Nintend'oh! #2: Jackal!

Jackal
Developer: Konami
Release Date: June 1986 (arcade); September 1988 (NES)
“You've been chosen to be one of the few, the proud, the Jackals.”

Welcome to the second installment of Nintend’oh, the column that provides fresh perspectives on the finest entertainment of yesteryear – The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)!

It’s been 19 months since I reviewed Paperboy and a lot has changed: the name of this blog is considerably better (shorter), the Knicks seem like they may not be totally and unfathomably awful, I’ve moved to a new state, I’ve gotten a new job, I am now a hunter, I wear glasses, I married my beautiful wife Erin over the summer, I have two new nieces Elizabeth and Keira…the list goes on and on. The most notable and important change, however, is that I will be getting a new gaming console, the Xbox 360. But, to quote Cinderella’s Tom Keifer, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Let me put this in perspective for some readers. This is the first time in 10 years that I’ll be getting a new system with new games. New games in that they are actually new; they're currently being made and released in present day. This is a momentous occasion. It’s a daunting task, really, because there is so much out there that I know so little about. I find the unknown simultaneously arousing and frightful. The term “fear-boner” has found itself in regular rotation. I’ve taken to researching various titles for the Xbox and the result is, well…interesting. No matter what game title I enter into Google, no matter what YouTube search query I use, and no matter what Gamespot review I read, I always arrive at the same conclusion. Let’s just say that if I were a character on Lost, Jackal would be my constant. To illustrate my point, here are snippets of my stream of conscious as I search out new games to buy for Xbox:

- Wow! A new Bond game – is it money!? Will it be as money as Goldeneye? It’s a first/third person shooter, but it has some driving levels…Shooter…Driving…JACKAL

- EA’s Madden 2011 looked pretty money. The Jets are stacked in it. Stacked Jets…throwing bombs…Jets and Bombs…War…Wait, doesn’t EA make those Medal of Honor games too? Are those money? I heard the newest one takes place in Afghanistan…Afghanistan borders Iran…Iran Contra…Iran borders Iraq… Saddam…Desert …Kicking ass …Kicking ass in the desert? … JACKAL

- NHL 2011 looks incredible. It’s almost as fun as NHL 94 for Genesis or Blades of Steel for NES. Blades…Of steel. Awesome game…cool graphics…all your friends will want it…JACKAL.

Jackal, or as I like to call it, 特殊部隊ジャッカル, is a fantastic game for the NES. It is the NES port of the popular arcade game Top Gunner (which certainly tried to play off the popularity of Top Gun which also came out in 1986). Jackal is an overhead run and gun game that can be played single player or multiplayer (simultaneous). The player controls an armored jeep with the dual objectives of rescuing POWs and defeating the boss at the end of each of the eight levels. The player is awarded points when POWs are transferred to rescue helicopters at several pick up locations interspersed throughout each level. If a player earns enough points, an extra life will be granted. If the player catches a POW that is blinking, that player's weaponry will be upgraded. Any collision or contact with an enemy will cause the jeep to spontaneously combust and costs a life.

Jackal is a tremendously fun game. For those familiar with the classic game Choplifter, Jackal is essentially Choplifter-in-a-Jeep. Combining rescue missions with a run ‘n gun arcade style game was not only awesome but considerably ahead of its time. There’s something inherently fun about driving games, but driving games that employ fighting and/or shooting are even better (remember Road Rash or Skitchin' for Sega Genesis?) There are several aspects of the game that make it incredibly enjoyable even 22 years later. The mechanics of the game are spot on; players can quickly adapt to the controls of the vehicle and the shooting, but mastery requires repeated play. The pacing of the game is perfect. Like most games, it starts out easy and gets progressively difficult as the player gets further along in the game. However, there is no sudden or drastic shift in difficulty. This makes Jackal uniquely engaging from the beginning of the first level to whenever-it-is-that-your-game-ends. The weaponry in Jackal is extremely fun to play and manipulate. Each weapon brings its own dynamic to the style of play used by the player. Honestly, it’s also just fun to run people over and flatten them. Especially foreign people!

The best aspect of Jackal is the multiplayer option. In my opinion, playing Jackal in two player mode is one of the highlights of the playing the NES altogether. Aside from Contra or Double Dragon II, Jackal is the best tandem two player game ever made for the NES. The ebb and flow of the game is so effortless in Jackal. Jackal’s maps are quite large and don’t fit on one screen (known in inner geek circles as being a “push-scroller”) and this works perfectly. The “push-scroller” nature of the maps and simultaneous management of the increasing difficulty and varying landscapes provides for much strategizing on the part of the players. For example, one player can stick with the original weapons and be aggressive on the front lines, while player two hangs back and retains the upgraded weapons and is more defensive minded to minimize unnecessary deaths and loss of weaponry. This strategizing on two player mode is what makes Jackal one of the top NES games of all time.

Jackal is also awesome because of its unintentional humor. Think about it; you are essentially given a map of different parts of the world (the Middle East, Rome, Europe) and you basically obliterate every area to shreds in the name of saving American POWs, should you so choose. You don’t even have to save anyone. You can just scorch the non-American earth and leave the POWs if you want. There are heat-seeking missiles firing out of moving Medusa busts, you get to run people over with your jeep, you get to mow people down with heavy artillery, you get to ruin the ruins. It’s awesome. Take a look at this story and try to tell me that you’re not fired up about kicking some foreign ass and saving some American tail. By the way, if you aren’t fired up, then you’re either a terrorist or a communist (probably both):

The characters that you can choose from are Colonel Decker, Lieutenant Bob, Sergeant Quint (my personal favorite) and Corporal Grey. Who you choose has no impact on the game play whatsoever.

If you dominate a level you get this screenshot:

If you get dominated on the level you get this screenshot:

Wait a minute. Is that Saddam Hussein? In our jeep? Is he on our side? If not, then why do the bad guys look befuddled when I just had an awful round? What the hell? IS THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN?

All in all, Jackal has everything; fun game-play (especially multiplayer), intuitive controls, funny enough story line, funny characters, challenging maps, awesome music, great weaponry and the replay value is essentially never-ending. The game does not have any glaring flaws.

Look out for the next installment of Nintend’oh coming soon (if by soon I mean 19 months).

A

Dan Baxter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svGkctaM43w (Jackal NES game play)

The Dailies 12/2/10 - Tru(man) Grit

Trailerz

Ed Wood (1994) – B+

- Directed by Tim Burton

- Starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette

- Awards: Won – Best Supporting Actor (Landau), Best Makeup

- A touching and revealing look at a perennial optimist who directed some of the worst movies of all time.

L.A. Confidential (1997) – B-

- Directed by Curtis Hanson

- Starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger

- Awards: Won – Best Supporting Actress (Basinger), Best Adapted Screenplay. Nominated – Best Art Direction (Set Decoration), Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Picture

- A slightly rushed and haphazard pseudo-noir film with great performances from Crowe and Spacey.

Jackass 3D (2010) – B+

- Directed by Jeff Tremaine

- Starring Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Steve-O, and the rest

- Jackass is funny.

Stalker (1979) – C

- Directed by Andrey Tarkovskiy

- Starring Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko

- A tremendous idea about an uninhabited mystical no man’s land becomes bogged down with endless metaphorical babbling dialogue and provides no action and little payoff.

Features

True Grit (1969)
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Starring John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Robert Duvall
Awards: Won – Best Actor (Wayne). Nominated – Best Original Song

I had never given John Wayne much thought before. Even after delving into the legendary films of the past and trying to discover for myself the cinematic giants who created and starred in them, John Wayne never struck me as particularly interesting. There seemed to be something about the majority of his films, with their cardboard plots constructed only to showcase him blowing the shit out of Japs, Commies or whoever America’s enemies were at the time, that was childish, vulgar and antiquated. Wayne’s persona superseded his acting; he appeared to me to be a spokesman for thoughtless jingoism. And because I never did much investigation into his body of work, I assumed that he never played a part beyond a “rah-rah” American soldier, which wasn’t very appealing to me. Wayne, it appeared to me, was a relic of an era that I had missed and I was not keen to discover.

But through all that personal garbage, I didn’t realize that Wayne was more than a bygone icon. He could legitimately act. I watched the classic, John Ford-directed Stagecoach (1939), and thoroughly enjoyed both the film and Wayne’s performance. With the forthcoming True Grit remake coming this month, I thought it would be an appropriate time to watch the original film (for which Wayne won that year’s Best Actor Oscar) as preparation.

