THE NINE LEVELS OF HELL (AS APPLIED TO UNDERWHELMING THIRD ENTRIES IN MOVIE FRANCHISES)

To qualify for this list, a third movie in a trilogy must fit these qualifications:

1.) It must suck. Therefore, Back To The Future III, for example, doesn’t qualify.
2.) It must be a worse movie than its two predecessors. If Army of Darkness were a bad movie, hypothetically speaking, it wouldn’t qualify, because the original Evil Dead is pretty bad.
3.) Its two predecessors must at least have been okay, and preferably good (although it’s permissible for the first to be better than the second). This knocks out, for example, Austin Powers: Goldmember, because the second Austin Powers movie is just unwatchable crap. (If you liked it, tough noogies. My list.)
4.) Its two predecessors must have been somewhat notable. This cuts out most horror movie trilogies, which are mostly boringly bad and of a generally mediocre quality throughout.

Thus:

FIRST LEVEL: Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Rocky III, Rambo III, Lethal Weapon 3, Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome

SECOND LEVEL: Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation, X3: The Last Stand, Friday After Next, Spy Kids 3D

THIRD LEVEL: American Wedding, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, The Naked Gun 33 1/3rd

FOURTH LEVEL: Alien 3, The Matrix Revolutions, Blade: Trinity, Major League: Back To The Minors

FIFTH LEVEL: Spider-Man III, The Godfather Part III, Speed Zone!, Scream 3

SIXTH LEVEL: Batman Forever, Scary Movie III, Hellraiser 3: Hell On Earth, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift

SEVENTH LEVEL: Beverly Hills Cop III, The Bad News Bears Go To Japan, Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles

EIGHTH LEVEL: Shrek the Third, Rush Hour 3, Addams Family Reunion

NINTH LEVEL: Superman III, Look Who’s Talking Now

Beautiful Girls is something of a rarity, because it is a guy movie.

By this, I do not mean it is an action movie, which for some reason has become the accepted definition of “guy movie,” despite the fact that women can enjoy a good action movie just as well as men can. (Men, to be fair, are probably better at enjoying shitty action movies. Eighteen million opening gross for Rambo, baby!) It doesn’t mean “stupid gross-out comedy” either – thankfully, society’s notions of gender have evolved to the point where a boy fucking a pie is considered hilarious entertainment for both sexes, and honestly, aren’t we all slightly better for that?

No, Beautiful Girls (a great film in the fine and too-short career of the late Ted Demme) is a guy movie in that it is the equivalent of a “bonding”-style chick flick, except instead of being about women, it is about men. This is a dreadfully rare commodity in Hollywood; Diner and About A Boy are probably the only other two major entrants in the field, and the latter is also about single parenting and the definition of family, so let’s say it only counts as half. The simple truth is that, at some point, Hollywood decided – and probably not entirely without justification – that movies about men confronting their fears and anxieties, men bullshitting, and men being, well, guys, were not box office mojo in the working. So this is a rare example of it.

And it’s a good example, of men supposedly in their prime, their early thirties – and societally, we’re all conditioned to accept that men in their early thirties to mid-forties are expected to take the lead in any problematic situations, there has been science done on this and everything, trust me – and, like most men in their early thirties, not really happy about it. In your early thirties, you’re not definitively not a kid any more, you’re an adult – but oftentimes, you still don’t know what you’re doing with your life, where you’re going; and if you’re very, very lucky, maybe you understand women a bit.

Willie (Timothy Hutton), a piano player, comes home early to his small hometown for his high school reunion, his girlfriend (Annabeth Gish) due to arrive a couple of days later. His brother Mo (Noah Emmerich) is (mostly) happily married. His best friend Tommy (Matt Dillon) plows snow and landscapes for a living, and relives his high school football glory days by cheating on his girlfriend (Mira Sorvino) with his former head cheerleader (Lauren Holly). Paul (Michael Rapaport) is trying to fix his relationship with Jan (Martha Plimpton).

Floating around these guys are Max Perlich as “the sidekick,” Pruitt Taylor Vince as “the other friend done good,” Uma Thurman as “the unattainable dream girl,” and Rosie O’Donnell as, well, mostly herself really, but this was long before she got annoying, back when she still did excellent standup. All of these performances are excellent; Emmerich allows his calm, placid demeanour to occasionally reflect the anxiety every dad who doesn’t understand why he’s a dad already, Holly’s brittle exterior lets us see her need to not just become another suburban wife, and Hutton’s everyman character is universal without being generic.

