You watch TV, right? Of course you do. Who doesn't? (Don't pretend, snobs. "I don't watch television," you say? We know all about your little love affair with PBS. Yes, Masterpiece Theater is still television. Now go and hang your head in shame.) As such, you're likely used to being exposed to all sorts of commercials. (Unless you just Tivo everything and fast forward through said commercials.) And what commercials are more obnoxious than video game commercials? I'm a lifelong gamer and hell, I have no problem admitting how bad those things are. (Though granted, Nintendo's "Wii Would Like To Play" commercials at least promote a healthy approach to the hobby, as opposed to the others' efforts to convince you that you're some sort of badass for sitting in a room alone in front of your TV jamming on buttons.)
These commercials, desperate to sell you on how awesometacious their product is, will often beat you over the head with its attitude and attempt to paint a very one-sided picture of the product. It's very common for Xbox 360 games to focus on CGI cutscenes over demonstrating actual gameplay in their games. And I have yet to see so much as a single Playstation 3 commercial that shows any actual gameplay footage whatsoever. They focus on only showing the CGI cutscenes to attempt to convince you that that's what the game looks like in motion - for these two consoles, this generation's been all about pushing graphics while pretty much rehashing and regressing gameplay, considering how often game quality has suffered on these consoles as a result of the fixation on visuals. (Remember, kids! If it isn't all about the high definition visuals, it may as well give you AIDS! Also, if the game isn't Rated M For Mature, then it automatically sucks and is aimed at two-year-olds with learning disabilities. Good games compensate for your insecurities. Who said anything about fun!?) When publishers aren't trying to pull the wool over consumers' eyes when it comes to their software's visuals, they're touting review scores.
"Its graphics are more realistic than real life," says GameSpot.com.
"This one time, I had a sex dream, but it really turned out to be this game I was porking," says 1up.com.
"You're not a hardcore gamer unless you own this," says Game Informer.
"I would kill my own mother if necessary to play this game," says IGN.com.
Veritable sound bites written to be slapped onto game packaging and quoted in commercials are written, and at times going the extra personal route - by implying that you, as an individual, need to make a purchase in order to maintain "hardcore gamer" credibility. Jump on the bandwagon or you're not one of the cool kids! Sound biased? You bet it does. For years, refusing to critically judge games - in particular the big name ones - and instead acting as shills is a problem that's only grown in the gaming media. Publishers have a dangerous amount of influence on the press, and the press allows this - even comes to rely on it - while gamers choose to ignore the lack of journalistic integrity and objectivity that comes with it.
Integrity in general has been a hot topic amongst gamers in the past few months. Unfortunately, most miss the mass corruption forest - allowing the media to continue to get away with its corruption with no mass public outcry or criticism of influence (Even this no-name blog will have no impact, but in the least, I can serve to get the word out there.) - for a few carefully spun trees. The prime example of this being the dismissal of staff writer Jeff Gerstmann at GameSpot.com late last year. He wrote a highly critical review of a much-hyped third person shooter, Kane & Lynch, which GameSpot had been paid to promote for a while. The quality of the review was less than remarkable - largely unprofessional, with the video review playing out like a bag YouTube vlog rant. Shortly after his dismissal, Gerstmann opted to take his revenge on GameSpot by outing them as "adjusting" their review scores based on advertising dollars received from publishers, paying them to act as shills - to sell games, not criticize or objectively evaluate them like they claim. GameSpot never aired the reason for Gerstmann's dismissal. Nor did Gerstmann himself state why he was fired. The gaming populace on the internet decided to jump to conclusions - a conclusion, ultimately, so accepted that were the truth to come out, it wouldn't be accepted - that Gerstmann had been fired for "sticking it to the man" and writing an honest review. This is a flawed theory, given that had that been the issue, Gerstmann himself would no doubt have announced it and used it to fuel his efforts to not only burn his bridges with GameSpot, but to burn the site down entirely. Gerstmann claims that he is legally unable to reveal why he was fired, while CNet, the company behind GameSpot, has stated explicitly that it had nothing to do with the review. We don't know exactly why Gerstmann was fired, but Gerstmann and his friends managed to use their biting back at GameSpot to fuel hordes of gamers on the internet to attempt to sink the site at every turn and discredit it as much as possible. These same people never ask themselves why it took Gerstmann so long to out GameSpot, or speculate that maybe, just maybe he was a willing part of the same corruption up until he was let go. He's successfully made a martyr of himself - despite his own unprofessionalism and general poor quality of reviews, in addition to his own clearly exhibited biases that he denies (When all good critics need to be able to criticize and question themselves and their methods, as nobody does in the gaming media. They prefer to ignore their own biases, which in Gerstmann's case, were most often tantamount to apparent efforts to lower Wii game scores on aggregate review sites, making it clear that he does not particularly like the platform, and as such, is not particularly qualified to write unbiased reviews of its games.) - and drawn a reader base to his new, similarly untrustworthy review site/blog, Giant Bomb. (Which is an ironic name in and of itself.) Unfortunately, the majority of gamers are immature, whether man-children or outright children - making it very easy for Gerstmann to make himself look like a victim, when we don't know the whole story, and he's hardly an innocent himself.
Unsourced information was presented as facts (As is commonplace.), and the gaming blogs - such as Kotaku and Joystiq - in no way helped to provide intelligent commentary or framing for the Gerstmann firing scandal, instead helping to whip up the self-proclaimed "hardcore" masses into a frenzy of GameSpot hate. What we watched then was any semblance of journalistic integrity go right out the window in the name of getting hits on the internet - crass, tabloid style writing intended for consumption by masses dying to crucify a site over methods like this. (When they're known to be common enough in the industry as is. Even Japan's must-beloved Famitsu magazine openly admits to giving games better reviews based on how many advertisements companies buy for said game in their pages. But even they manage to maintain some semblance of integrity when reviewing games that publishers aren't bothering to advertise - like Opoona.) And instead of diving in and looking for the truth of what happened, the gaming masses - as the blogs made the connection for them - decided that Gerstmann's dismissal was done for his refusal to conform to corporate pressure and give Kane & Lynch a higher, paid-for review score. (Gamers do love the image of a bad boy renegade. And it isn't hard to trick them into seeing and believing in that image.) The bottom line is, the entire scandal was the result of terrible journalism, lack of actual facts, and conjecture being tossed out as legitimate conclusions in their place to get people stomping their feet. We may never know the real reason GameSpot fired Jeff Gerstmann - and people might not believe them if GameSpot/CNet disclosed it, anyway - but he's come out of the whole thing smelling like a rose. And does he deserve to? Absolutely not. No part of the scandal and its aftermath in any way served gamers, nor the improvement of the gaming media. GameSpot's scrambled ever since to improve their image, which Gerstmann has effectively shattered, despite being no more trustworthy - but they continue to adhere to the same old groupthink that Gerstmann himself represented. Games simply don't get bad reviews unless they're small name and the mainstream market doesn't care about them.
Groupthink too is a scourge on journalistic integrity. The market is currently divided into two camps, one slowly fading into the other - the conservative minority that refuses to play anything beyond the more "traditional" consoles that do nothing new in terms of controls that contribute to gameplay (Awkward use of webcams that serve no purpose or as any means to the furthering of gaming and tacked on, poorly implemented tilt for some "Me too!" motion control in the PS3 controller do not count.), and instead focus on high end technology specs and fancier graphics, while there is little seen and done in the way of new and innovative gameplay. The systems in question are Sony's Playstation 3 and PSP, as well as Microsoft's Xbox 360. Those who cling solely to these systems largely came in during Sony's decade of dominance in the industry, in which they in no way moved it forward in a meaningful sense - their contribution to gaming has been to provide a line of consoles that found success in that developers wanted to put their games on CDs, not N64 cartridges, and that the Sega Saturn was far too difficult to program for with its overly elaborate internal architecture. (The internal architecture's haunting Sony years later now, as developers are having a difficult time developing games for the PS3 that even feel like solid PS2 era games.) But as a big corporation that entered gaming for the profits - and no doubt in part because Ken Kutaragi (The father of the Playstation brand) was sore at Nintendo for refusing to sell (Complete with all their properties) to Sony in exchange for a Super Nintendo Entertainment System CD add-on - they've demonstrated repeatedly that on the whole, they don't understand the first thing about gaming, let alone gamers. Their designs over the past decade were largely built upon copying the Super Nintendo (All the way down to their basic controller design, simply tacking on more buttons and awkward analog sticks in time, creating controllers too complicated for their own good, then refusing to try - and actually commit - to anything new, when new controllers had been the standard each generation in the past.) and its style of games, as the game industry made the move into 3D.
Sony themselves did not facilitate these advances, the third party developers and publishers taking the lead on their platforms - Sony's own first party software frequently being mediocre at best, making their hardware's lifeblood its third party support. Even as conservative as the console's hardware was, Nintendo made more real advancements with the N64 than Sony did with the Playstation. Super Mario 64 was the premiere platformer that brought the genre into 3D and set a precedent for a good decade plus of games in the genre. Likewise, The Legend of Zelda franchise's transition into 3D set the standard for 3D adventure games. Nintendo was the first to bring an analog stick to a controller as a standard feature as well, as awkwardly designed as the N64 controller was. They introduced force feedback in game controllers through the Rumble Pak, which you would plug into the back of the N64 controller. Sony would go on to follow them with their Dual Shock controllers, adding their own rumble - which they'd later lose late into the PS2's life and early into the PS3's for using technology the Immersion company had patented, without permission - and tacking on a couple of awkwardly placed analog sticks and never moving them to more comfortable positions, taking on the complacent position that their designs didn't need fine tuning and were essentially perfect as it was. (And I wish I was kidding about their arrogance, but when the PSP came under criticism for some noteworthy hardware flaws - particularly in using its buttons - Kutaragi himself boasted that "Nobody can criticize the design of a genius architect," his own massive ego on full display.) Overall, Sony's legacy in gaming has largely been an attempt to monopolize the industry while in no way moving it forward - in fact, making as few changes, let alone improvements, to their systems themselves beyond making them more powerful from generation to generation. Absolute conservativism in gaming - an absolute killer on gaming, an industry that thrives on finding new ways to do things, new kinds of gameplay, and new ways to interact with software. Their success continued to go to their heads over the course of their decade of dominance, getting to the point at which they treated their fanbase like idiots who would eat up anything they said or sold - from insulting marketing campaigns (Yes, this is what they think of us.) to boasting upon unveiling the PS3 that we "would buy it even if it didn't have any games." Naturally, they've gotten their just desserts since then, with the arrogantly designed PSP a failure in the gaming market due to a combination of mostly uncompelling software and ease of piracy, and the PS3 representing a sort of extremely poorly designed "Hindenburg of gaming" that fell flat on its face shortly after launch, with its limited software offerings, poor quality software overall, and general design by which it is entirely unfriendly to game development. (It was a Blu-Ray player with gaming options tacked on. And its arrogantly high prices - thanks to the incorporation of expensive technology that in no way actually benefits gaming, in an effort to compete with Microsoft's own powerhouses, when historically, the most powerful gaming hardware has never won a console or portable war - sure as hell didn't help either.)
In retrospect, Sony's biggest accomplishment in their decade of market domination was market expansion - essentially, doing successfully what Sega tried to but never quite made it - selling video games to the crowds that beat nerds up, rather than just the nerds themselves. They groomed a new, very large generation of gamers around the time much of the NES/Master System/SNES/Genesis generation was quitting gaming as they grew up. With Nintendo becoming an underdog and Sony completely dominating, media biases immediately shifted to vilifying Nintendo - as they have yet to break away from after a year and a half of the Wii having successfully dethroned the Playstation brand, and it'll no doubt take longer yet - while virtually deifying Sony. They were the newcomer bad boy to the gaming hardware wars, after all, both kicking ass and taking names. (In console sales anyway, they took long enough to get into portables, and Nintendo summarily destroyed them there with the DS.) They told their fans that they were the "hardcore" gamers, especially during the PS2 years, while pushing M-rated ultraviolent games as the standard of quality and image for games to look up to. The insecure masses latched on to this kind of image they wanted to associate with themselves. And throughout all this, Sony successfully groomed a large generation of uber-conservative gamers who clung to Sony hardware, controllers, and largely mainstream games. (Even while Final Fantasy VII was largely accredited with "making RPGs mainstream," this is largely untrue. What it served to do was make Final Fantasy mainstream, as that franchise shifted its focus to a new, shallow demographic, focusing more on attitude than quality gameplay and worthwhile stories. Instead, it began the trend under Sony's dominance of more traditional Japanese RPGs (JRPGs, as they're commonly referred to) coming under attack, and the entire genre being judged by the question of "How much like Final Fantasy is it?" and if not enough, the game automatically "sucks," so while Final Fantasy enjoyed mainstream success, the RPG genre itself did not. The only sales boosts its games saw came from Sony-pushed advertising campaigns - particularly when they focused on having a bad attitude for the teenagers - and as a result of the general larger gamer base for the console than Nintendo's platforms had enjoyed. These games largely saw a push away from gameplay to more cinematic focuses in presentation, Sony and Square - the company behind Final Fantasy - sought to Hollywoodize video gaming, ultimately to its detriment as a medium.) These gamers pick a very few types of games by which to judge all others, and don't want to see changes in hardware beyond added power. Naturally, when Nintendo's DS and Wii hit the market to record, unforeseen sales, while bringing major new forms of input to the table - allowing for some fantastic and sorely-needed innovation in gaming - along with better prices with moderately powered, well-planned, and designed hardware, they did not take it well.
Microsoft's Xbox line has suffered from some of the same issues, and largely contributed to the same gaming groupthink - "only these games are good," "traditional controllers are perfect, we don't need change," "we only want peripherals to praise as an option but never real changes to gaming input," "rated M is rated awesome," "colorful games might make me gay," and so forth - while their approach to the market was largely in pushing high end technology (Which largely goes unpushed in the end, and the PS3 and 360 both suffer from longer development cycles, much shorter gameplay, and often less meat to their games in general because so much goes into the graphics over everything else now.), and making first-person shooters huge on consoles for the first time since GoldenEye with the Halo series. The Xboxes are largely high-end (At least at launch) gaming PCs in console boxes with a focus, largely, on first person shooters - a PC gamer staple - with the occasional hit western RPG here and there. They don't push anything genuinely innovative as gaming hardware, and are largely a different variation on Sony's conservativism, without nearly as much focus on image consciousness, seeing as even Microsoft seeks to draw in more casual and generally wider audiences. They fail at this, however, in having spent all the early years of the brand pushing it as being "the hardcore console" next to the Gamecube and PS2, when they were all fairly on par in their own ways. The biggest problem the Xbox really brought to gaming was the beginning of efforts to reintroduce PC gaming elements into consoles, while using tired, overcomplicated controller designs, which largely served to alienate by the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation. Console gaming has largely replaced PC gaming in popularity over the years because of the very problems in PC gaming we've seen resurface in full force on the PS3 and 360 - messy games with little to no bug testing, requiring patches, forced installs to reduce load times on disc games, space management issues despite larger hard drives without the ease of swapping memory cards, and so forth. Especially in the PS3's case, these issues have gotten them some bad PR.