Wayne stars as Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed, cantankerous marshal of the old West intimately familiar with the mostly lawless nearby Indian territories. He is hired by a teenage girl named Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), who pays Cogburn to enter the Indian territory and hunt down and capture the man who killed her father. Famed country singer Glen Campbell accompanies the two on their mission as a Texas Ranger who is tracking the very same outlaw. Other famous and familiar faces appear throughout the film, such as Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall.

True Grit works because of the interaction between Wayne and Darby. Darby’s character is smart and resourceful, refusing to be pushed around by the male-dominated old West. Because of her attitude, she proves a worthy foil for Wayne, a hard-drinking old-timer who initially seems to care more about money (and himself) than justice. Their back and forth needling eventually gives way to a close friendship, one that is believable due to the quality acting involved. Wayne called one particular scene, in which he discusses his ex-wife with the girl, the best scene he ever did.

Wayne carries an appropriate balance of tenderness and menace in True Grit. We know because of what other characters say about him and how he conducts himself that he is a man to be feared. But Wayne plays the old gunfighter not so much grizzled as mellowed by his hard life, and his spitfire female companion finally gives him cause to come out of his shell.

Pieces of True Grit are a tad hokey. The film is rated G, so the standard western gunfights and killings are subdued and tame. The music and some dialogue lend themselves toward an aura of comedy, which works well for the film, though I wonder how the Coen Brothers will choose to play the material with their remake. True Grit is a fun, enjoyable film with great performances; a film that has caused me to rethink my stance on John Wayne and investigate some of his other films.

B+

The Truman Show (1998)
Directed by Peter Weir
Starring Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich
Awards: Nominated – Best Supporting Actor (Harris), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay

Jim Carrey’s career has followed an interesting trajectory. After a few years on the sketch comedy show In Living Color, he burst onto the national scene in the early 1990s and immediately became one of the biggest stars in the world. After several smash comedy hits, he branched out into “legitimate, dramatic acting” with films like The Truman Show and later Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). He carried these films to critical and commercial success despite their lack of fart noises or other scatological humor, proving that audiences would pay to watch him in more challenging and less juvenile roles. From there, unfortunately, he largely disappeared, coming out of hiding once a year or so to voice a computer-animated Ebenezer Scrooge or appear in some children’s schlock. Carrey is still a big name, but it seems he hasn’t appeared in anything anyone has cared about in close to a decade.

The Truman Show was Carrey’s first foray into a more dramatic film, though it is more appropriately termed a comedy with some dashes of humanity and drama. As you most likely know, Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, the star of a reality television series that follows him around 24 hours a day. Truman has no idea he is on television; the producers of the show have created a domed world that contains Truman and the other citizens (re: actors) of his town.

The Truman Show is fascinating in its exhibition and description of Truman’s artificial world and how everything works within it, and the best parts of the film are scenes where Truman is growing suspicious of exactly what is happening around him and starts testing his surroundings to try and figure things out. Indeed, much of The Truman Show can be considered a science-fiction caper, with Truman coming to realize his situation and seeing what wacky things he can get away with.

The film does miss some golden opportunities and does not delve into areas I would have liked to see explored. Truman has no existential crisis when he finds out everything and everyone he has ever known were manufactured. He doesn’t question how he came to adopt his constant cheery disposition and whether that’s who he really is or whether he’s been engineered to be that way. There are no meaningful confrontations with his wife, mother, or best friend, the three closest people to him. These conversations would have made the film a little more human and would have helped bring us down from the high-level concept and technical mumbo-jumbo we are bombarded with throughout. The Truman Show proved Carrey had the capacity for a true dramatic role and lends hope that he has another great act left within his career.

B

John Lacey

People We Hate #2

This is pretty self-explanatory. We post a picture of someone we dislike or find annoying. You comment on it. Caption the photo, say whether you agree or disagree with the hatred, etc.

Kathy Najimy

From the Library: Neil Young - This Note's For You

Neil Young
This Note’s For You
1988 Reprise

I don’t know if you know this, but libraries are a great place to pick up new music, particularly the libraries of Somerville and the Merrimack Valley. These libraries are not only stocked with classic albums, but commonly contain droves of records from indie-rock Pitchfork.com darlings. I enjoy “shopping” for music at the library because I don’t know what I’m going to find there and because I’m still working with a limited selection. I can’t type a band into a search box and automatically download every album. I’m at the mercy of the front-desk weirdo who orders these albums, and hence I sometimes need to go out on a limb and try out something I wouldn’t have thought to listen to previously.

For fans of legendary and/or prolific artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, the library is a godsend. These types of musicians always have numerous unknown and unheralded (re: shitty) albums that the library always seems to have. For a completist like me, this is fantastic. I’m certainly not going to buy a copy of Empire Burlesque, and even the Slovak on the other side of the bit torrents I frequent doesn’t have it. It’s called filling the gaps; I’m missing certain albums from my favorite artists and the library helps me to track down those records.

One such filled hole is This Note’s For You, a Neil Young album released in 1988. Young had released a string of critical and commercial flops throughout much of the 80s (some self-inflicted; he released the nigh-unlistenable Trans to spur his release from his record contract), leading to the release of this album. This Note’s For You helped Young get back on the right track career-wise and set up his true “comeback” album, Freedom, released the following year. The song “This Note’s For You” actually won MTV Music Video of the Year honors for 1989, which I still think is absurd. The content of the video is vehemently anti-MTV, but beyond that, it shows how much MTV and the music business as a whole has changed that Young would have even been considered for such an award, let alone win it.

You could mistake This Note’s For You for a concept album. From its blue, rain-soaked cover art, to its title, to its blues-jazz bar band sound, everything about it gives off the vibe of a smoky basement music club. Young plays the small-time, big fun bandleader on This Note’s For You. It’s a rare and different sound for him, one that works very well.

There are shades of the grunginess that would come to define Young’s 90s albums and which we still hear off-and-on today. “This Note’s For You” stays with the blues tempo, but its edges are sharpened by a forceful opening and refrain. The subject matter is more biting as well, with Young bemoaning the corporate permeation of music and lambasting other artists whose songs are used in commercials to promote corporate interests. Towards the song’s end, Young assures what he assumes to be a mainstream-sick audience, repeating “I got the real thing, baby”. We didn’t know it at the time, but Young was then issuing what would basically be his credo for the rest of his career.

Later, on “Hey Hey”, Young pleads to the listener, “Get offa that couch, turn off your MTV!” Young posited himself as a lone warrior trying to repel the commercialization of music while everyone else in the mid-to-late 80s seemed to embrace that mentality. Rather than sound curmudgeonly, however, Young is so direct that he sounds passionate, inspired, and ultimately correct. He’s stating for his followers and anyone else who will listen, “This is what music is, not that”. That sentiment makes the MTV Video Award win that much more astounding.

There are points where Young falls into the trappings of the era. “Twilight” strays from the album’s M.O., delivering a beat reminiscent of a darker Police song and ultimately sounding dated. Neil was dipping his toes into the 80s distant-sounding big bass soundscape here. That he entered uncharted territory for himself is admirable, but the execution is lacking.

Throughout much of This Note’s For You, including the excellent “Married Man” and “Sunny Inside” (both helped in no small part by a vibrant horn section), Young sounds truly excited and inspired, feelings lacking from much of his earlier 80s output. The record sounds intimate due to its simplicity; there’s no place where the care and craft Young put into these songs can hide. Young is reacquainting himself with the type of music he was raised on, and judging by the late-career renaissance that followed, This Note’s For You represented a cleansing of the palette. It allowed Young to deconstruct, get comfortable, and earn a fresh start.

As a smoky, bar room blues-jazz album, This Note’s For You is an absolute triumph. For a Neil Young album, it’s a terrific curiosity, exhibiting a sound rarely heard in his music. It is a very good album, well worth the zero dollars I paid for it.

B+

John Lacey

The Random Ten #20

Welcome back to the Random Ten. This was supposed to be a Random Twenty, with Mr. Steele collaborating, but prior engagements prevented him from doing so. He’ll be back with his own Random Ten next week.

