Meekly Musings

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Conspiratorially Good

2011-09-19T14:41:00.002-05:00

In 2000, Warren Spector helmed a masterpiece ship into the lochs of gaming history. Deus Ex was the recipient of numerous Game of the Year awards, and universally praised by critics and gamers alike. Offering gameplay beyond the standard run-n-gun variety, the game threw players into a wide assortment of situations and gave them their choice as to how they tackled the situation. In every encounter, it was possible to gear up for, and attempt, to start a third world war, or decide to stealthily creep through back doors and vents, remaining unseen and unknown. Aside from choosing a plan of attack, and whether to kill or leave enemies unharmed, if a little less conscious, players could choose and upgrade several incredibly useful augmentations and skills that proved incredibly useful. Supporting all this choice-laden gameplay was a rich story full of double- and triple-crosses, among other twists and turns, such as modern-day conspiracies about the Illuminati and other secret factions warring over control of the world’s population. With everything so masterfully executed and the game so absolutely chalk full of details a player could run through several playthroughs and still discover brand new things they hadn’t noticed the previous four times, it’s no wonder the game was a phenomenal success, often regarded as one of the absolute best games of all time. Obviously, making a sequel would be an incredible undertaking.

Considering the overall failure of the first attempt at a sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, no great expectations should be levied against a sequel well over half a decade later. So upon the moderately unexpected announcement of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, hope for a worthwhile sequel was unsurprisingly low. Even throughout the lengthy course of promotional material leading up to the release skepticism reigned as a leading comment about the upcoming game, due mostly to the shortcomings of the past attempt.

So, going into Human Revolution with low expectations yielded a great time, one almost entirely worthy of the “Deus Ex” name. Implementing gameplay reminiscent of the original Deus Ex, and a conspiracy theory story that doesn’t run nearly as deep as the original’s, but is still captivating, Human Revolution is a game that gives new players a lighter version of the original experience, and players of the original a refreshing aftertaste of what they came to love in the first place.

Opening up almost the complete opposite of the original, Human Revolution starts you out in the tightly scripted shoes of Adam Jenson, the super high rank in charge of security stuff for one of the leading biotechnology and augmentation firms, Sariff Industries. While taking a guided tour of a soon-to-be-revealed scientific discovery that everyone is hesitant to tell you about, bad stuff happens. During the next fifteen minutes the game plays like any other generic sci-fi shooter, after which Adam gets his augmentations, and the game opens up for you to make what choices you will.

It’s at this point that Human Revolution starts earning its namesake. Upon returning control to the player after the opening titles, the game presents an immediate objective that is free to be ignored in preference to exploring the environment to pick up goodies and figure out the mysteries of the ladies’ room. In a very nice detail, as in the original, these explorations are often more than just exploration. These little side areas offer up spare ammunition or other items, extra dialogue, side-quests, and alternate paths. There are few dead ends that are without some use, and any that appear initially empty are often returned to later, their purpose then revealed.

The game absolutely revels in these asides in the hub locations. Side streets and alleyways are littered with useful items or experience bonuses, and although these hubs are absolutely huge, there’s almost no wasted space, with level design reminiscent of The Chronicles of Riddick in its use of space. The hubs encourage all sorts of varied exploration as well. For example, at one point I hacked open a relatively high level door, behind which was an empty apartment hallway with inoperable doors. But past these was a window I could open, leading out onto a series of air conditioning units that found me on a lower roof of a neighboring building. Upon this roof there was naught but an air vent that, upon entering, yielded a silenced sniper rifle. And this is but one of a multitude of similar situations the game employs. There are plenty of items stashed on precarious perches or in areas requiring skilled acrobatic jumps to reach. Again, offering up choice, players with the ability to do so can often choose to take the shortest route between two points and simply punch straight through the wall. There are several routes only available with the proper augmentation, such as immunities to electricity or to falling damage, but there are almost no areas that are inaccessible without them. Sometimes you just have to take a different or longer route. Throughout the entirety of my play, I was constantly taking one route and, upon reaching my destination, would notice another route I could have taken, that sometimes would have saved me some trouble. Unfortunately, the strength augmentation that allows a player to pick up heavy objects is almost required, as a lot of the side passages through vents are hidden behind otherwise immobile vending machines or large crates.

And such explorative treats aren’t just limited to the hub locations either. Missions themselves also feature several alternate routes and side rooms, nearly always serving a purpose, whether offering up extra items, ammunition, or, at the very least, a different point of access or a place to store bodies. However, for all the extra outlets or ventilation shafts, the mission levels are stringently linear. While nowhere near as limited as a corridor shooter, it’s less like being put into an area and given an objective to accomplish than being carefully steered down an incredibly wide field, bounded by fences, and only going in one direction. Despite the relative straightforwardness, the illusion of freedom is exceedingly convincing. The story progresses with the mission well and the sense of moving forward is so compelling that it never feels like you’re being pushed along, rather you’re readily trying to keep pace with, or even ahead of, the story. Keeping ahead though, is another matter entirely.

While not the conspiracy epic of the original, Human Revolution is still a highly intriguing tale of corporate espionage and world domination, full of twists, turns, unknowns, and plenty of other hard-driving story caveats. Obviously most details are spoiler-laden, but without giving away too much, the story revolves around protagonist Adam Jenson’s position as chief of security at Sariff Industries, and the various breaches of security that take place. Following leads about these problems, Adam goes globetrotting, only to discover something far more involved than he could ever imagine. As mentioned previously, the story is gripping, and genuinely worth pursuing, though occasionally, in its effort to be mysterious and conspiratorial, it tends to leave the narrative confused with missing or mixed-up details rather than withheld ones. This never derails or gets in the narrative’s way, but at times I wished I could call up some sort of recap. Perhaps the only viable complaint is that the ultimate antagonist seems to have unsure or conflicting motives, and one of the reveals the game treats as Earth-shaking is ultimately nigh inconsequential and was something I had guessed literally fifteen minutes into the game. Even with these really-hard-to-actually-call-detriments, the story provides an incredible backdrop. Constantly, through conversations, news reports, radio broadcasts, books, and newspapers, almost everything is talking about the controversial augmentations that people choose to get or sometimes are forced into getting. The themes of basic human rights, equality, justice, fairness, addiction, and all sorts of “if augmentations were real, how would our inherent evils be amplified?” stuff are the story the world constantly tells you while you uncover the true story of what’s going on with Sariff Industries. All of the events and arguments are well done and convincing enough to provide a believable setting for the game and a tangible world to simply sit back and soak up.This is the background to the great gameplay that makes this game so very good.

As previously stated, Human Revolution is relatively linear in design, but within those bounds the gameplay is rich and open. The game gives you a wide berth as to whether or not you want to be loud or stealthy, killing enemies or being a pacifist. It gives you a sizable amount of freedom to choose how you tackle the myriad of situations Adam gets thrown into. The shooting is relatively tight by default, and with augmentations you can tighten it up even more to your advantage. The stealth is very functional, and the game has achievements encouraging a nonlethal, no-alarm playthrough. It even allows you to “ghost” the game, a la Thief, in which no one ever knows you were there, not even by waking up hours later, or dismissing something they “thought” they saw. An exceedingly explosive firefight is rivaled in excitement and satisfaction by getting through an area without anyone ever having a paranoid thought cross his mind. And whichever style of play you choose, the augmentations available are, for the most part, helpful.

There are offensive augs, like taking down multiple targets at once or aiming stabilizers, defensive augs like armor plating or cloaking, useful augs like hacking or negating fall damage, or redundant augs like showing an enemy’s field of view when the radar upgrade does nearly the same thing. Likewise, the augmentation that lets you kill all enemies in a circle around you is relatively useless for a tranquil character. But there are ultimately no completely useless augmentations, depending on your playstyle.

One of the few universally useful augmentations is hacking. Although anything that needs to be hacked to progress forward is low enough that any player can hack it, the majority of the game’s goods are locked behind hackable doors or safes. An aggressive player can break down doors, but the higher level upgrades to hacking are nearly invaluable. It also doesn’t hurt that the hacking game is fun, providing a challenge and giving a nice thrill when you complete a hack with less than a second remaining. There are two power-ups for hacking, but I never used them except on a single Easter egg computer near the end of the game. At the end of the game, I had twenty-something of one power-up, and thirty-something of the other. There are also some mild control issues with hacking, such as difficulty selecting the action you wish to perform, especially under pressure, and when trying to survey your surroundings while hacking, the controls just aren’t sensitive enough to look around quickly and completely, at least not without a controller.

As for the non-computer enemies in the game, the enemy AI is capable of holding its own in a firefight and has a neat trick of looking behind it as it goes around on patrol, but this always happens in the same spot. Obviously, it wouldn’t be fair if the AI didn’t do the same thing over and over, and it’s pleasant that they dispel the previous genre staple of enemies not turning around. But apart from that, the enemies are relatively stupid. Hiding in a vent is practically invulnerability. While hiding in a vent with the entire Detroit police station mad at me, I was able to kill about two thirds of the station by sitting in the vent and waiting for them to move in front of it, whereupon I promptly shot them to death. And while headshots are an instant kill, crotch shots are not. I shot several people six or seven times right in the groin, canonically bringing “male enhancement” into the augmented age. While an actual combat area may not have that exact issue, the AI still reeks of the stupid. Provided they’re not alerted, every gunshot fired alone is free, only instilling curiosity instead of alarm. In a dream world, the AI would notice some random gentleman wearing a trench coat and covered with augmentations in an area he doesn’t look like he belongs in moving a vending machine out of the snack area and stacking a crate on top of it underneath the balcony of a restricted area, but as is, the AI serves its purpose of providing dumb guards to avoid and beat up on.

The one major flaw with the gameplay resides solely in the boss fights. Completely out of place within the game, each and every one of them brings the game to a screeching halt while it takes on a very arcade-like persona within such a beautifully crafted and reputable world. The mobile bosses all seem to have brain damage, as even those with a ranged attack seem to run right towards you. There’s no explanation for the fights, so beating them is a matter of trial and error. During one boss fight, lacking a certain augmentation will lead to several instant deaths, when on the hardest difficulty, that seem to come randomly, until you notice that if you let them hit one of the computers it shocks the ENTIRE ROOM, with no safe zone for you to retreat to. It’s also a pain that, while it’s a given, that as a boss fight they’re going to have a large health bar, I dumped a war’s worth of ammunition into every boss before they went down. Who knows what would have happened had I decided not to carry any ammunition for my super-stealth, no-kill character? Which highlights another issue with the boss fights, and that’s the fact that the game encourages you to build your character how you want, so someone who decides to be a super stealthy hacker type is suddenly thrown way out of his element in these forced boss encounters. They’re so bad that they almost ruin the game while in them, but as soon as one of the fights is over, the game resumes doing everything right.