Ultimately, the ultra-conservative groupthink spawned by the generation of gamers that came in with Sony and Microsoft has helped to not only taint, but break today's gaming media. Conservative gaming groupthink largely serves to hold the industry back by discouraging free thought and new ideas, saying that things shouldn't change, that they can't get any better beyond processing power and graphical advancements. (They often tout higher end hardware leading to better physics and AI too, but let's face it - most AI in gaming is terrible, and it'd make games too hard and upset gamers if it were better than it is. Likewise, realistic physics, while an interesting feat, don't serve to improve quality of gameplay at all, and in fact often contribute to additional gamer frustration. The more a"realistic" Sony and Microsoft push games to look and feel, the less fun they become. This approach seeks to essentially strangle the imagination out of gaming, the fantasy the industry has built itself upon.) Gamers cling to notable centers for their groupthink to originate from - hence why Jeff Gerstmann remains popular and his own corruption denied. He tells them what they want to hear, so as far as they're concerned, he's innocent. Unfortunately, the video game industry has no real center of true media and journalism, just shills masquerading as journalists with no integrity.
The next issue in the downfall of the industry is hype. It's a damn hype machine. I've rambled enough here as is, but over at Kombo, Michael Kelly says well how the media impacts games, ultimately how our review scores are bought as a standard part of the marketing process, killing journalistic integrity. Games get hyped to death, and Kelly articulates the effects well as being "The Phantom Menace Effect." We were all dying to see a new Star Wars movie, critics all raved about it, and it saw more hype than any movie in a very long time. We all saw it, most loved it, caught up in the hype. Others' jaws dropped at how terrible it was. After enough time had passed and the hype finally wore off, most of the rest of us were finally able to look back and admit to ourselves, "Man, that movie sucked. What the hell were they talking about?" Final Fantasy VII saw this treatment back in 1997 when the press was largely bought off to call it the "greatest game ever made." Nowadays, it's lucky if it makes it into top 100 lists, simply because it wasn't a good game, and has aged terribly.
We're seeing the exact same thing repeated now with Grand Theft Auto IV, which I'll get to in a bit. (If you're still with me. I can't imagine that many of you are sticking with this whole thing, there's so much reading here.) What we should have learned from this is that no flawless review should be trusted, especially when this universal, but like Square did back then, Rockstar is pulling a fast one on us in 2008. And the press hasn't lifted a finger to stop them. Gamers say they want serious criticism and commentary - for games to be treated like art - but after one well known site's review of the PS3/360's Iraqi-killing/high-five-getting simulator, Army of Two, tore the game apart for its reprehensible politics and gave it a serious critique, gamers on the internet largely threw a tantrum in getting what they want not equaling all M-rated games being given top notch scores and called "art," as they want to call all games now. (These are not people who understand art, either. Speaking as a lifelong gamer and patron of the arts, most video games are no more art than the average bad show on television.) The truth of what they want from the press is this - to hear exactly what they're expecting, in continuing conservative groupthink. If a game has been hyped up to be amazing, then you have to call it that. If it has a big name behind it and it's rated M, it's automatically awesome. You can't criticize these games. Not Ratchet & Clank, not Uncharted, not Devil May Cry, not Halo, not Gears of War, and especially not Grand Theft Auto. (Or anything Take-Two/Rockstar makes, for that matter.) Games like these have their reviews bankrolled - and at times, even written - in advance. The media's job is ultimately made to be to satisfy publishers with high marks for their money. And if they don't get what they want, they lose advertising revenue and at times even risk being cut off by that publisher. While if a game is small name and isn't getting pushed hard on the market and - god forbid - E-rated, it's automatically garbage, regardless of how good it actually is. If there's no hype and extra money coming from that title, it's no good. (I'll be addressing Opoona as a noteworthy recent example of this in a bit.)
The divided market itself plays a major role in the shattering of any semblance of journalistic integrity in gaming these days as well. The gaming media and its dialogue is dominated by conservative groupthink, where games are not judged by their own merits, but in comparison to other games that conservative gamers would rather be playing. (And they like to call themselves these "hardcore" gamers, claiming open-mindedness, while ultimately acting on just the opposite, and refusing to recognize their own conservativeness and bias, since they'd lose the ability to use these matters to attack and criticize games they don't like and segments of the market who don't think the same way they do. This is hardly uncommon human behavior, even outside of gaming.) The broken media caters to these gamers - as many developers try to - in an effort to wage war with progress and change in gaming, the progress and change represented by Nintendo with the Wii and DS and the massive market expansion they represent, bringing all sorts of games. to anybody interested, with more accessible new control schemes that further gaming as a medium. Instead of judging games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Elebits, and so forth on their own merits, they tear them down because - a) Wii Sports isn't a "serious" sports game, b) Wii Fit is seen as a huge threat that somehow could possibly cause all of gaming to collapse on itself and all previous games to disappear forever in giving us exercise software (That most gamers could sorely use), and c) how dare a game be light, humorous and colorful while taking the FPS approach! They'd be better suited to blasting aliens with blood everywhere! Don't you know that cute, light games with a sense of humor are all for children?! (Remember, being a "mature" gamer entails having no sense of fun.) Nintendo doesn't bankroll their reviews. And Wii games by third parties largely don't get advertised much. As a result, the media here tends to tear the system's games apart more often than not, nitpicking games to the Nth degree to reduce their score instead of giving you a balanced review weighing the pros and cons. (Conversely, they'll excuse many, many flaws - both big and small - without their impacting reviews on the PS3 and 360.) It's what the conservative crowd wants to hear, after all - that the Wii sucks and is just a fad machine being purchased for Wii Sports (Actual attach rate numbers and software sales numbers show it easily overtaking the 360 this year and completely dominating this generation like the PS2 did last time, with a much wider variety of software selling than on its competitors.), while the 360 is amazing (Because the real important things in gaming are pay-to-play online and voice chat so you can hunt each other down in FPSes online and feel like big men.) and the PS3 is somehow magically on its way to becoming a juggernaut that will take the market by storm and crush the Wii. (Which isn't happening, and it's not even taking off as a Blu-Ray player, since the format hasn't picked up in sales like it was predicted to with the demise of its competitor, HD-DVD. There's no reason the market should adopt a high definition successor to DVD at this point, after all, so it isn't.)
And thus, we get to Grand Theft Auto IV. It just hit shelves the other day, and naturally, it's selling like gangbusters. (For a PS3/360 release. Which ultimately means that it won't quite reach the series' usual PS2 sales last gen with its market dominance, considering that neither the PS3 nor the 360 will never achieve what the PS2 did, as is more than obvious at this point.) The game was hyped to death. Literally to being the most obnoxiously public example of the death of integrity in gaming journalism. Rockstar has a disgustingly aggressive policy of effectively bullying the press into hyping their games and giving them near flawless to flawless reviews. This was something they were just outed for last fall. Very few segments of the media covered it, largely trying to stomp out and ignore the story. It was in Rockstar's interests, after all.
And after those revelations, we're seeing the worst case scenario come true - the entirety of the mainstream media manipulated and hyped into agreeing that Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest game ever made, and getting it to the top of the aggregate review sites - Gamerankings and Metacritic - dethroning the #1 game there (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which I don't personally agree is the greatest game of all time either, but it certainly belongs far up there and was a suitable game for that slot.) and the #2 as well (Super Mario Galaxy, which managed a great feat in getting up there in Nintendo's not bullying the press, and frequently seeing much harsher reviews as a result. Mario Galaxy belongs up there too - it is effectively gaming bliss, representing the best of gaming's roots, modern gaming, and the future of gaming in input and interaction.), Rockstar essentially moving to take that spot as a fuck-you to Nintendo's traditional dominance of the top 10 (Though The Orange Box managed to get a couple of its versions up there too, though honestly, as good as that is, it's kind of overinflated for FPSes.), given that GTA was supposed to be a major weapon against the success of the Wii, which they've only laughed about. (Ironically, given that the best version of Bully - which is honestly the only game of theirs that interests me - being on it. Their only other releases on it were their Table Tennis game, a superior-controlled port of the 360 original with added motion controls but some unfortunately removed content, and Manhunt 2, which was a terrible game and a general clusterfuck of controversy to hype the game up, when it just honestly wasn't good.)
And what we've gotten as a result of their stranglehold on the media with the GTA franchise is the most blatant lying we've seen yet. Gamers've been reporting numerous problems with the game, from freezing to crashing to console bricking, the game has plenty of issues with the in-game engine running properly and consistently, and the controls are clunkier and less intuitive than before, a sacrifice made to "more realistic" physics. Then they tacked on a so-so online mode, which got hyped up tremendously as well despite not being anywhere near as remarkable as they made it out to be - in not being remarkable at all. And the core of the game? The cardinal sin - it's a rehash of the exact same core game, same kinds of missions, same exact gameplay, with little to no fine tuning and a few new clunky additions - such as taking cover when fighting - that in no way enhance the game. It's a popular PS2/Xbox franchise's awkward, heavily flawed transition to the conservative high-end hardware consoles, bringing nothing new of note to the table, and ultimately serving as a tired rehash of a series that has overstayed its welcome, having stopped truly innovating beyond its initially bringing a vast world to the table - the series was never known for its quality gameplay, just a large variety of half-assed gameplay, like - as it was recently put best on SomethingAwful.com - "a bunch of used up bars of soap squeezed together to make a big new one." Rockstar manipulated the media and hyped the majority up into giving the GTA series far more credit and praise than it ever deserved, and this is the gaming media's biggest offense to the gaming public in breaking away from journalistic integrity - blatantly misleading the masses in calling it the greatest game ever made despite numerous flaws that nobody could responsibly overlook. There was nothing impartial, unbiased, or even intelligent and honest in IGN's multi-page masturbation of the game in calling it better than watching movies - when GTA's always been B-movie gangster writing at best, and this is no different - and worth $300 easily, when that's outright pandering to Rockstar and spitting in gamers' faces. (No game is worth that kind of money. Let alone the $50-60 most go for these days.) And even after Rockstar was outed for their corrupt practices in working with the press? The average gamer's raving about the game - drinking the kool-aid - because it's exactly what they wanted to hear. That "the best game of all time isn't on the Wii and couldn't be done on the Wii, fuck Nintendo and their success," while the game itself is nothing to write home about, let alone deserving of the kind of blatantly excessive praise it's received. There's no objectivity, no impartiality, no honesty.
Rockstar has successfully martyred themselves in the industry through stirring up controversy and ending up the target of figures like Florida attorney Jack Thompson - who seems to be more of a hired joke for PR stunts than actually passionate bout his cause, he's become such a cartoon character. But no, you're not wrong in wondering if that heavily violence-laced game really is the best game ever made. It's just what they want you to think, amidst its numerous noteworthy flaws. If Rockstar's accomplished anything here, it's in openly revealing how broken the mainstream gaming press is. It's all about stirring up controversy and cashing in on a media frenzy. Rockstar's marketing department and higher-ups have no qualms about abusing the system to their benefit. They represent the worst, the lowest discourse in gaming. What they do cheapens it, and is an insult to each and every one of us.
On the opposite end of the scale, we have Opoona. Even more so than the similarly railed-upon Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey on the Xbox 360, it represents media bias ripping an undeserving game apart. Like the other two, it's a traditional JRPG, going all the way back to the genre's NES/SNES roots, with random enemy encounters, stats, spells learned naturally over time, and a more energetic twist on classic turn-based combat. In the western media, every JRPG gets the same sorts of complaints these days, which pretty much amount to this - aside from Final Fantasy, the mainstream does not like JRPGs anymore and finds gameplay elements that define the genre "unacceptable," which is a statement about the players and their tastes, not the game's quality. Today's conservative gamers - who feed on the groupthink, convinced that their opinions are sacrosanct fats - just don't seem to be able to realize that mabye their tastes aren't in classic JRPGs and general JRPGs after complaining after playing games like more recent Final Fantasy titles, judging the genre by exceptions, not the way the majority play. It's like there's a bullet list of classic JRPG cliches that all suddenly make games "suck" now. The genre isn't going to change because a bunch of North Americans are sick of the formula. (Which offers a great deal of variety in and of itself, Opoona being one of the most unique JRPGs in quite a while.)
The western media ripped Opoona apart, and the average gamer here said "eh, I knew it was going to suck," when the reviewers never gave it a chance. The media simply gave them an excuse to deny their being conservative gamers, deciding that every game that they had no interest in to begin with 'sucks' and that's that, while still telling themselves that they're open-minded and justify a lack of adventurousness. (An irony in the RPG genre.) So we get people basically agreeing 'hay if this site sez it sux it sux cuz I like this site,' all an excuse for people to avoid forming their own opinions and falling into the same old groupthink, as most gamers do and miss out on a tremendous amount of worthwhile games as a result of.
It's this same kind of groupthink by which even where they are now, Nintendo can do no right, while so many still cheer on Sony and readily forgive them for everything they've done wrong at the drop of a hat. Just like people when it comes to just about anything else, gamers are rarely free-thinking individuals who work regularly as fully functional critical thinkers when it comes to their hobby. And the fact that there isn't much of a 'real' gaming media to speak of - (Reiterating for the umpteenth time) critics are paid to sell games, not to give honest reviews, and personal biases are rarely if ever owned up to, creating the illusion that anyone is fit to adequately judge any game objectively, while you get no real insight into or criticism of games, generally, when it should be done. Tired games are praised on other platforms where evolutions of classic franchises are slammed on Nintendo hardware. (Zelda and Smash Brothers are criticized for being rehashes, while GTA is praised for doing the same thing, as are games like Devil May Cry and God of War, when those are especially shallow, overhyped games to begin with that do nothing for the medium.) And if a reviewer thinks critically about a game - like the infamous Army of Two review - we see gamers throwing a hissy fit because it wasn't the review they wanted.
The damage conservative approaches to gaming have done to the industry in and of itself makes the Wii and DS all the more significant as gaming hardware goes, not just in their sales triumphs, but what they bring to the table that's fresh and new. Gamers need to peel off the crusty conservative buildup of the past decade and open their minds to something new - failing that, at least learn to acknowledge their own biases and tastes, rather than trying to write off everything that doesn't fit them as garbage. (Which is what we're seeing now, with the nearly violent reactions we saw to the Wii and DS at their announcements and even more so to their mass market success. And the Wii especially is still a target of that today, though the DS still sees some anger, mostly from PSP fanatics who're still convinced that it's doing well as a gaming platform, when it isn't.) We're seeing close minded-arguments that the market is splitting into casual and hardcore consumers, which isn't true either - Sony thrived for a decade because they captured the casual, mainstream market as well. It wasn't all the same people who're buying Brain Training and such now, but it's a similar idea. But the bottom line is, the market isn't going to segregate itself, and with the Wii on its way to complete market dominance, we're only going to continue to see more third parties put their big titles on it, given that it's also proven that third party games can sell extremely well so long as you treat the Wii owner base as seriously as the other platforms' users. The Wii Sports/Big Brain Academy gamers are not the ones making the Wii the success it is, and even then, the Wii attach rate is higher than the other consoles' fanatics claim it is. The Wii is already a more serious hardcore console than the PS3, and it'll pass the 360 in that regard, library-wise, in time too, especially due to its being essentially the only hit console in Japan this generation. It's the all-inclusive console, not an either/or system. Just as Nintendo was wrong about being able to divide the portable market between the Gameboy Advance and DS and create a new market with the DS rather than swallowing the other, gaming itself is not becoming segmented and separated into casual and hardcore users (With the latter all supporting Sony and Microsoft as they claim), the Wii's simply swallowing up the majority share of the market, period. After a decade of conservative gaming strangling the market and the PS2 suffering from the worst rate of sequels and rehashes of any console in a generation, the Wii revolution is what gaming needed most.
