30
Dec
29
Dec
1.) Wolfie’s forehead is frigging enormous. Is he a Klingon? Does the store manager loathe Trekkies? Is this anti-nerd discrimination?
2.) FUN AT HOME PROJECTS: Guess what ethnic group Wolfie is supposed to represent! Pick one of: Jewish, Italian, Hispanic, or “Asian.” Is it not shameful how lazy Wolfie is compared to the heroically Aryan Buzzy? Write an essay about how you wish you were Buzzy. Girls who do not wish to mystify their own genders may instead write an essay about how they wish they could marry Buzzy.
3.) Note that this advertisement was presented by the National Social Welfare Assembly. National Socialism. And you thought I was joking about Buzzy’s heroic Aryan nature!
4.) How much would you hate Buzzy if you had to work with him every day? Be honest. You would hate him a lot, wouldn’t you?
5.) HOMEWORK: If Dwight Schrute got into a knife-fight with Buzzy, who would win? Explain your reasoning.
29
Dec
Sometimes I wonder what I feel like writing about and I draw a bit of a blank. This is why I am thankful for Republicans. Give them a couple days, and inevitably they will produce a howler. For example, this one, from a mid-to-high-level organizer in the Rudy Guiliani campaign:
“I’ve been very concerned about this Muslim thing for quite awhile. The average American does not know beans about what the Muslims are about. I am talking about the Muslims in general. I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims.”
Wow. No, just wow.
(Also, I am horribly amused by the use of the phrase “know beans.” I honestly thought I would never see that phrase again without rereading a Henry Huggins book.)
28
Dec
1.) Yes, the next parody is almost entirely finished. I merely have to dot the Is (in Photoshop) and cross the Ts (in a second window I opened – that is how dedicated I am).
2.) I’m not going to post it until after the new year, though, so everybody can see it if they are on holidays or the like.
3.) Why, yes, I am single, why do you ask?
28
Dec
With the Iowa caucuses for Presidential candidacy less than a week away, I’ve gotten one or two emails asking me which candidate I prefer. I can see where my opinion – being a foreign national who does not vote in American elections and all – is dramatically important, of course.
Now, it’s important to preface that most of the Democratic candidates would likely make anywhere from decent to excellent presidents, except for Dennis Kucinich. (Yes, Kucinich agrees with me on certain positions, but you know who agrees with me on every position? Me! And yet, I would likely make a terrible President. Competency in the duties of the job itself is just as important as having the right agenda, and Kucinich just doesn’t have that competency.)
And it’s also important to preface that the Republican candidates are barely worth mentioning. This is one of the weakest slates in Republican presidential history, if not the weakest period: a blowhard former mayor with a tendency to explode his own campaigns and an agenda that essentially amounts to “let’s blow up everything,” a former actor who doesn’t even seem that interested in running for President, a out-and-out theocrat who’s at least honest about his prejudices, and Mitt Romney, who is, I think, an android. John McCain, despite being eleventy thousand years old and touting his executive experience as a former Pharaoh on the campaign trail, manages to be the least offensive by being willing to say things like “torture is wrong” and “guess what, you can’t deport twelve million people, it just doesn’t happen” – which of course hurts his chances with the Republican base.
But back to the question at hand.
continue reading "The All-Important Non-Voting Canadian Primary"
27
Dec
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.”
26
Dec
24
Dec
…despite it being the holidays, I do in fact have my weekly TV column up at Torontoist.
24
Dec
Remember to keep your holidays dope.
24
Dec
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.
23
Dec
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.
23
Dec
THE MUSIC CRITICISM DIET
Go through any newspaper’s “top (X) albums of the year.” Count how many of them are hip-hop. Do not count Kanye West’s most recent album (it’s too obvious a selection). Then compare to the number of records to which the phrase “indie rock” could be applied. If there’s anything other than the occasional major act (after having looked through about a dozen fairly major and comprehensive lists so far, the only albums I’ve seen mentioned are Kanye and Jay-Z), eat a triple-caramel-fudge ice cream sundae for each album mentioned.
You will lose weight, I promise you.
You know what? Hip-hop critics don’t do the same in reverse. You don’t see a hip-hop critic do their top whatever albums of the year then throw on a Fall Out Boy album just to show that they really do listen to other genres of music. (This is not to accuse “regular” music critics of tokenism. Well, actually, come to think, it is.)
And given the output of 2007 – which featured outstanding new albums from Common, M.i.A., Ghostface Killah, Ozomatli, and Underground Kingz in addition to the aforementioned Kanye and Jay-Z discs – it’s either shortsighted or just stupid. I don’t even listen to that much hip-hop, but I was at least aware of the existence and significance of these albums, and nobody’s paying me to talk about music.
(Which is probably for the best, considering that I’d waste valuable common inches on how awesome a song “Thunderstruck” is. Every week. I mean it.)
In summary: hipsters now ruining music criticism, just as they manage to ruin everything else. DAMN YOU, HIPSTERS.
21
Dec
The last time I posted something from Craigslist, it was, ahem, not so nice.
21
Dec
Everybody I’ve ever known in military service (or who is a gun nut) mostly agrees that the M16 (and its variants, like the Colt C7, which is the Canadian equivalent) is a piece of crap and that the AK47 is a much better rifle, mostly because the latter is the most reliable gun ever made and the former jams if you look at it funny.
So why hasn’t some gun manufacturer backwards-engineered the AK47, given it a fancy new name that is vaguely sexualized, and made a lot of money? Serious question.
21
Dec
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.)
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