In technical aspects, Human Revolution is extremely solid. The game looks pretty good and, even on my aging system, runs buttery smooth. The animations are pleasant, especially when the AI turns while walking or falls asleep when you tranquilize someone, and they truly shine when Adam takes someone down. Browsing online, I found several reports of horrendous glitches, but in my playthrough it only crashed twice. And other than a few bugged ragdolls, was glitch-free. One thing that really stands out is that the game has a setting in the options menu to widen the field of view for those of us in the PC gaming master race. It’s beyond incredibly nice that there isn’t a required FoV hack or any ini modification. It’s just a setting right there in the options menu.

The game is also full of throwbacks to the original Deus Ex, with Easter eggs littered about. The soundtrack has murmurs of the original Deus Ex’s soundtrack scattered throughout it, at one point going so far as to use the actual UNATCO theme music for the in-game radio. Emails from FEMA director Joseph Manderly and other such references make the game feel like part of the Deus Ex storyline but aren’t used to root itself into the world, instead using them as additional spice. The game also features Easter eggs not related to Deus Ex, including a Megadeth Easter egg that made me smile for several minutes after I found it.

Considering the way that Deus Ex: Invisible War was a fair game in its own right but should have never had “Deus Ex” in the title or used Deus Ex story elements, it could easily be expected that Deus Ex: Human Revolution should be approached with only the last two words of the title. However, thanks to much better story, and game design, it fully earns the initial two words as well. Even if you aren’t a fan of Deus Ex, it’s a great game. The fact that it happens to be part of the Deus Ex universe, and a well-orchestrated part at that, just puts the icing on an already incredibly delicious cake.

Criminal Flaws Don't Lock Up L. A. Noire

2011-06-09T22:30:00.000-05:00

     Calls rain in from all over the city, like drops of blood running through a dying man’s fingers, clutching at his newfound chest wound. In Central, a hit-and-run leaves the victim splattered across the road, bloody skidmarks as his life comes to a screeching halt. A few blocks away, a hopeful Hollywood starlet is found battered, bloodied, and beaten in a park, her dreams having bled dry long before the warm dawn sun found her cool dead body. Across town, a family of four burned alive in their house overnight. The American Dream, up in smoke. Somewhere in Hollywood, two jazz musicians overdosed on some smuggled drugs. Cool cats getting colder by the second.

     All these modern horror stories are the pulp on the pages of L. A. Noire, Rockstar’s new crime-themed sandbox game. In this twist to Rockstar’s usual gameplay formula, you play on the law’s side of the law, assuming the role of Detective Cole Phelps, a Pacific Theater World War II veteran come back to police the streets of Los Angeles. Starting out as a beat-cop, you quickly move up to detective work, taking cases at four desks: traffic, arson, vice, and homicide. At each desk, the aforementioned stories start only half-told, and it’s up to you and some keen, if sometimes questionable, detective work to fill in the gaps and make the partial stories whole.

     Through good, or sloppy, detective work, you can cut through the half-truths and lies to find, in theory, the real truth. Most cases open with Cole being handed an assignment, followed by Phelps and his currently assigned partner heading to the crime scene to gather clues and to occasional testimony. The gathering of clues is simplified to walking around and hitting “A” when a chime tells you you’re next to one, another chime and change of music telling you when you’ve found every meaningful clue. The chime can be disabled, but considering how arbitrary or hard to spot some of the clues are, I’d advise keeping Spidey Sense turned on, regardless of any immersion breaking it does. Realistically, not every clue is a valuable one either. Empty soda bottles and irons routinely produce the chime for a clue, despite being utterly useless. The clues that actually are useful vary wildly, sometimes being registered the instant you find them, others requiring you to turn them over or open them before credit for finding them is given. Rarer still are puzzle clues, which require puzzle solving almost too light to warrant having included in the game. Most of the time when you pick up a meaningful clue, Cole will make a long-winded comment that you’ll have to wait through before you can further investigate. If a clue can be examined closer or opened up, the appropriate time is always indicated with a highly annoying every-single-damn-time instructional pop up box, which, by its lonesome, makes it worth keeping these exceedingly annoying tool tips turned on. Imagine if GTA popped up the driving controls every single time you got in a car or the shooting controls every single time you pulled a gun out. L. A. Noire routinely puts up information you already know and have seen at least fifty times prior on the screen. Apart from the physical clues you gather, some are gathered from talking to witnesses, most of which use the interrogation gameplay to mixed results.

     As far as the interrogation mini-game goes, the setup is fairly simple. Cole enters a conversation with someone and after a brief question-answer part, you’re presented with three button options, “Truth,” for when you believe someone, “Doubt,” for when you don’t but don’t have any proof, and “Lie,” for when you know someone’s lying to you and have proof, at which time you’re taken to a list of found clues and have to select one in order to present proof. As with the investigation mini-game, a happy chord tells you when you’re right, while a few sour notes indicate you’re wrong, either by having selected the wrong answer, or the wrong piece of evidence. Tying the investigating and interrogating together can be difficult, depending on how thorough you are. You may know a person is lying, but lack the sufficient evidence to get the correct answer. It can be frustrating when such a situation arises, and the rub-it-in manner of the right or wrong chimes make the situation even more so. When a sizable case is going real well only to be blown by misreading facial expressions, it can be maddening, especially when a case has only three questions. And as far as reading those facial expressions, L. A. Noire takes it to a whole new level.

     Using new technology that consists of pointing over a trillion HD cameras at an actor’s face, Rockstar captured every individual pore on their face and mapped their movements to create an ultra-realistic emotional performance for every character’s face. For such a huge technological investment, the results are a wildly mixed bag. The fidelity the performances are captured with make them incredibly credible and convincing, and any “I’m super not lying right now!” tells are either due to bad direction, or intentionally done to make the player feel smart. On the more convincing performances, calling someone out on a lie and being correct feels good, like you’ve correctly read someone’s poker bluff. The downside to that is that reading a very subtle bluff is rare, and most are done through a very obvious, “I’m lying!” gesture, such as a huge nervous position shift or eyes darting about the room like they’re watching Wimbledon. To be fair, that’s not a detriment, because it’s oftentimes difficult enough to read facial expressions without trying to pick up on better acting or micro-hints. The ability to exactly replicate an actor’s facial performance is where this new technology really shines, which is good considering that’s what it was designed for.

     But investing in new technology often carries that early-adoption risk, like people buying 3D TVs when water-loaded 4D TVs are due out late next year. It definitely is a step towards capturing a more humanlike performance, with what the actors do captured in minute, exacting detail. But in terms of crossing the Uncanny Valley, it jumps headfirst to the bottom. For those that don’t know, the Uncanny Valley is a point where a computer generated human likeness becomes highly unnatural. Up to a point, the more realistic a representation is, the better. But after that point, the likeness takes a dive and becomes creepy, and highly unnatural. And the new facial capturing system Rockstar employed in L.A. Noire puts all the characters right in that valley. While the performances themselves are great, both believable and, more importantly, readable, it’s the characters and their faces that the problem stems from. To put it in technical terms, the faces look exactly like what they are: three dimensional data extrapolated onto a model’s animated head. It doesn’t look like bones and muscles and tendons moving around, so much as it looks like a video projected on to a blank face. To use a more simple analogy, imagine walking around with a paper plate on your face. On the plate, one of those incredibly talented artists capable of painting believable depth paints your face’s every little move. Regardless of their talent or how good the painting is at capturing an expression, or how convincing the depth is, your face is still a flat paper plate with a highly detailed painting on it. Reading it is more akin to looking at flashcards of emotions instead of real emotions. And while the emotions and performances are as legible as they need to be, it’s still a creepy puppet. This is due in part to the fact that, unlike traditional techniques of modeling a character’s head and face, this method relies on the data interpreted from the array of HD cameras. This creates artifacts like crawling skin, where the skin of a character seems to have come detached from the muscle underneath and starts to just move around. Other oddities are from the lack of modeled teeth and a tongue, causing those teeth to appear as if they’re bursting out of the lips or entirely non-existent. Those nitpicking complaints about the side-effects of using this technology aside, it does work wonders in this game. It allows for an actor’s performance to be captured with the utmost fidelity, and transported into the game, where it is helpful beyond words at allowing a player to judge another character’s intent. However, I don’t see it being utilized outside of L. A. Noire, or at least I pray that it won’t be. It doesn’t seem to create a more believable character in the game, but instead just enhances a gameplay mechanic.

     This admirable attention to detail could have been more evenly distributed on the other gameplay mechanics, as they tend to fall frustratingly flat. With Phelps being on the right side of the law, you have to follow said law as best as you possibly can. That means that hitting civilians, or civilian cars, earns Phelps a penalty to his performance on any given case. While that makes plenty of sense in the context of story, in the context of gameplay, it’s a huge annoyance. Several cases end up in a high speed vehicle chase. Often times I would be closing on a suspect and they would turn down an alleyway or cut through a park or other place crowded by civilians. While they would be smart enough to jump out of the way of the truck speeding towards them, they would immediately resume their route, not giving two damns about the speeding police car right behind said truck. Even without suicidal civilians, L. A. Noire features Rockstar’s patented Really Bad Traffic AI. Even with the siren blaring, cars tend to turn out in front of you, or even in to you. Several cars that are already near a stop, such as a traffic light, will use their last ounce of momentum to try and pull over, effectively closing off that entire side of the road. Eighty percent of the time you can avoid the cars, but that remaining twenty percent of the time is rather frustrating, especially in a chase.

     And the issues with the mechanics continue on foot. There are plenty of chases in the game where Phelps is hot on the heels of a suspect who doesn’t trust these newfangled automobiles. In several of these, Phelps is able to aim his gun at the suspect and, after the reticule fills up, Cole will fire a shot into the air, and the suspect will stop and put their hands in the air. The problem with this is that it makes no sense when you can fire shots inches from the suspect’s head without them so much as flinching. Compounding this is the fact that when you shoot them in the leg thinking it will slow them down or stop them for the half-second you need to catch up, it ends up killing them and you fail the case, having to restart the chase over again. And the chases themselves feel artificially drawn out. While being a super cop who catches the suspect within twenty feet of the starting point wouldn’t be fun, making suspects faster than Cole for all but the last segment of the chase feels like a contrived way to make sure chases don’t end “too early,” when most of them seem to go on too long. Admirably, despite the fact that “shoot” and “run” are both mapped to the left trigger, due to a smart control scheme, you probably will never accidentally fire your gun while trying to chase someone down.

     And as far as gunplay is concerned, L. A. Noire gets the basics down really well. Cole Phelps, despite being a military man, isn’t near the gunslinger John Marston was or the grunt soldier Niko was. The aiming lock-on mechanic from Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption is still present, but it’s much looser, and the aiming feels fat and inflated. The cover system received some welcome upgrades, such as the ability to stay in cover while going around corners, and the ability to move across a gap while remaining in cover. These additions make getting off of cover a little trickier, but I’d prefer that over a cheap death due to accidentally popping off of some cover or being unable to get to some. Most of the gunplay takes place in the mid-mission side quests you can complete around the town are where, a welcome relief for Cole’s lesser combat skills. As an aside, the wording of the objectives were at first a little confusing when the objective was, “Subdue the suspect(s).” Using a modern interpretation, I was under the impression I was to shoot them in the leg or to try and shoot them in the arm to knock their weapon away. The objective actually means you are to kill them stone cold dead, something I came to terms with during my first hostage situation, where, when presented with this objective, I shot the perpetrator in the arm, attempting to remove his gun. The result was that he staggered for a second before recovering, and shooting her dead, failing the case. It was a startling wakeup call that the era of L. A. Noire is one where shooting first and asking questions later is a legitimate option.