And then, on a whole other level, there is Natalie Portman, playing an intelligent, nigh-luminous thirteen-year-old girl named Marty, who immediately develops a deep (but, do not worry, PG-rated) relationship with Willie. The script and Portman’s performance play this absolutely right; Willie laments (and you can understand why) that he’s actually jealous of some punk 13-year-old kid because that kid gets to be thirteen at the same time as Marty – and it’s obvious that Marty is equally jealous of Willie’s girlfriend for exactly the same reason in reverse. Every time Portman is on screen, the sense that there’s this amazing life ahead of Marty is strong without ever being forced or obvious. This could have been a plotline that wrecked this movie, simply because the temptation to eroticize it for shock value would be obvious, but it’s played respectfully and intelligently throughout – although Willie and Marty both wish things were different, they just aren’t. And they have to deal with that.

This is a movie about guys being guys. About guys playing video games (and cheating when their friend’s back is turned), about guys getting drunk and having a singalong, about guys stupidly not understanding that they have a good thing going with a given girl, about guys not understanding when they’ve fucked up a thing with a given girl for good, about guys swearing at each other, about guys having a tendency to want to fight things out to solve them even when they know it’s stupid and won’t help, about guys thinking with their dick and about guys managing to not think with their dick, about guys wanting to live the dream and about guys learning to settle for a pretty good thing instead. And you should see it. Because it’s pretty damn good.

Ultra-awesome home theatre setups. I am horribly, horribly impressed, although when it comes to home theatre, I am a fan of couches first and foremost. I mean, presumably the objective of home theatre is to have somebody with which to snuggle, right? That’s the biggest advantage of home theatre over, like, actual theatre.

(Yes, yes, I know, no cinema talkers, less expensive, et cetera. But in terms of experience…)

You are given a hundred million dollars and orders to remake The Seven Samurai (or, if you prefer, The Magnificent Seven) in the setting of your choice.

What is the setting, and who plays each of the following roles:

The Stoic Leader
The Right-Hand Man Who Gets All The Good Jokes
The Weapons Master
The Gung-Ho Kid Who Falls For The Pretty Girl
The Guy Who Claims He’s Only In It For The Money
The Wanted Man On The Downward Spiral
The Outsider (Who Identifies With The Villagers)

Explain your work.

Heath Ledger dead at 28.

A good young actor, who I firmly believe was on the brink of greatness. Fuck.

Best Picture: Juno, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton, Atonement. A much better year than average for nominees in this category, with everything being either very good or pretty damned good; where is my standard Academy embarrassment nomination? Where is the Ghost, the Crash? Anyway, this is basically a two-horse race between P.T. Anderson and the Coens, maybe with Juno being a dark horse, this year’s Little Miss Sunshine except less annoying.

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood, Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd, George Clooney for Michael Clayton, Tommy Lee Jones for In The Valley Of Elah, Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises. Again, all very solid performances, although Jones is in a movie that was kind of iffy on the whole, and Depp isn’t going to win an Oscar until he trims his hair and starts being a nice respectable person in a movie about lawyers or businessmen finding their inner child or something. I think it’s DDL’s to lose, frankly, because his performance (while excellent) is the showy, big-turn performance the Academy fucking loves.

Best Actress: Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Ellen Page for Juno, Julie Christie for Away From Her, Laura Linney for The Savages, Marion Cotillard for La Môme. This one’s interesting, because we have the first major embarrassment nom (Cate Blanchett, who had a bad performance in a worse movie that was designed as cynical Oscar bait), the first serious unknown (Cotillard, completely off my radar and everybody else’s), and then two very small-scale turns (Linney and Christie), rounded out by a young’un in Page. My gut says Linney, but I think there’s a shot for Ellen Page or Julie Christie as well.

Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson’s War, Javier Bardem for No Country For Old Men, Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Hal Holbrook for Into The Wild, Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton. Traditionally the “give the award to the old fart who’s paid his dues” award, and in that regard you have to look to Tom Wilkinson as an old fart who has, most verily, paid his dues. On the other hand, you have excellent performances from pretty much everybody, Hal Holbrook as a lesser-known old fart who has a lot of dues paid as well, and Bardem, who created a classic movie villain, and this is also the category where villains do well. Tough call.

Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett for I’m Not There, Ruby Dee for American Gangster, Saorise Royan for Atonement, Amy Ryan for Gone Baby Gone, Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton. I never have any idea about this category and almost always get it wrong. That having been said, I am rooting for Tilda Swinton and hope that Cate Blanchett doesn’t get a win for the pretentiously shitty “it’s Bob Dylan but not” movie that I strongly disliked.

