Happy Halloween.
Speaking of dressing up, can someone please explain the camouflage that soldiers wear these days? Why is it all digital-looking? Are our troops hiding behind pixelated flora? Is it some kind of homage to classic first-person shooters.
I realize that most of our soldiers learned to shoot by playing Doom and Wolfenstein, but graphics are much better-looking these days.
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Speaking of Left 4 Dead, some disagreement has arisen amongst my gaming friends (many of whom at least claim to read this blog) about the usefulness of the Hunting Rifle. I had taken for granted that it was a sort of red-herring weapon, there to distract gullible players. Almost everyone in the game forums agrees that the best possible combination of weapons is two shotguns and two automatics (everyone capable of forming a properly-punctuated sentence, anyway). I decided to try it out on a few campaigns and make up my own mind, and I reached the following conclusion:
The Hunting Rifle is both the most over and under-rated weapon in the game.
After a few delays and epic shit-tons of anticipation, the early access demo for Left 4 Dead 2 dropped for pre-purchasers. I'm a pretty big fan of the original, so please allow me to throw my two cents in regarding our glimpse of the sequel.
The demo lets you play through two chapters of the final campaign (about twenty to twenty-five minutes of gameplay or about 1/12 of a single run through the total game). My conclusion: L4D2 is everything we want out of a sequel--more of everything that worked in the original, less of what didn't work, and new and inventive additions. And let me also address the naysayers: we could not have gotten this game by incrementing through free downloadable content. This is a totally new game with vast improvements, so quit your goddamn bitching!
The key to this game is "more". More campaigns, more gameplay modes, more enemies, more variety in both your weapons and your enemies, more story, more well-rounded characters, etc, etc, etc. And all that "more" mostly works. I will say that the demo never felt like it got bogged down by the additions--and we weren't all veterans playing either. We had someone over that had never played the first one; we gave him a quick tutorial on the gameplay and by the end of the first chapter, he was keeping up and killing things alongside the rest of us.
My only real complaint, and I hesitate to call it a "complaint", is with the new Special Infected. I like them, I just found them a bit underwhelming. The Spitter feels like a less-dangerous Boomer. The Charger feels like a less-dangerous Tank. The Jockey feels like a less-dangerous hybrid between a Hunter and a Smoker. The Wandering Witch behaves just like a regular Witch, only now she can't block off paths, making her much more avoidable. Coupled with the inclusion of the old SI's, the new ones gave us variety, but not much of a challenge.
The addition of Uncommon-Common Infected certainly made up for it. So far I've only gotten to play against the riot-gear-wearing infected, who are more or less immune to a frontal attack. Having those mixed in with the normal horde did a lot to spice up gameplay, and I'm supremely interested to see how the different UCI's add to the challenge and character of the levels they inhabit.
The really dramatic improvement of this game over its predecessor comes from the weapons. In the original game, you had a shotgun, an Uzi, or a pistol, and could eventually find an automatic shotgun, an assault rifle, a hunting rifle, and dual-wielded pistols. 98% of players go with either the shotgun or the automatic (whichever version of either that they happen to have handy), with pistols as a backup. Since all guns are found grouped into caches, everyone just goes straight to their favorite.
The L4D2 guns are far more organically placed, forcing players to occasionally use a gun they don't prefer. Additionally, there are many different types of each class of gun. We encountered two different pistols, three assault rifles, two handheld fully-automatics, and three shotguns--each with its own unique character. Furthermore, rather than having your secondary weapon be a pistol, you can swap it out for any number of melee weapons, everything from a cricket bat to a frying pan to an electric guitar. I was skeptical at first--would I really want to forgo dual-pistols just so I could wield a melee weapon?
Then I tried out the machete. After I picked that up, I barely even fired my primary weapon. Hacking the infected to pieces was just too much fun.
There's also a "bile bomb" (Boomer puke, essentially) that can summon the horde to attack whatever you throw it at--which is interesting and great for bringing down Tanks. It's not quite as cool as the plain old pipe bomb, which attracts infected and then sends bits of them flying every which way (as opposed to vaporizing them like the original game... pipe bombs are so much fun to watch now).
So, all told, I was looking forward to playing L4D2, and now my appetite has been whetted. It looks to be a dramatic improvement over what was already a fantastic game. I'm excited.
