a movie, a video game, and a show
Aug. 8th, 2022 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaUnbreakable (2000)
Damn, how many movies has Samuel L. Jackson been in? Totally didn't expect him here and he's fantastic in this.
As a time capsule, this movie is fascinating—something that could've only dropped in 2000 or earlier, before the Superhero Movie Formula TM got entirely overdone, and before there really even was a Superhero Movie Formula TM. (Remember how fuckin' weird e.g. the 2003 Hulk was?)
This movie's trying to straddle the world between Actual Realism and Supernatural Powers, but not in an Alan-Moore-Watchmen kinda way, more in an everyman-ish way. The bulk of the running time is straight realism—David Dunn's a middle-aged man, he's a football stadium security guard, he's thinking about cheating on his wife, and then he miraculously survives a train crash in which everyone else died.
But he doesn't jump to discovering the mechanics of his superpowers—why would he? It was a fluke, good luck, and so he meanders through life as usual (issues with his kid and his wife), despite the comic book expert Elijah Price's (Jackson's) sorta-creepy insistence that Dunn is something more. This movie is patient; I like that patience.
There is a twist at the end, of sorts—it is a Shyamalan film!—but it doesn't feel cheap or contrived, just perfect, a smart reframing of everything that's come before.
It's an imperfect film. It doesn't push far enough with the ordinary strangeness it hints at. The "what our hero does when he unlocks his powers" bit feels contrived and awkward. I wish Bruce Willis had more on-screen charisma here.
And yet—Wikipedia tells me that Shyamalan wanted this marketed as a superhero film. Once again in my life, I am surprised how often artists can totally miss what makes their art interesting. It's neither a superhero film, nor a Shyamalan horror, nor a gritty-realism-with-supernatural-powers thing. It sits somewhere in-between, and that's it's great strength—it makes it difficult to forget even with its shortcomings, a thing I can't really say about any mere superhero movie.
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
As a kid I thought Spyro 3 (subtitled "Year of the Dragon") was the best Spyro game by far. It's striking to replay it as an adult and realize—nah. Spyro 1 is superior.
Like, sure, the controls in game 3 are a little more polished than game 1. The skateboarding minigame really is a delight, imo the perfected version of the whole Tony Hawk: Pro Skater thing.
But it feels disjointed and overstuffed in a way that Spyro 1 never was. Completing a level in Spyro 1 could sometimes be infuriating ("I'm just missing one gem! where is it?"). But it never felt jarring, the way it does in Spyro 3, where the "just one gem" equivalent may be some stupid gopher-bashing minigame where you play some yeti in a little side-portal universe, totally disconnected from everything the "main" level. In Spyro 1, the level is the unit of play, and the controls always exactly the same, and you know that if you just look hard enough, you can find everything, and glide gloriously over this miniature world, confident that you've now explored in its entirety. The core game loop is pure discovery, timing, focus.
And that's something Spyro 3 couldn't give me even if all these minigames were compelling and fun. That clean focus, that effortless immersion—it's simply not possible when you've got a playable cast of a half-dozen instead of just Spyro, when every level's got 1-4 different side-portal minigames with totally different controls, totally different widgets to collect or timers to beat or whatnot.
I suppose the things I valued as a kid were different. I wanted more, more. Novelty, garbage, whatever, just more of it.
And maybe that's just the nature of being a kid. It's a known thing that the Kirkus and Horn Book starred reviews often diverge sharply from what kids actually seem to read; I'm pretty comfortable saying Animorphs and Goosebumps endeared a hecka lot of kids way more than the typical Newberry award winner. It's a known thing that what adults (even industry insiders!) think are the most popular kids' cartoons maybe are just the most popular kids' shows for adults; Ninjago blows Steven Universe out of the water if you're talking about "actual children watching the thing".
Or maybe it's just an issue of playing in 2022 versus 2000. There was a time when packing more, more, more into a game surely was exciting, but after what Ubisoft's done with Assassin's Creed, and all the other game design crimes brought to us by sequel-driven AAA studio bloat, it just feels exhausting these days.
The Anarchists (HBO)
Someone recommended me this documentary series on the basis of "there's a dude named Juan Galt" and "it's hilarious". I think that primed my reaction, in a bad way.