Best Director: The Coens for No Country For Old Men, P.T. Anderson for There Will Be Blood, Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton, Jason Reitman for Juno, Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Again no bad nominations, although I think this is again a two-horse race between the Coens and Anderson, as the Academy finally recognizes one or the other as the master director/directing team that they are.

Cloverfield is, quite simply, just about fucking perfect in every respect that a giant monster movie could be.

Out of all the things people have forwarded me this week, I am gonna talk about this. Mostly because I’ve seen the sentiment that films like Juno and Waitress and Knocked Up are “pro-life movies” crop up elsewhere and it’s just getting annoying.

Juno and Waitress and Knocked Up are all, emphatically, pro-choice movies. This is not hard to understand. In all of these films, the protagonist becomes pregnant, then – wait for it – chooses to have the child. See? Pro-choice. There is a choice made in each film, and the choice to not have an abortion is made freely in each incidence. In all of the movies, other characters are used to emphasize the fact that these characters are, if they wish, allowed to get an abortion.

That is all that being pro-choice entails.

(Never mind that from a narrative standpoint, an abortion is lousy for a whole movie. Consider: the HBO telefilm If These Walls Could Talk deals with three women who have abortions, in three separate segments, each about forty minutes long, and at least one of them feels stretched out. That’s because an abortion is a single event: it happens and done. You can deal with the fallout or the decisionmaking to an extent, but that’s mostly going to be “talk talk” rather than “do do”, and a good narrative usually goes for the latter rather than the former. That’s why pregnancy is a good storytelling engine: it has a defined beginning, middle and “end” which everybody is completely familiar with, which provides its own set of challenges. It’s a process rather than an event, which is why any writer worth their salt knows it’s easier and offers more possibilities for storytelling than an abortion does.)

In any case, complaining that the characters choose to have the children makes the films “pro-life” is just stupid, because by doing so the complainant, who is presumably pro-choice, is buying into the framing of the pro-life argument that being pro-choice is de facto being pro-abortion. This just isn’t true, as any pro-choice individual knows: the whole point of the movement is to make abortion safe, legal, and (for most people) rare. Abortion isn’t a pleasant experience and wishing it on people is just ludicrous; the point of being pro-choice is to ensure that women have the legal right to determine the use of their own bodies. Yes, the movies present childbirth as miraculous. So what? Childbirth is pretty goddamned miraculous, after all. It just shouldn’t be legally required.

That’s why Juno and Waitress and Knocked Up are all pro-choice movies. They assume their characters have a choice. It’s just that simple. Anything more is arguing for ideological tautologies we really don’t need.

Many things in 2007 were good. These, unfortunately, are not some of them.

Balls of Fury

On paper, I can understand how this might have been appealing: a combination sports comeback parody/kung fu epic, Enter The Dragon as applied to ping-pong. It even had Christopher Walken, for crying out loud. Unfortunately, it only had Christopher Walken With Give-Me-My-Paycheque-Already-Action-Grip, as opposed to good Christopher Walken. Worse, it had precisely one decent joke (which was in the trailer) and a plot so stupid it barely deserved consideration as something capable of putting a sequence of events in semi-chronological order. Worst of all, it starred Dan Fogler, quite possibly the least charismatic, most unfunny, and downright most unappealing “comedy actor” to appear on film in the last god-knows-how-many years. I understand that Fogler won a Tony Award, thus proving to me once and for all what I have long suspected: that Broadway does not know its head from its ass and that anything good emerging from it is the dictionary definition of “lucky accident.” Dan Fogler is a worthless piece of shit who does not deserve to be a third-rate comic relief stooge, let alone a leading-role player. Let me put it this way: Dan Fogler is Jack Black minus the talent and good looks, and I don’t particularly like Jack Black to begin with.