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So yesterday morning I was turning into the parking lot at my office, and the car in front of me was driving very slow, but since I was blocking a lane of traffic (turning left and all), I hugged her fender pretty close. Then she stopped. Then her reverse lights came one. Then I started honking my horn, but she didn't stop until she hit my front bumper.
It wasn't a bad hit. She was probably going 1mph when she hit me--we took one look and decided that it wasn't worth pursuing, there was no visible damage and no reason to think either of us had been injured. So she left... out the other entrance to the lot. Apparently she had planned to use the lot as a turn-around and hadn't bothered to look behind her as she backed up.
Whatever. It's rainy, it's morning, we all make mistakes. No blood, no foul. But in retrospect I'm a little irked at her total lack of concern. I understand not wanting to say that she's sorry because it might appear that she's claiming fault (which you're never supposed to do), but once we'd established that we weren't going to call our insurers, there was no reason to keep up the charade. I was standing still--it was pretty clearly her fault. She didn't even ask if I was okay.
Damned inconsiderate, if you ask me.
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So, I decided to try out a casual game that showed up on Steam last week called Everyday Genius: SquareLogic.
The years after the Beatles broke up were filled with new album releases (kind of like Tupac, but with less new material): retrospectives and compilations of obscure and hard-to-find material. This made for a pretty broad swath of music given the Beatles' tendency to not release singles on albums and the fact that the early Beatles albums released in the U.S. were a bizarre mish-mash of songs from their U.K. releases.
So, when the catalog was "canonized" for CD, the group opted to put out CD's of their U.K. albums and then put everything that was left over into a two volume set called Past Masters, which was originally released as two separate volumes but is combined into a double-album for the remasters. Most of the collection is non-album singles and their B-sides, so in that respect, PM could almost work as a hits/rarities retrospective. But it doesn't really, because the songs are arranged chronologically rather than sorted into "hits" and "rarities", and huge gaps of their hits, even their singles, exist on albums and have not been included. Nor does the chronology give you a particularly good picture of the Beatles' progression as musicians. If that's what you're after, pick up 1 instead.
Volume 2 (I'm arbitrarily starting with Volume 2, by the way, Volume 1 is its own host of problems and will get its own post) opens with the one-two punch of Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out, a double-A-side released between the Help! and Rubber Soul albums. These songs mark a pretty firm step for the Beatles. They'd gone from being period hit-makers to the creators of some truly timeless music, but they hadn't quite jumped into the acid-rock phase of their later career. The trend continues with the next track, Paperback Writer, which has the distinction of being the first Beatles single that isn't a love song. It also is the first song to really show off Paul's bass chops.
But Kurt, you promised us suck! Where's the suck?
The suck begins with Rain, the B-side off Paperback Writer, which is a solidly mediocre craft. At least it's well-recorded. Rain is followed by Lady Madonna, which is one of the most perfect songs I've ever heard, and it's B-side The Inner Light. TIL provides us with one of those moments that's going to show up more and more as the Beatles age. I call it a "What the fuck, George?" moment, which happens when Harrison's influence by Eastern music weighs so heavily on the composition that it overshadows the fact that HE'S A FUCKING BEATLE!
TIL is full of sitar tritones and spiritualism. Lyrics include such gems as "without going out of your door, you can know all things on earth" and such, some of which directly quote the Tao Te Ching (although, I can't help but thinking that maybe George was predicting the Internet and Wikipedia). But it's weak and it's out of place.
Next we get the timeless, the lengthy, the incredible Hey Jude, and while it may be perhaps the most perfect song ever written, it features another golden moment in, one we'll be seeing more of, a moment I like to call "John being a dick". This happens at 2:58, when Paul misses a chord and shouts "Fucking hell". Something like this would normally have been taken out, but John insisted that it be kept in, mixed quietly so no one would really be able to hear it. It comes out pretty well in the remasters, if you're looking for it.