Getting back to reiterating previous points yet again, and following previous trains of though where I got away from Opoona there - it's groupthink that simply leads to nonthinking blind defense of a bad review of a good game someone never played nor wanted to, simply because the review 'proves they were right.' Opoona's a damn good game, with a beautiful, immersive, and incredibly well designed world overflowing with more personality than most games in the past decade combined. Not flawless, to be sure, but the flaws are not huge by any means, and where it shines, it more than outshines the detriments of the game's flaws. It's a quirky, obscure third party game that deserves to be supported - and regardless of reviews, it'll no doubt ultimately sell out its small print run in its entirety anyway (Koei went in knowing the game wasn't going to be a hit, as it wasn't in Japan, given that most new IPs don't sell well there, regardless of critical reception.) - and not marginalized even worse than EarthBound (A similarly quirky, wonderful SNES RPG that hit in 1995 to much crying over its visual style and less focus on a dramatic story than an immersive adventure with the focus on the experience of the journey - like Opoona.) was when it came out to largely the same reaction from RPG fans. 'Look at those graphics! It can't possibly be good!' They want the media to tell them they're right - and so they did. The way Opoona was received, by and large, is an excellent source of insight into - and a strong example of - everything wrong with the gaming media. Smaller name, obscure games get ripped apart. The blockbusters all get raved about. (Though they're more than willing to attack Nintendo ones, as they have the more recent Mario Kart games, which are excellent.)
And in the end today, the western press - and most western gamers - don't want JRPGs. If they get anything in the genre, it has to take itself seriously, like Final Fantasy - too seriously, to the point of painful melodrama. And I can remember that when I was a kid, RPGs were the genre we could pride ourselves on playing because of their deeper stories and huge amounts of text - not to mention the thoughtful, strategic combat. Now it either has to be a near-action game or feel like an MMORPG with no battle transitions for today's ADD gamer, who considers reading in the genre to be a BAD thing. Whaddaya mean the game isn't fully voice-acted!? I feel like I'm doing homework, reading in my games.
In summation, whether you're a regular gamer who pays attention to these things or someone who simply enjoys it as a light hobby - if at all - you shouldn't listen to the words of the video game media - especially not the big, mainstream sites. They're thoroughly in publishers' pockets, and in large part, there's no sense of real journalistic integrity to speak of. Think for yourself, keep an open mind with games, and do your own research. Don't let the media tell you what's good and what's bad, and what to buy.
Yes, this was a freaking long one.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
I will play for you Forest Funk
I took another short hiatus to focus on other things here, but I've returned at last to write what will probably be the last post of April here. (Maybe I'll fit another one in before we hit May, no guarantees.) Still trying to finish that novel, after all. There's still a good ways to go. Progress always tends to go slower than I intend, but it's still coming along.
Anyway, I'm not inspired enough to prattle on about any particular aspect of life at the moment - hopefully the last entry did well enough for the month anyway - so this time around? This Jackass Talks Movies! Part Zwei.
If last time's ultra-obscure Woody Allen tribute wasn't strange enough for you, prepare to have your socks and/or perhaps your wooden clogs knocked off by this one. (Assuming you're some sort of incredibly dated, irrelevant European stereotype, anyway. You don't see too many people like that wandering around these days.)
This time, I feel it's worth drawing your attention to the Japanese 2005 surrealist comedy film, Naisu no Mori: The First Contact, better known in the west as Funky Forest: The First Contact. The film is an essential 150 minute tour de force of its genre, written and directed by Katsuhito Ishii (Cha no Aji/The Taste of Tea, another surrealist comedy, and Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna/Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, an extremely '70s-themed yakuza getaway comedy.), Hajime Ishimine, and Shunichiro Miki. The film enjoyed a brief stint at New York's ImaginAsian Theater back in early March, then finally saw release on DVD here in North America.
The film itself is broken up into a series of loosely-connected vignettes with little in the way of a core story - like many vignette-oriented art house films - focusing on various characters and the extremely absurdly funny situations they get themselves into. What there is of a plot that comes together is a focus on a sort of "couple that is not quite a couple" - Takefumi and Notti (Nocchi) - played by Ryo Kase and Erika Nishikado. Takefumi is a young English teacher, and Notti is his girlfriend and former student (Who doesn't seem to be too much younger than himself, presumably in a later grade or a graduate by then. It's never explained, nor is it important to the plot.). The two of them laze around together at - presumably - Takefumi's house and have meandering conversations that ultimately lead into their discussing dreams they've had. (All the while, Takefumi plays dance music in the background, having a turntable in his living room and apparently working as a DJ as well.) Only two fairly long vignettes seem to explicitly be their dreams, but it could be believably implicit that the rest of the film that the rest of the vignettes that make up the rest of the film are dreams as well. Dreams seem to play a central part in the story, after all, as we look at this couple and see how their dreams reflect on their lives and relationships. They don't appear in all of the other vignettes, but they're participants in some of them, making it unclear whether they are dreams or actual surreal real life events.
The rest of this post is pretty much spoilers (It had to be, at least, because I wanted to really go over all the strangeness this film entails.), so if you've got your interest piqued by what you've read already, you may not want to read on, in the interest of leaving the majority of the film's content a surprise. But if you want a good second opinion without much in the way of spoilers, a fellow westerner who gets it, by all means check out this review at Cinema Strikes Back.
The film begins with a surreal, fairly clear dream in this microscopic cell structure like space, where Takefumi sits inside a sperm-like spaceship of sorts watching a couple of manzai comedians perform their act on a television screen. Then we see a recurring little girl daydream about her own odd little science fiction-esque persona in that same space, increasing and decreasing the speeds at which little spheres orbit one another and eventually shooting a little robot nearby with lasers from her eyes. After being introduced to Takefumi and Notti, we watch another ongoing vignette series unfold - Guitar Brother - initially introduced as the story of three brothers unpopular with women. The middle brother, Masaru (Played the the always-great Tadanobu Asano, who's frequently described as a cross between Johnny Depp and Toshiro Mifune. He's turned memorable performances in films such as Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe (A personal favorite, which I'll be writing on later), Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, and Katsuhito Ishii's previous films, The Taste of Tea and Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl.), looks rather unkempt, grows his hair out long, and plays the guitar in hopes of getting women with it. He is often seen with his younger brother, Masao, who is a rather rotund white western kid who speaks relatively limited Japanese and never indicates that he speaks any English, instead simply awkwardly interacting with his older brother and irritating him, while sitting around and eating candy bars. (Seemingly particularly partial to Snickers, as it's the only kind mentioned by name in the film.) Why Masao is white and the dynamics of the family are never explained, but in its execution, the humor of his presence works well. Their older brother - whose name I've missed, unfortunately - spends his time in another room practicing an odd dance to an enka song of sorts, also in hopes of making himself attractive to women through this. (The men of Funky Forest tend to draw odd conclusions about what would make women want them, to much comic effect.)
The elder brother later goes on a short trip to a ryokan/inn with hot springs, where he meets a trio of women, who we see several vignettes revolving around - the "babbling hot spring vixens." They chatter amongst themselves, telling one odd story or another (Introducing one of the film's recurring jokes, references to these mysterious "Piko-riko aliens" that nobody has actually seen, and only mentioning Takefumi in passing, one of them saying he was a friend of hers who'd encountered them.). Over time, their stories become more and more pointless and in one calling one another on telling an utterly pointless story and a fairly violent pillow fight erupting in which they all screamed at one another for telling stories with no purpose, causing the hotel staff to rush in and pull them apart. (All of this done in an extremely absurd fashion.) Within this story arc of sorts, the elder brother from the Guitar Brother vignettes invites them to a "gokon"/singles picnic of sorts to help himself, his brother, and their friends meet women. Somewhere in there, we see a scene featuring Notti running through a park and lying down to take a nap, a little black dog - which could have been a scottish or cairn terrier - looking at her.
By the end of the first half of the film, we return to Takefumi and his dream, watching a long, incredibly surreal series of events play out on a beach. He wakes up on the sand when an old, rundown car shines its headlights on him. A punk appears dressed as a demon and dances around him with a gun, then returns to the car and begins to play music. Notti appears in a monster costume, which she unzips to show her face, then sits down on a throne of sorts on a hill overlooking the beach and commands Takefumi to show her his dance moves. The punk plays a variety of music and pairs Takefumi up with all sorts of other dancers - both people in strange costumes and even animated characters - while Notti continued to tell him to dance, dissatisfied with his performances. Takefumi, on the other hand, responds by telling her to show him her feelings, his dream reflecting anxiety he feels about their relationship, while in voiceover, the viewer has already learned that while Notti likes him, she hasn't fallen in love with him yet.
Following Takefumi's dream, we see Notti talk about having had a dream herself, and the film has a three minute intermission.
When the plot resumes, we're introduced to an entirely new set of vignettes.
Throughout the second half, we see these aptly titled vignettes called "HOME ROOM!!!!!!!!!" that focus on various students conducting home room in place of the teacher at the beginning of class (Including Rinko Kikuchi, who received plenty of deserved acclaim for her performance in Babel, and also had a role in The Taste of Tea.), with hilarious and often obscenity shouting-filled results.
A high school girl is tricked into one of the weirdest comedy bits conceivable, in which one of the comedians who draws her in dresses up in a furry costume of sorts that seems to be sealed to his skin and asks her to pull the tail in the front. His partner explains to her that they're serving the Piko-riko aliens, and she agrees to help them by sticking a little tube with a phallic end into her navel, which allows the partner to reach into this box with a distinctly anus-like opening, from which he proceeds to remove a very short (Though not a little person, simply scaled down by camera effects) sushi chef, and reveal to the girl that she'd just participated in a comedy routine.
Another class assembles with very strange looking aliens being played like musical instruments after a great deal of build-up with the utterly bizarre creatures - all of which seemed to have human faces, making them look like genetic experiments gone horribly wrong.
Masaru teaches a girl some sort of sport with at tennis racket at a school gym, which involves a mutated middle-aged man who could be controlled through a weird fleshy bulb that dropped - presumably from his rear- through a hole in a chair to squirt fluids from his freakishly large and long nipples (I wasn't kidding when I said this was a weird movie.) while the girl swung at them with her tennis racket. He then produced these strange mutant creatures from his pants that she'd have to hit out of the air, one of which latched onto her underarm and spawned a mandragora-like creature with a human face that Takefumi called the school doctor to help with. The doctor proceeded to yell at the mandragora of sorts and generally berate and belittle it while it weakly argued in its defense, while eventually stealing his personal stamp (A seal that Japanese people generally have to act as their signature of sorts when signing for things.), hidden within its phallic abdomen after making it squirt a lot of a weird white fluid. (There is no shortage of bizarre metaphorical sexual images in this film, either.) After humiliating the mandragora enough, it was finally removed.
We see Masaru again later working in observing animators drawing cuts for an anime production created by a dog - the same little black dog seen before - who was able to do his job in having an assistant who could read his mind.
Towards the end, live action protesters are seen demanding a raise in an animated world, in which an anime parody story of sorts plays out between a number of crudely animated characters seeking to track down and beat up a new transfer student. Presumably the story the animators were working on before, as it featured the same dog in question.
We finally see the singles picnic unfold, with the Guitar Brother siblings there, along with the angry teachers from HOME ROOM!!!!!!!!!! and several other minor characters from throughout the film. Notti is seen jogging past them. And none of the invited women show up, leading one of the guys to show off his dance moves in encouragement from the others.
After that, we see Notti's dream at last, wherein she's wearing an odd furry costume covering everything but her face and playing a violin in the middle of a forest. The sound she makes begins to change as three alien girls with mixing equipment built into the forest itself around her play with the sound she's making, filling the forest with music, which seems to send them into a state of blissful ecstasy. A young boy records the music, and a wanderer on a pilgrimage stops to listen. When the music ends, the girls and boy all turn to streaks of color which return to a ship in space. Upon the scene's ending, we see one more brief scene between the young couple, and the film ends.
All of this was written doing entirely on memory and what few resources I could find on the overall layout of everything in the film, so I may have the order of things slightly wrong, and perhaps forgotten to include some things as well.
Given the odd fluidity to the random, dreamy, non-linear plot, it is frankly near-impossible to discern how many real people may have been involved in the film's overall story, whether we were witnessing many characters' dreams, or if it revolved entirely around Takefumi and Notti - who admittedly, had the strongest part of the story beyond merely producing laughter, given the subtle tension between them and interesting dynamic of their characters when on screen together - or if their dreams were the only dreams, and the rest of the film was simply random silliness.
A warning to westerners, again (As though it were really needed now, if you read the rest of this.) - the film's sense of humor is very out there. To the point at which for the most part, it hasn't been well-received by western audiences as a whole, simply because you need to effectively cultivate an appreciation of Japanese humor - to be able to "get" it, even to this sort of extreme - in order to be able to fully enjoy Funky Forest. If you lack this, to you, the film may be nothing more than two and a half hours of "What the fuck am I watching!? What is going on!? Ow, my brain!"
There is some meaningful content, a few more serious undertones in some of the plots and statements about life itself and the world around us (As absurdist cinema tends to seek to reflect in the very absurdity that defines it.), but if you can't deal with the eccentric sense of humor through which the film carries itself (The last scene of the film simply amounting to the aforementioned couple that isn't quite a couple, Takefumi and Notti, dancing outside in the fall leaves to a rather meaningless gibberish song Notti begins singing, playing on the word "lie," "uso" (As in telling a lie.), and the end credits rolling at the end of their dance.), you'll likely miss out on these things.
All that said, the cast is wonderful and everyone fits their part well. (There's no shortage of attractive, talented women, either.) The direction is superb, giving the viewer all sorts of interesting and well orchestrated images, both surreal and beautiful. And the music, which plays an important part in the film as it plays out, is infectious and serves each scene well. Beyond its relative - and relative is putting it lightly - inaccessibility to the average western moviegoer in terms of content, Funky Forest is a surreal, hilarious, and supremely enjoyable film.
Don't go into Funky Forest expecting a full coherent linear plot where everything connects and makes sense. It's very far out there as art house films go, and it sheds the traditional conventions of cinema we've come to expect in many regards. If you have the patience to sit through a film that long in fully knowing that it has no real full story that it's trying to tell you, and enough of an appreciation of Japanese humor, by all means, give Funky Forest a chance. It'll have you in stitches practically the entire time, when it isn't making your jaw drop at some of the unexpected and almost-shocking pseudo-sexual images it throws at you for the sake of humor. Rather than try to make sense of it all - life itself rarely makes sense either, after all - just turn off your brain and immerse yourself in the world of Funky Forest. Accept everything you see for what it is, and everything's even funnier. The movie's an even bigger trip than Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the best example I've got for you of a western film that attempts something similarly surreal. (Though Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep borders on that with its surreal and half-nonsensical dreams as well.)