Hellgate: London

For the first few hours, this uninspired but at least reasonably competent 3D Diablo clone plays as one would expect the umpteenth Diablo ripoff to play. You kill monsters in an interesting post-apocalyptic future-London setting, and if the fact that the “London streets” look mostly nothing like London streets should look, at least you’re killing monsters and hiding out in tube stations with the survivors, and the various classes are at least kind of fun, and there’s at least one particularly cool scenario with really giant-ass monsters that’s a visual treat. This would be a mediocre-to-okay success, except about halfway through the game, Hellgate: London switches from a Diablo clone to a nearly impossible, teeth-grindingly frustrating, completely unfun and totally half-assed top-down realtime strategy sim, which is required to continue forward in the game. (You will never in fact do this – yes, it’s possible to eventually beat, but trust me, you will lose interest after the first ten or fifteen failed attempts.) So the single-player campaign is thus written off, and the humble player proceeds to experiment with multiplayer – except that the creators of Hellgate: London actually expect a monthly fee for the privilege of online multiplayer for their mediocre-ass game you can’t be bothered to finish in single player. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

“Survivor: China”

A show that ranges the gamut from incredibly entertaining to dreadfully toxic (and sometimes both), one of the most consistently redeeming factors of Survivor is that it’s never boring – or, at least, it was until this season. Jeff Probst’s embarrassing man-crush on gravedigger James would be the cardinal sin of most seasons, but James was a minor offender in what was probably the densest cast ever assembled for the show: moron after idiot after drooling dumbass, every last one extolling their nonexistent playskill. When winner Todd was applauded as a “grandmaster” for managing to execute what essentially amounted to the original Richard Hatch strategy – IE, “form a small alliance and hope that nobody catches on” – he was being applauded for a combination of dumb luck and the inert stupidity of practically every other player in the game. These dullards weren’t even fun to watch in the sense of generating schadenfraude – they were just boring clods. (Particularly noteworthy: Jean-Robert, the professional poker player so dense and gullible you have to wonder how the hell he makes money playing poker.)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear this was a very clever, ironic parody of the prototypical costume drama: people made up in exceptionally elaborate costumes, shouting their lines and generally being unsympathetic asses. Casting decisions you would otherwise consider excellent (Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh, Samantha Morton as Mary Queen of Scots) turn out to be completely wasted, all in pursuit of Shekhar Kapur’s artistically bankrupt vision, which is about as subtle as a trainwreck. An Elizabethan trainwreck, clad in extremely gaudy rainments, fifty percent composed of slow tracking shots. The worst part is that this is the first film to attempt to depict the English defeat of the Spanish armada – one of the most important battles in naval history – and it makes the battle boring, boring, boring. (If you really wanted to know what happened to the horses the Spanish brought along with them, though, this movie totally has you covered.)

Absolutely everything to do with DC Comics’ Countdown

Dan Didio’s latest comments about how the fans just don’t appreciate all the hard work that’s going into Countdown To Final Crisis are completely misdirected. You see, we know perfectly well how much work is going into Countdown: it takes a lot of work to write a year-long weekly series, multiple tie-in miniseries, and more one-shots than I can conveniently remember (with many, many colons and liberal use of the word “presents”). We know it’s not intended to be haphazard, boring, or gratituous. Unfortunately, though, it is haphazard, boring, and gratituous, and there literally has not been a single Countdown book, not one single, solitary, lousy issue, that has been readable – let alone “good.” It’s all a vast morass of cheap fanboy porn masquerading as a story, “what if” concepts in plot’s clothing. I could forgive Countdown if it at least sold like hotcakes and attracted readers to DC’s line (which, whatever else you might say about Civil War, Civil War did in spades), but it’s doing exactly the opposite: it’s marginalizing everybody who isn’t a longterm fan and demanding total attention from its readership, and the gradually disintegrating sales on the main title and the terrible sales on the tie-ins make it pretty clear that DC has pinned all its hopes on a white elephant. And yes, I know this is building to a Final Crisis miniseries by Grant Morrison and JG Jones, and I’ll be the first to say that a creative team like that sounds appealing – but at this point, Final Crisis itself has to be the Star Wars and Casablanca of comics combined to be worth all the dogshit DC is shovelling out in an exploitative frenzy.

Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3, Dancing Like a Tool

You know, I’ve never actually seen a movie franchise so vividly jump the shark. I saw that stupid dance and said to myself, “wow – this is the exact moment that Spider-Man movies started to suck.”

“Prison Break”

See, I like Prison Break, but man, sometimes a show just can’t jump all the hurdles that get thrown at it. Losing Sarah Wayne Callies due to her pregnancy really hurt Prison Break – sometimes you don’t realize when a character really anchors a show, but her Dr. Tancredi did precisely that, and losing Rockmond Dunbar’s soulful C-Note was a loss too. Of course, those aren’t the real problems – the real problem is that this was a show with a limited lifespan at best, because the show is CALLED “Prison Break”, and well, they broke out of the prison in the first season. So, rather than ending the show with a graceful finish, what do they do? They put the lead character in an even worse prison in Panama. You can almost hear the writers’ feverish thought process. “Gotta get them back in the prison – but can’t put ’em back in the prison – how about another prison?” It’s really kind of sad.