#1) Peter Gabriel – “Mercy Street” – So (1986)

So, featuring songs like “Sledgehammer”, “In Your Eyes” and “Big Time”, was one of the biggest albums of the 1980s. “Mercy Street” is a lot different than those songs, replacing their intoxicating exuberance with a toned-down seriousness that doesn’t work quite as well.

Gabriel’s sound is interesting because it is so synonymous with the 80s. “Mercy Street” has a plodding, brooding, and vaguely computerized/vaguely foreign beat that date the song but don’t make it feel old. Peter Gabriel was ahead of his time, and even though his then-state of the art methods are now antiquated, there’s still a vibrancy and contemporaneousness to his music that continues to stand out.

“Mercy Street” isn’t very good, though, clocking in at around 6 ½ minutes but containing a boring intro and outro that take up almost half of the runtime. It’s bland, but Gabriel had a way of making even his bland songs sound interesting.

#2) String Cheese Incident – “Hotel Window” – On The Road: Louisville, KY 4/17/02 (2002)

“Hotel Window” sounds like it might be originally written by someone else, but I couldn’t find any information online. Anyway, I don’t listen to “SCI” too much anymore, but I’m always happy when they show up on a Random Ten. They have the capacity to play some balls-out jams, they play some interesting covers (such as Talking Heads’ “Naïve Melody” and Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies”), and then they can come with a traditional rock ballad like “Hotel Window”.

As with many jam bands, would-be strengths of more straightforward rock acts are sacrificed to lengthy instrumentation and improvisation. Bill Nershi is not a very good singer, and his vocals on “Hotel Window” don’t fit well; they’re nasally and low, where the lyrics and music call for a singer able to hit a more soulful note.

There isn’t much else I can say to the negative. Of course, an extended jam fills out the middle portion of the song, bookended by a couple of quick verses. The music matches the lyrics nicely, creating a hopeful but lonely aura around a person watching over a city from their hotel room window. It’s a nice listen.

#3) U2 – “Twilight” – Boy (1980)

“Twilight” is from U2’s first album, released back in October of 1980. The sound here is post-punk, with Bono providing a snarling slant on his vocals and staggered, direct guitar riffing from The Edge.

There is a lot of force to the early work of U2. Their new material is so layered and purposefully larger than life that it is able to replicate through engineering what they were effortlessly able to do in their beginning. Not to say their new material is bad, but “Twilight” has amazing vitality and raw strength readily apparently thirty years later. If you couple that sound with some monolithic hit singles, it’s not hard to hear how U2 became U2.

#4) moe. – “Plane Crash” – Tin Cans & Car Tires (1998)

It is an undeniable fact of life that studio albums from jam bands are not as good as their live work. Jam bands are great at improv and experimentation, two traits that don’t fit the rigid structures of a studio record.

We just discussed String Cheese Incident, who were able to cobble together a couple of half-decent studio albums due to their bluegrass/country background and traditional, old-timey songwriting. Bands like moe., on the other hand, come up with a really cool guitar riff and then play endless variations on it for eight minutes. Live, while on drugs? Fine. On a record? Boring.

Tin Cans & Car Tires is moe.’s best studio album, though it still falls into those riff-heavy, repetitious trappings described above. “Plane Crash” is the album’s standout. The song is about being deathly afraid of a plane crash and it is forceful enough in both lyrics and music to get that feeling across. Some of the lyrics are a bit foolish, but their simplicity is also effective. Consider the chorus:

Strap me in, tie me down
And roll me a bone
I’m getting on an airplane
And I’m flying home

Strap me in, tie me down
I’m learning to fly
Drive across the country
I get too fucking high

The chorus rightfully explodes with energy and an appropriately desperate and frightful vocal style. The song concludes with a rolling jam and what sounds like an instrumental panic attack, with a violin added to complete the foreboding effect. This might be moe.’s best song.

#5) Leo Kottke – “Echoing Gilewitz” – A Shout Toward Noon (1986)

I know Leo Kottke best as the classical guitarist who has collaborated with Mike Gordon, bassist of Phish, on two albums. This was a library pickup that I’ve never listened to, so let’s learn more about him together!

“Echoing Gilewitz” is Kottke playing an acoustic guitar with no accompaniment, and it is appropriately beautiful. It’s soft, contemplative, and slightly sorrowful; it’s like the guitar equivalent of watching a sunrise by yourself. Not for everyone, but quite good.

#6) The Beatles – “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” – Help! (1965)

You probably know “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”, or at least I hope you do. It’s a timeless pop rock classic.

The Beatles made everything sound so simple. This song is haunting, mesmerizing, hopeful and tentative at the same time, all while sounding great and coming in at barely over two minutes. A flute accompaniment shortly before the song’s conclusion pushes it into “brilliant” territory.

The lyrics aren’t very complex, but they match the music to a T. The Beatles did the “I miss my baby” songs to death in their early days, but they managed to not only make them sound fresh and interesting, but made them some of the best songs ever produced by anyone.

#7) Iced Earth – “Vengeance Is Mine” – The Dark Saga (1996)

I gotta be honest. I was digging this list so far, and I don’t really feel like listening to a metal song I haven’t heard in ten years and which I only keep on my iTunes for the sake of posterity. Matt, you want to help?

But seriously, let’s give it a whirl. This is from a concept album based on the Spawn comic book (really), and the lyrics are predictable violent babble and forced rhyming:

Profaner to humanity menaced by flesh and bone
Screams of the unknown youth to him the sweetest tone
Undying in his will to kill his bloodlust is profound
For the blood of the lamb I’ve got to bring him down

But…BUT…the guitar riffs and blast beat drumming are definitely awesome. It’s hard not to like some of the thought that goes into the music here. The melodies are complex and often legitimately harmonious, making “Vengeance Is Mine” childish but enjoyable.

#8) Robert Johnson – “Traveling Riverside Blues” (alternate take) – King Of The Delta Blues Singers (1961; song originally recorded 1937)

Ah, Robert Johnson. You sold your soul to the devil just so Led Zeppelin could make a more famous version of your song. Zeppelin may have lengthened and electrified “Traveling Riverside Blues”, but the song undeniably remains Johnson’s.

From 1937, this recording obviously sounds old. Johnson’s legend casts a shadow over his work, and due to the crackles and tininess of the original recording, you’re almost listening for hints of a diabolic influence in the music. His legend shines through, and the song is simply great.

#9) Beastie Boys – “Live At P.J.’s” – Check Your Head (1992)

Another raucous outing from the Beastie Boys, with the three rappers passing off verses and punctuating each other’s lines throughout. A lot of what the Beastie Boys do sounds awfully similar to me, but “Live at P.J.’s” is greatly aided by a funky beat, nice tempo changes and some inventive rhyming. “Live at P.J.’s” is very raw; it sounds like a live performance at some dingy night club, which is the song’s premise. Two songs from Check Your Head have showed up on the Random Ten over the last couple of months and I’ve liked them both. Perhaps it’s time to give the record a serious listen?

#10) Little Feat – “Cold, Cold, Cold” – Waiting For Columbus (1978; the song was originally released on Feats Don’t Fail Me Now [1974])

“Cold, Cold, Cold” appeared as part of a medley on Little Feat’s seminal album Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. This is culled from their Waiting For Columbus live album of a few years later.

Little Feat has an unmistakable southern rock sound. Like so many other 70s southern rock bands (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, even the Band, to name a few), their music pays homage to the past while adding muscle and inventiveness to their influences. Now Little Feat sounds almost traditional, but for the time this was advanced stuff. The guitar flourishes, organ, and horn flares sound right at home. The songs of Little Feat, including this one, are infectious and fun, the way southern rock should be.

John Lacey

People Play Games #3: Monopoly/Battleship

People Play Games is back, taking another look at old video games that are uniquely terrible for one reason or another. Today, we’ll discuss video games based on board games, looking at the examples of Monopoly and Battleship, both for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

It’s hard not to like a good board game. They’re inexpensive, they’re easy to learn, and they provide simple but competitive fun. Additionally, most of the classic ones have been around for like a hundred years, so board games like Monopoly and Battleship are ingrained in American culture. Even if you’ve never played a game of Monopoly, you probably know how it works and what it’s about.

For some reason, video game companies thought that consumers would want to spend $50 to play these age-old American institutions in a newer, shittier way. Never mind the fact that a copy of the real Monopoly is probably in the area of $20, that a board game is inherently more interactive and fun because you are actually rolling the dice and moving the pieces, and that no one has any need or desire for a digital Monopoly game.