The B-side to Hey Jude was Revolution (not to be confused with Revolution 1 or Revolution 9 from The White Album), and I was going to save this rant for The White Album, but I think I'll do it now. The song Revolution is not the least bit revolutionary. Paul didn't like it--he thought it was too political and didn't think that was appropriate for The Beatles (which is not to say that Paul was above politics--see his far more subtle Back In The U.S.S.R.). But John was undeterred and wrote a supposedly-political song called "Revolution" whose chorus is "Don't you know it's going to be alright?" That's correct, a song called "Revolution" is an endorsement of the status quo. If anything, the song is counter-revolutionary, going so far as to say that if you endorse Mao, you'll never get laid. Moreover, this version of the song (which is far faster and grungier than the album cut) features John saying that "if you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me..." followed by him saying both "out" and "in", because ostensibly he couldn't really make up his mind. John, we love you, we miss you, but you were full of shit sometimes.
Next we get Get Back and Don't Let Me Down from the sessions for what would eventually become Let It Be. The single version of Get Back includes a coda that was excised from the album mix. Don't Let Me Down is a wrenching, heartfelt love song that only suffers from not being particularly well-written. John was still phoning-it-in these days.
Next we get The Ballad of John and Yoko which is a good song, if a slightly obnoxious one (made more so when you see her seated with the band on the single's jacket), and it's B-Side Old Brown Shoe, a Harrison contribution. OBS is a good-but-not-great song that was badly, badly recorded. The vocals are thin and quiet and the transitions are fairly weak. Next we get a sped-up version of Across the Universe that Lennon had donated to a charity album--this version was slowed down and overdubbed to give him more contributions to Let It Be.
Finally, we get the single version of Let It Be, which features quieter orchestration and a different (read as "better") guitar solo than the album version, and its B-Side: a truly, truly awful tune called You Know My Name (Look Up The Number). It's four-and-a-half minutes of the group trying to be funny and failing pretty grandly at it. They took it so not-seriously, that it's the only song of theirs since She Loves You to only have a mono mix. This is true barrel-scraping, perhaps the worst song they've ever recorded. Apart from Revolution 9, that is.
Now I understand that B-Sides are B-Sides, so this album contains mostly music that was either dubbed "too good to put on an album" or "not good enough for an album, but we hate to throw it away completely". That's fine and understandable, but I promised you suck and I hate to leave anything unexamined. I'm not criticizing it for the fact that it is simple a collection of songs and lacks anything that might be confused with "album cohesion". And keep in mind that this is just the second disc of the Past Masters set.
The first disc is far worse.
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Overheard at work:
So this week I got to tell professional web developers to their faces why I didn't agree with their decisions. I enjoy that aspect of my job.
How crazy is this?
Roughly twenty percent of the world's population is left-handed, but in a large part of the world, using one's left hand is taboo. I had a professor in college who remembered being told in grade school that writing left-handed was sinful (she's a lefty). Obviously, this was before baseball became the national pastime and south-paws gained some respect.
But seriously, we as a species have nothing better to do than pick on a fifth of the population for something that is absolutely meaningless?
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Random trivia, half of the Beatles were left-handed. Anybody care to guess which ones? (before Abby does, because she knows).
So, I've sort of become the UI guy at work. There's job security in that, but more to the point, it means I have some credibility when I rag on other people's poorly-laid-out websites.
So I've been thinking about the economics of complimentary water lately. You know how it is, you go to a restaurant and they give you water for free while you wait for your order because, well, most people order a drink anyway and it compels you to stay at the table while at the same time you don't feel neglected.
Complimentary bread as an appetizer serves the same purpose, but not every restaurant gives you bread. Every restaurant brings you water. Hence, free water is the norm for dining establishments.
So translate this to fast food. Every fast food restaurant out there lets you get free water, because that's the norm. Problem is, they derive zero intrinsic value by giving water to everyone--it's fast food, it's not like you're waiting for ten minutes while it's prepared. But they can't charge for water because customers would say "What do mean I have to pay for water?--Red Lobster gives me water for free!"
To complicate this, fast food restaurants make huge margins on their soft drinks (unless you think that cup of ice and sugar-seltzer actually costs them $1.50), so they encourage diners to order soft drinks through a series of... you guessed it... incentives. Some times these are incentives to buy the soft drink--game pieces on cups, etc--but most of the time you see disincentives to order a water. Water comes in small cups (a la Taco Bell) or in ridiculously small cups (a la St. Louis Bread Company). Sometimes the water shares a spigot with some kind of fruit drink, so that when you dispense water, it always comes out vaguely pinkish.