Whatever the fuck they are doing to Wolverine

If you asked anybody on the street about Wolverine, their answer would be “he’s the cool guy on the X-Men with claws who heals.” He does not particularly require a highly documented past, because he is supposed to have a mysterious past. He especially does not need to be the totemic survivor-legend of a race of mutant wolfen-men. He does not need a psychotic son with claws of his very own. He does not need a mutant wolfen-man archenemy who is the king of all the mutant wolfen-men. The list of things Wolverine does not need, frankly, is exhaustively long, and I am waiting to see if, in 2008, Wolverine is given a rocket-powered funny car, amusing derby-hat wearing comedy sidekick, and the hobby of juggling potatoes, learned from a ten-year journey through the back counties of Ireland, because Marvel seems absolutely determined to overcomplicate and dilute the essence of one of their best and most enduring commercial properties as much as possible.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End

As Nigel Tufnel once said, “there’s such a fine line between clever and stupid.” At World’s End wants so very badly to be clever – you can tell by the plot twists and visual stunts they throw in at every opportunity – but it always, unfortunately, remains firmly in the land of stupid. A giant 100-foot women dissolving into crabs – stupid. Sailing seas of sand – not only stupid, but unoriginal and stupid. Worse, the movie is flabby, three hours long with needless subplots (if you’re not going to resolve the Calypso/Davy Jones romance satisfactorily, then don’t spend fucking screentime on it), way too in love with explaining every little fit of creative pique the writers came up with, and just too boring for too long. If I was more inclined to be generous I could call it an admirable failure which at least tried, but this is the tail end of a trilogy that, until this point, varied from wildly entertaining to reasonably fun at the worst points – the standards are higher, and they didn’t even come close to “okay.”

One of two in a series.

Many things in 2007 were good. These are some of the most good bits.

Ratatouille

As has been said elsewhere, it’s really nice that once a year, Pixar puts out a movie, and the best case scenario is that it’s a timeless classic and the worst case scenario is that it’s just a really good, fun little movie. Ratatouille is firmly in the middle ground of Pixar releases – better than Cars or A Bug’s Life, but not as fully realized as The Incredibles or Toy Story 2. (Which makes it only about ten times as good as most movies at a bare minimum.) Brad Bird – a likely candidate for the best animation director alive, and yes, I’m counting Hayao Miyazaki when I say that – brings a relatively simple story of a rat-turned-chef to life with a minimum of fuss, a wonderful turn from Peter O’Toole and a sweet, widely applicable moral.

Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword

The deepest computer strategy game there is – period – gets its second extension, and god, what more can they pack in if they decide to create a third expansion pack as rumoured? A ton of clever new mods, new units, the addition of corporations and advanced espionage rules, a crapload of new civilizations (including the Dutch, Sumerians, Byzantines and the Holy Roman Empire – but, sadly, no Canada), and of course the chance to play as Abraham fucking Lincoln. The game just keeps getting deeper and more complex with every expansion, and the best bit is that the learning curve can be as slight or as tough as you want. And it’s so deeply moddable a game – if I were inclined to mod games, this would be it. Civ IV as applied to the Wheel of Time world? As applied to Tolkien? Heck, even Eddings. (Eddings wouldn’t be hard, you’d just take the appropriate equivalent existing civilizations and change the names.)

The Immortal Iron Fist

Unlike, for example, Chris Sims, I have no particular fetish for the curious remnants of 1970s Marvel comics, and I had no expectations of an Iron Fist series. The man wore slippers for god’s sake, little yellow kung-fu booties. He kicked people, which in and of itself is not really that amazing or impressive. (I mean, Karate Kid kicks people, and just look at Countdown.) In short: a third-tier superhero with a small, dwindling fanbase is, generally speaking, not something about which I really look forward to reading. But then Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker decided they wanted to write a complete kung fu epic, only really tangentially related to the Marvel Universe, and they got superb art from David Aja and a host of others, and thankfully they got rid of the booties. The result is quite simply the best superhero comic available at present: a non-angst-ridden story-driven work, stuffed to the buns with top-quality action, a wealth of backstory applied smartly, and whip-smart dialogue. And again: it’s Iron Fist. Who woulda thunk?