Anyway, I'm not inspired enough to prattle on about any particular aspect of life at the moment - hopefully the last entry did well enough for the month anyway - so this time around? This Jackass Talks Movies! Part Zwei.
If last time's ultra-obscure Woody Allen tribute wasn't strange enough for you, prepare to have your socks and/or perhaps your wooden clogs knocked off by this one. (Assuming you're some sort of incredibly dated, irrelevant European stereotype, anyway. You don't see too many people like that wandering around these days.)
This time, I feel it's worth drawing your attention to the Japanese 2005 surrealist comedy film, Naisu no Mori: The First Contact, better known in the west as Funky Forest: The First Contact. The film is an essential 150 minute tour de force of its genre, written and directed by Katsuhito Ishii (Cha no Aji/The Taste of Tea, another surrealist comedy, and Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna/Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, an extremely '70s-themed yakuza getaway comedy.), Hajime Ishimine, and Shunichiro Miki. The film enjoyed a brief stint at New York's ImaginAsian Theater back in early March, then finally saw release on DVD here in North America.
The film itself is broken up into a series of loosely-connected vignettes with little in the way of a core story - like many vignette-oriented art house films - focusing on various characters and the extremely absurdly funny situations they get themselves into. What there is of a plot that comes together is a focus on a sort of "couple that is not quite a couple" - Takefumi and Notti (Nocchi) - played by Ryo Kase and Erika Nishikado. Takefumi is a young English teacher, and Notti is his girlfriend and former student (Who doesn't seem to be too much younger than himself, presumably in a later grade or a graduate by then. It's never explained, nor is it important to the plot.). The two of them laze around together at - presumably - Takefumi's house and have meandering conversations that ultimately lead into their discussing dreams they've had. (All the while, Takefumi plays dance music in the background, having a turntable in his living room and apparently working as a DJ as well.) Only two fairly long vignettes seem to explicitly be their dreams, but it could be believably implicit that the rest of the film that the rest of the vignettes that make up the rest of the film are dreams as well. Dreams seem to play a central part in the story, after all, as we look at this couple and see how their dreams reflect on their lives and relationships. They don't appear in all of the other vignettes, but they're participants in some of them, making it unclear whether they are dreams or actual surreal real life events.
The rest of this post is pretty much spoilers (It had to be, at least, because I wanted to really go over all the strangeness this film entails.), so if you've got your interest piqued by what you've read already, you may not want to read on, in the interest of leaving the majority of the film's content a surprise. But if you want a good second opinion without much in the way of spoilers, a fellow westerner who gets it, by all means check out this review at Cinema Strikes Back.
The film begins with a surreal, fairly clear dream in this microscopic cell structure like space, where Takefumi sits inside a sperm-like spaceship of sorts watching a couple of manzai comedians perform their act on a television screen. Then we see a recurring little girl daydream about her own odd little science fiction-esque persona in that same space, increasing and decreasing the speeds at which little spheres orbit one another and eventually shooting a little robot nearby with lasers from her eyes. After being introduced to Takefumi and Notti, we watch another ongoing vignette series unfold - Guitar Brother - initially introduced as the story of three brothers unpopular with women. The middle brother, Masaru (Played the the always-great Tadanobu Asano, who's frequently described as a cross between Johnny Depp and Toshiro Mifune. He's turned memorable performances in films such as Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe (A personal favorite, which I'll be writing on later), Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, and Katsuhito Ishii's previous films, The Taste of Tea and Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl.), looks rather unkempt, grows his hair out long, and plays the guitar in hopes of getting women with it. He is often seen with his younger brother, Masao, who is a rather rotund white western kid who speaks relatively limited Japanese and never indicates that he speaks any English, instead simply awkwardly interacting with his older brother and irritating him, while sitting around and eating candy bars. (Seemingly particularly partial to Snickers, as it's the only kind mentioned by name in the film.) Why Masao is white and the dynamics of the family are never explained, but in its execution, the humor of his presence works well. Their older brother - whose name I've missed, unfortunately - spends his time in another room practicing an odd dance to an enka song of sorts, also in hopes of making himself attractive to women through this. (The men of Funky Forest tend to draw odd conclusions about what would make women want them, to much comic effect.)
The elder brother later goes on a short trip to a ryokan/inn with hot springs, where he meets a trio of women, who we see several vignettes revolving around - the "babbling hot spring vixens." They chatter amongst themselves, telling one odd story or another (Introducing one of the film's recurring jokes, references to these mysterious "Piko-riko aliens" that nobody has actually seen, and only mentioning Takefumi in passing, one of them saying he was a friend of hers who'd encountered them.). Over time, their stories become more and more pointless and in one calling one another on telling an utterly pointless story and a fairly violent pillow fight erupting in which they all screamed at one another for telling stories with no purpose, causing the hotel staff to rush in and pull them apart. (All of this done in an extremely absurd fashion.) Within this story arc of sorts, the elder brother from the Guitar Brother vignettes invites them to a "gokon"/singles picnic of sorts to help himself, his brother, and their friends meet women. Somewhere in there, we see a scene featuring Notti running through a park and lying down to take a nap, a little black dog - which could have been a scottish or cairn terrier - looking at her.
By the end of the first half of the film, we return to Takefumi and his dream, watching a long, incredibly surreal series of events play out on a beach. He wakes up on the sand when an old, rundown car shines its headlights on him. A punk appears dressed as a demon and dances around him with a gun, then returns to the car and begins to play music. Notti appears in a monster costume, which she unzips to show her face, then sits down on a throne of sorts on a hill overlooking the beach and commands Takefumi to show her his dance moves. The punk plays a variety of music and pairs Takefumi up with all sorts of other dancers - both people in strange costumes and even animated characters - while Notti continued to tell him to dance, dissatisfied with his performances. Takefumi, on the other hand, responds by telling her to show him her feelings, his dream reflecting anxiety he feels about their relationship, while in voiceover, the viewer has already learned that while Notti likes him, she hasn't fallen in love with him yet.
Following Takefumi's dream, we see Notti talk about having had a dream herself, and the film has a three minute intermission.
When the plot resumes, we're introduced to an entirely new set of vignettes.
Throughout the second half, we see these aptly titled vignettes called "HOME ROOM!!!!!!!!!" that focus on various students conducting home room in place of the teacher at the beginning of class (Including Rinko Kikuchi, who received plenty of deserved acclaim for her performance in Babel, and also had a role in The Taste of Tea.), with hilarious and often obscenity shouting-filled results.
A high school girl is tricked into one of the weirdest comedy bits conceivable, in which one of the comedians who draws her in dresses up in a furry costume of sorts that seems to be sealed to his skin and asks her to pull the tail in the front. His partner explains to her that they're serving the Piko-riko aliens, and she agrees to help them by sticking a little tube with a phallic end into her navel, which allows the partner to reach into this box with a distinctly anus-like opening, from which he proceeds to remove a very short (Though not a little person, simply scaled down by camera effects) sushi chef, and reveal to the girl that she'd just participated in a comedy routine.
Another class assembles with very strange looking aliens being played like musical instruments after a great deal of build-up with the utterly bizarre creatures - all of which seemed to have human faces, making them look like genetic experiments gone horribly wrong.
Masaru teaches a girl some sort of sport with at tennis racket at a school gym, which involves a mutated middle-aged man who could be controlled through a weird fleshy bulb that dropped - presumably from his rear- through a hole in a chair to squirt fluids from his freakishly large and long nipples (I wasn't kidding when I said this was a weird movie.) while the girl swung at them with her tennis racket. He then produced these strange mutant creatures from his pants that she'd have to hit out of the air, one of which latched onto her underarm and spawned a mandragora-like creature with a human face that Takefumi called the school doctor to help with. The doctor proceeded to yell at the mandragora of sorts and generally berate and belittle it while it weakly argued in its defense, while eventually stealing his personal stamp (A seal that Japanese people generally have to act as their signature of sorts when signing for things.), hidden within its phallic abdomen after making it squirt a lot of a weird white fluid. (There is no shortage of bizarre metaphorical sexual images in this film, either.) After humiliating the mandragora enough, it was finally removed.
We see Masaru again later working in observing animators drawing cuts for an anime production created by a dog - the same little black dog seen before - who was able to do his job in having an assistant who could read his mind.
Towards the end, live action protesters are seen demanding a raise in an animated world, in which an anime parody story of sorts plays out between a number of crudely animated characters seeking to track down and beat up a new transfer student. Presumably the story the animators were working on before, as it featured the same dog in question.
We finally see the singles picnic unfold, with the Guitar Brother siblings there, along with the angry teachers from HOME ROOM!!!!!!!!!! and several other minor characters from throughout the film. Notti is seen jogging past them. And none of the invited women show up, leading one of the guys to show off his dance moves in encouragement from the others.
After that, we see Notti's dream at last, wherein she's wearing an odd furry costume covering everything but her face and playing a violin in the middle of a forest. The sound she makes begins to change as three alien girls with mixing equipment built into the forest itself around her play with the sound she's making, filling the forest with music, which seems to send them into a state of blissful ecstasy. A young boy records the music, and a wanderer on a pilgrimage stops to listen. When the music ends, the girls and boy all turn to streaks of color which return to a ship in space. Upon the scene's ending, we see one more brief scene between the young couple, and the film ends.
All of this was written doing entirely on memory and what few resources I could find on the overall layout of everything in the film, so I may have the order of things slightly wrong, and perhaps forgotten to include some things as well.
Given the odd fluidity to the random, dreamy, non-linear plot, it is frankly near-impossible to discern how many real people may have been involved in the film's overall story, whether we were witnessing many characters' dreams, or if it revolved entirely around Takefumi and Notti - who admittedly, had the strongest part of the story beyond merely producing laughter, given the subtle tension between them and interesting dynamic of their characters when on screen together - or if their dreams were the only dreams, and the rest of the film was simply random silliness.
A warning to westerners, again (As though it were really needed now, if you read the rest of this.) - the film's sense of humor is very out there. To the point at which for the most part, it hasn't been well-received by western audiences as a whole, simply because you need to effectively cultivate an appreciation of Japanese humor - to be able to "get" it, even to this sort of extreme - in order to be able to fully enjoy Funky Forest. If you lack this, to you, the film may be nothing more than two and a half hours of "What the fuck am I watching!? What is going on!? Ow, my brain!"
There is some meaningful content, a few more serious undertones in some of the plots and statements about life itself and the world around us (As absurdist cinema tends to seek to reflect in the very absurdity that defines it.), but if you can't deal with the eccentric sense of humor through which the film carries itself (The last scene of the film simply amounting to the aforementioned couple that isn't quite a couple, Takefumi and Notti, dancing outside in the fall leaves to a rather meaningless gibberish song Notti begins singing, playing on the word "lie," "uso" (As in telling a lie.), and the end credits rolling at the end of their dance.), you'll likely miss out on these things.
All that said, the cast is wonderful and everyone fits their part well. (There's no shortage of attractive, talented women, either.) The direction is superb, giving the viewer all sorts of interesting and well orchestrated images, both surreal and beautiful. And the music, which plays an important part in the film as it plays out, is infectious and serves each scene well. Beyond its relative - and relative is putting it lightly - inaccessibility to the average western moviegoer in terms of content, Funky Forest is a surreal, hilarious, and supremely enjoyable film.
Don't go into Funky Forest expecting a full coherent linear plot where everything connects and makes sense. It's very far out there as art house films go, and it sheds the traditional conventions of cinema we've come to expect in many regards. If you have the patience to sit through a film that long in fully knowing that it has no real full story that it's trying to tell you, and enough of an appreciation of Japanese humor, by all means, give Funky Forest a chance. It'll have you in stitches practically the entire time, when it isn't making your jaw drop at some of the unexpected and almost-shocking pseudo-sexual images it throws at you for the sake of humor. Rather than try to make sense of it all - life itself rarely makes sense either, after all - just turn off your brain and immerse yourself in the world of Funky Forest. Accept everything you see for what it is, and everything's even funnier. The movie's an even bigger trip than Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the best example I've got for you of a western film that attempts something similarly surreal. (Though Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep borders on that with its surreal and half-nonsensical dreams as well.)
Friday, April 18, 2008
How to Age Gracelessly
Milestone hurrah! Or some other exclamation of pseudo-jubilation. This post makes the 50 in Spiral Reverie total now. Never thought I'd make it this far, did you? Hoped and dreamed that I would give this whole "blorging" thing up, eh? Too bad. I'm never going away. Not even if you pay me. (Note: If you pay me, it might help.) Anyway, it feels like an accomplishment in and of itself to me, having found this much to babble about here and there, now and then, since the blog formally launched in early July last year. At this rate, you can expect me to hit post 100 by... roughly early February 2009. Let the salivation in fear and trepidation begin. (Or anticipation, I suppose, should you somehow actually enjoy these ramblings. Somehow.)
So here we are, mid-April. Everything is covered in yellow and it's an entirely miserable time of year for me. My allergies are running at an all time high, like a runaway freight train powered by economic anxiety and also probably some coal too because dirty energy's getting to be cool again these days, or so the far right's claiming. (Next thing we know, the black lung will be a fashion statement! Or maybe not. Maybe.) As the northern hemisphere revives from winter (Not that we had much of one, as usual. And it's been spring for a good while now anyway - we're slowly making that painful transition into summer here now, otherwise known as the season that ate EVERYTHING.), the birds burst into rapturous song and flowers explode into colorful bloom, blasting anything and everything with pollen. And though we've seen some nice - and much needed - rain here and there, it hasn't been enough to stave off that dreaded yellow flowery taint creeping across the country and making those of us allergic to it wish we were dead. (And generally hope that we can find some medication that'll help without making us too tired or screwing up our sleep too much. Three cheers for pharmaceuticals.)
Of course, like any season, spring brings birthdays. People get to enjoy tacking extra digits onto their age, pointing to the calendar, and loudly exclaiming "NOW I'M THIS MANY!" This stops being remotely cute or amusing by the time you hit puberty, and you will be beaten with extreme prejudice if you insist upon continuing this behavior pattern. What are you, six!?
Many significant individuals were born around this time of the year. Like Conan O'Brien, host of Late Night - and soon taking over the Tonight Show when Jay Leno steps down in 2009 - whose birthday is today. And the ghost of Hitler, who ages on sunday - otherwise recognized as the infamous "4/20" on which the world's potheads celebrate the attempted extermination of the Jews, homosexuals, and other individuals who make the world a more interesting and varied place by smoking all the pot they can and trying to make contact with the ghost of Jerry Garcia. Some day, you guys, someday. (And this year it's also an excuse for G4 to give me a reason to watch it once again with the special episode of Code Monkeys they made for it, given the frequency of drug humor on the show. Now they just need to get some official season 2 announcements out already. It's rather nice having new episodes of entirely scripted dramas and comedies to watch again, post-strike. The Office, Scrubs, Reaper, and Battlestar Galactica are keeping me entertained, anyway, aside from the usual Daily Show, Colbert, and Conan.)