Now, I'm a water drinker when I dine-in, but a soda drinker when I use the drive-through. This is because I drink a lot of water and I will refill my drink if I'm dining in, but you can't do this in the drive through.
And here's the kicker: I would be perfectly willing to pay for water. I wouldn't pay as much, but I would pay $.50 for a cup of ice water, if I could get it in a regular sized cup. And I bet I'm not the only one. And I bet that there wouldn't be all that many converts from soda if you implemented this kind of scheme. In short, I can't see Pepsi (which, because irony is fun, owns Taco Bell) losing money by charging a nominal fee for water and removing the disincentives. But you can't do this.
Free water is the norm.
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In 1956, Elvis Presley recorded a cover of Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog, and to this day it is an instantly-recognized staple of the Elvis Presley musical catalog. Then, in 1962, The Beatles recorded a cover of Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven, and to this day it is an instantly-recognized staple of the Chuck Berry musical catalog.
You know you made me cry
I see no use in wondering why
I cry for you
And now you've changed your mind
I see no reason to change mine
I cry it's through, oh
So I got the latest batch of census-related paranoia from a rather conservative fellow I know. I know of a lot of Republicans who are really big on trying to undermine the census, like it's so important to protect your private information from that government. Which, I get. I think they're over-worrying, but I agree that it's a legitimate concern.
We were watching something on Hulu not too long ago and got the option to watch a long-form commercial for Halo 3: ODST in lieu of the normal commercial breaks. This long-form commercial took the form of a Zune/ODST party where minor celebrities (e.g., Ryan Phillipe or the DJ from Incubus) sit around playing Halo 3: ODST and talking about the experience.
So my wife snores. Not often, in fact, not most of the time. But every now and then she'll roll onto her back and start snoring.
I went to see They Might Be Giants at the Pageant last weekend. There were sock puppets. There was a confetti canon. One of my favorite albums was played in its entirety. So why wasn't it a better show?
I found out this week that former classmate, Anna Rodriguez, passed on last Monday after suffering a fatal heart attack at the age of twenty-six. I'd friended her on Facebook perhaps three weeks ago, although we were never particularly close--I would describe our real-life relationship as "friendly" rather than "friendship". Nonetheless I'm sad to see her go, and I'm particularly struck by the weirdness of the phenomenon of death on a social network.
In a real conversation that took place at my office, my boss used the word "orthogonal" to describe two threads of a discussion that were being inappropriately linked. Someone asked what that meant and was told that it meant "perpendicular". Another co-worker added that it really only meant perpendicular in a 2-D space, and that in a 3-D space it described vectors whose dot-product equals zero.
Of course, we were using the more statistical meaning (a derived meaning from the literal definitions above) that describes two sets whose data have no correlation. But, either way, can I get a "Yay math"?
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Let It Be is the Windows Registry of Beatles albums: a bad execution of a bad idea (ending hoity-toity IT humor now). When the group seemed to be at its most tense, Paul decided it would be a good idea to pile on the additional pressures of a film crew and live show and an unfamiliar producer, and for some reason no one talked him out of this.
I know the GOP have been obstructionists lately, rendering all attempts to work with them unproductive, but I have a suspicion that we simply aren't throwing them a big enough bone.
Here's my proposal:
If we let you teach Creationism in schools, will you let us have our Universal Health Care? You see, I can de-program my kids, but I can't set a bone...
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Stands for "Awkward Moments Of My Youth, Remembered".
Anybody else here remember Funny Farm? I will always remember it as Chevy Chase' Funny Farm, but I'm pretty sure the actor's name wasn't in the title. It was a 1988 Chevy Chase comedy that sort of billed itself as National Lampoon's Vacation To The Middle Of Nowhere.
Anyway...
There's a scene towards the beginning of Funny Farm in which Chase's character Andy and his wife are in their new house in the country waiting for the furniture to arrive. Andy asks his wife "when's the last time we fooled around in the middle of the day?" to which she responds "six years ago"--or some such--"when we were both down with the flu". This transits into a would-be sex scene that is immediately interrupted by a doorbell or phone or something else. Standard 80's-PG-comedy fare.
We had rented this movie when I was... I dunno... 9, maybe 10, and at this point in the movie my mother interrupted to ask me "you know what that's okay?"
I really had no idea what she was talking about, but I went with it.