Don’t Mess With The Dragon by Ozomatli

Their best album so far, and when you’re dealing with a band with a discography like Ozomatli’s that is no small thing to say. Some music critics dismissed the album as “admirable, but unfocused.” This is Music Critic for “not all of the songs sound the same so I have trouble writing up the album in one paragraph. Please make all of your songs sound kind of alike.” Ozomatli cannot do this, though, partially because they are a nine-piece band, but mostly because they are simply too damned awesome, with their melange of funk, hip-hop, salsa, rock and jazz fusing together into an improbable, wondrous whole. And as a bonus, this is far and away their most danceable album yet.

“30 Rock”

Quite possibly the funniest television show of the new millennium – all the sharp, venomous wit of Arrested Development combined with the quotability of the best seasons of The Simpsons and a surprising amount of heart to boot, and topped off with performances that any other show would kill simply to have one of. In most shows, Judah Friedlander’s fat nerd writer would be the go-to joke character; in 30 Rock, he’s not even in the top three, not when you have Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin and – I can’t believe I’m typing this – Tracy Morgan, who prior to this was my second-least-favourite SNLer of all time (beaten out only by the truly talentless Horatio Sanz). But especially Alec Baldwin, who finally gets to display the savage comic ability that was only hinted at by his numerous guest appearances on SNL, and who should be on this show for the rest of his natural life if they can manage it.

Air Guitar Nation

Everybody making best-of movie lists this year gives the nerd-doc props to The King Of Kong (and understandably), but by god do not overlook Air Guitar Nation, which like that other doc works the “competition” storyline by having one rock-steady hero (the incomparable C-Diddy) and one egomaniacal ass (the deeply strangleworthy Bjorn Turoque), who are both extremely good at what they do. The fact that what they do is cavort around on stage rocking an imaginary guitar is at first hilarious, but then eventually becomes life-affirming and wonderful (and hilarious), and when the film progresses to the World Championships of Air Guitar, somewhere in rural Finland (no, really), and the crowds cheer for the devoted air guitarists – well, it is entirely possible that a small portion of Heaven is like this. A fairly weird portion. But a portion.

Team Fortress 2

When it comes to the Orange Box, Portal understandably gets all the hype, because it’s clever and original and funny. But Portal only lasts a few hours. The real meat of the Orange Box comes with the involving, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master online gameplay of Team Fortress 2, a game with animation and visual design reminiscent of The Incredibles and a sense of humour from, well, pretty much the same place (the Heavy Weapons Guy’s pseudo-Slavic commentary alone is worth the price of admission, but don’t discount the Scout’s Bronx taunts, the high-pitched German screaming of the Medic, or the muffled yells of the Pyro – because the Pyro wears a mask, you see). The gameplay is simple and elegant, and always extremely easy to follow: “snapshots” freeze-framing the guy who killed you not only help you identify who killed you but help newcomes get an idea of how. Plus, they helpfully label the pieces of your dead body when you get gibbed.

“Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team” by Michael Weinreb

Recommended particularly for nerds, and I estimate my readers are, oh, ninety-eight percent or so nerds. (Wave your freak flag high.) Even if you aren’t a chess fiend particularly (and I, personally, am at best an average player – although if we’re talking speed doubles chess, that’s different strokes right there), this book will resonate, because – come on – it’s about nerds surviving high school by doing their own thing. It’s just that in this case, “their own thing” wins them big-ass trophies.

Killer of Sheep

I first saw Killer of Sheep when I was 20, taking an American Cinema course. The prof had a bootleg copy, which is how I got the rare chance to see a movie that, though made in 1977, only got released this year due to conflicts over the music rights. Killer of Sheep is amazing – a lot of people liken it to Italian neorealist cinema like The Bicycle Thief, but I always thought of it as having a more Cassavetes sort of a feel, despite the film’s essential lack of continuous narrative – it’s bleak and honest but doesn’t lack heart, and indeed I would argue it almost has more because of that bleakness. It’s on DVD along with Burnett’s second feature and a number of his shorts, which are likewise brilliant. Rent or buy, either way.

The video for “1234” by Feist

The song alone would qualify for this list, but the video is the sort of thing that births superstars – delightful low-fi wonderment, relying on showmanship and pure filmmaking skill to pull off (trust me when I say that I can tell the focus pulling for the shoot was nightmarishly difficult just by looking at it), and effortlessly communicating sheer joy in a way that isn’t entirely common, to say the least. A thousand thousand high school girls just got their first girl-on-girl musician crush this year because of this video. (Tori Amos would be proud.)