     For the driving, the cars control really well, and handle very tightly, almost too tightly. For the realistic (read: like a piece of crap) way that the cars in GTA IV handled, the cars in L. A. Noire handle exceedingly well for the most part. Trying to stop on a dime isn’t going to happen, but they often stop a lot shorter than cars in GTA IV might have. For the turning, they also handle way too well for the period. Playing through Mafia II, set roughly ten years after L. A. Noire, the cars control a lot worse, and more realistically. Considering the nature of the chases, what with their sudden turns and quick dives into alleyways, it’s a welcome relief the cars control as well as they do, but it sticks out in an otherwise fairly realistic atmosphere. That realistic atmosphere also costs you a GPS, in the one Rockstar game where it’s arguably needed most. With a city much more detailed and complicated than what Rockstar has built in the past, you’re left without a GPS, which is inexplicable considering every horse John Marston grabbed in Red Dead Redemption somehow came with as a standard feature. Instead you’re left to pause the game, pull up the map, note when you need to turn and your route to where you’re going (completely breaking the flow) or worse, ask your partner for directions. Often times you’ll hit the button to get them to tell you which direction to go, and by the time they respond you’re in the middle of the intersection. Worse still, if Cole and his partner are in the middle of dialogue, they’ll finish a line before they give you directions, putting you even further from where such help would have been useful. It’s a painfully glaring omission that could have easily saved the driving from being a chore.

     Overall, aside from a few frustrating and annoying nitpicks, the gameplay is solid. The investigating is fun, interrogating is well executed, and the gunplay, driving, and running around, are mostly pretty entertaining. In actuality, the weakest part of the L. A. Noire is the story and the characters, a sizable disappointment considering how well written Red Dead Redemption was. Cole Phelps defies the grand Rockstar tradition of having an antihero who did horrible things that he regrets and now is trying to atone for. Despite the lack of a dark past, he’s still shoehorned into having some skeletons in his closet which are revealed throughout the story. Though the traffic desk’s cases are all independent, the other three desks each have their own overarching stories that lay on top of another overarching story that lasts the entire game. Add a wartime flashback layer under all of this and the story could have easily become convoluted and hard to follow, but never actually did. But while it never lost quality due to confusion, it was never very good to begin with. The desk stories are alright, serial killers and insurance fraud being easy enough to piece together and create believable cases with, but the overarching story is poorly told and poorly written. Cole Phelps’ attempt at a troubled past makes him seem like an asshole, something his character in the gameplay segments only reinforces. Often times an interview will go from “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” to, “You’re a lying sack of shit who isn’t worth a damn! You’re lying, I hate you, I hope your mother dies of cancer, and if you don’t tell me what I want you to tell me, I’m going to shoot your God damn dog!” with a single button press. This is also a noted attitude when Phelps hits civilians with, and without a partner in the car. When the partner is present, he’ll yell at Phelps and call him varying levels of insane. When Phelps is alone, he’ll simply blame the civilian he just manslaughtered, often calling him something him something untoward. Another storyline involving Phelps plays out over the course of the game, however it’s kind of just sprung on you at some point, poorly executed considering you’ve been playing the character the whole game and would know about. Cole’s family is often mentioned, but to no effect because you only ever see them once in the game, serving as a poor mechanic to forward the poorly written story. When the end of the game arrives and Phelps’ painfully imposed journey of “redemption” is played out, the game’s ending feels hollow and empty, completely devoid of any closure or satisfying resolution. Rockstar is great at making characters you hate. I hated most of the cast of Red Dead Redemption and GTA IV, not because they were poorly written, but because they were so well written I legitimately felt they were horrible human beings fully deserving of the murder I brought down upon them. The heroes of both tales, while considerably terrible people in their own rights, were antiheroes you could get behind and were glad to see them trying to right their wrongs, and change their ways. With Cole Phelps, I couldn’t care less whether or not he got gunned down or not. I hated his character because he was a complete and total asshole with no redeeming qualities, other than his keen detective skills. The other characters are forgettable, and for the most part don’t play much of a role in most of the stories aside from delivering lines. The ones that do play a meaningful part in the story tend to forecast their “I’m super evil!” party quirk immediately. The few betrayals that happen don’t feel like legitimate betrayal because you see them coming from the first five hours of the game. The only characters I really found myself liking were Jack Kelso, one of Cole’s WWII buddies, and the coroner, simply because he was sane, rational, smart, and detached from the story.

     Compared to the story, L. A. Noire’s other faults are superficial and cosmetic, easily forgiven. Cole controls awkwardly when investigating a crime scene, often times forcing you to step a few feet away from something you were trying to look at in order to orient properly to it. At one point during a segment in which you’re asked to tale a suspect’s car, the traffic messed up so bad that it wasn’t moving and for ten minutes I repeatedly drove as far away from the suspect as I could without losing them in effort to “jump start” the traffic into moving. That eventually worked, but not without several attempts. It also only happened ONCE, and was probably a one-in-a-thousand chance based on how the traffic is random. The game desperately needs an ability to skip cutscenes. It’s great that you can’t accidentally skip dialogue during an interview, but the five minute opening vignette to a case doesn’t need to be seen more than once. The game features a nice film noir homage with a black and white mode, but I would never recommend playing the game through with it on, only testing it out and seeing how it looks.

     The complete package of L. A. Noire is a pretty solid one. Overall the game is fun, and on a case by case basis, it’s well done. If you tune out the underlying story and just take it for the adventure game that it is, it’s a highly entertaining game. It doesn’t shoot as well, drive as well, or read as well as Rockstar’s other games, but in the end, it’s almost as fun as them.

Fewer things are more fun than a blood-soaked Machete!

2010-09-04T22:34:00.004-05:00

Machete originally started as a one-off joke trailer for Grindhouse. That trailer was ridiculous. And awesome. And now, it’s been made into a fully fledged movie. Which is ridiculous. And awesome. Nearly every conceivable facet of this movie put a massive grin on my face as I chuckled and chortled and outright laughed at it, enjoying the whole ride.

First and foremost, it should be noted that this movie is intentionally “bad.” The acting is WAY over the top, the action is WAY over the top, and the story is just about as loose as the women in it. But all of this rolls together into something so incredibly kick-ass that any “flaws” in the movie aren’t flaws at all. It’s all an intentional homage of the old grindhouse movie style in which ultra-violence was status quo, women barely wore clothes, and exploitation was awesome.

Danny Trejo stars as the titular Machete, an ex-Mexican Federale. He’s after a drug kingpin in Mexico when the film starts, and within five minutes there’s over a dozen bodies (though not whole bodies) lying around. Machete storms a bar in an attempt to rescue some damsel in distress (who happens to be a very naked damsel) and we find out where he got his namesake. Instead of using a gun, he just goes room to room lopping off bad guys’ heads, arms, legs, ears, noses, everything and anything he can. Eventually he’s helpless in the hands of bad guy numero uno Torrez, played by none other than Steven Seagal. Anyone (and I mean literally ANYONE) could do a better fake-Mexican-accent than Steven did, but they couldn’t do it as convincingly bad as he did. And his entire performance during the course of the movie is pure gold-plated gold.

Torrez gives Machete the ultimate cause for revenge and then leaves him in a dire situation we never see the resolution of due to the sudden title sequence, complete with massive amounts of film scratches. Honestly, it’s probably fair to assume Machete just got out of it by sheer bad-assery alone. Either way, the title sequence ends and we find ourselves three years later, introduced to two more of our man villains. Von Johnson (Don Johnson), the leader of a local vigilante militia dead set on keeping illegal Mexicans out of the country, and Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), a politician who is ardently campaigning for harsher immigration policies, including a massive, electrified, border fence. We learn that these two men are very evil when they catch a Mexican couple crossing the border and they execute both the pregnant woman, and the young man she was with. There’s no deep political ideology or philosophical debate on what’s right and what’s wrong here, it’s just straightforward “They just shot a pregnant lady in the baby!” evil here.

This takes us to Machete’s current state in a day labor camp with a bunch of illegal aliens, run by Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), who resides in a taco truck and is constantly harassed by immigration agent Sartana (Jessica Alba). Through a fight Machete gets noticed as the one-bad-mother that he is and is hired by a mysterious suit, Booth (Jeff Fahey), to assassinate Senator McLaughlin. Of course this all goes wrong and the movie kicks it into a second overdrive. Machete is now hunted by just about everyone in the film and is on the run while he goes after those who betrayed him (D. All of the above). What follows is more violent than a lot of horror films, and oh my God is it great.

Not to ruin any of the surprises Machete has in store, but Machete himself has a tendency to use the body parts of other people for other uses than they were originally planned for. He also has a penchant for using blades of all sorts up close and personal, although he does make hilarious use of some other implements, notably a weed whacker. The poor goons he chops to bits the whole movie through aren’t standard faceless thoroughfare either. There are a handful of reoccurring grunts that provide constant laughs.

Eventually minor characters are introduced later, such as Machete’s brother, a priest with shotguns played by Cheech Marin, or Booth’s sluttier than slutty daughter (Lindsay Lohan) and although they’re incredibly short parts, they play them perfectly. There’s even a hitman hired to take out Machete and the advertisement for him lists “1-800-hitman” as the number to call. The absurdity of Marin’s priest-who-was-a-killer-but-now-reluctantly-kills-again or Lohan’s delinquent daughter who orchestrates a threesome with her mother and the gardener to further her porn site are really what sells them. The fact that all the characters in the film are ridiculously exaggerated is the icing to the bad acting cake.

Equally as awesomely overdone is the rampant nudity and sex. Within minutes of opening Machete slings a nude woman over his shoulder. He’s rescued at one point by Luz, who, in effort to see if the man lives up to the legend, hops on Machete. He has that aforementioned threesome with Lohan and her mother. And, in the wake of a drunken Jessica Alba, proceeds to decline her bed, only to be swayed by her begging and begrudgingly lies with her.

Machete is a great, stupid movie. To sum it up in a single shot from the movie itself, Machete jumps a chopper motorcycle over a massive explosion while blasting two dozen bad guys with the CHAINGUN MOUNTED ON HIS MOTORCYCLE. There’s rampant nudity, most shots have copious amounts of dismemberment and blood, and its execution is impeccable. Machete is probably the most bad-ass summer action movie so far this summer, a strong claim concerning its competition. Run, don’t walk, to go see, MACHETE!

The Last Exorcism is GOD DAMN (ha! pun!) awful

2010-09-04T22:34:00.003-05:00

WARNING: This review contains graphic clichés like:

“The worst part about that movie was that I paid money for it” and

“Thank God this was the LAST exorcism!”

