gordan-Levitt, forger Eames played also sexily by Tom Hardy (queer viewers can read into their playful banter as gay innuendo), chemist Yusef played by Dileep Rao, and backing the whole operation is Ken Watanabe's eloquent Saito, who joins the action to ensure his investment pays off. Cilian Murphy's Robert Fischer is at the centre of their heist, and only because it's his subconscious being explored, he becomes one of the more developed characters, and shoulders the weight with ease.

The band of adventurers are great, but the bulk of my acting accolades go to Marion Cotillard as the film's villain - the memory-ghost of Cobb's wife, Mal. There's a scene where Ariadne sneaks into Cobb's subconscious and finds Mal in a trashed hotel room, and it's brilliant to watch. Cotillard's elegance belies a very cold and detached lethality, made more substantial by Page's fear of her. The concept behind Mal makes her a terrifying adversary despite not actually existing. She's part of Cobb, which makes her as skilled at disrupting his plans as he is at coming up with them, and Cobb's emotional attachment to her makes her virtually impossible for him to defeat. Like her real-world predecessor, this Mal only wants Cobb, and attempts to destroy all his connections to the real world to achieve that. Their story together is tragic and beautiful, and it's not often that a relationship can hold that kind of resonance in an action movie.

And then, just thrown in for good measure, are a bunch of other great actors who I would call underused if this wasn't a cast so already bloated with talent. Lukas Haas, Peter Postlethwaite, Tom Berenger, and of course Michael Caine all play their parts well even if they're on the screen for such short spans. It must be nice for Nolan to be at a point in his career when he can get such high profile actors for what would have to be a throwaway cast for a less established director.

Inception hasn't been free of criticism, and the one that is I think the most substantial is that aside from Cobb, and to a lesser extent Ariadne and Fischer, the characters are largely one-dimensional, and it's true. There's not a lot to the support characters, but on the other hand, they serve their purpose in the film, and we are quickly made to like them. Cobb's backstory is unusually elaborate and requires a lot of attention, and this is already a film that's nearly two and a half hours long. While it would be nice to get into it a bit with characters like Arthur, Saito, Eames or Yusef, it's unnecessary, and this is a film with very little fat left to be trimmed.

Another criticism, famously lodged by the South Park episode "Insheeption," is that a premise being convoluted doesn't mean it's cool. This statement is true, but I don't think it applies here, and the ground kinda of fell out from under the South Park writers when they admitted to not having seen the movie. Yeah, the movie has a loaded premise and there's a lot to explain, but it's paced well enough that it's never overwhelming or confusing.

I'm not a big fan of bandying about terms like "perfect movie" but there is very little wrong with Inception. As an action movie, it's got very exciting and original sequences which only get more and more intense. As a drama and character study, it gets great performances from its actors and explores some very dark territory. And just as a film in general, it tells a compelling story that covers a lot of ground, has you on the edge of your seat, and is just a lot of fun to watch. Plus there's not really any room for a sequel. I'm interested what people will be saying about Inception in, say, ten years or so, but I have a feeling it will be considered for a long time as one of Nolan's crowning achievements, and an action movie on a scope rarely seen.