This week I had an inadvertent Mary Harron film festival, because I rented The Notorious Bettie Page and American Psycho without realizing they were both by the same director.

You can understand my confusion — one’s a biography about a 50s pin-up star, and the other’s a horror/black comedy adaptation of a satirical novel about yuppies. But when you look at them back-to-back, especially when you combine them with the only other Mary Harron movie I’ve seen, I Shot Andy Warhol, you can see an oeuvre developing. They’ve got a lot in common: they’re all period pieces, they’re all driven completely by the stand-out performance of a lead actor (Gretchen Mol, Christian Bale, and Lili Taylor), they all show a pretty antagonistic relationship between men and women, and they’re all ultimately unsatisfying for reasons that are kind of hard to define, exactly.

My first reaction after seeing Bettie Page and American Psycho was that Harron has what I call the “Drew Carey Syndrome.” That’s when you’re hip enough to be able to recognize what’s cool — Carey was a fan of The Sims back when it was still fairly esoteric, and he recognized the potential of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and its stars and brought them to popularity in the US — but everything you put out yourself is just kind of… there.

But that seems like too harsh a criticism. I have a hard time finding fault with either Bettie Page or American Psycho — they’re technically well-made, the scripts are fairly solid and well-paced and competent, the period touches are dead-on accurate without being overbearing, there are plenty of clever visual touches that keep the movie interesting, the casting is perfect and the leads are given the opportunity to totally take over the part, and as you go through you get the feeling that Harron made all the right choices.

Still, at the end of each I was left thinking, “how has my life been improved by watching this movie?” And I couldn’t come up with anything. The Notorious Bettie Page ends up feeling just like a standard biopic, with (welcomed) nudity and some interesting visual touches thrown in. It felt like a performance — a great performance, but still without the feeling that I got closer to understanding or relating to a real person.

And American Psycho is more broadly a satire/black comedy, so you’re not really supposed to relate to the main character. But it still feels “off.” Maybe it’s in the subject matter; you get the real sense that Harron worked hard to keep the 80s references from being too obvious or heavy-handed, but she was too constrained by the book and was forced to keep that material in there. Mocking yuppies, and Huey Lewis and Whitney Houston, might’ve seemed fresh in 1991, but by 2000 it just seems so dated as to be irrelevant.

American Psycho works the best of the three I’ve seen, because it ends with some ambiguity and forces you to think a little about what you’ve just seen. Of course, I did have to watch the ending again with the commentary on, to make sure that the ambiguity was intentional, but then that’s what the commentary is for.

The thing is that I really want to like Harron’s movies a lot better than I do, because of all the stuff she gets right. As I said, all the technical stuff she gets dead-on right. And the performances from Gretchen Mol and Christian Bale are about as perfect as you can get. And the choice of subject matter is interesting, and the take on it is uncompromising. All of the movies portray women as people, with their own motivations and their own independent life stories, instead of just defining them by how they relate to men. Considering she was able to convey that viewpoint even in the on-the-surface-misogynistic American Psycho, that’s pretty impressive.

So it’s remarkable that any of those movies were ever made, and that they managed to come out as strong as they did. I just wish I liked them better.

Ha! Boom! Suck on that witty post title, “Lost!”

Looks like the show has finally hit me with the one-two punch: a mediocre episode followed by a long break to completely ween me of any sense of involvement in the series. It’s their own fault; they’ve been hyping this thing since even before the season started, saying that we were going to discover all kinds of stuff and it was going to change our perception of the series forever.

It didn’t do either. It set up a cliffhanger that has enough maybe enough weight to it to ratchet up the tension for about a week. Not two months. And they didn’t answer anything. Unless you count “which guy will Kate choose?” but really, who the hell cares? It’s an ensemble cast with smoke monsters and polar bears and electromagnetic machines and mysterious codes; don’t we have more significant things to think about?

I’m still going to be watching come February; I’d be lying to say I won’t. But this was just a huge triple-A Anti-Climax.

Sitting in a hotel overlooking the Hollywood Hills writing a blog entry while watching “Dancing With the Stars.” It doesn’t get any better than this.

Ever. Since I’ve apparently been condemned to Hell. I guess what the preachers kept saying about self-abuse being a carnal sin was true.

There’s an orc-like woman who lurks in the rental car office at the Burbank airport. For all I know, she’s a charming woman when not in between me and a set of car keys, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it. She’s not openly hostile, and she doesn’t hit or throw things, but still she manages to be just thoroughly unpleasant to be around. She just makes everything that much more difficult, and she seems to cherish the opportunity to do so.

In reality, it only ends up taking a few minutes to deal with her and be on my way, but it’s like the prolonged hyper-time of a car crash. By the end of it, I just take whatever car she’s giving out — minivan, Pontiac Vibe, pogo stick, whatever — just to get away and get “Ramble On” out of my head. (In particular: “then Gollum and the evil one came up and swept away with her…”)

The thing about Burbank is that it’s just awful. It’s mile after mile of relentless suburb. As you fly in, you’re blinded by the glint from all the identical swimming pools in the back of every identical house, crammed in among all the identical strip malls.