Of course, with all this horrible pollen making me miserable and all these other key birthdays popping up, I suppose it's somewhat worth noting that I age-up, as it were, this coming Saturday. What better time to age and be reminded of how much life's been passing me by, after all? I'll finally be stumbling into my mid-twenties - though granted, the earliest of the mid-twenties years - and as you can tell, I couldn't be more pleased.
Aging has its upsides and its downsides. On one hand, it makes it easier to dismiss the youthful follies of the past, to laugh at my own stupid decisions and mistakes and think to myself, "Hey, look how much I've grown since then! I wouldn't even consider something that stupid now!" Then it usually hits me about a second and a half later that I don't have any room to talk now anyway. (No one putting so much into such a hopeless unrequited love novel project like this has any right to think themselves anything but a fool, let's face it.)
There's plenty of less than wonderful things about tacking that extra year onto the old age bulletin board (I'm sure you all have one of these too, or at least an enchanted abacus that counts down the number of years until your demise. I don't know what I'd do without mine.) as well. Aging tends to warrant reflection on one's life. And looking back, high school sucked, college was fascinating and educational, but nothing spectacular, nothing like people make college out to be. (But then, according to pop culture, all you do is get drunk and high and "get yo fuck on" or whatever people are saying these days. I did none of these things, the former two not interesting me, personally, having plenty of fun with friends while sober, and the latter largely a matter of a lack of meeting and connecting with anybody of the opposite sex with any level to things beyond simple, enjoyable platonic friendship. I'd say the unrequited love thing played a part, but that only really hit me hard about halfway in - I thought I was over her for a long time, after all - and I simply never met anybody I found myself particularly attracted to. For all that cheesy INFP "emotional sensitivity" I deal with, I have a hard time really being attracted to anybody beyond noticing someone, thinking "Hey, she's kinda cute," and leaving it at that.) Now I've been a graduate for about four months, and I've been out of classes for nearly a year, having finished all my academic requirements for graduation up last May. Time does have a way of flying. Not unlike the toasters on that old Windows 3.1 screensaver. (Admit it, you were waiting for someone to drop that reference on the "blarghosphere." ... See what I did there? How witty "blargosphere" is? It's okay to like it.)
Post-graduate life is kind of sad, reflecting on where many people my own age are in their lives. I know, you aren't supposed to look at other people's lives and compare them to your own - you have to find your own way, walk your own path instead of trying to follow the beaten road and be like everybody else. But it's still hard not to laugh at myself at this point. I'm going into my mid twenties, and after graduating, I just moved back home. (Doesn't help that the job market is a mess as the economy continues to collapse and I'd be miserable in most jobs anyway, the way I function on many levels. Not too easy out there in that thar "real world" when you're an awkward introvert who doesn't have much in the way of job skills - and a BA isn't worth much of anything in the professional world these days anyway. I'd lose my mind in a corporate office, and most things are either too externally oriented or reliant upon people skills to do anything but drain the life out of me. And thus, I've kept my focus on my novel and am hoping to make it into a grad school Creative Writing program in New England starting in January - with any luck, getting this first novel published and my writing career launched over the remainder of this year and picking up a higher-level degree.) With the circle of friends I socialized with having largely disbanded by the end of college - I was practically entirely shut out, only really hearing from friends on the occasion I'd run into them on campus or at one of the club events they ran, like game nights, since I always kept to the periphery anyway - and now we're all scattered about. I'm back home in Raleigh, others are still out in Charlotte, finishing school and figuring out what they want to do next, while others yet - the ones I usually hung out with most - are scattering across the globe, mostly to Asia - Japan and China in particular. So this isolation I've been dealing with for about two years now? Not exactly a blast, though I can't complain too much, considering that parting ways with friends is just part of the whole "growing up" thing that comes with post-college life. Doesn't make it any less fun, though. Haven't I done enough of this "coming of age" crap already!? I already know life sucks! (This intentionally over the top sophomoric outburst brought to you by McDonald's: Fight off sadness with morbid obesity and adult diabetes!)
Despite that I know I'm still living my own life, obviously, and not anybody else's - rather than taking their way, I'm trying this whole serious dedicating-one's-life-to-writing thing, after all, which is full of its own difficulties, like any other life (Unless you're filthy stinking rich and have a talking gorilla butler. In which case, I hope you get hit by a bus.) - it's hard not to have some misgivings. This, of course, can largely be blamed on that I've made the mistake of reading a recent discussion thread on post-college life on the SomethingAwful.com forums. As you can imagine, it makes adult life in general look depressing. So many people get sucked into this depressing void of simply getting up, going to work, maybe going to the gym, coming home and eating some dinner, watching some TV, playing a game for a bit, or messing around on the internet, then sleep and repeat, day in and day out. This is the kind of hollow, hellish 9-5 trap the very thought of being sucked into utterly terrifies me. I couldn't see really wanting to continue my own life if that's all I had. I'm not exactly a ray of sunshine to begin with, and a life like that would quickly beat me down until I had no motivation left to speak of. And even many of these people have things to enjoy for it that I sure as hell don't. Their own place, for instance, which I'm hoping to manage one way or another in grad school, actual money, which I hope to at least make a small amount of my first novel, and such. Not to mention relationships - usually, people seem to cut the "let's just sleep together and devalue intimacy as much as possible" crap commonplace in high school and college and start really pursuing serious relationships by then. By my age, it's not exactly uncommon for people to have had at least several serious relationships. It's kind of depressing getting to this point in your life and seeing how many of your peers are getting married when you still haven't been in a relationship with anybody who actually liked you, frankly.
Your teenage years are made out to be something incredible, as you only live them once - mine weren't. Those were actually pretty terrible years for me. Same with the early twenties and college in general, go wild, you're only young once! - not for me! And by one's mid-twenties, in leading a life like this, it's hard not to suddenly start becoming more acutely aware of your age and feel like you've missed out on a hell of a lot that you won't get like everybody else seems to during those glorious late teens/early twenties, and even resent the people those sorts of things seemed to come to easily a bit. (Even though a number of those things were matters I had no actual interest in, and still don't. Though getting out of here and having a relationship that isn't terrible for once would be pretty fantastic. My expectations are low enough as is, as ambitiously high as I'm aiming with this unrequited love novel gesture - I can't expect success, though. I've never had that kind of luck, after all. Especially the kind to back up a long shot like this.) In reading a thread like that on people's normal experiences in post-college life, though, it was rather easy to realize how much you've missed and haven't come close to what people enjoy now at your age. If we had a basement, it might be time for me to move down there and roll a 1d20 saving throw vs. failing at life. (Yes, the D&D joke was necessary.)
And so, it's spring. Everything's been coated by a tidal wave of pollen, and it's a relatively hellish time of the year to celebrate aging. I need to move up north already.
Considering, though, that I haven't really had a birthday celebration (To the point at which my birthday was nothing more than just another day in recent years, with a slightly depressing tone to it.) since I turned 18 back in 2002, shortly before high school graduation, this Saturday should be interesting, if not a little surreal for me. (Though I did spend my birthday evening last year at a rather high budget student theatrical performance of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, which was an interesting way to spend it. Even if I just bought my ticket and went for extra credit in my theater class that semester.) In the least, I'm sure I'll appreciate the whole cake-and-presents thing more than ever. I probably won't be able to enjoy it many more times before it simply becomes and stays just another unremarkable day of the year, after all. Very little in life lasts, so you've got to enjoy what you can while you can.
For soon, we shall be dead.
(Now that's how you end a blog post on aging. Right? Right? High five, anybody?)
So here we are, mid-April. Everything is covered in yellow and it's an entirely miserable time of year for me. My allergies are running at an all time high, like a runaway freight train powered by economic anxiety and also probably some coal too because dirty energy's getting to be cool again these days, or so the far right's claiming. (Next thing we know, the black lung will be a fashion statement! Or maybe not. Maybe.) As the northern hemisphere revives from winter (Not that we had much of one, as usual. And it's been spring for a good while now anyway - we're slowly making that painful transition into summer here now, otherwise known as the season that ate EVERYTHING.), the birds burst into rapturous song and flowers explode into colorful bloom, blasting anything and everything with pollen. And though we've seen some nice - and much needed - rain here and there, it hasn't been enough to stave off that dreaded yellow flowery taint creeping across the country and making those of us allergic to it wish we were dead. (And generally hope that we can find some medication that'll help without making us too tired or screwing up our sleep too much. Three cheers for pharmaceuticals.)
Of course, like any season, spring brings birthdays. People get to enjoy tacking extra digits onto their age, pointing to the calendar, and loudly exclaiming "NOW I'M THIS MANY!" This stops being remotely cute or amusing by the time you hit puberty, and you will be beaten with extreme prejudice if you insist upon continuing this behavior pattern. What are you, six!?
Many significant individuals were born around this time of the year. Like Conan O'Brien, host of Late Night - and soon taking over the Tonight Show when Jay Leno steps down in 2009 - whose birthday is today. And the ghost of Hitler, who ages on sunday - otherwise recognized as the infamous "4/20" on which the world's potheads celebrate the attempted extermination of the Jews, homosexuals, and other individuals who make the world a more interesting and varied place by smoking all the pot they can and trying to make contact with the ghost of Jerry Garcia. Some day, you guys, someday. (And this year it's also an excuse for G4 to give me a reason to watch it once again with the special episode of Code Monkeys they made for it, given the frequency of drug humor on the show. Now they just need to get some official season 2 announcements out already. It's rather nice having new episodes of entirely scripted dramas and comedies to watch again, post-strike. The Office, Scrubs, Reaper, and Battlestar Galactica are keeping me entertained, anyway, aside from the usual Daily Show, Colbert, and Conan.)
Of course, with all this horrible pollen making me miserable and all these other key birthdays popping up, I suppose it's somewhat worth noting that I age-up, as it were, this coming Saturday. What better time to age and be reminded of how much life's been passing me by, after all? I'll finally be stumbling into my mid-twenties - though granted, the earliest of the mid-twenties years - and as you can tell, I couldn't be more pleased.
Aging has its upsides and its downsides. On one hand, it makes it easier to dismiss the youthful follies of the past, to laugh at my own stupid decisions and mistakes and think to myself, "Hey, look how much I've grown since then! I wouldn't even consider something that stupid now!" Then it usually hits me about a second and a half later that I don't have any room to talk now anyway. (No one putting so much into such a hopeless unrequited love novel project like this has any right to think themselves anything but a fool, let's face it.)
There's plenty of less than wonderful things about tacking that extra year onto the old age bulletin board (I'm sure you all have one of these too, or at least an enchanted abacus that counts down the number of years until your demise. I don't know what I'd do without mine.) as well. Aging tends to warrant reflection on one's life. And looking back, high school sucked, college was fascinating and educational, but nothing spectacular, nothing like people make college out to be. (But then, according to pop culture, all you do is get drunk and high and "get yo fuck on" or whatever people are saying these days. I did none of these things, the former two not interesting me, personally, having plenty of fun with friends while sober, and the latter largely a matter of a lack of meeting and connecting with anybody of the opposite sex with any level to things beyond simple, enjoyable platonic friendship. I'd say the unrequited love thing played a part, but that only really hit me hard about halfway in - I thought I was over her for a long time, after all - and I simply never met anybody I found myself particularly attracted to. For all that cheesy INFP "emotional sensitivity" I deal with, I have a hard time really being attracted to anybody beyond noticing someone, thinking "Hey, she's kinda cute," and leaving it at that.) Now I've been a graduate for about four months, and I've been out of classes for nearly a year, having finished all my academic requirements for graduation up last May. Time does have a way of flying. Not unlike the toasters on that old Windows 3.1 screensaver. (Admit it, you were waiting for someone to drop that reference on the "blarghosphere." ... See what I did there? How witty "blargosphere" is? It's okay to like it.)
Post-graduate life is kind of sad, reflecting on where many people my own age are in their lives. I know, you aren't supposed to look at other people's lives and compare them to your own - you have to find your own way, walk your own path instead of trying to follow the beaten road and be like everybody else. But it's still hard not to laugh at myself at this point. I'm going into my mid twenties, and after graduating, I just moved back home. (Doesn't help that the job market is a mess as the economy continues to collapse and I'd be miserable in most jobs anyway, the way I function on many levels. Not too easy out there in that thar "real world" when you're an awkward introvert who doesn't have much in the way of job skills - and a BA isn't worth much of anything in the professional world these days anyway. I'd lose my mind in a corporate office, and most things are either too externally oriented or reliant upon people skills to do anything but drain the life out of me. And thus, I've kept my focus on my novel and am hoping to make it into a grad school Creative Writing program in New England starting in January - with any luck, getting this first novel published and my writing career launched over the remainder of this year and picking up a higher-level degree.) With the circle of friends I socialized with having largely disbanded by the end of college - I was practically entirely shut out, only really hearing from friends on the occasion I'd run into them on campus or at one of the club events they ran, like game nights, since I always kept to the periphery anyway - and now we're all scattered about. I'm back home in Raleigh, others are still out in Charlotte, finishing school and figuring out what they want to do next, while others yet - the ones I usually hung out with most - are scattering across the globe, mostly to Asia - Japan and China in particular. So this isolation I've been dealing with for about two years now? Not exactly a blast, though I can't complain too much, considering that parting ways with friends is just part of the whole "growing up" thing that comes with post-college life. Doesn't make it any less fun, though. Haven't I done enough of this "coming of age" crap already!? I already know life sucks! (This intentionally over the top sophomoric outburst brought to you by McDonald's: Fight off sadness with morbid obesity and adult diabetes!)
Despite that I know I'm still living my own life, obviously, and not anybody else's - rather than taking their way, I'm trying this whole serious dedicating-one's-life-to-writing thing, after all, which is full of its own difficulties, like any other life (Unless you're filthy stinking rich and have a talking gorilla butler. In which case, I hope you get hit by a bus.) - it's hard not to have some misgivings. This, of course, can largely be blamed on that I've made the mistake of reading a recent discussion thread on post-college life on the SomethingAwful.com forums. As you can imagine, it makes adult life in general look depressing. So many people get sucked into this depressing void of simply getting up, going to work, maybe going to the gym, coming home and eating some dinner, watching some TV, playing a game for a bit, or messing around on the internet, then sleep and repeat, day in and day out. This is the kind of hollow, hellish 9-5 trap the very thought of being sucked into utterly terrifies me. I couldn't see really wanting to continue my own life if that's all I had. I'm not exactly a ray of sunshine to begin with, and a life like that would quickly beat me down until I had no motivation left to speak of. And even many of these people have things to enjoy for it that I sure as hell don't. Their own place, for instance, which I'm hoping to manage one way or another in grad school, actual money, which I hope to at least make a small amount of my first novel, and such. Not to mention relationships - usually, people seem to cut the "let's just sleep together and devalue intimacy as much as possible" crap commonplace in high school and college and start really pursuing serious relationships by then. By my age, it's not exactly uncommon for people to have had at least several serious relationships. It's kind of depressing getting to this point in your life and seeing how many of your peers are getting married when you still haven't been in a relationship with anybody who actually liked you, frankly.