Allow me to wedge a personal complaint in this space before we truly begin. I am not a fan of scary movies. It’s not that they frighten me so bad that I become paranoid of miscarried evil twins or girls thrown down wells or door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses (scary enough as is) or any such number of things. It’s that I sit through them and in the end I feel cheated out of my time and potential entertainment value. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy some of them, but nine times out of ten I leave the theater rather annoyed that I didn’t take the option of “paint drying.” Chief among these hatreds are exorcism movies. They generally consist of a young girl around high school age making weird voices, doing odd movements, and pretending to be sweet and innocent one second and possessed another. They’re not nearly as scary as they are ridiculously hilarious and stupid. The Last Exorcism, however, lacks this unintended redeeming quality.

It opens up surprisingly strongly for an exorcism movie. It’s set up as a documentary to follow this lost-faith preacher who used to perform exorcisms but is now intent on showing them for the hoaxes they are. It’s yet another in a now too-long list of shaky-cam movies but for ninety-eight percent of the movie it’s nowhere near Cloverfield. It does a good job of establishing its documentary credit and it does a real good job of establishing the protagonist. However that’s where the good stops. After the initial exposition the plot becomes, “Here’s this letter asking for an exorcism I got, let’s go film it!” It uses a lot of historical references (to which I have no idea how much truth there is in them) to establish reasons for the belief of possession. It then follows the preacher through his exorcism ritual using mild science as the man behind the curtain. And, predictably, it fails.

Essentially, in this movie, the protagonist is basically against all the sorts of exorcists as you see in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. A lot of people subject to exorcisms are often killed as a result, and he’s out to show that they’re nothing more than scams and to save lives. To this end, he’s constantly trying to save the possessed girl from potential abuse or other maladies. His stalwart gooditude prevails throughout the film, as, as suspected, when facing true supernatural occurrences with good ol’ science and rational, he’s quick to get himself well in over his head in trouble he has no way of fighting. As I said, this is actually well done. He only once gives in to superstitious hooey, and is always approaching the situations in the film using his head. But even then, when there’s obvious bad going on, he still charges in blindly in an attempt to rescue the evil damsel in distress.

When I say “charges,” it should be noted that he could easily have been outmaneuvered, outflanked, and routed by an army of snails. The pacing of the movie is so incredibly dull and dreary that I almost fell asleep within the first forty-five minutes. It takes its sweet time to do anything. Excessive drawn out long cuts reminiscent of a high school video editing class are what this movie is really about. While this movie is trying to ground itself in reality with its documentary-style camera work and editing, even a real documentary is more exciting to watch than this. And as far as grounding itself in reality goes, it breaks the fourth wall by adding in music during “scary” parts that would not be in a documentary (forgivable considering the nature of the film), and by having titles and text placed over the film as though they were edited in during the “post” process, which is impossible granted the stereotypical “we are never ever getting this camera back” ending employed.

To be fair, the acting isn’t bad. It conveys realistic “why no, this is not a movie” well and there isn’t much apart from the ending where I wasn’t able to buy into the characters. Aside from that whole “possessed” thing. Concerning the characters themselves (and foregoing the “possessed” thing, as you know how I feel on that subject), they’re presented well. Everyone plays their part as they’re supposed to, although with any scary movies, there’s unintentional funny to be found everywhere. In one scene which was a “first-person possession” scene, I was laughing hysterically at the actions taking place.

Boiling it down to simpler points, this movie is so bad that to write more expanded paragraphs on it would simply reiterate the same points needlessly. It’s so bad that when I got home, I ripped up my ticket stub and defiantly threw it into the trashcan. Or at least I tried. The shards of pain missed the trashcan so I had to pick them up piece by piece. Even when I get refuge from this movie it still torments me. Had there been someone at the customer service desk of the theater I would have asked for a refund. It’s a two hour (feels like four) slog through an incredibly boring fake documentary setting about a ridiculous concept with the most utterly insane, random, and ridiculously stupid ending I can recall in recent memory. Hands down, this movie makes Jonah Hexx look like a prime candidate for sweeping the Oscars.

Hang On to The Expendables

2010-08-13T14:49:00.000-05:00

I fully well went into the theater expecting The Expendables to be a really stupid, pretty bad, “shit done blowed up!” action movie. And I was most definitely right about the last part. However, concerning the first two, I was dead wrong. If you’ve seen a trailer for this movie, you know it’s basically the idea that if you take every single action star you can find and put them in one movie, you’ll get something pretty kickass. The result is a Reese’s peanut butter cup covered in peanut butter and chocolate; it’s good-wrapped goodness you’d expect to be hard to swallow but it actually goes down really well.

The plot is pretty thin, but it’s fleshed out for what it is. It’s like construction paper really. No, it won’t hold up a lot of weight if you put some on it, but it wasn’t meant to. Some evil dictator in some South American island is evil, and these guys go out to stop him. For what it is (and isn’t) it pulls off the plot fairly well. There are a few twists and turns but nothing you can’t see when you queue up for the roller coaster.

The acting is, surprisingly, well done. It’s not going to win any Oscars, but it’s an action movie, and since the cast are veteran action movie actors (or wrestlers) they can act their rolls well enough to service the parts. One weak point I’d point out is in Mickey Rourke’s part. He was cast to play the hollowed, war-weary, housewife member of the group who stays home and provides the stereotypical, “war is bad and it makes me sad inside” character that gives the rest of the group a moral home base so they can do the base running with explosions. Another weak point was Dolph Lundgren’s character, who was supposed to be the mad dog, tugging and pulling on its leash. His portrayal of the role was underwhelming but the role itself is most likely to blame.

As far as the characters of the movie go, I enjoyed all but Dolph’s. Sylvester Stallone plays the old-but-not-too-old-to-kick-ass veteran leader of the team. He does this well and, as with almost every other actor and their respective roles, manages to fatten up a flat part. Jason Statham plays the second in command and provides the young attitude to combat Stallone’s old attitude. Throughout the movie they have a mild back and forth contest of who’s badasseder. Providing the background roles are Jet Li, Randy Couture (who is almost absent from the film), and, stealing the show wonderfully, Terry Crews. Eric Roberts is a good bad guy, David Zayas is a good dictator-turned-softy, and Steve Austin is good muscle. Giselle Itié is a good leading lady and despite having a fairly small part, she fills it well and brings a strong female character, something most fiction tends to lack. It’s nice to know she doesn’t just roll over when the bad guys point a gun at her and it takes more than a slap to take her down. In another nice turn, all of the good guys, and even some of the bad guys aren’t misogynistic. Eric Roberts’ character won’t strike Giselle Itié’s character, and Jason Statham sees his 90-seconds-of-screentime girlfriend has a bruise from her new boyfriend and proceeds to beat the hell out of him and make a ball joke while he’s at it.

And that’s a lot of what this movie is. Not ball jokes, but balls. There’s so much machismo and testosterone in this movie I swear that the cameras were operated by giant testicles. And while a lot of times that lends itself to a movie screaming at the audience, “LOOK HOW COOL I AM AREN’T I COOL YOU LOVE ME LOVE ME I WANT YOUR LOVE I’M AWESOME,” this movie is actually just cool by its own merit and doesn’t force its coolness down your throat. As I mentioned, shit blows up, and really well. For an action movie about impossible action it manages to keep suspension of disbelief most of the time. It opens up with the crew performing a hostage rescue and it quickly breaks that suspension with some shoddy night vision effects and them treating a delicate hostage rescue like a shooting gallery, opening fully automatic fire on a cargo hold full of hostages and yet never hitting one. Apart from that there isn’t a whole lot that leaves you “waitaminute”ing. The only qualm I had was that with such cool night vision technology, near the end of the movie Stallone goes barreling down a hallway with a flashlight mounted on his gun, very much advertising his presence and position in a supposed stealth infiltration. But apart from minor nitpicks like that, this movie holds together when it comes to blowing things apart. Terry Crews has a shotgun that literally makes things explode when he shoots them, and even though the film tries to explain this, and even does so in a manner that you don’t question in a film of this caliber, it’s just much, MUCH more fun to imagine that Terry Crews has a shotgun that makes things explode. Also, as a little known fact, Terry Crews actually brought Old Spice from his endorsement deal with him onto set, and since that day kicking ass was up by thirty percent.

And despite how much of this movie is about things being taken apart by large explosions, there’s actually as much, if not more fisticuffs being thrown around. Here’s where the casting really shows off because there’s a mix of styles going on in the melee combat. You have Stallone’s barroom brawling, Steve Austin’s wrestling, Jet Li’s kung-fu, Statham’s quick knife-y skills, and then they all mix together at some points.

At the end of it all, The Expendables is a really fun action-packed ride. Despite being ridiculously thin in plot (unlike the necks, of which there are none in this movie) if you look at it as a snowflake instead of just cut up construction paper, you’re going to love watching things go boom. Oh, and the soundtrack is just as kickass.

The Spider

2010-07-21T15:39:00.001-05:00

This happened yesterday but I'm just now recovering from the shock, awe, and utter terror to just now write about it.

So yesterday, I woke up around 10AM. People were already gone for work so it was just me, alone, in the house. Or at least that's what I thought. I take my shower and as I turn off the water I open up the curtain. Well I see this dot on the ground and as I shift my gaze towards it I discover, quite to my dismay, that it's a spider about the size of a quarter. And it's just staring at me. Being rather defenseless (as I tend to shower defenseless) I froze for a brief moment, staring into its eyes staring into my soul. I could see thoughts of blood red murder coursing through its spidery head. One wrong move and it'd make its own move, killing me and doing unspeakably horrible things to my once youthful and living body.

With neither of us willing to place forth the first move in our deadly game I decided to inspect it a little closer. I bent down slightly, making sure to keep my face well out of range of its acidic and toxic webbing. Upon my slightly closer inspection I noticed it had what appeared to be tufts of hair upon its abdomen. I thought it was certainly odd to see a spider of that size that fuzzy but didn't think any further on the matter, lest I drop my guard and leave myself open for a killing blow. I straightened up, quickly grabbed my towel, sidestepped out of the shower towards the door, and went and grabbed a shoe. I came back and much to my surprise and alarm the spider was exactly where I left it. It hadn't left to go set up an ambush, it hadn't gone onto the ceiling to drop down and bite the back of my neck and inject a neurotoxin, it had simply stayed put and stared at the tub I was once in.

So this was it. The final showdown. I raised my shoe up. I could see the murderous intent in its eyes, the look of pure rage and hatred, the wanton wanting of my destruction, to see every fiber of my being ripped into shred and torn again into smaller shreds, the ways it would eviscerate my cold and dead body when it finished its maniacal plan, the I squished it with my shoe. I thought I did. The spider shot across from where I hit it and stopped where the tub met the floor. And where it once stood quietly and intensely, there was now

A DOZEN LITTLE BABY SPIDERS RUNNING IN ALL DIRECTIONS!!! THE BIG ONE DIDN'T HAVE RANDOM TUFTS OF HAIR, IT HAD LITTLE BABY SPIDERS ON IT! I JUST ATTACKED THE SPIDER SCHOOL BUS AND LOOSED THEM UPON THE WORLD! ALL OF THEM, EACH AND EVERY ONE FULL OF HATRED AND INTENSE RAGE AS THE SCUTTLED ABOUT IN RANDOM FASHIONS TRYING TO TAKE COVER FROM MY NOW SMASHING SHOE!

