Monthly Archive for December, 2008

Is it wrong to enjoy the failure of others, dear reader? Okay wait, don’t answer that, let me rephrase: is it wrong to enjoy the richly deserved failure of others? To bask in it as if it were the warm glow of the sun, or drink from it like a font of every blessing?

Yeah, don’t answer that, either. You’re quite wise, dear reader, you know my heart’s wickedness even when I won’t confess it. Nonetheless, I cannot pretend that Frank Miller’s “The Spirit” debuting in ninth place this past weekend while being greeted with uniform scorn doesn’t please me immensely; you had it coming, Frank. Miller’s sporadic and overstated talent for gruff characters and bloodletting churned out a few worthwhile pieces of comic book fiction, maybe even a classic here and there, but his ego is a stray dog and it’s been waiting to break its leash, devour whatever skill he may have, and rip up our collective living room. Every time he does something creative recently, I feel I’m being served a subpoena which reads: “You will find this awesome. This is what’s cool now. Shower me with praise.” I think I’ll choose to be held in contempt of court.

It didn’t start with “The Spirit,” as comic book fans well know. Ol’ Frank was handed the reigns of “All Star Batman and Robin,” a headlining comic series with no ties to any other continuity, complete artistic freedom, and rock star artist Jim Lee on pencils. I can’t fault DC Comics for making this decision, I mean this guy put out “The Dark Knight Returns,” he deserved the right to run wild in Gotham City. I can and will, however, fault Frank Miller for losing his effing mind, then writing an absolutely terrible series of comics. Transparently intending to slowly morph the caped crusader into a character from “Sin City,” he blazed a trail for highly-paid professionals churning out garbage that wouldn’t survive on a fan-fiction website. You must realize, this man saw himself write Batman as saying, “What are you dense? Are you retarded or something?…I’m the g**damn Batman!” He looked at this happen, he nodded his head, and he actually decided other human beings should see it. “I will publish this,” he concluded silently. Clearly, he is in need of serious medical attention. We’re not even going to talk about “The Dark Knight Strikes Again,” which may be the most incomprehensible piece of fiction ever produced in Western culture.

It’s not that he doesn’t deserve to be where he is, I think Miller is a genuinely talented guy, but something about success has ruined his artistic output. Everything I see from him now is sloppy, self-conscious and stupid, demanding my love but never earning it. It’s disappointing, it’s annoying, and it almost undoes the good will he earned by reinvigorating my beloved Dark Knight in the late 80s.

And then came “The Spirit.”

I will not review this movie, because I have very deliberately chosen not to see it; at no point in the next few paragraphs will “this is a bad movie” be said. I will say that the trailers for this thing suggested a ludicrous, self-indulgent waste, born of a silver-tongued pitch to a studio head that should have been seen through. I might casusally mention that “The Spirit” looks exactly like “Sin City,” but lacks that success’ key ingredient, co-director Robert Rodriguez. I will also point out that the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer sits squarely at 15%, and that an omnipresent marketing campaign couldn’t prevent a ninth-place opening with a wheezing, coughing $6.5 million. I don’t think I’m the only person who sensed a masturbatory dud here.

Maybe the real reason I’m happy about Frank Miller’s failure is that I want him to drop off the radar, take off his stupid trendy quasi-fedoras and ties that don’t fit him right, and go back to real writing again. Success has made this guy’s work insane, and he needs a reality check so badly it actually hurts. When he’s in the right place, I think Frank has a lot to say and a real gift for saying it, but that place is not here.

Hello there, dear reader. I know it’s been too long since my last update, you must patiently forgive me, but a married man has a lot of responsibilities when the holidays roll around. Christmas is a funny time for the betrothed, it demonstrates how antiquated the institution of wedlock can be. We have no social mechanism, besides politeness, for turning fresh-faced spouses into proselyte members of the family; we tend to just throw ourselves against one another and hope something sticks. In other cultures, they have dances, chants, rituals, whatever, and we may chucklingly dismiss these as ridiculous, but they acknowledge a necessity for formal integration which we patently ignore, sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “lalalalala” until the problem goes away. Slipping quietly into a brand-new holiday celebration, filled with a lifetime of traditions and honed preferences which you know nothing of, is kind of like being sucked into a game of pick-up basketball with a team that speaks French. 