"Because they're married," she said.
B'der... I love my mother dearly, but this particular incident stands out. I mean, the joke is that you're supposed to have a quick mental image of two sick people attempting to copulate. To most of the world it's a not-terribly-effective-but-at-least-fairly-casual sex joke. To my mother, it's a teachable moment for her 9-year-old.
This has been another awkward moment of my youth, remembered.
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The importance of this album cannot be understated: it propelled the Beatles to stardom, five of the fourteen tracks on it receive regular radio play to this day, (Twist and Shout, Do You Want to Know a Secret, Love Me Do, P.S. I Love You, and I Saw Her Standing There). Please Please Me was mostly recorded in one day, in a single marathon session to get ten tracks to add to the four that already existed as singles/B-sides. It started Beatlemania, which would give birth to the British Invasion. It is a singularly important album.
I was having a drink with a friend of mine a few weeks ago, and we veered onto the topic of teaching Creation in schools and I was mildly astounded to hear him say that he thinks, yes, that we should teach both sides in science class. And still am, somewhat. You can make your pithy responses, talk about how showing both sides isn't fair to Creationism, but I feel compelled to go into a little more depth. So here are my thoughts about teaching both sides.
Let's do it. Let's show both sides of the Creation/Evolution debate, and let's start with the churches. We need to start teaching evolution in Sunday School. Maybe devote a sermon or two a year to Darwinism. Church-goers need to be exposed to multiple interpretations of the data.
I am, of course, being absurd. This is a horrible idea, but why it's a horrible idea is really at the root of the problem. You see, science has no place in a church, not because they disagree with each other, per se, but because they represent two very different approaches to understanding the world. In church, you are taught to trust, to have faith. When new data emerges that challenges your faith, your reaction should be even more faith, even to the point of rejection of the new information.
In science, you are taught to ask questions and to conform your worldview to the emergent data, and to constantly revise and try to recreate and validate new evidence. "Agreement" doesn't enter into the picture. The approaches are fundamentally at odds. To introduce science to a religious setting undermines the nature of religion. Therefore, we have no excuse to try and force people to learn about science in their religious settings.
Likewise, we have no excuse to try and force people to learn about religion in a science classroom. To do so would undermine the nature of science. Now, you may be saying to yourself that there is a scientific backing to some Creationist theories. You would be mistaken. Not because the conclusions are wrong, but because the conclusion was reached by fitting data to a pre-determined endpoint. This undermines the scientific method, which is ultimately what we're trying to teach kids in science class.
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I'm in the midst of a Bad Beatles Renaissance. Last month the Beatles re-released their full canon on CD, remastered with unified packaging and Enhanced-CD Quicktime making-of docs (known in the mid 90's as CD-ROM extras... way to innovate there, fellows).
So I spent the weekend in Houston for a wedding in Cypress, which is just down the street from Spring, where I used to live. So I took a moment to revisit my old stomping grounds, and I was struck by how much Houston felt like home more than any other home I've gone back to.
Which is not to imply that I would ever want to live there again. It still has the oppressive heat, the wasps, the roaches, the torrential downpours, the mother-loving humidity, and, you know, Texans. I talked to the groom at the rehearsal dinner, he asked me how my drive was, and I said it was twelve hours in a small car, but it wasn't awful. He proceeded to tell me about how that was nothing--you could drive for fourteen hours from one end of Texas without leaving the state.
Really? You went straight from "how was your drive?" to "Texas is big, yee-haw!" without pausing for, you know, conversation? I lived here, I've gotten over how big it is. And for your information, there's nothing but filler between El Paso and San Antonio, so it's not as if you're making the best possible use of the space.
Another striking Houston oddities: the sheer number of people who dress up for a wedding by wearing their "good blue jeans" and their "nice belt". Why yes, I'm glad you wore your nice ball cap to the reception. If my recollection holds, there were eight men in suits: the groom, the groom's father, the preacher, the two groomsmen, the two ushers, and me.
The bride's father wore a sports jacket over a Henley, which I might almost count except he paused at one point to tell Abby and I that he wanted to design a short-sleeve sports jacket for warmer weather. I swear to god...