At this point I was panicking and hitting the ground with my shoe as fast as I possibly could, each blow crushing one of the little bastards and sending the others in a new direction. When I finally finished killing all of them I looked back at the larger spider. It was still sitting there where it had moved to, battered and broken. I made short work of it and went to go grab a paper towel to pick up the mess they had made.

The truly terrifying part is that my first thought was to just grab the big one with a paper towel and kill it that way, which would have simply resulted in the little ones hopping off and RUNNING DOWN MY SPIDER-COVERED ARM AND KILLING ME IN A HORRIBLY GRUESOME DEATH!!!

Predators Review

2010-07-09T16:36:00.005-05:00

Predators, is a long ride. It’s like heading to your grandmother’s house in Nebraska, and you have to pass through Kansas to get there. Sometimes you’ll pass an interesting ball of twine, or a neat looking building, but ultimately you’re spending a long time going through absolutely nothing. And that’s what this film does best.

It opens with a bang. “OhmiGod! Adrian Brody is falling! OhmiGod! I hope his parachute deploys!” and within a few minutes you’ve met everyone, all of whom have been mysteriously paradropped into this mysterious jungle on this mysterious planet. From the get-go it’s predictable in terms of character development. Obviously Adrian Brody is the lead guy who makes wild leaps in logic and is complete and totally right regardless. Then you have the supporting characters. And no one cares about them. Seriously, they’re pretty uninteresting. When Topher Grace is the most interesting supporting character in an action, you may have done things wrong.

But then again this isn’t much of an action movie. You don’t see a predator for a good third to half the movie. So it’s a group of uninteresting people lead by a mercenary who always looks like he’s about to cry as they wander the jungle and keep noticing strange things. Finally there’s some action when the predators sic their preddogs on the group. It lasts for a few minutes… Then it’s back to aimlessly wandering the jungle.

We finally see predators when the group seeks out the predators’ camp. As they come across one of our “classic” predators, they’re attacked by these new predators. At this point we see what one of my biggest complaints is. The predators in this film, this brand new, shiny, new-film-smell, 2010 film, look WORSE than the one from 1987. They look more guy-in-a-rubber-suit than they did two decades ago. I understand that it’s hard to make a real prosthesis suit and film it and make it look real, but all they had to do was get Brian Steele (who played the biggest and baddest of the predators) to call up his old friend Guillermo del Toro to help out. But instead they settled with what looks like a goofy Halloween costume with a lot of money thrown at it.

After they escape these rubbery predators, they meet Laurence Fishburne’s character. There’s no doubt that he was played for comedic effect to some extent, but in reality, his character is nothing but a joke. I couldn’t take ANY of it serious. He’s supposed to be insane, but it was both annoying, and dumbtarded. He’d do things that were supposed to be taken straight-faced, but I couldn’t help but laugh. Thankfully, he explodes.

This brings us to the next complaint about our featured creatures. They’re weak. Extremely weak. There are two types of predators in the film, the “classic” we saw in ye olden days and the new “black” predators, who are bigger, stronger, harder, faster, more than ever, hour after hour, work is never over. Oops, Daft Punk’d out there. Anyway, the new predators are MUCH more not-good for your health as the old ones, and they’re also exclusively what the cast fights. And there are three of them.

In the original Predator, a group of elite commandos is taken apart one by one by a single “classic” predator. In the end, Dutch, the hero, barely manages to kill it, and even then the tough-as-nails bastard almost kills Dutch with one last trick. So here we have a whole team of men that know each other, can communicate well, and work as a cohesive unit getting reamed by a single weak predator. Flash forward two decades. You have a group of unrelated people who are individually good at killing but don’t have a unified tactic or mind. They’re killing the “black” predators single-handedly. Remember that scene in Predator where the group is moving on and Billy stays back with his knife to try and kill the predator? He got raped. Yet in this one, a yakuza member tries the same shenanigans and pulls it off, despite this newer predator being a much tougher opponent. The predators do manage to pick them off, but slowly, and ineffectively at best.

But it doesn’t particularly matter anyway; the cast isn’t something you can get attached to. Like I said earlier, the supporting characters are ridiculously weak. The main characters aren’t much better either. You have Alice Braga playing an Israeli Defense Force sniper who is pretty much a cardboard cutout, and then you have Adrian Brody as the main character. Apparently he put on 25 pounds of muscle for this role. Too bad it didn’t change the fact that every scene in which he tries to be a bad-ass has him looking like he’s welling up with tears inside that could overflow at any second. Casting fail.

On a note unrelated to the film’s actual quality, I’d like to highlight a recent trend in Hollywood, which I believe is A HORRIBLE THING. Watch the Iron Man 2 trailer. “You complete me!” says Tony as he dives out of a plane after his helmet. Not in the movie. Same thing here. The trailer shows Adrian Brody with a single tri-dot on him, quickly lit up by about fifty more of them. In the film, there’s one. A single, solitary, measly, little tri-dot on him. I find it incredibly annoying that they’re putting shit in the trailers that isn’t in the movie. It’s almost like false advertising. “See this cool thing! But not in the movie…” But anyway…

At the end of the film, I sat there for a moment trying to think what I thought of it. When it’s over, and all’s said and done, I can’t honestly say Predators is a BAD film. But it’s not a good one either. It’s a boring slog through the jungle with action scenes that don’t really pay off any action. Despite being a sequel to the original predators, it really feels like it’s a remake of the original with a modern budget. As a large fan of the original predator films, I can’t really recommend this one for fanservice either. Predators is best reserved for a rainy day when you have nothing to do and an extra ten-spot in your pocket.

A Review of Jonah Hex

2010-06-18T14:46:00.004-05:00

When approaching a film like Jonah Hex, it’s simply best not to. But if you have to, don’t make eye contact and know what’s going to happen before it does. It’s based on a comic book. Don’t expect realism. It’s set in the Wild West. Don’t expect historical accuracy. It’s a summer action movie. Don’t expect to think much beyond, “Holy shit, didja see that blow up!?” And even with all these restraints placed on your gag reflex, Jonah Hex still manages to make you queasy.

It opens up with a true-to-its roots comic book inspired sequence. You’re shown some live action stuff that quickly becomes highly stylized as it pans through sweeping valleys and Confederate and Union camps, all trying to play out some mild back story where you’re not sure who’s who, what they’re doing, or why they didn’t just spend the extra time to make this part of the movie. But that would have made this film longer and at only an hour and twenty minutes long, it’s plenty overdrawn anyway. Eventually it opens on our lovable, squeezable, huggable anti-hero dragging along some bodies from his latest bounty hunt and it quickly goes south from there. From the moment he tosses a bag with a head in it to the sheriff to the moment when the sheriff says he’s going to collect the bounty on Hex’s head, the acting is an insult to freshman drama students everywhere. This is also where it starts a slippery slope downhill. And that’s a relative term as the movie was 6 feet under when we started.

After unsheathing twin gatling guns mounted on his horse and mowing down all who oppose him while dodging rifle bullets, Mr. Hex just strolls right on out of town and on to his next merry adventure. And then we meet the lovely Megan Fox. I used the word “lovely” as ironic! She’s not a good actress. Her best “lines” are her figure (go go gadget-pun!) and as far as that goes, she still manages the impossible and falls flat. He whole role in this movie (in which she gets roughly six or seven minutes of screen time despite being featured prominently in the trailers) is to go, “Look at my tits and here are my legs!” and she manages to mess even this simple role up. In a sex scene (that thankfully fades to black very quick) with the titular character, it feels as though she stated in her contract, “I want to be a mature actor and have myself a sex scene now!” The whole two minutes building up to it feels so forced and unnatural. She plays a frontier prostitute, so she’s hardened and can handle herself, as illustrated when an obsessed customer tries to take her for his own and despite him getting hold of her derringer she still kills him easy as 1-2-3. But her kryptonite seems to be Irishmen from whom a swift slap can render her helpless like all the other female leads ever. Realistic, sure. Entertaining or fitting to character, no.

But that seems to be a lot of what this movie does. Its characters are so bipolar as to whether or not they’re this, or that, or that or this. One moment Jonah can dodge a bullet he can’t even see coming, the next he can’t dodge one fired at him from a good range while he’s looking the shooter in the eye. The only character with a modicum of sameness is the evil villain played by John Malkovich (just another in a long line of actors proving that they too have bills) who is consistently outgunning Jonah, even in Jonah’s dream sequences. His whole fiendish plot doesn’t really add up or make a whole lot of sense but I’m willing to let that go because the movie is a comic book action flick that takes itself super duper seriously. Thank God he was in the movie however, because the other actors couldn’t have saved a lion from a gazelle, let alone this movie.

Jonah Hex is played by Josh Brolin, who has done some other movies that have had actual acting in them (No Country for Old Men being one of the few) but clearly he brought his Grindhouse game here. I’m sure in part it’s the writing’s fault, but the character isn’t likable as even an antihero. Half of his lines are literally someone saying something to him (sometimes not even that) and him grunting in return. The aforementioned Megan Fox can’t even do her aforementioned role, and the rest of the cast is even worse. The bit parts are extremely poorly played and the conversations between them and the main characters are often spliced with incredibly distracting shots. Especially the one where there’s an arbitrary ring fight. The best actor is Will Arnett, who actually does what he normally does. He plays a US Lieutenant who’s been put in charge of putting Jonah in charge. The problem lies in the fact that even though he’s dead serious, Arnett is so tied to comedy that I couldn’t do anything but laugh every time he was on screen, no matter what. And the rest of the movie was adept as inspiring equally unintentional laughs.

At one point Jonah is wielding two “dynamite crossbow guns” which are actually kind of neat. But he went to the trouble of seeing his bit-part weapon smith to get them, and what does he do? He uses them once, and drops them. In another highlight he shoots a crate of dynamite and, instead of blowing it up as it would in any other action movie, he manages to somehow light one of the Everlast™ fuses. And so one of the main henchmen (Irishman) grabs the bundle and tosses it at Jonah while he’s running away mortally wounded. This leads to Jonah’s resurrection ritual and at the start of the movie a crow flew across the screen and I thought, “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if they rereleased The Crow into theaters?” Wish granted. Thanks Monkey’s Paw.

The absurdity just escalates when they bring in Jonah’s ability to talk to the dead by touching them and bringing them back for as long as he does. This leads to a “comedic” moment where he tries to talk to someone he killed a long time back and as he wakes the dead gentleman up, he gets punched, severing the link between them and returning the dead man back to death. Multiple times. There’s another moment where he’s talking to a dead man to interrogate him and despite the deceased being in agonizing burning pain, all he can do is very calmly demand Jonah stop the pain. In the movie’s absolute most ridiculous point they show you the view from the telescope gun sight on the villain’s super weapon. And the reticule on this gun sight is IN THE SHAPE OF THE CAPITOL BUILDING. At that point I couldn’t contain my laughter any longer and burst into hysterics, making another wish along the lines of my own demise. Unfortunately this is the movie they’d loop on the in-flight to Hell.