This miscalculation could be forgiven if the video game sported amazing graphics or put a new, fun slant on the original game. Of course, it doesn’t. Unless I see the thimble and the iron popping out of my television set or unless I’m getting real money to play it, I think I’d rather play the real game with real people.

But does it feel like the real Monopoly? When playing board games, there is inherent and constant shit-talking, especially when some poor sap just landed on your deluxe hotel property and now has to fork over all of their cash. In the NES Monopoly, the game moves so fast you hardly have any idea what the fuck is going on. The computer rolls the dice, lands on a property and purchases it in the space of four seconds.

Yeah, that looks just as good as playing the real thing, right? So Monopoly for Nintendo offers no discernable reason for playing it over the real board game and it costs $30 more. Why was this made?

If Monopoly is the baseball of board games (a patient and strategic game, takes forever to play, has been around forever), Battleship is the football. The action is violent and quick, players slowly squeeze the life out of each other once they get a “hit”, and the game can turn around in an instant if your opponent gives you an opening. Again, this sounds more exciting in real life, right?

Battleship for NES adds some insane “wrinkles” to the classic game, allowing the player to use “depth charges” and shoot five missiles at once. I point to this as evidence that the game didn’t need to be made in the first place. Everyone loves Battleship. I don’t think you can find a person who knows what Battleship is that doesn’t adore it. People like it the way it is. The only justification for its existence on Nintendo is that the programmers piled some stupid shit on top of it and claimed it was a new game.

In past articles on the Musicarium, we’ve discussed media that claimed to promote family values while simultaneously undermining them. The Tamagotchi allowed kids to raise a virtual pet when a real life pet is much more fun and rewarding. TGIF told families to sit and watch other, better families on TV and passed this off as a family activity. Board games can be played by anyone, but I’d wager the first thing you think of when you think of the term “board game” is a family sitting around a table playing one. In this instance, board games are perfect the way they are. The idea of improving on them by making a group of people perform yet another activity where they sit around a television is a tad insidious.

Although, it is cool to see the enemy battleship actually blow up.

John Lacey

People We Hate #1

This is pretty self-explanatory. We post a picture of someone we dislike or find annoying. You comment on it. Caption the photo, say whether you agree or disagree with the hatred, etc.

John Ratzenberger

Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses - Junky Star

Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses
Junky Star
2010 Lost Highway

Junky Star is the latest release from Ryan Bingham, the Americana-country-folk-rock fusion artist known primarily for his amazing guitar work and raspy “beyond his years” vocals. Junky Star is the third official album from Bingham and his Dead Horses backing band, following 2007’s Mescalito and 2009’s Roadhouse Sun. Bingham also contributed to the soundtrack for the 2009 film Crazy Heart, penning the Academy Award-winning track “The Weary Kind” for that movie.

His previous efforts are strong throughout and provide many reasons to be excited about his emergence. They don’t quite put it all together at once, but there were enough inspired moments to believe that Bingham was capable of creating a masterpiece, and it was hoped that Junky Star would hit the home run that fans had been waiting for.

In order to create such a cohesive, strong album, Bingham is forced to walk a tightrope between his two styles. He has one hand in traditional acoustic country-folk and the other in stampeding hard rock, and these styles often manifest themselves from song to song or sometimes within one track. The first two songs, “The Poet” and “The Wandering”, are both harmonica driven tunes displaying this dichotomy between the two styles of Bingham’s music. “The Poet” is direct and controlled, while “The Wandering” is fast and loose.

Bingham has the ability to go dark, as evidenced by the twangy, desperate and paranoid “Strange Feelin’ In The Air”, perhaps the album’s best song. This track contains a fine example of Bingham’s oft-employed breakdowns, where the song deviates from verse-chorus conventions and explodes into a multi-layered groove. Some of Bingham’s material, like the title track of the record, can be sparse, but it often works in reflection of what he’s singing about, especially on his Springsteen-esque stories of the dusty downtrodden.

Junky Star covers a variety of styles without problem. The record moves from contemplative acoustic folk to riff-heavy Americana to road house bar blues and back again, and neither the music nor the album’s structure suffer for it. The record strikes a much better balance between his tones than his previous work and keeps things on an even keel, eschewing the jarring transitions between tracks that disrupted his other albums and allowing things to fit together more seamlessly.

Bingham is only twenty-nine, but we get a sense that he is the real deal, and it’s not just because of his rootsy music. His gruff voice and stories of the dust covered back roads of the country ring authentic. He’s a trustworthy guide, knowledgeable of the material he’s singing about despite his young age. There’s a Bob Dylan quality about Ryan Bingham; someone who tells human stories with authority and who is talented enough to back up those stories with his music.

I’m not certain that this is the breakthrough that Bingham was hoping for, however: there really isn’t one knockout song in particularly that carries the rest of the record on its back. But there are a number of good songs not discussed above (the eerie “Hallelujah”, the sorrowful “Self-Righteous Wall”, and the raucous “Direction of the Wind”, to name three), and Junky Star represents a collection of music featuring a number of improvements over his previous two albums. Better lyrics, better structure, and evidence of an improved songwriter jump to mind. Maybe he’ll hit the grand slam next time around.

B+

John Lacey

The Dailies 9/29/10 - I've Fallen Way Behind

Well, I’ve watched a lot of movies recently, many of them really fucking good. So let’s dive right in.

Trailers

Stray Dog (1949) – C
- Directed by Akira Kurosawa
- Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji
- Yes, it’s a Kurosawa picture, but the incredibly slow pace and the hopeless reactions of the characters to nearly every obstacle they encounter led to the average grade.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) – B-
- Directed by Stanley Kramer
- Starring Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters and countless others
- Awards: Won – Best Sound Effects. Nominated – Best Color Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Best Sound
- An endlessly spoofed treasure hunt comedy featuring pretty much every funny screen personality from the turn of the century to its release.

The Wages of Fear (1953) – A-
- Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli
- An effortlessly and incredibly tense story of four downtrodden men tapped to drive unstable dynamite across treacherous terrain.

The Hustler (1961) – A-
- Directed by Robert Rossen
- Starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George S. Scott
- Awards: Won – Best Black & White Set Decoration, Best Black & White Cinematography. Nominated – Best Actor (Newman), Best Supporting Actor (Gleason), Best Supporting Actor (Scott), Best Actress (Laurie), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture
- A movie about a pool hustler that becomes much more than that due to four epic performances by the principals.

Stroszek (1977) – A
- Directed by Werner Herzog
- Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz
- A Herzog classic that doesn’t star Klaus Kinski, and already one of my favorite films ever.

Rocky Balboa (2006) – B+
- Directed by Sylvester Stallone
- Starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Tarver, Milo Ventimiglia, Burt Young
- Much, much better than a sixth Rocky movie has any right to be.

Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) – C-
- Directed by James D. Scurlock
- Featuring various talking heads
- A documentary that purports to inform us of predatory credit card practices and ends up telling us nothing we didn’t already know.

Features

The American (2010)
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Starring George Clooney, Violante Placido, Irina Bjorklund

Here’s a film that’s too patient, too deliberate and perhaps too directionless for its own good. The material in The American screams for more action; for the film to shed its meticulousness and give us some sort of blow-off that never arrives. I’m a believer that one can make a good film about anything, and there is a good film to be made with this story. Unfortunately, that film will have to be made another time.

George Clooney plays an experienced assassin who takes into hiding in Italy shortly after the film begins. You see, the film opens with Clooney being nearly killed by assassins in Sweden, which causes him to go on the run. We are not told who the Swedes are or why they want to kill Clooney, but this actually becomes inconsequential as we continue. The American admittedly does a fine job of keeping Clooney’s encounters in Italy self-contained, so that we don’t need to know who is pursuing him to get the gist of what’s happening.

Though the film begins promisingly, it eventually feels like we just start following Clooney’s character around as he does different things. It doesn’t feel like a cohesive film. Things happen, and the camera films them, but it all feels empty and rather pointless. The American is so purposely esoteric that it eliminates most of the investment we have in its characters.

The American does have its merits. It looks fantastic. It is shot very sharply and very well. The Italian scenery is great to look at. It features a couple of incredibly beautiful women. Clooney does a nice job as the tired, lonely veteran assassin, who just wants to leave the killing business and settle down on a villa somewhere but realizes that’s probably not realistic for his line of work (which is itself a tired theme). The other actors and actresses perform admirably as well. It’s too bad there’s just not enough going on to care.

