1. Samurai Movies. Last Saturday was an active one for me. The day began with the traditional Samurai Saturday Kurosawa movie viewing. The Criterion Collection on Netflix Watch Instantly has proven a handy tool for filling out the gaps in my samurai movie knowledge, even while it gives me a chance to go back and watch some of my old favorites. Sanjuro was new to me, but I loved every minute of the film.Toshiro Mifune was at his gruffest, but still stole the show in this story of a group of inexperienced young Samurai dealing with a rebellion and taking advice from a grizzled old drunk. Mifune delivers the goods, as ever. I’m not sure why I get such a kick out of these old movies. Sure, part of it is the unquestionable bad-assery of dudes just straight up wailing on each other with swords. But the violence is surprisingly low key. (Until it isn’t). But there is a lyrical quality to films like Sanjuro and thematic depth to movies like Rashomon that I prefer.
2. Triple Rock Brewery Firkin Festival. After the film ended and the Beautiful Wife returned from her trip,we met up with some friends and made our way out to the East Bay for some delicious craft beers at the Triple Rock Brewery Firkin Gravity Beer Festival. Some of the finest small brewers in Nor Cal showed up with kegs of their most delicious brews. All of them served the old fashioned way, relying on an angled keg and Sir Isaac’s Newton’s specialty to make the suds flow. I tasted probably the finest Imperial Stout ever from Ballast Point. It was called “Sea Monster” and it tasted so good that it made me want to float through the gulf stream and hassle 17th century sailors. My local brewery, The 21st Amendment brought their “Imperial Jack” ESB, which was brewed with Maker’sMark barrel oak chips and tasted like it’s ideal setting would be to drink it from a Mason jar on the front porch of a large Kentucky home.
3. Punks fighting hipsters with bikers watching. The East Bay Rats are a motorcycle club based in Oakland. After the beerfest, we moseyed along to their clubhouse for an irregular Fight Night. I do not ride a motorcycle and I have never attended a soirée at a clubhouse before, so I had nothing to calibrate my expectations aside from my fervent appreciation of Sons of Anarchy so I didn’t know what I was getting into. The night was billed as Punks Versus Hipsters, and they started out trying to match the mohawks to the moccasins, but over time the match ups moved away from that theme and anyone who wanted to enter the boxing ring took a turn. It was awesome. The bikers that I met were all nice guys.No one removed anyone else’s tattoo with a blowtorch, so Sons of Anarchy may have oversold the danger. The bouts were all overseen by a referee, the fighters wore gloves, and everybody hugged after the match. It was more like a Smoker at a local boxing gym than Thunderdome. The club house was super crowded though, and it seemed like a popular event.
Alex Mason has problems. That much is clear from the start. Restrained, drugged, and under interrogation by mysterious inquisitors, the main character in Call of Duty: Black Ops begins the game from a compromised position. In the dark, the voices demand that he reveals what he knows about the missions he undertook as a special forces operative during the Cold War. From this framing device, the game takes the player on several individual missions that range from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to escaping a Soviet Prison, to invading an enemy warship. Along the way, Mason flashes back to moments of betrayal and paranoia worthy of the most frantic conspiracy theory. Alex eventually takes his quest for revenge and clarity to the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around the game mechanics at the heart of the Call of Duty games. I prefer to enter a room filled with X number of bad guys, slay them all (preferably by hiding behind something and taking a series of measured headshots, although I’m not opposed to bumrushing the bastards and circle strafing until I’m alone), and then leisurely search for treasure, ammo, and health. I feel a sense of pride when I clear a room of enemies, especially when I do so swiftly and with the efficiency of a special forces bad-ass. The best games impart a sense of identification with the gun-wielding avatar, such that when Master Chief finishes off his last brute and takes a minute to survey the carnage in Halo, the player basks in the reflected glory of the hero. In that moment, he has vanquished all foes.
The Call of Duty series asks me to eschew this slow, thoughtful approach to combat in favor of a more aggressive berserker style. In Call of Duty: Black Ops, the methodical sniping of far away enemies is stripped of any sense of satisfaction because they’ll just keep respawning until you cross a certain checkpoint. No matter how many times you kill the enemy, he is instantly replaced by an identical doppelganger who doesn’t seem to learn anything from his predecessor’s mistakes.