I was lucky enough to catch Jonah Hex for free last night. Jonah Hex, for free, is a bad movie. God help you if you spent eight dollars to see this. It’s full of actors that calling “bad” would be a compliment, it’s utterly ridiculous and absurd, and it will have you leaving the theater wanting to punch someone else so that you’re no longer alone in your suffering. The one redeeming quality to the movie is that it’s very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely they’ll make another one. And on one last note, I’ll bring to your attention an editing mistake I noticed that bugged the hell out of me the entire film. In the editing room, when they had finished stitching this rotting thing together, they forgot to hit the ‘delete’ button. And with that, Jonah Hex was released to theaters this week. God help us all.

Christmas Means Money

2009-12-18T15:05:00.001-06:00

So for the past few weeks my parents have been repeatedly telling me, "Hey, we don't really know what to get for your birthday or Christmas so..." and as much as I enjoy the fact that I can say, "Well, dearest parents, I would very much like to receive..." I also hate that idea.

For one, I have to pick out myself a gift which promotes a number of problems for me, one being, which one do I pick? If there's multiple items I want I suppose in true human fashion, I WANT THEM ALL! But obviously that's not going to happen. So I have to figure out what I want the most and pick it. The problem with that lies in that fact that it seems incredibly greedy to me to pick out my own present. Especially if it's something so trivial as a video game or something like that. As much as I'd like to have Left 4 Dead 2 or Dragon Age or any number of digital diversions, I can't help but feel bad saying, "Hey buy me this. It's Christmas, come on! Come ooooooon!" The second issue with such a gift is that it's not very heartfelt, even less so if I pick it out myself. If my parents were to get me something that I picked, it's not a gift from them, it's a gift from me, to myself, with them as some bizarre middleman. It just feels wrong, especially with so much sentimental value attached the holidays, regardless of whether or not you celebrate wholeheartedly or not.

My father has always been of the opinion that for Christmas and for his birthday, yeah there are things he's like to receive. Sure it's cool to get the whole collection of From Earth To The Moon or a full series of Farscape or some such, but to him, spending time with his family is pretty much all he really wants, and I'm easily the same way (which is only indicative of a wondrous upbringing, thanks daddoo!). A couple weeks back I spent my actual birthday (Dec. 5) over at another friend's house celebrating a dual surprise party for two other friends. The day was 90% not about me and honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not much for a show of, "HEY LOOKITME I'M AWESOME AND IT'S MY BIRTHDAY DO WHAT I WANT YAAAAAAAY!!!" Instead I was completely happy receiving my "gift" of spending a large portion of the day with a bunch of my friends having a good time. I'd hope to do the same with the quickly approaching Christmas but considering everyone's going to be with family I'm betting we aren't all going to get together for some awesome hang-out session. But that's cool, I enjoy spending time with my family. They're pretty cool actually.

So I'm sitting here with a notepad and pen making a list of "Shit I Would Like To Have" and listing what I'd like, how much it is, and doing a little prioritizing of the items on it. I'm looking over it and most of it seems to be pretty trivial, lame things. They're also all expensive, which makes me feel even worse. Not only am I picking out my own gift from my parents (which doesn't make it much of a gift in my eyes) but it's looking a lot like it's just an excuse to pick something normally out of a price range and say, "BUT IT'S CHRISTMAAAAAAAAAAS!" in a really high-pitched nasally voice.

Happy holidays huh?

Having An Awesome Family Is Awesome

2009-11-27T02:15:00.000-06:00

For Thanksgiving I woke up this morning at 10 and after going through my usual morning routine of showering, eating Eggos, watching the Macy's parade, and playing Rock Band (in which I unwittingly committed the irony of playing Megaeth's Good Morning/Black Friday) I loaded in the car with my parents to go to Talequah for Thanksgiving with the family.

After taking the "slow stupid" route to get there we arrived to a house filled with relatives I couldn't identify my relationship to if there were a million dollars and a brand new llama as a reward. We showed up a little later than we intended and as a result we arrived just before we dug into The Feast.

As we sank into delicious turkey and ham and green beans and corn and mashed potatos and bread we all sat around a table, as one might expect. Seated was my (I think) aunt-in-law once removed (or something) Dorothy, her brother Bill, his daughter Olivia (20?), Dorothy's daughter Christin (Chris for short), her husband Scott, their son Westley (~25?) and daughter Amber (~23?), my somethingorother JR (~25?), Dorothy's son Michael, his new wife Michella, and everyones children, all about 1-3 years old.

After we ate and the Cowboys beat the Raiders (including a play where two Raiders players slammed into each other in an attempt to catch a ball in a hilarious baseball outfielder style), Olivia, JR, my parents, Michael, and myself all discussed college pranks to play and the fact that people straddle brooms and play "real" Quiddich and the idea that hijacking the crane building the new band hall by a soccer field at TU to make it more realistic.

After this highly entertaining discussion wound down, most people quickly vanished leaving only Dorothy, Bill, Olivia, Michael, Michella (who left shortly thereafter), Chris, Scott, my folks, and me at a feels-like-9-o'clock-but-it's-really-only-7-o'clock. At this point Scott got out a game "Hunting, Fishing, and Camping Trivia" which was little more than a Trivial Pursuit knock-off that had (horrible) questions in relation to those topics. The five categories were "Camping", "Big Game", "Fishing", "Small Game", and "Weaponry", all having questions ranging from the stupidly easy "What is a big mouth buffalo? A buffalo, an ugly person, or a big mouthed fish?" for fishing to ridiculous questions like, "How many teeth does a jack rabbit have?". Overall, regardless of the wacky questions (including a massive amount of boating and boat related questions in the "camping" category) it was an uproarious great time filled with horrible innuendos and sexual puns that had the whole family (what was left of us) in stitches until we all parted ways at a little past midnight.

Also of note: There was this really awesome "toy" "hourglass" "thingy" that Dorothy got from some drug company that was basically a small tube with two chambers like an hourglass (except in a cylinder that was smooth, not hourglass shaped at all) with a small hole in between them and one chamber was filled with a liquid with a viscosity of thick, cold-snot (as in the type of snot you have when you have a cold). It was fascinating to flip it over and watch as the liquid would slowly ooze into the lower chamber while an air bubble made its way from the lower chamber, through the goop falling in, and broke the surface in the upper chamber, quickly inciting a rush of glop to pour in before slowing to a crawl again while the next air bubble started up. It was an awesome "toy" "thingy" and I really want one to just watch for hours upon hours upon hours on end...

Life Needs a Better Reward System

2009-10-30T23:37:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had the experience of giving away money for nothing. I was on my way to the PAC to perform in the show I'm currently in (the pit of) and due to our small little production having a performance the same night as the ballet's monster production of Dracula, parking was $5.00. Not having five bucks, this is not where I parted with my cash. Instead, I kept driving down 2nd Street and found a spot on the side of the road just past Main Street (about a block away from the theater) and, seeing as paid parking is free after 6, this is also not where my money left me.

I grabbed my sax from my trunk and started down the sidewalk. I was on the wrong side of the building so when I saw a small "Hey look, trees!" park thing right next to the theater, I thought I'd just cut through and be on my way. As it turns out, the opposite side of that grotto is totally not street level. It's actually about 20 feet above it. Being rather awesome, I could have easily survived the fall quite handily, but the sax wouldn't have. I didn't see a way down, only a bridge connecting to City Hall, and some double doors into the PAC. I went up to check them and naturally they were locked. They even had a convenient sign on the other side that, when read through the convenient glass, said that it was a convenient sign, conveniently located to inform you that those doors were, in all convenience, "Emergency Exit Only."

Now, this whole time I had had it in the back of my mind that this little nature preserve was picturesque in its setting for a horror movie. Now that I had reached a dead end, these thoughts came running to the front of my brain screaming bloody murder and telling me that a 20 foot drop wasn't such a bad deal. Fortunately I gave those thoughts a sedagive and turned around to head back the way I came.

Because of my navigational expertise, I had gotten myself into a corner with no exit were I to be accosted by a bum. I was accosted by a bum. He was now in the national park I had just passed through and intended to pass through again along my merry way. He pleaded for my attention with, "Sir? Sir!" and I, with no way out, gave it to him. He proceeded to tell me that all he wanted was a couple bucks to rent a cheap room so he didn't have to sleep in the rain. He promised he was willing to work for it (by washing my car or anything else I could come up with) and also that if I declined, he wouldn't hold it against me and that he had also never been to jail. That's what I caught, which is only about half considering how much he said I couldn't decipher. While Pearl Jam's Even Flow buzzed through my mind and I contemplated shifting my sax from the hand closest to him to my other one for comfort and whether or not he'd take offense to this "protective" gesture, I decided I'd give him some change and wish him luck. I dug into my pocket and grabbed only part of my change (still a lot more than I meant to), gave it to him, and walked off.

At that point, nothing happened. He didn't give me any special items or a tip to a hidden treasure or, in a massive logistical failure, a monetary reward. He said thanks, didn't give a "God bless." (thank God) and went on his way. I didn't get any experience aside from not to grab as much change. I didn't even get a deep rooted feeling of bettering the world or having done something good and right. The only thought I really left the encounter with was whether or not I had enough change left to get a 75 cent soda from the machine backstage. Maybe somewhere down the line he'll track me down after making billions of dollars and offer me a few million, but in all honesty, I seriously doubt he got the $7 he needed in time to sleep with a roof over his head.

To Develop the Truest and Bes- WHAT THE HELL GREG!?

2009-10-11T14:13:00.000-05:00

Really good weekend so far. It's a nice turnaround from the usual weekends that either end up being uneventful and boring, or just downright lame and lame. It all started Friday morning...

When I got up Friday morning, I actually got up for the first weekday in a while, instead of opting in for the "5 More Minutes" special. With that, I actually made it to piano on time, which was still lame. Got out of there and sat around in a freezing hallway for twenty minutes or so until Amber showed up as well. At this point I was thinking this day would be pretty crappy but when it came time for theory class it drastically turned around. Theory was good, we talked about wacky things, I got odd looks from Heidi, our instructor. And when it was all said and done we headed off to TU to go to band, which was made especially good because it had been declared an inside day due to the cold.

So we get there and proceed to play through Since I Fell For You a few times, and then we moved on to Stars and Stripes Forever. What would normally be a rather uneventful tune ended up being hysterical, with many a joke made at each others' expense (Sarge being the chief culprit) and an impromptu tuba gliss that had the whole band rofling their lmaos off. Band wraps up and we finish and I quiz Eric Noble on his lunch plans, to which he mentions Chick-Fil-A. So I walk with him and Jason Seabolt through a mucky field, past some vents in the ground billowing smoke (to which point Eric firmly believes TU is infested with pot smoking gophers) and over to grab lunch. Lunch was made all the more sweeter when Seabolt kindly offered to pay for mine, to which point I'm greatly appreciative. Over lunch with them and several other band people, we read an article in TU's paper about how the newly approved iPhone porn application will most likely cause the downfall of civilization as we know it (gotta love Oklahoma...). I also ran into a few people I hadn't seen since my time at Edison, which was a highly refreshing occurrence.