C-

The Town (2010)
Directed by Ben Affleck
Starring Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner

The Town is half blue-collar crime film and half romance film, with elements from each intersecting with each other in different ways. It’s a slick film with well-done action sequences, but its great flaw is its attempt to try to be more than it really is.

The Town concerns a group of bank robbers from the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, who are led by Ben Affleck. We start with a bank robbery in Harvard Square, where things go awry and the group takes a hostage (Hall). After the robbery, the gang finds that the hostage lives in Charlestown and Affleck sets off to intimidate her, but ends up falling for her instead. He then has to keep his bank robbing activity secret from her while continuing his illegal activities.

The film serves as a commercial for Boston, with great chase scenes taking place in the claustrophobic North End section and a final shootout occurring at Fenway Park. These and other action scenes in The Town provide the most enjoyable aspect of the film; back to basics police vs. bad guys car chases and gunfighting.

Storyline problems, however, haunt the film. Believability issues are a constant, glaring annoyance. Rebecca Hall’s character repeats that the hostage encounter was the worst experience of her life, but when she finds out that Affleck was one of the robbers (he was disguised during the heist), her fury dissipates almost immediately and she remains in love with him. The police, despite knowing that Affleck and his gang are responsible for the rash of bank robberies in the area but not having enough evidence to convict, somehow forget to tail them at the end of the film, allowing them to participate in the Fenway Park theft.

The acting helps us move beyond these problems. Affleck has played “young blue collar Boston bozo” more times than I care to remember, but he does it reliably well. His best friend and second-in-command Jeremy Renner is terrific as the psychotic muscle of the group. Jon Hamm, so great as Don Draper on Mad Men, is unfortunately saddled with a one-dimensional and thankless role as stock “threatening FBI agent”.

The Town should have stuck to its guns as an action-thriller. The love between Affleck and Hall is forced and unbelievable and barely affects the outcome of the film. The addition of cornball romance to the central story was used as a device to make the film seem like more than it really is when it would have been fine all along.

B-

John Lacey

Film Convention #2: Badass Western Artifacts and Weaponry

Two vital components to any western film are aura and legend. Successful westerns need to convey an inherent primordial lawlessness and chaos that would allow the characters in them to exist and thrive. Everything contributes to this feeling: the horses, the guns, the outpost town and its saloons and hotels, the desert or mountain surroundings, even the dirt and grime that covers most of the people. All of these factors must be spot-on in order to create the western illusion and to allow us to suspend our disbelief.

Nothing in a western embodies aura and legend more than the heroes and villains in these films. Their exploits are often well known by the other characters in the town, who speak of them in reverent or frightful tones. Western heroes and villains often have either cool or menacing nicknames, immediately distinguishing them from the two-dimensional riff-raff that otherwise inhabits the town. These characters command authority, from the other characters, from the filmmakers, and ultimately, from the viewer.

A convention often used in western films to push these main characters over the top is to adorn them with an artifact or weapon that works to strengthen the character’s motives or to make them seem even more unstoppable. Today, we’ll take a look at a few examples. Some are items, but not weapons, that spell doom for an enemy when they make their appearance. Others are unique or formidable weapons, like guns or knives, that give them an advantage in their nomadic travels and chance encounters.

“El Indio” – played by Gian Maria Volonté – For A Few Dollars More (1965)

“El Indio” is the principal villain in the second film of the Man with No Name trilogy (following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad, And the Ugly). Indio is the most wanted fugitive of the outlaw west. He’s a seemingly bipolar killer who operates under the pretense of being a bandit and bank robber. Though much of the action in the film revolves around an Indio-orchestrated bank robbery, the man himself is insanely detached from his actions, and we only see glimpses of his genuine humanity when he tortures and kills his enemies and those unfortunate enough to run afoul of him.

To torture, he uses a musical pocketwatch. He obtained the pocketwatch, we learn, from a woman he raped years ago. The woman was so disgusted and shamed that she committed suicide in the middle of the crime, and Indio stole her pocketwatch as a keepsake of that demented moment. Indio challenges his opponents to duels in the film, using the chimes of the pocketwatch as an indicator of when the duel begins and when the participants can fire on one another. Only Indio knows the chimes of the watch and exactly when the music will end. Multiple scenes in For A Few Dollars More consist of Indio’s enemy rigid with fright, awaiting an inevitable death while they both wait for the chimes to complete. Indio couples this unfair advantage with his expert gunmanship, meaning that the chimes of the pocketwatch mean certain death for whoever hears them.

“Silence” – played by Jean-Louis Trintignant – The Great Silence (1968)

Sometimes these weapons and artifacts don’t have a long back story. Silence, the appropriately named hero of The Great Silence, eliminates evil bounty hunters with a simple but awesome rapid-fire pistol. No story is given as to its origin, but we can tell from the way that Silence shoots this pistol that he’s had it for a long time, and that it has ended the lives of many people. Whereas in some films, like the aforementioned For A Few Dollars More, the item adds to and builds on the character, in some cases the character adds to the item. The protagonists in The Great Silence are Silence, a mute, scarred gunfighter railing against frontier injustice, and the maniacal Loco (played by Klaus Kinski), a bounty-hunting killer indiscriminately and excessively ravaging the local populace. Their conflicting personalities drive the film, and in this case they lend weight and importance to their weapons, particularly whether Silence has enough firepower to overcome his nemesis.

“Harmonica” – played by Charles Bronson – Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

The harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West serves a similar purpose to the pocketwatch in For A Few Dollars More (which makes sense, because Sergio Leone directed both films). The harmonica is meant to portend doom for those who hear it. Charles Bronson (he of Death Wish fame) plays “Harmonica”, who is actually unnamed in the film but gains this moniker because of his penchant for playing an eerie repeating tune on his namesake throughout the film.

Harmonica spends the film following Frank (Henry Fonda, in perhaps the best villainous performance in film history). You see, years before the events of the film, Frank tied a noose around Harmonica’s older brother’s neck, and forced Harmonica to support his brother and save him from hanging by standing underneath him for support. As Harmonica struggled, Frank stuffed an actual harmonica in his mouth, hence the gimmick and the name. The older brother died, but the harmonica became a calling card and provided a swan song to those that would soon be defeated in battle. Frank, too, is forced to hear that eerie song right before Harmonica gets his revenge.

“Django” – played by Franco Nero – Django (1966)

Django may have the greatest weapon of all western characters. A hero, he drags a coffin with him everywhere he goes. We don’t at first know what is in the coffin, but when Django is pressed into combat, we learn that it conceals a machine gun, which makes quick work of his pistol-carrying adversaries.

The Django character is an interesting case because the machine gun itself is so ridiculous and dwarfs the relatively puny weaponry of his foes, allowing Django to destroy large quantities of enemies at once. More interesting is the visual aesthetic of Django dragging his coffin, an image that has been recycled by a number of musicians and films (including countless copycat Django-themed westerns). The coffin gun provides both the character and the film an iconic weapon and an indelible image.

“Britt” – played by James Coburn – The Magnificent Seven (1960)

You may know James Coburn as the old commodore who didn’t cheat well enough at the final poker table in Maverick, but thirty-five years prior he was a switchblade-throwing hero in The Magnificent Seven. Coburn later became a western veteran, but here he was a fresh-faced newcomer to the genre, playing a character that is lightning-quick with a knife.

Knives aren’t often used as primary weapons in westerns because they aren’t as exciting as guns, but the film takes pains to show just how good Coburn is to establish him as a threat. When we’re introduced to him, we see him challenged to throw his knife faster than a bullet. He easily wins the contest, but the challenger demands that they duel, knife against bullet, for real. Coburn wins that battle, too, showing that western weaponry isn’t limited to enormous or otherwise crazy guns.

John Lacey

Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises

Sun Kil Moon
Admiral Fell Promises
2010 Caldo Verde

Mark Kozelek, the driving force (and perhaps the only force) behind Sun Kil Moon, began his music career in earnest as a member of the band Red House Painters. That band released several albums over the course of a decade or so until they split in 2001, and since then, Kozelek has been releasing a string of albums under both his own name and the Sun Kil Moon moniker. Admiral Fell Promises is the fourth album to bear the Sun Kil Moon name, following the fantastic Ghosts of the Great Highway (2003), Tiny Cities (2005) and April (2008) albums.