I can only gripe so much about this problem, however, because my in-laws are all gracious, hospitable people who happily massage their traditions and behaviors until I find them comfortable. Corelyn’s mother, upon learning that I was used to some kind of hallowed moment of eggnog drinking instead of random consumption throughout the evening, convened the entire family and decreed a new tradition on the spot. Corelyn’s dad knows I will forget to “shake up the love” at the end of each pre-dinner prayer, so he patiently shakes a little harder than necessary so that I appear to be on the ball. This kind of humility and warmth allows me to skip gingerly around the problem, but I have heard many horror stories from other newlyweds which convince me the issue still exists. Allow me to laugh at their misfortune.

Truth be told, even in my situation, little goofs can arise. People in Cor’s family adopt a rhythm of interaction which an Allen finds simply exhausting, because even when they’re bored to death and not doing anything, they prefer to stay congregated in a single place. My background instructs me that once a lull in activity occurs, I can leave the room and no one will care, but when I put this habit into practice amongst my wife’s clan, confusion arises. Corelyn often finds herself Ambassador from the sovereign nation of Andrew, trying to downplay the absolutely bizarre vibe I gave off when I slipped away from the living room. “He’s just in his room?” they’ll ask, “Doing what? We’re all out here!” The real curse of my wife’s position is that, secretly, she’s on her family’s side here, but she can’t have her husband looking like some kind of absent-minded hermit, so she plays defense. 

Moving on to something that has nothing to do with any of that…

“Left 4 Dead” is definitely my favorite game of this year, hands-down; it may even be one of my favorites from the last few. I love being in the firm grasp of a perfectly engineered game, one whose contours are so meticulously thought out that every possible behavior has an answer. 

On the off-chance you’re not sure what game I’m talking about, let me enlighten you: it’s a cooperative first-person shooter…with zombies. Lots of zombies. Last time we played through one of the missions, we killed something like 2,000 of them total, and that’s just the ones we killed. The game’s gimmick is that each and every play-through is completely unique, thanks to a complex programming algorithm called “The Director” who watches every aspect of your game and fine tunes the experience on the fly. If you’re doing too well, the Director might make ammo harder to find, or drop fifty or sixty rabid undead on you from behind. If you’re on your last leg, a med-pack might appear in just the right spot, although the Director is just as likely to perform a coup de gras and put you down for good. The point is that “Left 4 Dead” does not, like most other games, erect a series of booby traps and watch helplessly as you traipse through them, it evolves the game around you. Every single person who plays this game, no matter what their experience level, will get a perfectly tuned experience, a breathtaking fight for survival that you just barely survive. When you leap into the safe room after saving your friend from an oncoming wave of zombies, a precious two bullets left in your gun and a meager slice left in your health bar, you come to appreciate how masterfully this thing was engineered.

The neat thing about L4D is that it forces teamwork. No single player, no matter how good, is going anywhere without his or her teammates, so even the biggest jerks on Xbox Live are forced to depend on their comrades for survival. Ammo and health must be rationed, friendly fire assiduously avoided, communication encouraged. The game is extremely, sometimes unbearably, difficult, so strategy and cooperation are the only things that will see you to the rescue vehicle. Personally, I get greater satisfaction from being part of a team than I do just shooting my friends over and over; it’s constructive instead of destructive. When all four survivors pile into the helicopter and fly away from the hundreds of angry undead screaming at them from below, the thrill of success is overwhelming, because the players did it together, depending on one another. That’s my kind of game.

In psychology, I learned about “breach experiments,” which are studies where social norms are quietly broken, and the reaction measured. Mischievous psychologists have often been found asking to take a picture with a stranger in the grocery store, or doing normal activity at half speed. These tests must be carefully chosen, as actions with ambiguous meaning such as winking or locking eye contact will simply be subjectively interpreted, which is no good. A good breach experiment must be perfectly legal, nonthreatening, and impossible to explain.

I find these hilarious, and I somehow made up a bunch of them to play on my wife, who continues to endure my shenanigans with real sportmanship. I suggest you try some, and I’ve listed them below.

There are basic rules that they all play by: they happen very quickly, they only permit lying if the truth will immediately become apparent, and they only confuse or mildly annoy; actually scaring or offending someone is for jerks.

None of these are being made up. Seriously. Ask her.

1. “Poke.” Whenever Corelyn is telling me something only sort of important that she nonetheless wants me to commit to memory, this game may be played. The objective is simple: poke her in the nose as many times as possible, using only one hand, and retracting the arm all the way between each attempt. Early on, her initial confusion garnered me one or two free hits, but now she swats at my hand without even blinking, so it’s pretty tough. 5 successful pokes is a good score.