As the other people left Eric and I went around the corner to talk with a couple people from band, at which the conversation went on a 5 minute tangent about bears, their poop, and how everyone should know the facts about such. Amber and her boyfriend Jayson walked by and she kindly let me know I had a ticket from parking in the parking lot we're supposed to park in. I wasn't frustrated this time because Sarge had said to everyone that if anyone gets a ticket for parking in a lot that we're supposed to, bring it to him and he'll take care of it. Considering he did so for me earlier this week I believed him. We all checked our watches and noticed that we had places to be and things to do and decided to each head our own ways. I got back to my car and was very pleasantly surprised to see that Amber had actually mistaken another car for mine (turns out the only real difference is that they had a blue pine tree air freshener) and that I had no ticket on my windshield. Yay!

At that point I decided to be a super awesome son and see mumsy at work, since she worked nearby. So I drive over to AAA and head on up the steps to the main door. I go in and head past the front desk and slow to a stop when I look in the back corner and see nothing but an empty chair where she should be sitting. The receptionist finishes talking to whoever was at the desk, turns to me and gives me a warm welcome. She then says, "Ooooh! Today's her day off! You didn't know that?" to which I reply, "Oh yeah, it is!" She had only told me five or six times in the past twelve hours... So I head back out the door, and head on home, driving down the newly finished Utica to get there. I relay the story to my mother when I get in the door, we laugh, and then I just bide my time until later that night when Phi Mu Alpha is to do whatever they have planned instead of the camping trip, as it was canceled because our proposed camping grounds had become a swamp.

videogame babble starts now

When the time came to go hang out, it was a damned good one. I headed out 'round 8 to Blake's apartment and when I got there, there was only about 6 other people at the time, and we all just sat around for a few minutes waiting for others. Quickly it was decided to try and play four person Firefight on ODST (vidja games for those of you who don't know) and we found out that on that mode, one 360 only supports two players at a time. The movement to grab a second console was quickly passed before even being suggested, and so a few people left to go get one while the rest of us switched off on rounds on the console that we had there.

By the time the guys who had left to get the other 360 had returned, we had grown in number from 8-ish to about 15-ish. So we get the new 360 set up, connect the two with the ethernet cable, and start some 4-on-4 action with Halo 3 multiplayer. This opened up with some 4v4 Slayer (team deathmatch) in which my team beat the opposing team approximately 100v30 before we decided maybe we should switch things up a little bit. We did and the teams mostly evened out to where games weren't one sided and were generally unpredictable, sometimes swinging one way and then the other way for the win. We played a bit of slayer before going to a few rounds of rockets-only, then shotguns only, and then grav hammers only. When we grew tired of slayer, it was then suggested we do Oddball (steal the bacon).

At first it started out as just single round matches of oddball. We used standard weapons for the first set of matches and they were pretty close. Then we had the idea of playing rocketball. This is still Oddball, but the only weapons in the game are rocketlaunchers, which made things highly enjoyable. Adding to that was the competition we incited when we set it to 5 rounds. Two or three times my team swept the first two rounds, only to have their team come back for two, making the fifth round highly competitive (especially when both teams were near the 150 point limit and everyone was going for the ball at once). We switched to a few rounds of Ninjaball (Oddball but the carrier is very fast and weak) that we modified to make the carrier go 300% faster, have around 3 hits to his name, only be affected by gravity 50%, and be invisible. It was essentially like chasing an invisible rabbit through a forest, and while that may sound frustrating, it was actually incredibly fun. We finally closed the night out with a round of SWAT (Halo's version of Counter-Strike) and when it dragged on due to a wrong setting, we decided to call it a night. By that time it was 2 in the morning and my throat was in pure pain from yelling for 5 hours straight. Honestly I have no idea how Campo didn't knock on our door with a noise complaint.

videogame babble ends now

That was the end of Friday. I came home, slept, and woke up. Saturday was fairly uneventful until about 7 in the evening when I got a text from Eric Noble saying there was a cookie party over at his place. I head out and sure enough there was. It was a rather small affair with only 7 of us there, but in all honestly that was actually a good thing after the din of the night before, as much fun as it may have been. We started out bouncing back and forth between two or three college football games (all of which providing entertainment through some wacky plays) and when that was done, we were channel surfing. While looking at the guide, Natalie saw something that struck her as odd and simply asked, "What's Tool Academy?" Kurt then burst out laughing.

We switched the channel to catch the beginning of the episode and it was one of the most entertaining things I believe I have ever seen on television. The basic premise, for those who don't know, is that a girlfriend who believes her boyfriend is a douchebag tool will prompt this show to get ahold of them. Then they take them to a large house they treat like a boarding school and try to get them to be better boyfriends through a series of exercises. This episode was about "appreciation" and started off with them going to a mock funeral for their girlfriend, which induced all the guys but one into tears pleaded for them to not be dead, despite the fact that they indeed weren't. The one guy that didn't burst into tears was commenting in his interview, "And all I was thinkin' is that we totally have time to go have a quicky instead of this stupid funeral thing." After that the girls were arranged to go on dates with upstanding gentlemen while the boyfriends got to watch. The way they announced this was that they dragged the guys out to the front steps, drove the limo up, the gents got out in tuxes, and then they told the boyfriends what was going to happen.

Then, inducing many lulz on our part, the super buff tool just punches the lamp on the stairs. He's just standing there, and then it was like his fist had a mind of its own and just shot out to punch the lamp, quickly returning to its former position. Then, immediately after, he and two of the other tools decided to go beat the gentlemen up. So the big guy, his hand now leaking blood, and two of the others go down and head towards the gentlement while to producers and security immediately run on set and tackle them, causing many more lulz. The tools were taken back inside and were forced to watch the dates on a television, which most of them handled fine, excepting one or two. One of which was the guy that during the funeral exercise made the "quicky" comment. He stands up, freaks out, runs down the hallway (literally running full sprint), goes out onto the lawn, runs through the sprinklers, and when he's calmed down a little bit, he's walking away from the camera and just randomly rips his shirt off (rips it off, into two pieces). The episode came to a close and he was expelled (as we expected) and his girlfriend very grudgingly accepted his apologies and they rode off in the limo to a fate unknown. At that point everyone decided it was time to go and it was unfortunate, but they headed out. I meant to but I got wrapped up watching the last 15 minutes of Austin Powers in Goldmember with Eric and Kurt. After it was done I headed out, came home, and that was the end of the night.

Now it's now and I'm doing this. Yay.

Where the Hell is Sam Houston State Anyway?

2009-09-26T23:13:00.000-05:00

Today was a fine today I suppose. Started out strong, went on well, ended poorly. In the end, two for three is over 50 percent so I suppose I can chalk today up for a win.

Started out nice and early with me getting up at 8:30, in the shower at 8:45, out, eating Cheerios, leaving at 9:20, and getting to TU and on the field WELL before the 10:00 call time. So while I waited around for things to start, I joined the small huddle that was surrounding Sarge for story time. After some good ones we all broke off to start warming up on our own, fell into our block on command, ran the pregame and the show, and then we were done. At that point I figured since I was already at TU and I had to attend at least one actual Phi Mu Alpha meeting to fulfill my probationary requirement that I'd just go to the one at 11. Sure enough I went over to Tyreal, got another interview done (this time with Alex Jones), and attended the meeting. I lucked out because they actually moved to skip a few parts and no one had much to discuss, so the meeting was over in about 10 minutes.

At this point I decided I'd just go ahead and go home for a quick shower, after which I'd grab my uniform and other things and head right back to TU. I thought it'd only take 30 minutes but it ended up taking twice as long because I forgot so many things that I ended up making about 10 trips to and from my car. I blame those memory issues on the fact that this week has been like a series of Mondays. So many small mental errors you'd make on a Monday, but made on Thursday and Friday and today. Either way, I managed to get everything I needed (and then some) and head back to TU.

By the time I had gotten back to TU they'd already decided to start closing the parking lots nearest the stadium so I ended up parking in the lot near Tyreal and hauling my backpack, tenor, and uniform over to the band room. For those who have no concept of the TU campus, it's not very far away at all (between two or three football fields) but carrying all that crap didn't make it seem any shorter than it really was. I got back to the bandroom, set my crap down, and hoped to get started on our Music Theory III group project. This was made a slight challenge by the fact that I was the only one in the room from our group. That was nullified quickly by the arrival of Amy, Amber, and Jennifer (with Ricky following his usual pattern of showing up 30+ minutes late). We began to work on our theory work and for once, I honestly had no idea what I was doing. There have been a lot of times where I only halfway know the concept and manage to bullshit my way through it, but this was not one of them.

After getting relatively little of the theory work done over the course of an hour and a half I was called by one of the Phi Mu Alpha guys to come assist with the cookout. They usually hold a cookout before each game and today was no exception. Jason grilled the burgers (after damn near grilling himself/using half a bottle of lighter fluid), and my task was to cart them in a small pan to the table inside so that the band members could partake in their delicious deliciousness. It actually instilled a pretty sizable feeling of doing something good to help out with such a thing and to provide food for hungry friends. Unfortunately, because they had to go walk around campus with the drum line and weren't present, the drum majors didn't get burgers before we started putting things up, so if they happen upon this, my most sincere apologies.

Anyway, after the cookout everyone got their uniform on and their instrument out and we all lined up to march out to the stadium from the parking lot. We started out and barely out of the parking lot my foot starts cramping like none other for no particular reason. Marching for an hour straight, that's fine. Marching a quarter mile at OU's campus, that's jim dandy. Going 30 feet from the TU parking lot, that's impossible. So we marched to the stadium, and past it. We went out into the large field in the [new] U and played several stand tunes for the tailgating-on-the-grass crowd that was there. Then we marched to the stadium and stood in the road outside of it playing to a wall of the athletic building. Finally we marched into the stadium and lined up behind the end zone and waited for 30 minutes or so before we started into pregame. While we waited, the football team was warming up, which means that the kicker was kicking field goals. Through the goal posts. That we were right behind. It was actually kind of fun having to watch out for incoming footballs and possibly deflect or dodge them.

We got through pregame fine and headed into our two lines to make a tunnel for the players to run through. Then came the children. Hundreds upon hundreds of children were at the game for some reason and they were allowed to line up with us and make the tunnel stretch from one corner of the field to the other. That worked out without much problem, but the rest of the stuff was horrible. First ran out some group of people who were a mob of school spirit and body paint, then was a super golf cart with our new and "improved" Captain Cane mascot (to his credit, how the hell would you make a good hurricane mascot?), and then the athletic director rode his motorcycle out. We played the fight song, and started into our "super well rehearsed" move backwards move. It wasn't pretty, but no one died.