Kozelek’s lyrics are perhaps the main attraction to his music. He’s a very literal wordsmith. His music is soaked in nostalgia; most Kozelek songs, Sun Kil Moon or otherwise, concern remembrances of particular people and places. Kozelek is brilliant at bringing the listener to these places and painting an image with his words. The music acts as a solvent for those words, allowing us to glide through Kozelek’s thoughts and feelings seamlessly.

Though most of Kozelek’s output follows the same trajectory, most of his albums will erupt in a cascade of sound at just the right moments to provide some relief from the occasionally heavy melancholic nostalgia. Admiral Fell Promises is much more straightforward than Sun Kil Moon’s previous albums, opting for perennial sparseness and lightness and eschewing the more rocking elements of the previous records. Beautiful guitar work and strong lyrics abound, but Admiral Fell Promises doesn’t pack the punch of Sun Kil Moon’s earlier work and can’t match the otherworldly heights of those albums.

We start with “Ålesund”, a very pretty song with a simple acoustic guitar complimenting Kozelek’s haunted voice. All songs on Admiral Fell Promises consist of Kozelek and his acoustic guitar, which makes this sound more like an exercise in classical guitar than a rock record. Any type of percussion is rare and the music is rarely punched up, relying on Kozelek’s powerful vocals and force of will to push songs over the top.

The album continues with a number of nice, thoughtful songs, all providing enjoyable listens but never deviating from the mean or powering their way out of the speakers. The album’s fourth track, “Third And Seneca”, is the first to command attention, starting light but eventually picking up and changing tempo and sound, providing the album with a needed shift. Kozelek sings about the view from his apartment window and thinks about the places he’s been in illuminating simplicity:

Seattle black, Alaska blue
Oregon gray, raincloud Vancouver
Dead in Denver, drowsy Idaho
Just dreams away from your love, San Francisco

Sometimes songs go the other way, which also works well. “The Leaning Tree” starts softly, but morphs into a somber acoustic soundscape without resorting to a jarring transition. Songs continue to flow nicely into one another, each beautiful but largely lacking impression. Admiral Fell Promises is almost boringly beautiful, because Kozelek makes every song sound so nice and it seems so easy for him to write them. One nice thing about Kozelek is this effortlessness. Kozelek and Sun Kil Moon might be revelatory for people who like to slow down, take their time, and look around every now and then. Kozelek isn’t in a rush, and he’s one of the few songwriters with the innate ability to transfer this spirit into his music and have it make sense.

Despite the collection of good songs and the cohesion between them, Admiral Fell Promises can’t help but feel like a slight disappointment based on Sun Kil Moon’s previous, absolutely brilliant output. Where the three previous Sun Kil Moon records were dynamic and different, Admiral Fell Promises doesn’t take any chances and doesn’t stray far from its melancholy classical acoustic core. The lyrics remain top notch, but the album lacks the strength to make them as vibrant as they should be. This album is certainly a worthy endeavor, but one that might cause some lapses in concentration while listening to it.

B.

John Lacey

The Random Ten #19

#1) Wilco – “I Must Be High” – A.M. (1995)

“I Must Be High” is the first song from Wilco’s first album, A.M. On A.M., Wilco had not yet progressed into the atmospheric, droning rock they would later become famous for. There would be elements of those strange places Wilco would boldly go on their second album, Being There (1996), and their experimental pop-rock would become fully fledged with the Summerteeth album (1999).

There’s nothing on “I Must Be High” or A.M. in general that indicates that Wilco would head in that direction. It’s mostly straightforward country-influenced pop rock, not differing a great deal from what lead singer and guitarist Jeff Tweedy and his other Wilco band mates at the time had been doing with previous band Uncle Tupelo. Much of A.M. could be considered bland in light of Wilco’s later work, but there’s a lot to like, including “I Must Be High”. It’s a solid pop song, and is perhaps the strongest track from an album that showcases a new band trying to find its footing and starting off by playing what they know.

#2) The Jayhawks – “Ain’t No End” – Blue Earth (1989)

We’ve covered the Jayhawks here a few times before, and each time I hear them I always enjoy the experience but then never follow up by continuing to listen to their material. Whereas a lot of their songs can be called bluegrass-infused alt-country, “Ain’t No End” is more reminiscent of Neil Young in terms of guitar work. It’s a more grungy sound; not as clean as a lot of what I’ve heard from them previously. Usually, dirty alt-country is solid, but “Ain’t No End” doesn’t have any surprises or rewards within it. It’s just a nice boozy rock song, which is perfectly acceptable.

#3) Ryan Adams – “Come Pick Me Up” – Heartbreaker (2000)

I don’t think Ryan Adams has the capacity to write an unpleasant song. Pretty much every song I’ve ever heard from the guy is competent and enjoyable, even though he’s often writing about horrific break-ups or unrequited love or various other maudlin topics.

Adams has a way of writing about love and relationships in a way that sounds corny on the surface, but works because of the music surrounding those words. On “Come Pick Me Up”, he pleads for the object of his affection to “steal his records”, because even that type of relationship with this girl would be better than none at all. What sounds lame actually comes across sounding poignant, helped in no small part by a great harmonica section that pushes the song over the top.

#4) Pink Floyd – “Stop” – The Wall (1979)

“Stop” is a 29 second interstitial piano piece on side four of Pink Floyd’s opus The Wall, sandwiched between “Waiting For The Worms” and “The Trial”. It’s meant to push the story of the album forward, and really isn’t much of a song on its own. It’s too brief to be noteworthy.

#5) Beck – “Ramshackle” – Odelay (1996)

You can’t say Odelay was Beck’s breakthrough album, because he’s been on the charts pretty much since day one with “Loser” from the Mellow Gold album (1994). Odelay was the album, however, that proved Beck was not a fluke, spawning several hit singles and selling millions of copies.

“Ramshackle” is a light guitar driven song that is a noticeable departure from some of the busy, electronic singles that made Odelay such a success. “Ramshackle” is a definite harbinger that Beck would change his style significantly in the near future, shifting over to minimalistic guitar-based pop on Mutations (1998) and the brilliant Sea Change (2002). What remains interesting about Beck is that his sound is so unmistakable, whether the song is raucous and rambunctious or slow and introspective. He shines through his material, no matter what type of music he’s playing, which is a strong credit to him. He also usually writes really good songs.

#6) Sebadoh – “Sickles And Hammers” – III (1991)

Sebadoh are purveyors of fast paced garage-indie, and their catalog largely consists of songs that last no longer than a minute. Sometimes this is a blessing, because some of these songs consist of nothing more than abrasive noise that could hardly be considered songs at all. Other times, however, Sebadoh strikes a pleasurable chord, and the short length of their songs is more of a frustration. “Sickles And Hammers”, from the band’s much lauded third album III, is fifty seconds of blazing electric guitar and drumming. Like most of their output, it’s very raw, but that sound is a great match for this kind of material. If only it were longer.

#7) Beastie Boys – “Namasté” – Check Your Head (1992)

Some people love the Beastie Boys and consider them to be their favorite band. They’ve always been more of a curiosity to me than a necessity. I was first introduced to them through my older sister, and I heard their string of big radio hits, but I’ve wondered for a while what it is about their music that speaks to so many people.

“Namasté” is not a “stereotypical” fun/raunchy Beastie Boys song. It’s more of a jazz-funk fusion beat, with spoken narration in lieu of rapping. It incorporates psychedelic elements (echoes and other effects), and though it was unexpected, “Namasté” is quite a pleasant listen.

#8) Zero 7 – “Futures” – The Garden (2006)

Zero 7’s The Garden album includes all sorts of different styles, with some sprawling electronic epics and some songs that tone down the machine-made effects and take a more traditional approach. “Futures” has an excellent melody, with simple acoustic guitar, a great bassline, and sprinkles of electronic elements. The vocal harmonies conjure images of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, which end up fitting the music well even though they sound out of place. This is interesting and quite good.

#9) Radiohead – “Prove Yourself” – Pablo Honey (1993)

“Prove Yourself” is a song from Radiohead’s debut album, which gained them worldwide exposure, but not quite the cartoonish super-exposure that would follow with their subsequent albums. Though I really enjoy Radiohead’s atmospheric and electronic work on their more famous records, they were once a really good pop rock act, as “Prove Yourself” shows.