Look, I'm not above laughing at the dumb shit rich people and party-planners do. I watched that Fyre Festival documentary and guffawed as much as the next guy.
But the anarchists (really more ancap-flavored, for the record) featured in The Anarchists aren't just grifters way in over their head, or dudes solely looking for a crazy party. They flew from mostly-the-US to Acapulco, Mexico for a real conference ("Anarchapulco," fantastic name, A+), with a real community behind it, and wound up deciding to stay for good.
The show opens with their profiles, and they largely seem naive and clueless but not fundamentally bad. A few of them have kids; they're worried about the kiddos feeling stifled in picket-fence neighborhoods with unfriendly neighbors; they'd like the kids to have a bit of adventure while they're young. That's a real desire. I have an instinctive affection for intentional communities, even poorly-conceived ones, even ones that don't share my ideals, because at least they're trying, at least they're clued-in enough to realize there's something not working in their relationship to the world, and they're trying to do something about it. Probably it doesn't work out; probably they realize after a few years that living in Acapulco long-term is kinda cringe and isolating and logistically infeasible... but so what? So I saw these opening scenes and thought, aw fuck, if this all turns into "and look at all the stupid stuff these total morons do!," I'm gonna be so mad.
Fortunately, it's not that. The documentary is not cruel or sneering thus far. It's a fair and evenhanded look at a fundamental tension within the community, between the minority of anarchists who have serious grievances with where they came from (read: "fled across the US border to escape getting a ton of jail time for possession of weed"), and thus a scrappier and more oppositional view of how things should be, versus the richer set who tend to see this all as a bit of an extended holiday. It's also striking the level of self-awareness the unintentional founder of this community has about his position—he's a serial entrepreneur, he knows he's not good at running large companies so he sells them off quick, and when the online community becomes irl you know he's starting to get uncomfortable. Those are interesting tensions!
But I think back to that rec that got, "lol Juan Galt," that totally different way of looking at this material, and it's like. Damn, how primed am I (and others, I guess) to assume everything's written just for quick dunks? Sigh. Sad thing to realize about oneself.
I watched the first two episodes; haven't caught up yet, and might not, as the pacing really is quite clunky, but it's not awful either.
Damn, how many movies has Samuel L. Jackson been in? Totally didn't expect him here and he's fantastic in this.
As a time capsule, this movie is fascinating—something that could've only dropped in 2000 or earlier, before the Superhero Movie Formula TM got entirely overdone, and before there really even was a Superhero Movie Formula TM. (Remember how fuckin' weird e.g. the 2003 Hulk was?)
This movie's trying to straddle the world between Actual Realism and Supernatural Powers, but not in an Alan-Moore-Watchmen kinda way, more in an everyman-ish way. The bulk of the running time is straight realism—David Dunn's a middle-aged man, he's a football stadium security guard, he's thinking about cheating on his wife, and then he miraculously survives a train crash in which everyone else died.
But he doesn't jump to discovering the mechanics of his superpowers—why would he? It was a fluke, good luck, and so he meanders through life as usual (issues with his kid and his wife), despite the comic book expert Elijah Price's (Jackson's) sorta-creepy insistence that Dunn is something more. This movie is patient; I like that patience.
There is a twist at the end, of sorts—it is a Shyamalan film!—but it doesn't feel cheap or contrived, just perfect, a smart reframing of everything that's come before.
It's an imperfect film. It doesn't push far enough with the ordinary strangeness it hints at. The "what our hero does when he unlocks his powers" bit feels contrived and awkward. I wish Bruce Willis had more on-screen charisma here.
And yet—Wikipedia tells me that Shyamalan wanted this marketed as a superhero film. Once again in my life, I am surprised how often artists can totally miss what makes their art interesting. It's neither a superhero film, nor a Shyamalan horror, nor a gritty-realism-with-supernatural-powers thing. It sits somewhere in-between, and that's it's great strength—it makes it difficult to forget even with its shortcomings, a thing I can't really say about any mere superhero movie.
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
As a kid I thought Spyro 3 (subtitled "Year of the Dragon") was the best Spyro game by far. It's striking to replay it as an adult and realize—nah. Spyro 1 is superior.
Like, sure, the controls in game 3 are a little more polished than game 1. The skateboarding minigame really is a delight, imo the perfected version of the whole Tony Hawk: Pro Skater thing.