We went into the stands and sat there, playing Short (the ending few measures of the fight song we can just rattle off) several times because this week was like last week in reverse. We started smashing the other team, despite making stupid mistakes. It didn't end up being a shutout because they, unlike us, weren't too proud to just take a damn field goal. Either way the first half went by fairly quickly, and then came halftime. We went down to the field and Sam Houston State's band started into their Journey show. Honestly I don't have much of an opinion on it. It wasn't good, but it wasn't horrible. It just wasn't worth caring about to me. We went through out show and when we got back around to our side there were QT sandwiches and Pepsi and cookies provided for us. I grabbed a club sandwich and a Pepsi and a chocolate chip cookie and headed back to my spot in the stands.

Giving us sandwiches and cookies and then expecting us to eat them, while being ready to pick up our horns and play in a split second's notice provided much entertainment at the expense of Kurt's temper. Regardless of how much of a challenge that was, it didn't matter to me because I had about three bites of the sandwich and remembered I don't like them (Sam I Am) and moved on to the cookie. I took a single bite of the cookie and it was utterly horrible. It was hard, but not the crunchy type of hard. More like hardened steel. Then, to add insult to injury, it tasted abysmal as well. I felt kind of bad taking the food and not eating it when someone else could have grabbed either/or and have been happy with it.

Third quarter started with the traveling band getting up and, well, traveling. I kind of wish I was a part of it but on the other hand, it's nice to have a lax quarter to recover and recuperate. The rest of the game went by fairly quickly (in the blink of an eye compared to last week's game against OU) and we went down to the field to march back to the band room. We did so, and when we got back everyone managed to be gone surprisingly quickly. I checked to see if anyone was doing anything and the majority of my TCC friends were going to the Owasso marching invitational, of which I had no steak or interest so I decided to call them gay and not go. Other than that, no one was doing anything or at least nothing I was up for, so I headed back to my car with all my stuff.

Having gotten there I find a lovely little ticket resting on my windshield. The way things are set up are so that if you have season tickets (or just tickets, I don't know) you have a colored sticker for your car, and that allows you to park in certain lots. Nevermind the fact that my car was parked there WELL before they closed the lot off, I still didn't have one of those parking stickers. So I come back to find a ticket on my windshield that wasn't for the $25 that we had originally thought, but instead for twice that much. Fuck. That. Shit. Sarge told those of us at TCC that if we get a ticket for parking on campus that he'll take care of them, so come Monday I'm going to let him.

After that I got home, salted a slug (I expected more of a show but instead it just shriveled up), remembered I was hungry, and went to get tacos. As I pulled up to the drive through I had my window down and heard the tail end of a conversation between the squawk box and the person in front of me telling them that they'd have to deliver their complaint to the manager the following morning. I didn't think that boded well for my order but as it turned out things went fine. Brought the tacos home, ate them, and then wrote this.

The End.

Good Thing I Brought My Trunks

2009-09-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

For the first post I thought it'd maybe be a good idea to explain why I decided to write a blog but then I thought, "Why does anyone blog?" and it's simply to post stories about what they did, or how they feel. I'll certainly be doing the former quite often (provided things stay interesting) and none of the latter, because I've always felt that reading a blog composed of whiny inner monologues about how much Jane makes you cry are a painful experience and it'd be akin to being walked in on masturbating if you were caught reading one. Perhaps later I'll dig down deep to my AP English teachings and find a thesis for why I'm really writing this, but for now you'll have to accept the answer "Because."

Anyway, today was pretty uneventful. And then it wasn't. The morning was a standard morning in which I arrived late to my piano class, then sat around for an hour pretending to think about practicing while waiting for theory to start, and then finally going to theory when 11 rolled around. Theory went as it always does, with us "reviewing" things we've never heard of because the prior teacher we had was too lazy to do any actual teaching, and then we left at around 11:30 like normal to go to TU for marching rehearsal. Remaining uneventful we marched pregame a few times, and then went over the music we were supposed to have memorized (and curse our drum major for walking over to check our section on the one measure we didn't know!) and that was that. We left that rehearsal and came back to TCC for our concert band rehearsal. That's when the day became eventful.

Halfway through the rehearsal the guy next to me gets a funny look on his face and says to me, "Huh. My mom just texted me that there's nickle to softball sized hail in our area." This is what threw me off because for our marching rehearsal it was bright, it was sunshiny, it was hot, and it would have qualified for a pretty nice summer day. With that thought in mind, I just dismissed what his mother had sent him and figured she was insane. Then we wrapped up and everyone was overjoyed and started leaving. Yaaaay! I open the bandroom door to step out into the hall so I can put my bassoon up and look out the double doors leading outside.

It looked like it was about 9 at night. It was obviously raining so I paid no heed and continued to put my bassoon up (I still don't know if I managed to swab the wing joint or not, I was just so distracted). I finished that, jammed it in my locker, and went back to where the bandroom doors are and sat on a bench with my buddy Tyler. We discussed getting food and thought that it was a good idea and proceeded to head towards the exit.

The way the doors are set up is you have a hallway that connects to an antechamber through solid metal double doors surrounded by tiny panes of glass that you can't really see out of. The antechamber itself, however, is almost nothing but glass on the front. So we opened the metal doors and just kinda sat there in shock at just how much rain was coming from the sky.

I wouldn't have called it "storming" so much as I would have called it "apocalypting". Sheets of rain (pretty much solid sheets) were coming down, and the sky was regularly alight with lightning, the peels of thunder that followed shaking the building. So we just kinda stood there in awe, each of us thinking, "Huh... I wonder how we'll get to food now."

Long story short, we didn't. Long story long...

It started when a group of us were just standing there in the room, watching it rain. It was my buddies Tyler, Ricky, Jennifer, Amy, three people I don't know, and myself. The entryway has a double door leading outside across the pair leading inside, an elevator in the back corner, another set of doors next to that leading out to the side of the building, and a staircase on the side opposite that. The wind was gusting so hard that those doors leading to the side were blown and held open, and out of curiosity we decided to go check it out. Curiosity would be my downfall this day.

The way our buildings are laid out there's a second story walkway connecting the music building to the math and science building in a rough z shape. Under that walkway is a paved path that follows it. Well we noticed that the wind was blowing the rain straight into the lower walkway and that anyone walking under it wouldn't be saved any wetness at all. At this point I said, "I wonder how wet someone would get if they ran under it." Then came the playful shoves towards it and encouragement from just about everyone present to do it. Not being one to cave into peer pressure I removed my shoes first.

What followed was a comedic dash from the double doors of the music building along the concrete path (which was filled with water about ankle deep and was slipperier than something very slippery) to the double doors of the science and math building. I wasn't timed and I'm not sure how long it took, but I did make it and proceeded to enter the building absolutely soaked. Not a single inch of me was dry and thanks to the campus' super awesome air conditioning I also realized I was really freakin' cold. I walked through the hall of that building into the larger main hall, up the stairs, back down the same hall on the second story, and through the walkway to the music building, all while receiving the, "Dear God I'm glad that's not me..." looks from various people waiting the storm out in the math and science building. Walking down the stairs to the entryway we had been previously standing in I was greeted with cheers and applause and a brief comment wishing me luck finding my shoes. Finding my shirt to be colder than I could bare, I decided to take it off, and apparently my common sense was in the breast pocket. Shortly afterwards Amy and our band director both walked through the entryway to head outside and noticing me soaked, with a towel, without a shirt, looked at me as though I was insane. Probably fitting.

Next came a dare to go out the front doors, down the sidewalk to the closest car (about 30 feet) and run back to see how long it would take me. It didn't take just a whole lot longer from that idea being put forth for it to be realized in the span of about 15 seconds. Luckily people were willing to hold the door open for me, because to coming to a dead stop would have been impossible. And it was. I came through the double door, onto the floor mat, past it, onto the tile, grabbed the handicapped rail by the inside door and slid to a stop. Making mention that I had a towel and spare shirt in my car, another trip was suggested to go grab them, which I also did unwaveringly. As I reached the building again I tossed the backpack containing both items onto the bench, quickly unzipped it, and started toweling off before realizing I had my swim trunks with me as well.

Another dare was posed that I go out to the pond (about 100 feet from the side doors, and the trip consists of a flooding field, a flooded road, and some of the mushiest grass right next to the pond). I quickly pulled an about face, walked into the restroom, and came back out with my swimming trunks on, ready and willing to make the trip in as little time as possible. Voicing mild disdain for the notion, one of the gentlemen I don't know by name volunteered to go with me, and so we made it a race. We gathered on the concrete by the side door and readied ourselves to take off. Someone gave us a count and when they said "Go!" we went. Taking off almost as fast as possible we waded through a field (which we sank into above the ankle), across a flooded road (also ankle deep but with a potentially nasty half-foot step from the curb on either side ), and through the mushiest of grasses that lay right along the pond's edge. I got there first, just tapped the pond with my toe, and took off back towards the rest of the group. As it turns out, to run through a flooding field, across a flooded road, through the ooshie-mushiest of grass, touch a pond, and back through gooshy grass, a flooded road, and a muddy field takes all of about 35 seconds.

Afterwards we decided in our out-of-breath states that we'd wait a few whiles before attempting any more daring runs outside. In this time span I decided it was in my best interest to mess with Jennifer in any way possible, including (but not limited to) attempted soaking wet hugs, attempted kicks with muddy feet, attempted pushing-outs into the rain, throwing my wet towel at her, and various other ploys. I use the word "attempted" a lot there because in reality she's approximately the same strength as I am and was able to fend off most of my efforts. In discovering that last fact though, we did manage to get her to pick me up as though she were a proud groom and I her blushing bride.

The rest of the remaining half-hour or so we stayed there consisted of numerous Family Guy references, and my antics of running out to greet anyone on the sidewalk headed into the building in my trunks, shirtless, offering them a towel.

Pictures and videos will probably show up to embarrass me on Facebook soon.

After we all decided to head our separate ways I drove home listening to Kyuss and not seeing much interesting or exciting (other than more proof that people in Tulsa are idiots when it comes to driving) until I actually got home. When I got home my mother was already there and told me that I should probably come and take a look out at the back yard.

Our backyard goes from the house about 25 feet out, slanting down the whole way. After it hits our back fence there's a sudden 3 foot drop into a storm ditch that is used to channel flooding. I suppose it was doing its job properly considering the fact that water was almost up to the top of the drop off and for the houses behind us it was touching the foundations.

Looking down the yards towards Yale I noticed that the wooden privacy fence the last house had put up to kind of slightly keep them separated from Yale wasn't there anymore. In fact, a steady stream of cars had been coming down our street because the intersection where AMC's parking lot meets Yale had flooded and the flooding was bad enough that it knocked the fence down (uprooting the posts and actually breaking one of them) and was pouring like a waterfall into the storm ditch. I decided to go outside with my camera and look for awesome pictures of the storm and managed to find some as I went down the street into the neighborhood where the street was flooding. Two houses down from us it was ankle deep. A few more houses and it was up to the middle of my shins. A few more houses (the massive pond in the middle of the street) and it was knee deep with a stalled car that some kind person in a truck was attempting to winch out.

After heading down to one end and then the other I went back inside to finish writing this and as I look out the window behind me, I can see gray skies and a yellow tint to everything, my favorite kind of weather.

The massive rainbow is now covered by flashing clouds.

Pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13647091@N03/sets/72157622304020715/