Your teenage years are made out to be something incredible, as you only live them once - mine weren't. Those were actually pretty terrible years for me. Same with the early twenties and college in general, go wild, you're only young once! - not for me! And by one's mid-twenties, in leading a life like this, it's hard not to suddenly start becoming more acutely aware of your age and feel like you've missed out on a hell of a lot that you won't get like everybody else seems to during those glorious late teens/early twenties, and even resent the people those sorts of things seemed to come to easily a bit. (Even though a number of those things were matters I had no actual interest in, and still don't. Though getting out of here and having a relationship that isn't terrible for once would be pretty fantastic. My expectations are low enough as is, as ambitiously high as I'm aiming with this unrequited love novel gesture - I can't expect success, though. I've never had that kind of luck, after all. Especially the kind to back up a long shot like this.) In reading a thread like that on people's normal experiences in post-college life, though, it was rather easy to realize how much you've missed and haven't come close to what people enjoy now at your age. If we had a basement, it might be time for me to move down there and roll a 1d20 saving throw vs. failing at life. (Yes, the D&D joke was necessary.)
And so, it's spring. Everything's been coated by a tidal wave of pollen, and it's a relatively hellish time of the year to celebrate aging. I need to move up north already.
Considering, though, that I haven't really had a birthday celebration (To the point at which my birthday was nothing more than just another day in recent years, with a slightly depressing tone to it.) since I turned 18 back in 2002, shortly before high school graduation, this Saturday should be interesting, if not a little surreal for me. (Though I did spend my birthday evening last year at a rather high budget student theatrical performance of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, which was an interesting way to spend it. Even if I just bought my ticket and went for extra credit in my theater class that semester.) In the least, I'm sure I'll appreciate the whole cake-and-presents thing more than ever. I probably won't be able to enjoy it many more times before it simply becomes and stays just another unremarkable day of the year, after all. Very little in life lasts, so you've got to enjoy what you can while you can.
For soon, we shall be dead.
(Now that's how you end a blog post on aging. Right? Right? High five, anybody?)
Saturday, April 12, 2008
This Educational Experience brought to you by Corporate America
This one probably won't be too long, but with the personal concern it draws, there was no not writing on this subject.
Everything in this world is a commodity, there is nothing that lacks monetary value. Health care, food, seal pelts, first love, you, I, education. We're all commodities - walking, talking crates full of crap to slap a price tag on, to buy and sell until you're frothing at the mouth on some internet forum about how Ron Paul should be president - all of us. At least, this is what the hardcore libertarians would have us believe. Pretty crazy, right? Stripping all real meaning out of life and society and dumbing us down until we're nothing but commodities, products unto ourselves, and life is nothing more than a series of sales and purchases. Property rights are #1! These philosophies are essentially advocating a life of shallow materialism and nothing more. The market dictates what is right and wrong - the market dictates everything that matters, all that you see and seem. Bow down and worship at the altar of free market capitalism. Read Ayn Rand and accept Objectivism as your personal M.O. in this world, and look down your nose at anybody who disagrees with this approach to life - they just don't understand. (Somewhere along the way, you're also going to have to pretend that the market actually cares about individuals, and that it isn't going to essentially cannibalize the lower classes while favoring the wealthy and giving corporations near-absolute control in society. If your opinions and views don't conform with what the free market dictates - you're wrong.)
Fortunately, most people aren't quite that bad. (Rand's philosophy of glorifying selfishness, greed, and general self-absorption as admirable traits - beloved as it is by libertarians, with how much it has in common with their politics - has a hard time catching on, as much as its message could potentially thrive in modern America, in large part thanks to the fact that she was an incredibly bad writer. I may not even be published yet - and looking at all the garbage that gets published every year, publishing isn't a definite barometer of quality of writing - or particularly overconfident or egotistical in regards to my writing (As much as this satirically intended comment is going to make it seem otherwise - if I had more faith in people's ability to pick up on satire when they read it, I wouldn't feel the need for this disclaimer in the midst of this over-long parenthetical aside.), I can say with confidence that even I can write more interesting and compelling stories than Rand. My interests don't lie in writing brain-numbing two-dimensional literary rants with flat characters and plotlines conceived solely to push an entirely hollow philosophy - that effectively serves to glorify some of the worst traits people often possess - through strawman arguments and a simple "I'm right, everyone else is wrong" approach. It's intellectually and humanistically disingenuous, after all - not to mention downright insulting to anybody you're trying to sell on your philosophy as an adult capable of thinking for themselves.)
And as such, people like Ron Paul, though worshiped by half the internet, are mocked by the rest. You won't win friends by trying to argue that we're all commodities - especially when historically, this is something we as a species tend to strongly disagree with these days, slavery not exactly being looked well upon historically (Except by white supremacists, anyway, and theirs is not a perspective that holds any positive value in the modern world.) - nor trying to argue that rights we tend to appreciate should be commodified as well. (It's hard to take a political group seriously when you've seen its members trying to seriously argue against the FDA on the grounds that "We should have the right to eat whatever we want, no matter how unhealthy! Let the market decide which foods are manufactured in unsanitary conditions and which medications will kill us!" When the right to clog your arteries with trans-fats is a concern, your politics are not exactly relevant to the real world the rest of us live in. Especially considering that if asked, most people would no doubt say they'd prefer to eat healthier to begin with, so long as the food tasted good. I'm not entirely sure what it is that gives extreme conservatives the fetish you see here and there for attacking public health.) Health care should not be about money (If you ask the average American whether they'd like inexpensive to free, quality health care without bringing up that dirty, dirty word "socialism" that the right likes to associate with the "evils" of the world," you'd get pretty much the same response from everybody. Medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy for a reason, after all.), public education should not be privatized and commodified either (Education is a right, and absolutely necessary in order to maintain a true, modern society - a society which does not value education and intelligence is doomed to fall. To make education a privilege is to cultivate a society where intelligence is vilified - and intellectualism is looked down on far too often here in America as is, thanks to the right (See: the entire Bush/Gore election) - and ultimately create a society that cannot sustain itself in a meaningful fashion. A populace to be manipulated.), and the environment is not a commodity either - you can harvest all those natural resources you want, but they're all limited, and the more you do, the more you strip away at the core of our planet in the sole interest of corporate profits. These politics and this philosophy tie well into the typical conservative stance of "If you care about the environment, you're a dirty socialist hippie and destroying our nation." Something we see broadly between both the libertarians and Republicans - despite the libertarians' efforts to often paint themselves as socially liberal and economically conservative, Ron Paul himself is basically an extreme Republican who's only popular because he wants to pull out of Iraq. (After all, why vote for a candidate who'd at least try to start undoing some of the Bush administration's damage in addition to withdrawing from the Middle East - where our "surge" has failed, and it is impossible to achieve the "victory" the administration continues to insist that we can, with the military outright kowtowing to far right interests, politicized as it has become, taboo as I know it is to say of the military - when you can just vote for an anti-war Republican? He's a doctor!)
Socially commodifying politics are not liberal as they paint them, either - they're simply a matter of, once again, the free market!!! Like having that whole right of choice, ladies? You won't get a say anymore if enough loud conservative groups get the public to agree to ban it in your area. (Fun Fact: According to libertarians, local governments should handle everything and the nation should be effectively split into a series of commodified city-states rather than a unified nation where any one thing is universal beyond money. Why agree on universal rights, even if they're controversial, when we can just let locals decide on them? Don't like gays or black people? Get a lobby together and pressure your local government to throw them out! Mmm, that's good free market oppression!) In a commodified society, corporate interests are king. In an obsessively capitalist society (When we aren't even as free market capitalist as we like to pretend - we just like to give tax breaks and extra helping hands to major corporations thanks to groups like the tobacco lobby. Why support improved, more-leftist economic policies mixing aspects of the free market and a controlled economy to help farmers and small businesses while entering trade agreements that benefit the world's poor when we can give badmouth leftist economic ideas while using many of these same ideas in the worst way imaginable - through corrupt trade agreements and giving handouts to the already-massively-successful corporations who don't need them?), with such interests ruling, the interests of the people are marginalized - you get a playing field groomed for a conservative wet dream to flourish. (Except said dreams are not compatible with reality and would lead to widespread poverty and far deeper problems tearing the nation apart from the inside, the likes of which would put even the Great Depression to shame.) Civil rights? Personal freedoms? Unionization/Workers' rights? These are not conservative values. The potential for groups to lobby for local legal gay marriage does not a liberal stance on social values make. And contrary to Randian philosophy and libertarian politics, no, not everything of value in life can be obtained by working hard and making money. (Even if you're working long, abusive hours and the pay is terrible. You should feel lucky to be employed, striking is a communist move! If you don't like your job, find a means to improve your market value so someone else will employ you! ... I feel dead inside after writing that sentence, and I've read enough serious arguments to that end online before as is.)
At any rate, getting to the point, my alma mater the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is known for making bad, conservative decisions that certainly don't favor the students. (Even in the last month of my final semester in Spring '07, they attempted to get every student they could on campus to install software to scan their computers for mp3s to report directly to the RIAA - essentially telling students, yes, "Do us a favor and turn yourselves in to the RIAA, we're not particularly interested in sticking up for you, and we don't care if you graduate, so hey, bring some lawsuits on yourself!" The majority of the RIAA's targets have been college students who aren't in much of a position to put up a legal defense to their painfully gray-area legal bullying, and UNCC does not particularly care for their students over a corrupt recording industry organization's efforts to attack students, outright assisting them. In addition to this, they allowed the RIAA to begin monitoring the entire student network from then on, annihilating what privacy there was in students' internet connections then, in order to keep an eye for mp3 downloads on the off-chance that they could find someone pirating music, as commonplace as that still is, and as overexaggerated as the RIAA's claims of mp3 piracy-related losses are.) The latest in these decisions amounts to letting the school's curriculum be bought by corporate interests - in this case, specifically, BB&T corp. - with the agreement to push and forcibly incorporate Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged into the curriculum as required reading for students. (Several other universities agreed to the same contemptible deal.) No matter how you look at it, it's entirely academically unethical and a failure in responsibly respecting students' academic freedoms and interests in lieu of being paid to push a specific agenda. Of all the ways a university could look to raise money, this would be amongst the worst. (And UNCC has a history of not exactly using their money all that well, no less. I'd like to be able to look back on my alma mater and have nothing but praise for it like you're expected to, but that would be dishonest of me - the dorms were veritable ratholes, and the quality of food on campus was abysmal. I could go to a cafeteria in my freshman year, back when Sodexho still ran the dining services in 2002-2003, and actually not feel sick after eating there. Later in 2003, from then on, they switched over to Chartwells (No doubt in a costcutting move, they don't exactly have a glowing reputation across the country.), at which point, there were no more meals in the cafeteria that would make one think "I'm glad I ate that." The only welcomed additions to dining in the remainder of my time there were sushi on campus and this small Chinese place in the Student Activity Center, where I ended up getting lunches from regularly. UNCC does not have a track record, though, of making decisions in the interests of the student body - not in their health, in the switch to Chartwells and the stink students raised over that, not in their living conditions, considering how bad the dorms were, and sure as hell not their rights either, looking at their interactions with the RIAA. This Ayn Rand decision is yet another in a long line of fuck-yous they've handed down to their students. That said, as much as the UNCC administration and handling of things disgusts me, I can't tear down every aspect of the school - there's a lot of good programs, interesting courses, and respectable professors there, so while the administration has earned naught but my ire, I do look back on my five years there thinking positively in regards to having taken many worthwhile and interesting courses and learned from many professors I think well of.)
The Ayn Rand Institute (Institute of Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!) is playing this deal up as something to be praised - claiming value in Rand's absolutist ethics. The very concept of absolutism in something like ethics is laughable and utterly intellectually dishonest. Absolutism in all its forms amounts to one thing - dumbing down and oversimplifying everything as so to avoid having to think. The "hey, how 'bout that black and white?" take on things. And the field of ethics is absolutely one of the last fields where absolutism has a place. In my final semester, I actually took an ethics course myself - which made me regret not studying philosophy further, I may look into some philosophy courses when I make it into grad school - in which we looked at many, many different types of ethics and philosophies. (And what's more fun than wrapping your brain around Kant's Deontology and defining the categorical imperative on exams?) There were plenty of somewhat-absolutistic philosophies, sure, but they were far more well thought out than Rand's. And many more philosophies properly took all the gray areas in life into account, which made it hard to make any kind of absolute ethical judgment calls - these philosophies, of course, are far more compatible with reality, as life isn't and never will be black and white. Rand's philosophy, however, is so poorly developed and two-dimensional strawman argument-centric that it's practically a mockery of legitimate philosophy. Objectivism is in and of itself a philosophy that thrives on glorifying the worst in humanity. It figures that only now when the libertarians are louder than ever on the internet - when again, it isn't the average person whom free-market capitalism works in favor of - and with Rand's books' sales slumping even more than ever (Rightly so.) that corporations would seek to wedge Rand's self-righteous anti-free thought (When Rand speaks of "rational" thought, she tends to mean "this is how I frame my way of thinking - think like me or you're wrong.") literary masturbation into public education. Some schools get it, given Yale professor Harold Bloom's (Not even so astute, given how obvious it is) observation that Rand "could not write her way out of a paper bag." Not to mention that - as I've harped on many times here - her ideas were far too shallow to build a course around. (Let alone a real, meaningful philosophy. Objectivism is just a means by which selfish, self-interested individuals can rationalize their behavior without feeling guilty. Real altruism is almost unheard of in this world, but as little faith in humanity as I have - most of us at least have some capacity for caring for others over ourselves. This is a trait that should never stop being valued.)
BB&T should be publicly criticized, and universities reprimanded for this. To set this precedent in commodifying education, these schools' academic integrity itself is undermined, and it's a blatant betrayal of the student body. (Again, in no way the first time at UNCC.) It's bad literature, it's bad philosophy, and it holds no real academic value. There's no meaningful discussion stirred up by Rand's ideas - just the same old argument of selfishness versus generosity, "I want to feel good about looking out for number one" versus "I'd rather put others over myself and care about people." A fundamental argument of human nature, but by no means one we need to be debating in our schools - the day we start seeing self-absorption praised or accepted as a potentially good quality, we're in trouble. And with this precedent set in higher education, it's always certainly possible that we'll start seeing Rand's "literature" pushed into public education as well - to be read by far more impressionable teenagers who in many cases may not technically be capable of reasoning enough to know better than to believe in Rand's, to be vulgar, bullshit. (The human brain doesn't really reach its full development capacity until the early twenties, after all. It would essentially be proselytizing the youth in many cases.)
Of course, this is by no means the first and in no way the only incident we're seeing of corporate interests pushing themselves on schools. However, this stands out in that it's an attempt at pushing in moral and ethical propaganda on the students, as opposed to merely making them use one piece of software or another, or study one thing or another they focus on.