The song is charmingly 90’s sounding, going through the standard verse-chorus-verse-solo convention, but it is really catchy and good. For Radiohead fans that are unfamiliar with their early work, this is well worth checking out.

#10) Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Naked In The Rain” – Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)

I remain of the opinion that Blood Sugar Sex Magik is one of the best albums of the 90s. It contained singles that could be played on both rock and top 40 radio, and a number of unheralded songs that glued the whole thing together. “Naked In The Rain” has the classic Chili Peppers sound, with Anthony Kiedis singing like a wild man and Flea moving the song along with one of his trademark funk basslines, all linked together by a simple and strong chorus. It shows how good the album is that this song was unable to stand out among all of the other great songs on it. Highly recommended.

John Lacey

The Dailies 7/27/10: Two Different Kinds of Nightmares

Trailers

- Until the Light Takes Us (2008) - C
- Directed by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell
- Featuring Varg Vikernes, Fenriz, Hellhammer

- Lone Star (1996) - C-
- Directed by John Sayles
- Starring Elizabeth Pena, Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson

- Gosford Park (2001) - B+
- Directed by Robert Altman
- Starring Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Clive Owen, Helen Mirren

The Town That Was (2007)
Directed by Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland
Featuring John Lokitis, Todd Domboski, David DeKok

The Town That Was is a documentary that looks at the nearly uninhabited borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, located in the east-central portion of the state. Centralia, once an active mining town with thousands of residents, became a ghost town after a mine fire started underneath its surface and quickly spread out of control in the early 60s. The fire could not be contained (and actually continues to burn today), and various health risks to residents, such as sinkholes and noxious gases, caused most of the populace to move away by the early 1980s.

The film states the facts of what happened to cause the town’s demise and talking heads are used to articulate the feelings of the townspeople on having to leave Centralia. The Town That Was does well to present the history of the town in a humanistic way. Rather than present Centralia as an oddity, the filmmakers do well to show that it was once a vibrant community with real people in it. The use of old video footage of town parades and picnics is well used in stark contrast to the nearly empty place Centralia is today.

The town and its peculiar situation makes the work of the directors much easier. The imagery is inherently eerie and off-putting. We see the few remaining homes of people too old or too stubborn to leave; the local cemetery; a solitary bench with stencil letters reading “Centralia, PA”. In the cemetery, former residents, who loved the town and called it home and died in some cases long before the fire started, are now one of the only markers that indicate there was even a town there to begin with.

A few former town dignitaries and residents are spoken with, but Centralia is largely represented by John Lokitis, a thirty-something man who still lives in one of the town’s few remaining homes as one of its remaining people. Lokitis refused to abandon Centralia, even though the majority of residents fled while he was still a child. In the film, he laments that everyone moved away and claims that the state government overstated the health risks involved with staying in Centralia. He continues to mow the town’s lawns and put its Christmas lights up. He seems possessed.

The film detours and spends a lot of time looking at the plight of Centralia through Lokitis’ eyes. He’s fascinating. He’s a dopey, single, still-young guy who for some unknown reason cares so much about preserving the town’s legacy in any way he can. He continues living there even after his parents and family have left, and he seems to hold genuine scorn for the people who chose to accept a government buyout of their properties after the town was declared unlivable. He is portrayed as a hopelessly unflappable champion of a town destroyed and forgotten, and the film rightfully allows us to decide whether he’s noble or foolish.

The Town That Was has a runtime of seventy minutes, barely qualifying it as a movie. The filmmakers have an annoying habit of holding the camera on a subject for a few seconds after they’ve stopped talking, as a clumsy way of trying to add gravity to whatever had been said. The film has stylistic and technical flaws, but it covers its subject matter both imaginatively and well. B.

(The Town That Was is available for free viewing on hulu.com.)

Inception (2010)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy

Otherworldly, mind-bending thrillers, by their very nature, ask viewers to take certain leaps of faith and suspend logic in particular instances. Depending on a variety of factors (the quality of the film and its acting, the egregiousness of the leap of faith in question) these suspensions of logic are either welcomed or laughed at, and they can either make a film like this or break it. Inception gambled, creating a film with a fantastical foundation that unfortunately tries to pile on too much mumbo-jumbo and quick-cut action, bogging the film down and making the whole exercise exponentially more confusing.

Before extrapolating on that, it must be said that Inception is an entertaining film. It is very inventive, both in terms of its plot and its special effects. It’s impeccably shot as well, with director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) capably handling the difficult task of visually creating a dreamscape on film.

The premise of Inception is terrific. A team of skilled “extractors” (or dream-thieves) are tapped to plant an idea within the head of a target rather than extract information. Early scenes that discuss how the dream world works and how the dream areas are created are fascinating. It would take too long to relay the intricacies of how “inception” works, but for the most part, the first hour of the film lays out the rules and guidelines for the plot quite well.

The bulk of the film is spent following the planting of the idea in Robert Fischer’s head (Murphy), and that’s where things get tricky. New concepts, techniques, and procedures are brought up constantly, making it difficult to follow both what’s happening at that moment and how it figures into the timeline of the film as a whole. In order for the inception team to plant the idea into his mind, they have to go into a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream (seriously), with scenes occurring consecutively within different levels of the dream world. It sounds confusing because it is, and though when watching the film we receive sharp action scenes as distraction, it’s really difficult to pinpoint what’s happening, where it’s happening, and why.

The film’s final act, comprising roughly the last forty-five minutes, was particularly troublesome. Instead of a reasoned, understandable conclusion to the film, we’re treated to a maelstrom of action scenes set in different locales, pertaining to different aspects of the plot. Every shot within the last forty-five minutes is either an explosion, someone dodging gunfire, or a zany plot twist. What began as an inventive and interesting action-thriller goes full-tilt into craziness due to hyperactive imagination and a lack of patience. There is a brilliant film to be made with the jumbled pieces of Inception, but the way they were assembled makes it nothing more than an interesting, sleek, and ultimately empty action film. C+.

John Lacey

The Random Ten #18

#1) She & Him – “I Should Have Known Better” – Volume One (2008)

I’ve heard nothing but good things about She & Him, the American indie-folk duo comprised of actress Zooey Deschanel (she) and songwriter M. Ward (him). Until now, however, I’ve never actually took the time to listen to any of their material. “I Should Have Known Better” has a luau-lounge sound, like something you’d hear at a dimly-lit, red-tinged Chinese restaurant’s bar. Like a lot of luau-sounding music, it floats by easily, nudged along by the soft alternating vocals of the two musicians. It’s pleasant and professional, but a bit airy.

#2) King Crimson – “The Great Deceiver” – Starless And Bible Black (1974)

Along with Yes and perhaps early Genesis, King Crimson is thought of as one of the quintessential zany 70s prog-rock groups. They’re best known for what people call “the album with the crazy face on it” (In The Court Of The Crimson King [1969]), but the band has released about 100 other albums since then.

“The Great Deceiver” alternates between a pseudo-rant from singer John Wetton and bursts of unfocused power that contain some inventive riffing. The song eventually devolves and starts going all over the place, introducing new tempos and movements at random. It’s not quite good, but it’s certainly interesting.

#3) Modest Mouse – “The Good Times Are Killing Me” – Good News For People Who Love Bad News (2004)

Good News For People Who Love Bad News is the album that contained “Float On”, a hit that sent Modest Mouse from little-heard indie rock darlings to rock superstars. They’ve yet to replicate the runaway success of that song, though their 2007 follow-up, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts.

Most Modest Mouse songs fall into one of two categories: frenetic and hectic or contemplative and subdued. “The Good Times Are Killing Me” falls into the latter group, though lead singer Isaac Brock still sounds as manic as he usually does despite the softer tone. The title and subject matter of this song always struck a somber chord with me; the idea that the “good times” are just booze and drug fueled parties that are really wearing us down rather than providing us with any long-term happiness. Modest Mouse has a knack for looking at basic ideas with an esoteric slant. Good song.