Now, I don't want you to think that this is in any way a representative slice of Texans or that I'm deriding Texans across the board. There are lots of perfectly wonderful people living in Texas and Texans, in general, share some admirable qualities. They're typically very polite, as long you're non-hispanic, straight, and willing to at least feign some religiosity. They say "y'all" without even a hint of irony, and my word, but they could teach St. Louis a thing or two about building roads. Roads are big and broad with wide shoulders and dividers. Highways have one-way multi-lane feeders with no-signal U-Turn lanes at intersections. Damn straight.
'Course, they freak out a little when the weather gets below freezing, but it's not like that ever happens.
Also, if you speak fondly of Spring, they immediately thing you're talking about Old Town Spring, which is sort of a like a mile-long craft fair with sturdier tables. I don't care much for Old Town Spring, but it was good to see the old stomping grounds. I found the road where I got horribly lost after only a month with a driver's license. I found my old house, my old Junior and Senior high schools. I found the community theater where I had once been active, and found that, even fifteen-odd years after it's moved, the old sign is still visible from 1960 pointing to its old location in Breck Plaza.
Something never change, it seems, even though they really could use to.
'Twas good to be back, if only for a weekend.
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It's interesting to see how the left is sort of backing away slowly from Michael Moore. Self-proclaimed liberals have been complaining about Moore's new film Capitalism: A Love Story, and as a more-or-less liberal person, I have to agree with them.
Now I've been a long-time Moore defender. Yes, he plays fast-and-loose with the facts and yes he presents information in a way that is not strictly dishonest but somewhat misleading. I don't agree with the practice, especially if you're calling your film a documentary, but I understand that he's trying to make what is often a very honest point with cinematic flare, even if the facts seem to require some tailoring. Exactly how ethically dubious that is, well, that's a matter for another discussion.
But he's sort of isolating himself, and I'm not 100% sure why. I would cite a combination of factors: first, as the left has taken control of the middle, Moore and his ilk have become outliers and the rest of the left is trying to not be lumped into his extreme viewpoints. Another possibility--he may be losing his mind, just a little.
Take a look at C:ALS. I haven't seen it, but I'm aware of his two major themes: 1) Capitalism is evil and you can't regulate evil (that's a direct quote, by the way) and 2) Capitalism should be replaced by Democracy.
Ahem?
First, let's talk about this "evil" word for a minute. "Evil" is sort of like "Love" in that it doesn't really exist that way most people think it does. It is a word used to describe people's actions and perhaps their attitudes, but we tend to regard it as a causal force. "Evil" is not a thing that compels people to action, it is simply a description of horrific actions. In that sense, it can sure as hell be regulated. We regulate it all the time. We don't always do so effectively, true, but it's sort of like saying "you can't regulate murder". We should. We can. We do (to the best of our abilities).
Second, is Capitalism even a thing that is capable of being "evil"? Of course not. It doesn't make decisions, it doesn't act, but on the other hand, it does compel people to action. It is a system, so we can describe it as "flawed" rather than "evil". But if something is flawed, you treat it one of two ways: you fix the flaws, or you replace it with something better.
Moore's ideal replacement: Democracy. What does that even mean? One is a political system, one is an economic system, but the two are analogous in their own spheres. This is not an apples-to-oranges comparison, this is an apples-to-applesauce comparison. Bill Maher asked Moore that very question: "What do you mean by that?" and I think it's an important question to be able to answer if you're going to make any kind of statement about, well, anything. Moore started talking in pretty platitudes, but he never answered the damn question. Show me an implementation. Tell me how to Democratize commerce. Tell me what it is, why it's better, and give me a roadmap there.
I mean, Jesus, Mike, look at some of your own movies. Previous themes have been: Roger Smith (and by extension any CEO) doesn't care about working-class Americans, America has a bizarre and dangerous fixation with guns, the Bush administration lied about Iraq and other things as well, Americans would benefit from universal health coverage. These are all things that can be argued and discussed factually. But "Capitalism is evil"? It's too vague to be meaningful and, frankly, too childish to be discussed with a straight face.
And the beautiful irony of this is that capitalism begets democracy? You want to democratize something? Open up trade with it. And if you want to criticize capitalism, start by pointing out that what we have in America is a far cry from pure capitalism. That's an interesting subject. But "evil"?
Meh.
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And now, a live-blog of a wedding.
They do!!!!
Kiss!!!