In short, not cool, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, not cool. Year after year, you continue to sell out your academic and intellectual integrity. You want to be #3 in North Carolina, behind Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, so desperately? Fucking over your students and pulling stunts like this will not accomplish this. All you will do is damage your own reputation and integrity while making alumni like myself ashamed to be associated. Corporate interests are not student interests. As long as corporate interests remain a major priority to you guys up there on top, you will not be a respectable university. Either students come first, or they aren't a real priority at all. There's a reason people go to college, after all. (Hint: It's not just about getting stupid-drunk every night, banging a few loose people and starting a VD collection, then dropping out like the media plays it up as. Many of us do actually value our educations and want to learn. Letting a corporation set a curriculum is anti-education.) Having had plenty of good professors at UNCC, I have just enough faith in them that at least a few of them, I'd hope, would inform their students about why they're being forced to read Ayn Rand, and ultimately help to tear Objectivism apart in the classroom.
Unfortunately, when we're seeing schools stoop to things like this for money - public universities, no less - it says something again about where education is in our country, as public services go.
Hey, it ended up being longer than I thought. Fancy that. Once you get me going on a political tangent, it's hard to shut me up. (Here's hoping the rant didn't make any of your brains bleed.)
Everything in this world is a commodity, there is nothing that lacks monetary value. Health care, food, seal pelts, first love, you, I, education. We're all commodities - walking, talking crates full of crap to slap a price tag on, to buy and sell until you're frothing at the mouth on some internet forum about how Ron Paul should be president - all of us. At least, this is what the hardcore libertarians would have us believe. Pretty crazy, right? Stripping all real meaning out of life and society and dumbing us down until we're nothing but commodities, products unto ourselves, and life is nothing more than a series of sales and purchases. Property rights are #1! These philosophies are essentially advocating a life of shallow materialism and nothing more. The market dictates what is right and wrong - the market dictates everything that matters, all that you see and seem. Bow down and worship at the altar of free market capitalism. Read Ayn Rand and accept Objectivism as your personal M.O. in this world, and look down your nose at anybody who disagrees with this approach to life - they just don't understand. (Somewhere along the way, you're also going to have to pretend that the market actually cares about individuals, and that it isn't going to essentially cannibalize the lower classes while favoring the wealthy and giving corporations near-absolute control in society. If your opinions and views don't conform with what the free market dictates - you're wrong.)
Fortunately, most people aren't quite that bad. (Rand's philosophy of glorifying selfishness, greed, and general self-absorption as admirable traits - beloved as it is by libertarians, with how much it has in common with their politics - has a hard time catching on, as much as its message could potentially thrive in modern America, in large part thanks to the fact that she was an incredibly bad writer. I may not even be published yet - and looking at all the garbage that gets published every year, publishing isn't a definite barometer of quality of writing - or particularly overconfident or egotistical in regards to my writing (As much as this satirically intended comment is going to make it seem otherwise - if I had more faith in people's ability to pick up on satire when they read it, I wouldn't feel the need for this disclaimer in the midst of this over-long parenthetical aside.), I can say with confidence that even I can write more interesting and compelling stories than Rand. My interests don't lie in writing brain-numbing two-dimensional literary rants with flat characters and plotlines conceived solely to push an entirely hollow philosophy - that effectively serves to glorify some of the worst traits people often possess - through strawman arguments and a simple "I'm right, everyone else is wrong" approach. It's intellectually and humanistically disingenuous, after all - not to mention downright insulting to anybody you're trying to sell on your philosophy as an adult capable of thinking for themselves.)
And as such, people like Ron Paul, though worshiped by half the internet, are mocked by the rest. You won't win friends by trying to argue that we're all commodities - especially when historically, this is something we as a species tend to strongly disagree with these days, slavery not exactly being looked well upon historically (Except by white supremacists, anyway, and theirs is not a perspective that holds any positive value in the modern world.) - nor trying to argue that rights we tend to appreciate should be commodified as well. (It's hard to take a political group seriously when you've seen its members trying to seriously argue against the FDA on the grounds that "We should have the right to eat whatever we want, no matter how unhealthy! Let the market decide which foods are manufactured in unsanitary conditions and which medications will kill us!" When the right to clog your arteries with trans-fats is a concern, your politics are not exactly relevant to the real world the rest of us live in. Especially considering that if asked, most people would no doubt say they'd prefer to eat healthier to begin with, so long as the food tasted good. I'm not entirely sure what it is that gives extreme conservatives the fetish you see here and there for attacking public health.) Health care should not be about money (If you ask the average American whether they'd like inexpensive to free, quality health care without bringing up that dirty, dirty word "socialism" that the right likes to associate with the "evils" of the world," you'd get pretty much the same response from everybody. Medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy for a reason, after all.), public education should not be privatized and commodified either (Education is a right, and absolutely necessary in order to maintain a true, modern society - a society which does not value education and intelligence is doomed to fall. To make education a privilege is to cultivate a society where intelligence is vilified - and intellectualism is looked down on far too often here in America as is, thanks to the right (See: the entire Bush/Gore election) - and ultimately create a society that cannot sustain itself in a meaningful fashion. A populace to be manipulated.), and the environment is not a commodity either - you can harvest all those natural resources you want, but they're all limited, and the more you do, the more you strip away at the core of our planet in the sole interest of corporate profits. These politics and this philosophy tie well into the typical conservative stance of "If you care about the environment, you're a dirty socialist hippie and destroying our nation." Something we see broadly between both the libertarians and Republicans - despite the libertarians' efforts to often paint themselves as socially liberal and economically conservative, Ron Paul himself is basically an extreme Republican who's only popular because he wants to pull out of Iraq. (After all, why vote for a candidate who'd at least try to start undoing some of the Bush administration's damage in addition to withdrawing from the Middle East - where our "surge" has failed, and it is impossible to achieve the "victory" the administration continues to insist that we can, with the military outright kowtowing to far right interests, politicized as it has become, taboo as I know it is to say of the military - when you can just vote for an anti-war Republican? He's a doctor!)
Socially commodifying politics are not liberal as they paint them, either - they're simply a matter of, once again, the free market!!! Like having that whole right of choice, ladies? You won't get a say anymore if enough loud conservative groups get the public to agree to ban it in your area. (Fun Fact: According to libertarians, local governments should handle everything and the nation should be effectively split into a series of commodified city-states rather than a unified nation where any one thing is universal beyond money. Why agree on universal rights, even if they're controversial, when we can just let locals decide on them? Don't like gays or black people? Get a lobby together and pressure your local government to throw them out! Mmm, that's good free market oppression!) In a commodified society, corporate interests are king. In an obsessively capitalist society (When we aren't even as free market capitalist as we like to pretend - we just like to give tax breaks and extra helping hands to major corporations thanks to groups like the tobacco lobby. Why support improved, more-leftist economic policies mixing aspects of the free market and a controlled economy to help farmers and small businesses while entering trade agreements that benefit the world's poor when we can give badmouth leftist economic ideas while using many of these same ideas in the worst way imaginable - through corrupt trade agreements and giving handouts to the already-massively-successful corporations who don't need them?), with such interests ruling, the interests of the people are marginalized - you get a playing field groomed for a conservative wet dream to flourish. (Except said dreams are not compatible with reality and would lead to widespread poverty and far deeper problems tearing the nation apart from the inside, the likes of which would put even the Great Depression to shame.) Civil rights? Personal freedoms? Unionization/Workers' rights? These are not conservative values. The potential for groups to lobby for local legal gay marriage does not a liberal stance on social values make. And contrary to Randian philosophy and libertarian politics, no, not everything of value in life can be obtained by working hard and making money. (Even if you're working long, abusive hours and the pay is terrible. You should feel lucky to be employed, striking is a communist move! If you don't like your job, find a means to improve your market value so someone else will employ you! ... I feel dead inside after writing that sentence, and I've read enough serious arguments to that end online before as is.)
At any rate, getting to the point, my alma mater the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is known for making bad, conservative decisions that certainly don't favor the students. (Even in the last month of my final semester in Spring '07, they attempted to get every student they could on campus to install software to scan their computers for mp3s to report directly to the RIAA - essentially telling students, yes, "Do us a favor and turn yourselves in to the RIAA, we're not particularly interested in sticking up for you, and we don't care if you graduate, so hey, bring some lawsuits on yourself!" The majority of the RIAA's targets have been college students who aren't in much of a position to put up a legal defense to their painfully gray-area legal bullying, and UNCC does not particularly care for their students over a corrupt recording industry organization's efforts to attack students, outright assisting them. In addition to this, they allowed the RIAA to begin monitoring the entire student network from then on, annihilating what privacy there was in students' internet connections then, in order to keep an eye for mp3 downloads on the off-chance that they could find someone pirating music, as commonplace as that still is, and as overexaggerated as the RIAA's claims of mp3 piracy-related losses are.) The latest in these decisions amounts to letting the school's curriculum be bought by corporate interests - in this case, specifically, BB&T corp. - with the agreement to push and forcibly incorporate Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged into the curriculum as required reading for students. (Several other universities agreed to the same contemptible deal.) No matter how you look at it, it's entirely academically unethical and a failure in responsibly respecting students' academic freedoms and interests in lieu of being paid to push a specific agenda. Of all the ways a university could look to raise money, this would be amongst the worst. (And UNCC has a history of not exactly using their money all that well, no less. I'd like to be able to look back on my alma mater and have nothing but praise for it like you're expected to, but that would be dishonest of me - the dorms were veritable ratholes, and the quality of food on campus was abysmal. I could go to a cafeteria in my freshman year, back when Sodexho still ran the dining services in 2002-2003, and actually not feel sick after eating there. Later in 2003, from then on, they switched over to Chartwells (No doubt in a costcutting move, they don't exactly have a glowing reputation across the country.), at which point, there were no more meals in the cafeteria that would make one think "I'm glad I ate that." The only welcomed additions to dining in the remainder of my time there were sushi on campus and this small Chinese place in the Student Activity Center, where I ended up getting lunches from regularly. UNCC does not have a track record, though, of making decisions in the interests of the student body - not in their health, in the switch to Chartwells and the stink students raised over that, not in their living conditions, considering how bad the dorms were, and sure as hell not their rights either, looking at their interactions with the RIAA. This Ayn Rand decision is yet another in a long line of fuck-yous they've handed down to their students. That said, as much as the UNCC administration and handling of things disgusts me, I can't tear down every aspect of the school - there's a lot of good programs, interesting courses, and respectable professors there, so while the administration has earned naught but my ire, I do look back on my five years there thinking positively in regards to having taken many worthwhile and interesting courses and learned from many professors I think well of.)
The Ayn Rand Institute (Institute of Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!) is playing this deal up as something to be praised - claiming value in Rand's absolutist ethics. The very concept of absolutism in something like ethics is laughable and utterly intellectually dishonest. Absolutism in all its forms amounts to one thing - dumbing down and oversimplifying everything as so to avoid having to think. The "hey, how 'bout that black and white?" take on things. And the field of ethics is absolutely one of the last fields where absolutism has a place. In my final semester, I actually took an ethics course myself - which made me regret not studying philosophy further, I may look into some philosophy courses when I make it into grad school - in which we looked at many, many different types of ethics and philosophies. (And what's more fun than wrapping your brain around Kant's Deontology and defining the categorical imperative on exams?) There were plenty of somewhat-absolutistic philosophies, sure, but they were far more well thought out than Rand's. And many more philosophies properly took all the gray areas in life into account, which made it hard to make any kind of absolute ethical judgment calls - these philosophies, of course, are far more compatible with reality, as life isn't and never will be black and white. Rand's philosophy, however, is so poorly developed and two-dimensional strawman argument-centric that it's practically a mockery of legitimate philosophy. Objectivism is in and of itself a philosophy that thrives on glorifying the worst in humanity. It figures that only now when the libertarians are louder than ever on the internet - when again, it isn't the average person whom free-market capitalism works in favor of - and with Rand's books' sales slumping even more than ever (Rightly so.) that corporations would seek to wedge Rand's self-righteous anti-free thought (When Rand speaks of "rational" thought, she tends to mean "this is how I frame my way of thinking - think like me or you're wrong.") literary masturbation into public education. Some schools get it, given Yale professor Harold Bloom's (Not even so astute, given how obvious it is) observation that Rand "could not write her way out of a paper bag." Not to mention that - as I've harped on many times here - her ideas were far too shallow to build a course around. (Let alone a real, meaningful philosophy. Objectivism is just a means by which selfish, self-interested individuals can rationalize their behavior without feeling guilty. Real altruism is almost unheard of in this world, but as little faith in humanity as I have - most of us at least have some capacity for caring for others over ourselves. This is a trait that should never stop being valued.)
BB&T should be publicly criticized, and universities reprimanded for this. To set this precedent in commodifying education, these schools' academic integrity itself is undermined, and it's a blatant betrayal of the student body. (Again, in no way the first time at UNCC.) It's bad literature, it's bad philosophy, and it holds no real academic value. There's no meaningful discussion stirred up by Rand's ideas - just the same old argument of selfishness versus generosity, "I want to feel good about looking out for number one" versus "I'd rather put others over myself and care about people." A fundamental argument of human nature, but by no means one we need to be debating in our schools - the day we start seeing self-absorption praised or accepted as a potentially good quality, we're in trouble. And with this precedent set in higher education, it's always certainly possible that we'll start seeing Rand's "literature" pushed into public education as well - to be read by far more impressionable teenagers who in many cases may not technically be capable of reasoning enough to know better than to believe in Rand's, to be vulgar, bullshit. (The human brain doesn't really reach its full development capacity until the early twenties, after all. It would essentially be proselytizing the youth in many cases.)
Of course, this is by no means the first and in no way the only incident we're seeing of corporate interests pushing themselves on schools. However, this stands out in that it's an attempt at pushing in moral and ethical propaganda on the students, as opposed to merely making them use one piece of software or another, or study one thing or another they focus on.
In short, not cool, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, not cool. Year after year, you continue to sell out your academic and intellectual integrity. You want to be #3 in North Carolina, behind Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, so desperately? Fucking over your students and pulling stunts like this will not accomplish this. All you will do is damage your own reputation and integrity while making alumni like myself ashamed to be associated. Corporate interests are not student interests. As long as corporate interests remain a major priority to you guys up there on top, you will not be a respectable university. Either students come first, or they aren't a real priority at all. There's a reason people go to college, after all. (Hint: It's not just about getting stupid-drunk every night, banging a few loose people and starting a VD collection, then dropping out like the media plays it up as. Many of us do actually value our educations and want to learn. Letting a corporation set a curriculum is anti-education.) Having had plenty of good professors at UNCC, I have just enough faith in them that at least a few of them, I'd hope, would inform their students about why they're being forced to read Ayn Rand, and ultimately help to tear Objectivism apart in the classroom.
Unfortunately, when we're seeing schools stoop to things like this for money - public universities, no less - it says something again about where education is in our country, as public services go.
Hey, it ended up being longer than I thought. Fancy that. Once you get me going on a political tangent, it's hard to shut me up. (Here's hoping the rant didn't make any of your brains bleed.)
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Life like Frames in a Film Reel
Is this blog dead!?