The Spirit

Step 1: Get Darwyn Cooke to write and draw something.
Step 2: Fuck yeah.

Bioshock

A perfectly excellent first-person shooter, notable for both the character improvement system imported from the old (and fantastic) System Shock games, and the gorgeous, completely immersive 1940s Art Deco-ish visual design, brought to life with graphics both gorgeous and surprisingly interactive. (The opening, where your plane crashes in the middle of the ocean, and you get to swim around as you watch it sink – amazing.) Oh, and of course there’s the fact that the main plot boils down to “Atlas Shrugged, except it all goes wrong and people become zombies.” I am honest enough to admit that the game’s hearty “fuck you, Ayn Rand” ethos tickles me greatly.

Yau Man on Survivor: Fiji

Yau Man was easily the coolest player to come along in quite a while on Survivor – a canny late-fifties math teacher with a knack for practical survival and for playing the game to a brilliant inch. Plus, he was funny. Unfortunately, Yau Man made the critical mistake of thinking that somebody named “Dreamz” was intelligent enough to realize when he had precisely zero shot at winning the game outright, or that giving “Dreamz” a car would be incentive enough for the jackass to walk away happy rather than compromise his much-vaunted integrity in the hopes of winning a million dollars he would never actually win. On the bright side, the next season of Survivor, starting in February, is a “hardcore fans versus top Survivors” show, and you have to bet that Yau Man qualifies as a top Survivor – if he wants to go for a second round, that is. Yau Man might not, because he’s just that cool.

Upcoming: The stuff that did suck.

Via Norman Wilner, I see that Future Shop has released its Boxing Day flyers online, and – cheap jumbo flatscreen televisions aside – he’s right: the real story of the Boxing Day sale is the prices on the next-gen DVD players.

If you’ve been following the news on next-gen DVD technology, you know that right now the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is in full swing. Looking at it strictly from an entertainment perspective: Universal, Paramount, Dreamworks and Dimension Films are exclusive to HD-DVD, while Sony, Disney, MGM, Lion’s Gate and Fox are exclusive to Blu-Ray, with Warner Brothers and New Line supporting both formats.

From a technical perspective, Blu-Ray is the more powerful format, but HD-DVD is cheaper to produce and sell. (For a given value of “cheaper”, of course, considering that a pre-discounted list price for an HD-DVD is about $35, compared to about $40 starting list price for a Blu-Ray disc. As with all things Hollywood, the price will only drop when they think they need to drop the price to increase sales, not because their production costs shrink.) Blu-Ray is of course natively supported by anybody willing to shell out for a PS3, but HD-DVD is supported by the XBox 360’s addon drive, which more or less cancels out that advantage.

But if the door crasher sale at Future Shop is any indication, the HD-DVD backers have decided to make their play this year, because you can get a Toshiba HD-DVD player for a hundred bucks, plus free copies of 300 and The Bourne Identity, plus a mail-in offer for five more free discs (which together would cost more than the player itself). The cheapest Blu-Ray player at the sale, in comparison, is $250 with no free discs at point of sale (although they’re coming with mail-away offers for free DVDs as well).

I’m still not saying it’s time to buy a player either way. I’m probably not – after all, I want a region-free player first and foremost, and given the tenacity of the players involved I don’t see the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray going away anytime soon, as stupid and counterproductive as it might be. But if you need a new DVD player anyway and you live in Canada – well, a hundred bucks for a player is pretty good, and seven free movies is seven free movies.

The Films Of Will Smith

Will Smith Versus The Prosperous White People
Will Smith Versus The Drug Dealers
Will Smith Versus The Aliens
Will Smith Versus The Other Aliens
Will Smith Versus The Shadowy Conspiracy That Secretly Runs Everything
Will Smith Versus The Giant Steampunk Metal Spider
Will Smith Versus The Crippling Depression Of A Golfer
Will Smith Versus Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, And The Systematic Racism Against Black Athletes
Will Smith Versus The Other Aliens Again
Will Smith Versus The Even Worse Drug Dealers
Will Smith Versus The Need For Ben Affleck To Truly Realize How Much He Values His Daughter
Will Smith Versus The Robots
Will Smith Versus The Sharks And Also He Is A Fish
Will Smith Versus The Inability Of Men And Women To Communicate Their Romantic Needs
Will Smith Versus Poverty
Will Smith Versus The Zombie Vampire People

(“Will Smith Versus” concept originally invented by The King Of The Weasels.)