2. “Liar.” To win, I must lie about something unimportant and transparently self-evident, and I must do it well enough to make her hesitate. For instance, a solid victory might involve deliberately walking to the wrong car in the parking lot, then acting confused when she does not come along. A loss happens when Corelyn rolls her eyes and simply waits for me to stop referring to my ketchup bottle as “peanut butter,” and that is normally what happens. But those precious few times that she furrows her brow and doubts herself as I repeatedly refer to a pigeon as a “rainbow” are priceless.

3. “Communication Breakdown.” One of my favorites, it involves using inappropriate answers to simple questions. Like “Liar,” victory requires a moment of self-doubt, where Corelyn will hopefully wonder if she’s somehow asking a different question than she’s thinking. For example, if Corelyn asks, “What movie would you like to see tonight,” a good response would be, “I doubt it.” The right answer is only half the battle, it needs to feel out of context too, so I’ll say, “Mmm, I doubt it,” exactly as if she has just asked me if the Jets will go to the Super Bowl. You have to remember that the human mind is a powerful interpreter, and it will be trying to produce theories on what I could possibly mean. Only if my answer is completely incongruous to the conversation’s context will this work. When I do win, the conversation simply cannot proceed, and she has to abandon the whole dialogue like a sinking ship and try to start from scratch. Other examples include: “Should we go out tonight?,” “You’re welcome.” And “What time is it?,” “I thought so, too.”

4. “Favorite Song.” Easy one, normally a solid victory, all I need is a good set-up. When the right song plays on the radio, I insist that it’s one of my favorites of all time, and see how long she believes me. The hard part is getting the right tune. It can’t be anything from your iPod for obvious reasons, but it also can’t be a song she knows we’ve discussed before. Something like Britney Spears’ new single “Womanizer,” or Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” can’t do the job, because Corelyn knows she’s told me how much she hates both, and any attempt on my part to endorse them is too transparent. I need a song she has always assumed everyone dislikes, so she never troubled to verify it with me; music by Celine Dion is good. How this deception is carried out depends on the context. If the song comes on and she doesn’t say anything, simply turning it up a little is the most convincing thing. If she reacts negatively before I have a chance to jump in, feigning mild embarassment or defensiveness goes a long way. Once she’s kind of beginning to believe me, I allow each of my following arguments to get more and more ridiculous. By the time I say, “I used to listen to this song and just…cry my eyes out while eating ice cream,” she’s probably smacked me upside my head, laughed, and called me a “jerk.” That is a solid win.

5. “It’s Alive!” I have only won this game once. It requires the perfect set-up, and then a flawless, unblinking fib. Here’s how it goes: Cor and I are at a sit-down restaurant, sitting across from each other. Trying to find a resting spot, her foot accidentally places itself on mine, and she quickly asks, “Is that you?” Here’s the hardest part: I have to say “no” in a manner casual enough to be convincing; even the slightest overacting will be detected. If she believes me, she now has no clue what on earth this thing under the table is, and she will instinctively begin pressing down harder, trying to identify the anomaly. It will take about five seconds for her to realize that I’m lying, so somewhere in that window of uncertainty, during which her mind has classified my shoe as “unknown object,” I need to kick my foot up in the air and shout “It’s alllliivvvee!” The one time I pulled this off, she yelped at the top of her lungs in a crowded restaurant. It was awesome.

6. “Listening.” As Corelyn tells a story, I react the wrong way. People are sophisticated social organisms, and whenever we’re talking to someone, we’re rigorously monitoring their face and body to see how our performance is going. Therefore, it is easy to change one little thing about your face at the wrong moment and completely ruin someone’s train of thought. Big reactions are stupid, the goal is to alter the tiniest possible thing to derail the story. Remember, again, that Corelyn’s mind, like anyone’s, is trying to justify my behavior at all times, so I need to pick something that is simply impossible to explain. My favorite is inappropriate surprise. As Corelyn tells me how to skin a potato, I will quietly widen my eyes and furrow my brow slightly, maybe even cock my head a little. This will cause a train wreck in her brain. The best thing about this game is that no matter who you play it with, they will drop absolutely everything and attempt to comb over the conversation with you until they understand your reaction. People take this stuff seriously.