But it feels disjointed and overstuffed in a way that Spyro 1 never was. Completing a level in Spyro 1 could sometimes be infuriating ("I'm just missing one gem! where is it?"). But it never felt jarring, the way it does in Spyro 3, where the "just one gem" equivalent may be some stupid gopher-bashing minigame where you play some yeti in a little side-portal universe, totally disconnected from everything the "main" level. In Spyro 1, the level is the unit of play, and the controls always exactly the same, and you know that if you just look hard enough, you can find everything, and glide gloriously over this miniature world, confident that you've now explored in its entirety. The core game loop is pure discovery, timing, focus.
And that's something Spyro 3 couldn't give me even if all these minigames were compelling and fun. That clean focus, that effortless immersion—it's simply not possible when you've got a playable cast of a half-dozen instead of just Spyro, when every level's got 1-4 different side-portal minigames with totally different controls, totally different widgets to collect or timers to beat or whatnot.
I suppose the things I valued as a kid were different. I wanted more, more. Novelty, garbage, whatever, just more of it.
And maybe that's just the nature of being a kid. It's a known thing that the Kirkus and Horn Book starred reviews often diverge sharply from what kids actually seem to read; I'm pretty comfortable saying Animorphs and Goosebumps endeared a hecka lot of kids way more than the typical Newberry award winner. It's a known thing that what adults (even industry insiders!) think are the most popular kids' cartoons maybe are just the most popular kids' shows for adults; Ninjago blows Steven Universe out of the water if you're talking about "actual children watching the thing".
Or maybe it's just an issue of playing in 2022 versus 2000. There was a time when packing more, more, more into a game surely was exciting, but after what Ubisoft's done with Assassin's Creed, and all the other game design crimes brought to us by sequel-driven AAA studio bloat, it just feels exhausting these days.
The Anarchists (HBO)
Someone recommended me this documentary series on the basis of "there's a dude named Juan Galt" and "it's hilarious". I think that primed my reaction, in a bad way.
Look, I'm not above laughing at the dumb shit rich people and party-planners do. I watched that Fyre Festival documentary and guffawed as much as the next guy.
But the anarchists (really more ancap-flavored, for the record) featured in The Anarchists aren't just grifters way in over their head, or dudes solely looking for a crazy party. They flew from mostly-the-US to Acapulco, Mexico for a real conference ("Anarchapulco," fantastic name, A+), with a real community behind it, and wound up deciding to stay for good.
The show opens with their profiles, and they largely seem naive and clueless but not fundamentally bad. A few of them have kids; they're worried about the kiddos feeling stifled in picket-fence neighborhoods with unfriendly neighbors; they'd like the kids to have a bit of adventure while they're young. That's a real desire. I have an instinctive affection for intentional communities, even poorly-conceived ones, even ones that don't share my ideals, because at least they're trying, at least they're clued-in enough to realize there's something not working in their relationship to the world, and they're trying to do something about it. Probably it doesn't work out; probably they realize after a few years that living in Acapulco long-term is kinda cringe and isolating and logistically infeasible... but so what? So I saw these opening scenes and thought, aw fuck, if this all turns into "and look at all the stupid stuff these total morons do!," I'm gonna be so mad.
Fortunately, it's not that. The documentary is not cruel or sneering thus far. It's a fair and evenhanded look at a fundamental tension within the community, between the minority of anarchists who have serious grievances with where they came from (read: "fled across the US border to escape getting a ton of jail time for possession of weed"), and thus a scrappier and more oppositional view of how things should be, versus the richer set who tend to see this all as a bit of an extended holiday. It's also striking the level of self-awareness the unintentional founder of this community has about his position—he's a serial entrepreneur, he knows he's not good at running large companies so he sells them off quick, and when the online community becomes irl you know he's starting to get uncomfortable. Those are interesting tensions!
But I think back to that rec that got, "lol Juan Galt," that totally different way of looking at this material, and it's like. Damn, how primed am I (and others, I guess) to assume everything's written just for quick dunks? Sigh. Sad thing to realize about oneself.
I watched the first two episodes; haven't caught up yet, and might not, as the pacing really is quite clunky, but it's not awful either.