This “clown car” approach to combat often leads me into an existential crisis. What’s the point of shooting an enemy when another one will just take his place? My virtual warrior’s battle grinds to a halt as he ponders the futility of war. Gone is the quiet thrill of the headshot that reduces the machine-gunner who was blocking the hallways into pixellated pink mist, thus opening the way for me to slowly search the room. Instead, I find myself turning CoD campaign sessions into all-out sprints from checkpoint to checkpoint. Like WOPR in WarGames, my tactical assessment of the combat in Black Ops is ”the only winning move is not to play.” Instead of working out optimal paths through enemy-occupied territory where I cautiously crouch, hide, shoot my way to that victorious moment, I guide my character Alex Mason to run like a madman from one invisible checkpoint to another. Taking a few shots only bloodies up your screen, and if you find the best way to run forward you can complete stages without firing a single shot. I find this sort of victory hollow, yet the mechanics of the game force me into it every time. It doesn’t ruin the game, and the thrilling set-pieces more than make up for it. The entire rooftop chase sequence in the Hong Kong level is a master class in level design and the developer Treyarch just plain brings the fun. It plays like a living John Woo movie.
I don’t know if I can really call my feelings criticism in any real sense, because the Call of Duty approach to combat has proven to be vastly successful for the franchise. Despite my enjoyment of Black Ops I am not a convert to the approach and I don’t think I’ll be playing many other Call of Duty games.
1. Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA is probably my all-time favorite beer. I’ve been on a serious IPA kick for the last four years or so, and the hoppy goodness (90 IBU) that the fine folks at Dogfish Head consistently deliver in every bottle tickles my nose most pleasantly. The high alcohol content (9%) means that I can’t drink as many as I would like in any one sitting without starting to talk kinda loud and possibly riding the wrong bus about five miles in the wrong direction. Still, it’s a wonderful beer. I continually monitor their website in case they post a job opening for in-house counsel, but until they do I’ll keep drinking it.
2. The Strokes are a band that I’ve followed since they first broke onto the scene during my first year in undergrad.
Julian Casablancas and company have delivered album after album of kick-ass songs. Maybe the didn’t turn out to be the Indie Messiahs who would change the Face of Modern Rock; as some of the more ardent critics proclaimed them after Is This It? but I have enjoyed the slow progression of their sound all the way down to Angles
It’s been on daily rotation since I downloaded it from Amazon for $3.99 in one of the best daily deals Amazon has yet put out there. This album has a slightly 80s vibe to it, but in a good way.
3. Dragon Age II is my first real exposure to the series.
I did try to get into Origins but I was stymied by the difficulty level. I ended up not having fun because even when I micromanaged my party to within an inch of their lives, I still got schooled by nearly every Darkspawn we ran across. I was a big fan of Mass Effect games, so getting reacquainted with the BioWare approach to role playing wasn’t that hard. Dragon Age 2 is easier than its predecessor, in that it is actually possible for your followers to make rational decisions for themselves, such as drinking a health potion after they get knocked on their ass by orc-blades or not jumping in front of the toughest bad guy in the room when they are out of stamina. I also like the self-contained nature of the smaller scale adventure. Your hero basically just hangs out in the city and the setting changes temporally instead of spatially. That being said, I do wish that the you could check out more areas in the city and run through the same damn dungeon ten times. Nothing is more fun than setting up a cross class combo and having your rogue disorient an enemy just long enough for your spellcaster to bring the mystical pain. I also enjoy the way you go into conversational cut-scenes covered head to to in the gory ichor of your foes and just start chuckling with your buddies like it’s the end of Scooby Doo.
Zach Snyder has failed colossally with his latest film Sucker Punch. I don’t mean that the movie flopped or won’t make the studio money, even though it’s been beaten at the box office by the sequel to Diary of a Wimpy Kid and a movie where Matthew McConaughey remains full shirted. I don’t even mean the film is a failure because Snyder didn’t do what he set out to do. Sucker Punch bears all the hallmarks the director’s style: gorgeously choreographed action scenes, slick music video production styles, and an almost Kubrickian chilliness. I have no doubt that the movie came out exactly as the writer/director intended. Unfortunately, the task he set for himself was impossible.
Sucker Punch fails because Zach Snyder set out to make an exploitative movie about the exploitation of women. Which sounds all meta and awesome in a postmodern way, but isn’t possible to render in the medium of film. As Truffaut observed it’s impossible to make an anti-war film because no matter how hard the director tries to convey the horrors of war, there’s a primal appeal in watching violence. A badass is a badass, and if you film him being a badass it’s going to look cool no matter how squeamish you might personally feel toward badassery. Sucker Punch is about the exploitation of women and the lengths that his characters will go to in order to escape their male oppressors. The movie has a slightly muddled metaphysics, but basically takes place in three separate (but interconnected) levels of reality in a way that call to mind the far superior Inception, but is still its own creature. Both films share a sense of complexity and find their strength in the labyrinthine constructs of the human mind, though Sucker Punch takes itself far less seriously.