...Photos...
Speeches.
Dancey and drinky.
Maseltav.
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Right now I'm on the road with my wife and my (rather conservative) mother-in-law, driving to Texas.
Must not blaspheme in the car... or in the Texas.
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Today Zombieland opens, and if you're like me, you were probably just thinking to yourself wow, you know what I haven't seen in ages? A zombie movie. I could really go for a zombie movie right now. Sarcasm aside, Zombieland is at least a mild winner for being light, quirky, and self-aware enough to have some fun at its own expense.
Zombieland stars Jesse Eisenberg, whom we might as well call the "poor man's Michael Cera" right here and now. He's fresh from starring in Adventureland, and I can't help but think that missing out on Land of the Lost might have nearly killed his career. The film also stars Woody Harrelson, but don't be fooled, he's there to put a name on the marquis. It's Eisenberg's film.
When making a zombie apocalypse film, you have to ask yourself a few questions: What kind of zombies are we dealing with, i.e., how did it start? How do the survivors survive? What are the survivors trying to accomplish? How will it all end in a memorable bloodbath?
The zombies in Zombieland are the fast-moving variety. The outbreak started with an infected hamburger that carried a mutant strain of Mad Cow Disease, which turns humans into raging, bloodthirsty, mindless... well, zombies, along with anyone they bite. Eisenberg plays Columbus. And here I will break for a moment. The movie subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) points out the similarities between our nameless, stoic, insane heroes and the nameless, stoic, insane hordes. For most of the film, we don't know anyone's real name. Columbus is called "Columbus" because he's from Columbus, Ohio. His neighbor, back when the outbreak started, was "406". Anywho.
Columbus is going back home to try and find his parents when he meets up with "Tallahassee" (Harrelson), who is basically playing a funnier Bruce Willis. He starts out pretty one-dimensional, killing things because he enjoys killing and trying to find the sacred snack cake... a Twinkie. He and Cera--whoops, I mean Columbus--team up if only briefly because they're going more or less the same way and have found their union convenient, if not necessarily pleasant. En route they meet "Witchita" (Emma Stone) and "Little Rock" (Abigail Breslin, in the only role I've ever liked her in so far) who are sisters heading West to Los Angeles so they can visit Pacific Playland, which they hear is zombie-free.
The flow the story (and the tone) revolve around Columbus' rules, a list of mandates for himself that he writes on a little pad and constantly updates and adds to. Columbus was kind of a bookish, WOW-ish, shut-in before the apocalypse. He spent most of his life avoiding people, a tendency that turned out to serve him well once people became deadly. And he has found some very practical axioms that he chooses to share. There's "Limber up" and "Beware of bathrooms" and "Don't be a hero", but the first and ostensibly most important is "Cardio". Exercise. You can't outrun the horde if you're overweight and/or out of breath. These rules are represented visually and often show up as scene punctuation and transitional material (not unlike the rules from Fight Club).
The one thing I'll bring up is that the film knows what it is. It knows that zombies are a bit played-out at this point, so it has some fun with the topic. Oh, we get our fair share of gore, but it's generally fun gore. I particularly remember a shot of businessmen being chased by a blood-covered zombie in a G-string and pasties. The movie doesn't expect to be taken too seriously, but it offers wild surprises and meta-humor where a more serious film would have been stoic and tormented. Which is not to say that there isn't some melancholy under the mirth. Our four survivors are all heading someplace that they've heard is free of zombies, but deep down, they all know it isn't true. They just want to keep moving, because it's kept them alive so far.
As for the ending, I won't give it away, but it's called Zombieland and two of our characters are on their way to a theme park, so feel free to start drawing conclusions. All told, it was a perfectly enjoyable way to spend an evening. Kinda fun, kinda jaunty, kinda cool, and fairly fast-paced. It got a little cheesy in places, and there was an extended cameo in the middle that dragged on for a bit too long and then ended in a fairly obvious plot twist (albeit a pleasantly absurd one).
Oh, and the music was rock-solid. So that's a plus.
So if you get a chance, see it. Take the kids.
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I've now seen both ends of the Ben Folds performance spectrum. We saw him about this time last year when he was touring with a 5-piece band, playing mostly stuff from his production-heavy recent album Way to Normal. This time around, he had a piano. That was it.