SUPERMAN: …maybe I’m not explaining this properly.
WONDER WOMAN: No, you’re explaining it quite well. I just don’t agree with the concept.
SUPERMAN: How can you believe that writers don’t deserve compensation for creating intellectual property?
WONDER WOMAN: Because they don’t create it. Artistic inspiration flows from Apollo.
FLASH: The guy over on Earth-50 who’s in the Authority?
WONDER WOMAN: Very funny, Wally. The god Apollo. Music, poetry and literature are his province.
BATMAN: I’m Batman.
SUPERMAN: Uh huh – look, Diana, even if I conceded that all artists owe a debt to Apollo for being able to create art – and I don’t, I’d like to stress that – then the residual fee for screenwriters is akin to royalties for novelists or playwrights, and an expression of consideration for allowing the work to be created.
WONDER WOMAN: But Apollo –
SUPERMAN: All right, for allowing humans access to the work that sprung from Apollo’s noble brow, okay?
WONDER WOMAN: Regardless of quality, it seems.
SUPERMAN: What’s that supposed to mean?
BLACK CANARY: I think she’s talking about the way Barry always used to bitch about that television show.
WONDER WOMAN: Precisely.
FLASH: You know, he really hated that they got Mark Hamill to play Trickster instead of him.
SUPERMAN: Regardless of the other qualities of that television show, you have to admit that it did poorly in the ratings and was cancelled, which means that, if you think the writers wrote a bad show, that they were thus compensated appropriately.
BATMAN: I am the night.
WONDER WOMAN: Sure – but why not simply allow these writers to negotiate individually? I see no need for a union in this instance. We are not speaking of workers toiling for a single corporate entity. There exists a market.
SUPERMAN: An extremely limited one. There are only six production studios in America, and they control just about all the production and all of the distribution of entertainment media in the country and the majority of it internationally.
WONDER WOMAN: But nothing stops these writers from attempting to leverage one studio against another for their own gain.
SUPERMAN: The self-interest of the studios keeps that from happening. Say I’m a writer. Why would Sony seek to give me a larger share of the profits than Fox?
WONDER WOMAN: To attract the best talent.
SUPERMAN: Writers will come work for me anyway, because people with an innately creative bent, as much as they want fair compensation, want to create more. If I discourage one in five writers from ever working for me, that still leaves eighty percent of them willing to work for me at the rates that I set.
WONDER WOMAN: But then quality will out, and the public –
SUPERMAN: Remember how much you complained about 300?
FLASH: Oh, god, don’t get her started again.
WONDER WOMAN: It was not historically accurate! Leonidas was not an honourable man, and the Spartans were resolute pederasts, and –
SUPERMAN: My point is that the public’s tastes are both fickle and often ignore excellent work.
BLACK CANARY: Somebody’s still not over their novel selling poorly.
SUPERMAN: I’m not saying The Janus Contract was a masterpiece, Dinah. I’m just saying it was better than The Da Vinci Code. I mean, we’ve gone back in time. I’ve met Da Vinci, for Pete’s sake…
BATMAN: The city calls to me.
FLASH: That reminds me, when is J’onn going to get back so we can swap Batman’s mind out of that chimp and into his own body?

A while back, I linked to an article about bad American cosplay, and someone in the comments made an excellent point: that Japanese cosplayers attempt to go to the heart of the character when designing the costume, while American (and presumably Canadian and other generally western-type) cosplayers rely much more heavily on the external visual. The result of this is that Japanese cosplayers actually look pretty badass when they know what they’re doing, and American cosplayers look like idiots.

Now consider this maxim as applied to the following trailer.

I think the parallels are obvious. On first glance, Speed Racer is a dedication to external imagery: making the car look just like the cartoon car, giving John Goodman that stupid moustache because the cartoon dad had a moustache, giving Emile Hersch that ugly-ass costume. These are visual elements that worked in the cartoon because it was a cartoon; they don’t directly translate well into real-life visuals.

Or, to put it another way, consider if Batman Returns had had, instead of dark, brooding Christian Bale in Kevlar and leather and rubber Batsuit, Adam West geared up in spandex Bat-togs, which look more like what actually is in the comics, even today.

(Note that I say all of this as one who honestly does not particularly give a damn about the sanctity of Speed Racer, a show I never ever watched, but strictly as somebody who, generally speaking, likes it when studios spend an estimated $120 million dollars on a movie and it manages to not be aggravatingly bad.)