At the start of the film, Snyder shows us a montage that establishes our protagonist Babydoll just after her mother dies. The time frame is indistinct, but Snyder seems to place the action in the 50s or 60s. Her stepfather, a leering brute who we see in a rage at being left out of the will. In the first minute, he shifts from economic exploitation of Babydoll and her sister to a clearly lascivious interest. While attempting to save her from the wicked stepfather’s advances, Babydoll accidentally shoots and kills her younger sister. In the aftermath, the Wicked Stepfather ships her off to a cinematically dingy insane asylum where a sleazy and corrupt (male) attendant agrees to an off-the-books lobotomy behind the back of the (female) head doctor, Carla Gugino. Snyder establishes this as the “Asylum Level” as the film’s ground reality. Here, Babydoll has zero agency. She is literally confined by the males until such time as she can be negated with an icepick to the frontal lobe.
Before long, she starts imagining the asylum as a brothel/burlesque. The attendant becomes a pimp, the stepfather a corrupt clergyman, and the female psychiatrist the head trainer. This is the second level of reality the “Brothel Level.” It is populated Wizard-of-Oz-style by the same people Babydoll encountered when she entered the asylum including her bevy of attractive sex workers: Sweet Pea, Blondie, Daisy, and Rocket. Babydoll is told that “The High Roller” is on his way to deflower her in five days, a span that corresponds to the lobotomy countdown in the Asylum Level. On this level, the male oppressors are exaggeration further into caricatures of corruption and privelege. The cigar-puffing “Mayor” is especially creepy.
Interestingly, at this level of reality Carla Gugino’s doctor is reduced to an active participant of the subjugation of the girls, whereas in the ground level she is only ignorant of the danger posed by her staff. In the brothel, Babydoll is forced to dance. We never see what her dancing looks like at this level, but the other characters all find it spectacular. Males in particular seem to be helplessly enchanted while she dances. The setting and costumes, as well as the pimp’s reaction seem to indicate that a pole might well complement the routine. In any case, the men are so dazzled that Babydoll hatches a scheme to steal the items she needs to escape the brothel (all items that she spotted on her way into the Asylum Level). At least she is taking an active role in earning her freedom.
But every time the music cues and we see Babydoll start to shuffle, the camera pulls in tight and we see what she is imagining as she dances. These fantastical sequences are what got this movie made, and the source of much of the criticism of the film. Sucker Punch works best when Snyder brings us into these “Fantasy Level” sequences. They can get a little samey, and do have the slight echo of a genre checklist that the studio hoped would get the geeks of the world salivating. But the anarchic energy of these scenes makes up for it. It is the cinema of “what if?”. Snyder lets fly with some of the same wild enthusiasm that would lead a kid to wonder, why can’t a cop carry an axe and fight dinosaur robots? The mash-ups in Sucker Punch at the Fantasy Level are the most fun the movie offers.
Babydoll and her sexy sidekicks use mech armor to fight their way through a battlefield filled with steampunk Nazi zombies, engage in aerial plane to dragon combat over a sea of orcs, and engage in gun/sword fights with robots on a train. How could you not like that? The Fantasy Level is the Jungian collective unconscious, so it has room for all these disparate elements to live and breathe together. Babydoll’s tasks in these fictional worlds are her attempts to use her creativity to construct a new reality better and more exciting than the one that exploits her in the Asylum Level. It’s a little like the Imaginationland episode of South Park. Babydoll can use ninja swords against robots despite the fact that the Asylum Level is in the mid-20th century, because in the pure realm of the imagination all the genre tropes that have existed or will ever exist can occur at the same time.
The problem is that in the Fantasy Level, Babydoll acts for herself and in her own interest. She takes the initiative and through her own agency, engages in admittedly bad-ass battles. She becomes the subject of the story instead of its object. At least that’s what Snyder was shooting for. The problem is that in the Prime Reality where you, me, and Snyder all live we are watching these fantasies play out. From our point of view, these empowering acts are just further exploitations. Now, Babydoll and the girls can let it all hang out for us: The Audience Level. And because of that final abstractions, the story cannot rise above the level of exploitation: sexy girls in sexy clothes = teh hawt.
There’s nothing the director could have done. It’s easy to write Sucker Punch off as a tawdry attempt to titillate, but I give Snyder more credit. I think he did want to engage with issues of female agency. Tongue firmly in cheek, to be sure, but the intent was serious. I don’t know how much you can blame him for failing to do the impossible, but as long as he keeps delivering gorgeously constructed films like Sucker Punch, I’ll keep hanging in there for the film that perfectly matches his ambitions to his abilities.