NO! It's just sleeping. Or it was, anyway. Novel-writing and all that. I've run out of steam, motivation, and topics to write on in regards to my usual content in here, which you all know and love. (As reflected by the few of you who remember this place exists, haha.)
Basically, this is gonna be a short one, just to get warmed up again for blogging more in April. And with that, I'm introducing a new subject. This is a pretty all-purpose personal writer-guy blog anyway, so I figure I can get away with adding whatever sorts of new content I feel like - and besides, some of it might be of interest to more readers or something, as well. Can't just write about life and love and such all the time - especially when I haven't had enough topics to write on in that regard anyway, lacking in inspiration as I have been.
So rather than boring you all with another retarded comedy piece (I'm sure I'll come up with something to that capacity later this month anyway.), I hereby introduce This Jackass Talks Movies! Yes, I know what you're thinking (As I always say, in all my predictability) - whaddaya mean movie-talk!? This guy knows nothing! Very Socratic of you. But you remember what they did to Socrates in the end - and it had nothing to do with puppies. Think before you speak when facing my horrific oppressive regime here in relatively-unread-blog-country. (Where the law requires the wearing of bowler hats and at least three monocles at all times.) I've taken a few film courses in my time and turned into a pretty huge independent/art house and foreign film junkie in the past half-decade or so anyway, and I figure I may as well start a regular-ish feature for content focusing on another hobby I'm good at talking about - one that'd probably be more accessible to the average internet-goer. (I've kind of avoided blogging too heavily on video games largely to avoid driving off the disinterested, admittedly, while I try to blog about those - when I do - from an angle non-gamers could read and understand, at least. It can be a pretty insulated hobby, practically a subculture unto itself on the internets.)
I would've given it a more focused name - like maybe "Movies You've Never Heard Of!" - but that sounds kind of pretentious anyway. And I'm sure I'll run out of movies nobody's heard of to talk about after a while.
What could I be starting with? None other than Van Flesher, Randy Mack, and Zack Ordynans' Burning Annie. Given that it was released on 2004, never saw much theatrical distribution to speak of, isn't exactly easily found everywhere on DVD, and still has less than 200 votes on the IMDB (And a total star score that really isn't a good indicator of its quality, as a result of their rather unbalanced mean calculated scoring system.) four years after being made, I'd say it qualifies pretty well as a film most people have never heard of. Of course, to get a bit more of a glance at it, you may want to view the trailer.
In its essence, the film itself is a love poem to Woody Allen films. Gary Lundy leads the relatively small to no-name cast (Which works to the film's benefit, as it can when a less-identifiable cast of genuine talent is assembled - it can make a cast even more believable as their characters. Something many big Hollywood celebrities can't pull off in films, especially their own vehicles - but then, a great many stars in Hollywood aren't exactly good actors, per se.), pretty much only identifiable before (To me at least) from a small supporting role in Donnie Darko. He plays Max, a fairly traditional sort of Woody Allen archetype brought to a modern college setting (Though exactly how modern is a little hard to discern. I'm under the impression that it was set sometime in the late '90s, given that the N64 was the video game console of choice for the group of friends the film focuses on, and an NES and SNES are visible in the background in their suite as well.), hopeless and cynical as you'd expect. He hangs out with his friends whom he shares a suite with in the dorm (The film itself actually filmed on a real West Virginia college campus and providing a far better and more realistic portrayal of college than most.), has his own college radio show at the dead of the night that nobody listens to, and little faith in humanity, love, and himself. Practically raised on Woody Allen films, he says, and hooked on Annie Hall, he has, as they put it, "a love-hate relationship with love and hate."
As the film progresses, Max attempts a relationship with a friend, Beth, and watches it crash and burn quickly, leaving them to attempt to salvage their friendship with the occasional conversation. Max doesn't know how to let his own guard down, facing a constant clash within himself between his outer defensive smartass that plays everything off with a witty remark or crack of some sort or another and his true, unguarded self - who isn't actually a bad person, just someone afraid to let his guard down and be hurt. He'd rather play video hockey and watch Annie Hall than really live in the moment - something I can admittedly relate to greatly - in his life. After the collapse with Beth, Max meets another young woman, Julie - played well both as a believable person and Woody Allen style character by Sara Downing - who listened to his radio show on Beth's recommendation. The two cross paths several times on campus as time passes and Max watches his friends fall in and out of relationships, sitting back and making cynical comments all the while. The two eventually begin a fumbling relationship while he and his friends speculate that watching Annie Hall was a curse on their relationships, and noticing similarities between Julie and the character of Annie herself - making Max all the more insecure and uncertain of what he feels and wants.
The rest of the film, not to be spoiled, plays out in fairly traditional Woody Allen fashion - realistically, in this case, anyway - and enjoyably, overall. Everyone in their cast plays their roles well, some characters not getting fleshed out quite as much as one would like, but all avoiding being completely two-dimensional archetypes. (Save for bit characters, anyway, like a stoner and unpleasant frat boy that appear in a fairly early scene.) The soundtrack - pretty much all artists I didn't recognize - doesn't particularly stand out, but it complements the film well, working as a believable accompaniment to a modern college film. (They probably recognized that they would've been stretching it, had they gone so far in their homage to using a primarily jazz soundtrack, as Allen's films tend to.) The film itself is undeniably low budget - in watching where the camera goes and what it does and the quality of the cinematography itself, it's very obvious that they didn't have much to work with in the way of funding. That said, it doesn't take away from the film, either. Many classic Woody Allen shots and techniques - including very frequent breaking of the fourth wall to have characters view others' fuck-ups they weren't there to witness firsthand and comment, stepping right out of scenes, and talking directly to the viewers in monologue - are well integrated, and some Allen-esque color-tinting at times goes a long way in contributing to the visual feel of the film. The visuals wouldn't grab you anyway, though, being set at a real college, without any of the bells and whistles Hollywood tries to hang on college locales - there's certainly no faulting Burning Annie for its honesty there.
The real star of the film, though, is its script. Consistently biting and witty, it would definitely make Woody Allen proud. (And for the sake of the filmmakers, one can only hope he'd at least hear about it sometime, considering how few people seem to be aware of the existence of this movie. I lucked out with that Hollywood Video used movie bin. You never know what kind of gold you'll find there.) There's a lot of great fourth-wall breaking moments, social commentary, and pop culture references. (From several scenes spent with the characters sitting around playing N64 games and talking Kevin Smith movies, and even one such scene discussing how pop culture references are a cheap move in cinema, and how that if there lives were a movie, it would be downright terrible.) There's some real emotional resonance there, though it isn't hugely deep - it focuses on being more honest about relationships than warming or breaking the viewer's heart, and makes plenty of good points about love and relationships in college - and Lundy certainly plays a sympathetic, likable protagonist in Max. The film's conclusion won't blow you away or enlighten you, but it'll leave you with a satisfied feeling, having just viewed a worthwhile film with a smart, funny script. And all-in-all, it's the script first and foremost that makes Burning Annie worth seeing.
In short, if you're a Woody Allen fan, make a point of seeing Burning Annie. It shouldn't be too hard to find online, and considering its obscurity and the amount of talent involved in the film - while not without its flaws, it's a very well crafted Woody Allen style comedy/drama - it's certainly well worth seeing. These guys deserve more attention, and I certainly hope they get more chances to continue making indie art house flicks like this. It certainly beats out the average Hollywood dreck any day.
And thus, that concludes the first of my little cinema talk posts. Hopefully it was interesting enough, as I'm going to continue to focus on highlighting obscure films first and foremost, just for the sake of some more interesting content here and giving these movies the attention they deserve. There's a lot of good movies out there that just never get noticed.
NO! It's just sleeping. Or it was, anyway. Novel-writing and all that. I've run out of steam, motivation, and topics to write on in regards to my usual content in here, which you all know and love. (As reflected by the few of you who remember this place exists, haha.)
Basically, this is gonna be a short one, just to get warmed up again for blogging more in April. And with that, I'm introducing a new subject. This is a pretty all-purpose personal writer-guy blog anyway, so I figure I can get away with adding whatever sorts of new content I feel like - and besides, some of it might be of interest to more readers or something, as well. Can't just write about life and love and such all the time - especially when I haven't had enough topics to write on in that regard anyway, lacking in inspiration as I have been.
So rather than boring you all with another retarded comedy piece (I'm sure I'll come up with something to that capacity later this month anyway.), I hereby introduce This Jackass Talks Movies! Yes, I know what you're thinking (As I always say, in all my predictability) - whaddaya mean movie-talk!? This guy knows nothing! Very Socratic of you. But you remember what they did to Socrates in the end - and it had nothing to do with puppies. Think before you speak when facing my horrific oppressive regime here in relatively-unread-blog-country. (Where the law requires the wearing of bowler hats and at least three monocles at all times.) I've taken a few film courses in my time and turned into a pretty huge independent/art house and foreign film junkie in the past half-decade or so anyway, and I figure I may as well start a regular-ish feature for content focusing on another hobby I'm good at talking about - one that'd probably be more accessible to the average internet-goer. (I've kind of avoided blogging too heavily on video games largely to avoid driving off the disinterested, admittedly, while I try to blog about those - when I do - from an angle non-gamers could read and understand, at least. It can be a pretty insulated hobby, practically a subculture unto itself on the internets.)
I would've given it a more focused name - like maybe "Movies You've Never Heard Of!" - but that sounds kind of pretentious anyway. And I'm sure I'll run out of movies nobody's heard of to talk about after a while.
What could I be starting with? None other than Van Flesher, Randy Mack, and Zack Ordynans' Burning Annie. Given that it was released on 2004, never saw much theatrical distribution to speak of, isn't exactly easily found everywhere on DVD, and still has less than 200 votes on the IMDB (And a total star score that really isn't a good indicator of its quality, as a result of their rather unbalanced mean calculated scoring system.) four years after being made, I'd say it qualifies pretty well as a film most people have never heard of. Of course, to get a bit more of a glance at it, you may want to view the trailer.
In its essence, the film itself is a love poem to Woody Allen films. Gary Lundy leads the relatively small to no-name cast (Which works to the film's benefit, as it can when a less-identifiable cast of genuine talent is assembled - it can make a cast even more believable as their characters. Something many big Hollywood celebrities can't pull off in films, especially their own vehicles - but then, a great many stars in Hollywood aren't exactly good actors, per se.), pretty much only identifiable before (To me at least) from a small supporting role in Donnie Darko. He plays Max, a fairly traditional sort of Woody Allen archetype brought to a modern college setting (Though exactly how modern is a little hard to discern. I'm under the impression that it was set sometime in the late '90s, given that the N64 was the video game console of choice for the group of friends the film focuses on, and an NES and SNES are visible in the background in their suite as well.), hopeless and cynical as you'd expect. He hangs out with his friends whom he shares a suite with in the dorm (The film itself actually filmed on a real West Virginia college campus and providing a far better and more realistic portrayal of college than most.), has his own college radio show at the dead of the night that nobody listens to, and little faith in humanity, love, and himself. Practically raised on Woody Allen films, he says, and hooked on Annie Hall, he has, as they put it, "a love-hate relationship with love and hate."
As the film progresses, Max attempts a relationship with a friend, Beth, and watches it crash and burn quickly, leaving them to attempt to salvage their friendship with the occasional conversation. Max doesn't know how to let his own guard down, facing a constant clash within himself between his outer defensive smartass that plays everything off with a witty remark or crack of some sort or another and his true, unguarded self - who isn't actually a bad person, just someone afraid to let his guard down and be hurt. He'd rather play video hockey and watch Annie Hall than really live in the moment - something I can admittedly relate to greatly - in his life. After the collapse with Beth, Max meets another young woman, Julie - played well both as a believable person and Woody Allen style character by Sara Downing - who listened to his radio show on Beth's recommendation. The two cross paths several times on campus as time passes and Max watches his friends fall in and out of relationships, sitting back and making cynical comments all the while. The two eventually begin a fumbling relationship while he and his friends speculate that watching Annie Hall was a curse on their relationships, and noticing similarities between Julie and the character of Annie herself - making Max all the more insecure and uncertain of what he feels and wants.
The rest of the film, not to be spoiled, plays out in fairly traditional Woody Allen fashion - realistically, in this case, anyway - and enjoyably, overall. Everyone in their cast plays their roles well, some characters not getting fleshed out quite as much as one would like, but all avoiding being completely two-dimensional archetypes. (Save for bit characters, anyway, like a stoner and unpleasant frat boy that appear in a fairly early scene.) The soundtrack - pretty much all artists I didn't recognize - doesn't particularly stand out, but it complements the film well, working as a believable accompaniment to a modern college film. (They probably recognized that they would've been stretching it, had they gone so far in their homage to using a primarily jazz soundtrack, as Allen's films tend to.) The film itself is undeniably low budget - in watching where the camera goes and what it does and the quality of the cinematography itself, it's very obvious that they didn't have much to work with in the way of funding. That said, it doesn't take away from the film, either. Many classic Woody Allen shots and techniques - including very frequent breaking of the fourth wall to have characters view others' fuck-ups they weren't there to witness firsthand and comment, stepping right out of scenes, and talking directly to the viewers in monologue - are well integrated, and some Allen-esque color-tinting at times goes a long way in contributing to the visual feel of the film. The visuals wouldn't grab you anyway, though, being set at a real college, without any of the bells and whistles Hollywood tries to hang on college locales - there's certainly no faulting Burning Annie for its honesty there.
The real star of the film, though, is its script. Consistently biting and witty, it would definitely make Woody Allen proud. (And for the sake of the filmmakers, one can only hope he'd at least hear about it sometime, considering how few people seem to be aware of the existence of this movie. I lucked out with that Hollywood Video used movie bin. You never know what kind of gold you'll find there.) There's a lot of great fourth-wall breaking moments, social commentary, and pop culture references. (From several scenes spent with the characters sitting around playing N64 games and talking Kevin Smith movies, and even one such scene discussing how pop culture references are a cheap move in cinema, and how that if there lives were a movie, it would be downright terrible.) There's some real emotional resonance there, though it isn't hugely deep - it focuses on being more honest about relationships than warming or breaking the viewer's heart, and makes plenty of good points about love and relationships in college - and Lundy certainly plays a sympathetic, likable protagonist in Max. The film's conclusion won't blow you away or enlighten you, but it'll leave you with a satisfied feeling, having just viewed a worthwhile film with a smart, funny script. And all-in-all, it's the script first and foremost that makes Burning Annie worth seeing.
In short, if you're a Woody Allen fan, make a point of seeing Burning Annie. It shouldn't be too hard to find online, and considering its obscurity and the amount of talent involved in the film - while not without its flaws, it's a very well crafted Woody Allen style comedy/drama - it's certainly well worth seeing. These guys deserve more attention, and I certainly hope they get more chances to continue making indie art house flicks like this. It certainly beats out the average Hollywood dreck any day.
And thus, that concludes the first of my little cinema talk posts. Hopefully it was interesting enough, as I'm going to continue to focus on highlighting obscure films first and foremost, just for the sake of some more interesting content here and giving these movies the attention they deserve. There's a lot of good movies out there that just never get noticed.
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