7. “Noise.” Probably one of the hardest, because keeping a straight face is nearly impossible. You have to make some kind of noise, either in the back of your throat or with a concealed hand, and see how long you can pretend to be confused by it as well. The best noises are ones that Corelyn will only begin to notice after about twenty seconds, because she’s more likely to believe I’m not making them. A good sound needs to feel inhuman, un-patterned, and too mundane to be created for comedy. Most times, I crack a smile and she catches me, but if I actually get her up and searching the apartment for its origin, it’s fun to pick some weird corner of the kitchen and swear that it’s “coming from over there.” Any time a strange noise occurs, people will normally scan your face rigorously for about three seconds to determine if you’re making it. If you can survive that without breaking, you are darned good. I’ve only made it twice.

There. I have imparted my delicious games to you. Go out and try them on unsuspecting prey! I’m sure the people you do them to will be much easier than Corelyn, because she’s used to this stuff by now.

Poor woman. What has she gotten herself into?

A new tradition is going to begin on this blog. You will all gather around, sit indian-style, and watch with your chins resting on your knuckles as I gobble down my own words. I am a talker, everyone knows this, and invariably I say lots of things I later discover are the farthest possible thing from true. When I come to that realization, I’m going to own up to it here. I hope you enjoy it.

Andrew Eats His Words: “Heroes”

I have often said that “Heroes” is a crap show, a third-rate knock-off of “Lost’s” ensemble drama. I said this after dutifully watching 13 or so episodes of season one when they originally aired.

(ahem) I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.

Corelyn recently decided to get acquainted with the show via Netflix streaming on my Xbox, and although my participation was initially replete with heavy sighs and eye-rolling, by the third episode I was clutching a pillow on the couch and screaming at the television. I love season one of “Heroes.” I love it.

I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me the first time. “Heroes” is great. Now I’ve heard bad things about season two, which of course got scuttled by the writer’s strike, so I can’t make a statement on the entire show just yet, but it’s high on my priorities list.

My bad, “Heroes.”

Andrew Eats His Words: Guacamole

I have routinely said that guacamole is a disgusting, green goo that I would not like in a car, would not like in a bar, etc. Then my wife made me some of her family’s recipe, forced me to eat it, and now I would prefer if I could ingest the stuff intravenously.

Sorry, guacamole.

On another note…

I saw “Milk” last night, and it was quite good. The acting in particular was stellar, everyone from Sean Penn in the title role to James Franco, Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch, Victor Garber, Josh Brolin, Alison Pill, was just stunning. I think cinema is the best possible medium for great acting, because a movie can capture the most important part of a performance: minutia. Details. The tiny little moments that make a character become real.

That said, I’m even more pumped about what I’m seeing tonight: “Frost/Nixon.” I think it’ll be awesome.

The Killers’ new single, “Human,” is the most offensively awful piece of garbage I’ve ever encountered. I cannot tolerate this song’s existence, particularly from a band which has, on occasion, produced melodies pleasing to my ears. If you’ve had the misfortune of partaking, my most sincere sympathies. If you haven’t, heed my dire cries before curiosity leads you, like Screwtape the demon, to track this thing down: don’t do it. The chorus of this song is, “Are we human, or are we dancer?” If that ridiculous expression doesn’t contort your face into a half-grimace, there’s nothing else I can do to save you. 

I did a little research, and it turns out that frontman Brandon Flowers’ intent was to combine Johnny Cash with the Pet Shop Boys. Were I to meet him, I might suggest that some things aren’t mixed together for a reason, even if both ingredients are good. 

Moving right along, dear reader, how was your Thanksgiving? Good good, mine was nice too. Predictably, my wife and I gathered with a large group of people and ate much more than a person should, I’m sure many of you have similar stories. After that, Cor volunteered to help move some friends of ours out of their apartment and into some new digs, and a good thing too, because no sooner had they left than a drive-by shooting took place right on their old street. Good riddance, old neighborhood.

I’ve been using the heck out of Netflix lately, both the stuff they mail to my door and the instant streaming off of my Xbox. I am a diehard supporter of this service, and I think everyone who has the means should get their hands all over it. It’s a great tool, not just for seeing new movies, but for enriching your cinematic palette, because it’s never been easier to learn about and acquire foreign, independent, or lesser-known movies, many of which are vitally important to a proper appreciation of good moviemaking. Netflix has made it possible for me to absorb the work of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, John Woo, Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah, Sam Raimi, and so many others with the click of a button. If you have Netflix, there is no excuse for not being a film expert. I am not, at present, a film expert, but I’m working on it.