#4) Megadeth – “Psychotron” – Countdown To Extinction (1992)

Countdown To Extinction is a criminally underrated metal record that stands with anything else Megadeth released before it, and probably represents their last complete album. “Psychotron” has great riffs and is forceful enough to get its message across, but it loses points for the ridiculously stupid chorus, during which Dave Mustaine sings:

Part bionic
And organic
Not a cyborg
Call him psychotron

You see, the song is about a half-man, half-machine sentient evil robot. Really dumb. That’s the problem I have with a lot of metal at this point in my life. The music still sounds good, but the lyrics not only are inane and unenlightening, but cause me to cringe with second-hand embarrassment. Too bad, because everything else is good here.

#5) Sunset Valley – “Matinee Idol” – Icepond (2001)

“Matinee Idol” is good, soft indie-rock surrounded by a low and contemplative buzz. It features understated guitar and vocals that wisely eventually break into a jarring electric guitar part to liven things up. After this sequence repeats a couple of times, the song takes on a trance-like atmosphere and begs for another listen.

#6) The Magnetic Fields – “I Shatter” – 69 Love Songs (1999)

Released on the second volume of the three-volume concept album 69 Love Songs, “I Shatter” is really cool and really strange. It features a repeating violin (or some such stringed instrument) with vocals that are put through an effect that makes them sound simultaneously monstrous and robotic. The juxtaposition of these vocals against the classic sound of the strings provides an interesting dynamic that is charmingly strange. “I Shatter” is a bit of a curiosity, but it’s worth a listen for its inventiveness.

#7) Stone Temple Pilots – “Big Bang Baby” – Thank You (2003; originally appeared on Tiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop [1996])

“Big Bang Baby” was the lead single from STP’s 1996 album Tiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop. Stone Temple Pilots was a singles machine throughout most of the 1990s, churning out a slew of mainstream rock hits that were fun to listen to and immediately caught attention.

It’s too bad the band didn’t have more depth beyond its hit-making abilities, because they certainly had ample talent and knew how to write hooks and choruses. “Big Bang Baby”, like much of their output, is formulaic and predictable, but it’s energetic, fun, and easy to get into. Sometimes big, dumb rock can be rewarding, and STP’s collection of singles is proof of that.

#8) Grateful Dead – “West L.A. Fadeaway” – In The Dark (1987)

“West L.A. Fadeaway” was written about John Belushi and his descent into drugs and subsequent early death. It is culled from the Grateful Dead’s unexpected hit album In The Dark, which contained their biggest chart hit in their career, “Touch Of Grey”.

The song bounces along nicely, though it does sound quite dated (you wouldn’t have to guess when it was recorded too many times before landing on 1987). It has the requisite jam and is allowed to breathe through a semi-majestic chorus. “West L.A. Fadeaway” is a decent song, but it’s hard to shake the idea that a lot of the Dead’s 80s studio work sounds overproduced, too glossy and too manufactured, meaning it barely sounds like the Dead at all.

#9) Big Star – “She’s A Mover” – Radio City (1974)

Big Star lead singer and guitarist Alex Chilton recently passed away a few months ago, and when I saw Wilco in April, they closed their set with a Big Star song, “Thank You Friends”. It’s easy to hear the influence Big Star had on Wilco and other contemporaries.

“She’s A Mover” is tight but twangy indie-sounding rock, with a brief runtime and just the right amount of hooks to bring the listener back for more. The song sounds like it has one foot in the past (the Beatles influence is evident) and one in the future, because we’re now aware of what this influenced. A really good song.

#10) Dire Straits – “The Man’s Too Strong” – Brothers In Arms (1985)

From the album that produced gigantic mid-80s hit “Money For Nothing”, “The Man’s Too Strong” is more of a folksy ditty than a rock anthem. It’s refreshing to know that there was a time when an album that sold about ten million copies could have a song that sounds like this on it; it would be an impossibility now.

That’s not to say “The Man’s Too Strong” is very good. It’s atmospheric in an 80s way (synths and guitar effects) and quite boring throughout. It doesn’t sound like anything that would accompany “Money For Nothing”, but I respect Dire Straits mastermind Mark Knopfler a little more for that.

John Lacey

Shit from the 90s #6: TGIF!

In 1988, ABC executives decided to revamp their Friday night prime-time schedule. Rather than use Friday night as the customary dumping ground for low-rated shows the network needed to burn through in order to fulfill their obligations, they tried something zany. They thought, “You know who’s watching TV on Friday nights? Families with young children who have nothing else to do!”

It was a good idea. No one with a social life watches TV on a Friday night, but families have no choice. The kids are too young to leave home alone. Parents are too lazy and too tired after a workday or watching the kids all day. Most parents have long had their adventurous and free-wheeling spirits broken by those same children years before. Millions of mothers and fathers saw the ads, turned to their spouses, and said with resignation, “You know what? Instead of taking the kids to the Ground Round, let’s order a pizza and watch Family Matters instead.”

The idea was simple enough, but ABC needed both content and a catchy name. The catchy name they stole from early 70s Akron DJ Jerry Healy, who initially would say “Thank God It’s Friday” during his rush hour broadcasts (courtesy Wikipedia). ABC, fearing reprisals from atheists, I suppose, changed the term to “Thank Goodness It’s Friday” for their block of programming. This, of course, led to innumerable dipshits using the phrase non-ironically throughout the 90s and even into today. It also gave name to a low-rent restaurant chain, T.G.I. Friday’s, now found on every street corner in America.

The content was easy, too. Families are the target audience, right? So why not make every show on TGIF chock full of bland, inoffensive, unfunny comedy that the entire family can halfheartedly pretend to enjoy? Most shows on TGIF were about families, and each tried to strike a balance between the characters and their wacky high jinks and those same characters learning life lessons with the help of their family unit. Many of the shows also had a bumbling knucklehead who would constantly do and say stupid things and annoy the main characters.

What’s interesting about TGIF is the idea that instead of doing “family things” like talking, playing games and simply enjoying each other’s company, real families would instead gather each Friday night to watch fake families do those things. There’s something off-putting about a product that markets itself specifically to families, but requires that those families do very un-family things (like sitting silently and watching television). If the shows had actually been good, I could understand blowing my family off for television, but in looking back the carnival of crap that was TGIF, I wish I could have some of that time back.

A Selection of TGIF Programs

Perfect Strangers
- Years active: 1986-1993
- Years in TGIF lineup: 1988-1992
- Premise: a naïve and crazed Greek shepherd named Balki comes to live with his straight-laced cousin in Chicago. Hilarity ensues as Balki constantly does foolish, un-American things, much to the chagrin and embarrassment of his cousin.
- Drawing card: Balki, played by Bronson Pinchot. The loveable dope was at the forefront of all ads and promotional materials for the show.

Family Matters
- Years active: 1989-1998 (1997-1998 season was on CBS)
- Years in TGIF lineup: 1989-1997
- Premise: follows a large, African-American Chicago-based family and their oft-hilarious trials and tribulations. The family includes people young and old and everything in between, setting up all kinds of opportunities for its members to gain valuable life experience. Nerdy neighbor Steve Urkel breaks things and annoys everyone.
- Drawing card: Urkel, played by Jaleel White. Steve Urkel became a legitimate sensation in the United States in the early 1990s based on his nasally voice, ridiculous appearance, and his throng of catchphrases. Honorable mention goes to Waldo Geraldo Faldo (Shawn Harrison), Eddie Winslow’s dimwitted friend.

Boy Meets World
- Years active: 1993-2000
- Years in TGIF lineup: 1993-2000
- Premise: a middle school (and later high school) boy copes with the transition of moving from boyhood to adulthood. Of course, he has a wonderful family and strong friends to help him each step of the way!
- Drawing card: Uh, I dunno. There wasn’t really a kooky sidekick who would spout off catchphrases. I guess Shawn Patrick Hunter (Rider Strong), best friend to main character Cory Matthews, best constitutes the BMW drawing card.
- Recommended viewing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgbvtZAYv1g&feature=related

Step By Step
- Years active: 1991-1998 (1997-1998 season was on CBS)
- Years in TGIF lineup: 1991-1996
- Premise: two already large families combine when single dad Patrick Duffy marries single mom Suzanne Somers. The show is spent detailing the uneasy tensions between the two sides of the newer, bigger family.
- Drawing card: Cody (aka “the Code Man”), played by Sasha Mitchell. Perhaps the archetype for “dumb and crazy TGIF sidekick”, Cody helped popularize the phrases “Dude!” and “Ch-yeah!” in the United States and abroad.

John Lacey