As you walk around, if you’re in the right light and you look closely enough at yourself, you can see wispy tendrils of dull gray smoke escaping from your every exposed orifice. It’s not cigarette smoke, and it’s not smog. It’s the soul being slowly squeezed out of your body, leaving nothing more than a dessicated Ann Coulteresque husk.

The thing about frequent flying into Burbank is that it turns awful into a routine. Burbank is oppressively mundane, but there’s always the chance you turn a corner and see the WB studios or the Hollywood Bowl or something else you recognize from years of excessive TV watching. So it was the exotic kind of mundane. At this point, though, it’s all just familiar. There’s not even the lesser thrill of knowing that I could get lost at any second, since without thinking, I still manage to get where I’m going through sheer muscle memory. Maybe it’s Purgatory, not hell.

Hey, speaking of excessive TV-watching, lost, and purgatory, guess what’s on! Gotta go.

Today I exercised the right of every American citizen to have an uninformed voice in the course of action of our government.

I’m always left feeling guilty and ignorant every voting period, because of my policy of spending 30 minutes reading the for & against arguments about the propositions, then going to the poll and voting straight Democrat. I’ve done more research into buying mouthwash than I usually do for voting. (And yeah, I do use mouthwash. Shut the hell up.) And at the moment, I’m more up to speed with the politics of Damalsca and the Archadean Empire than of the state I live in. In my defense, water supply improvement bonds and Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Hummer aren’t 1% as cool as nethicite deposits and big-ass airships.

My main goals were to vote against Leland Yee and to vote No on Proposition 86. Turns out Yee wasn’t on my ballot, so his anti-videogame political grandstanding will have to continue unchecked until I move to a different district. And it’s no surprise that I voted against 86 (it’s the one that would introduce an additional $2.60 tax on each pack of cigarettes sold in CA) — I wanted to ask if they had a blacker pen so I could vote more against it — but it may be surprising that I’m against it for more than just the obvious altruistic reasons. It offends me as exactly the kind of intrusive, moralizing legislation that turns people to the dark side of Republicanism or even worse, libertarianism. I want to find the people who came up with the proposition and just breathe on them.

And when you vote in San Francisco, you’re constantly reminded that you’re voting in San Francisco. There’s the good way — the ballot’s in three languages and the names you’re voting for are of the widest multicultural demographic you’re going to see outside of Sesame Street. And then the bad way — last year, the Stupid City Proposition was something along the lines of “Should it be the policy of the city of San Francisco to call for an end to the Iraq War?” This year, it’s “Should it be City policy to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney?”

Which is one of those can’t-win questions like “How long have you been beating your wife?” It’s all in the wording. Should Bush & Cheney be impeached? Boy howdy. If the politics of Washington are such that getting blown by an intern is grounds for impeachment, then manipulating a terrorist attack and deceiving your constituency about it are most definitely grounds. But should it be City policy to call for the impeachment? No. It should be City policy to figure out why the water coming from my tap has the color and consistency of Goldschlager, or why it takes an hour and a half or $20 to get from any one part of the city to any other, or why the city has almost as many homeless people as it does iPods. So how are you supposed to distill all that down to “yes” or “no?”

Final Fantasy XII is a great game. It took me about eight hours to come to that conclusion, because I didn’t like it much at first, and it takes a long time to get going.

I wasn’t jumping up and down to get into another long RPG, but I ran into my friend Frank on the flight down to Burbank, and he recommended it. I had some time to kill before my flight left, so I went by and picked up a copy. And sitting inside with a videogame seemed to be the best way to guard myself against party-goers and trick-or-treaters on Halloween night.

There’s a lot going against it to start. It’s got the beautiful but interminable cut-scenes that are a Final Fantasy standard by this point, and you begin with just about the driest exposition possible of countries at war. After at least an hour of cut-scenes and training, you’re given your main character, Kelly Ripa (pictured). For some reason, they’ve given her a male voice. The battle system is different, and most of the familiar elements like scene transitions and end-battle victory music are missing, so you can’t get nostalgic. And the biggest insult of all: you start out fighting rats.

Gradually they trickle out additional characters, and familiar things like crystals and the power of the earth and giant dark conspiracies with androgynous leaders and it starts to feel like a Final Fantasy game is about to happen. But with it they introduce the new “gambit” battle system, which means they’ve finally removed that last pesky bit of interactivity from FFX and have finally released a game that can play itself.

But gradually, over the next few hours, it all starts to pull together. When it finally coalesces into sky pirates on hover bikes being shot at by giant airships during a daring escape from a palace culminating in a boss fight against a giant horse made of flame and you win just at the last minute and you finally see the camera pan across your party and get the familiar victory music, that’s when you sit back and think, “Okay, this is pretty bad-ass.”

It’s a really impressive production. Even more than the usual standard for the series; these things take years to produce and have budgets on the scale of small countries. But usually the result is visually stunning but overwhelmingly Japanese — technically unparalleled but completely foreign and indecipherable, with hundreds of neat things that get drowned in all the visual overload. This one, once you get past the overly complicated political intrigue, is an accessible and compelling story.

There’s a definite Star Wars influence. Other games in the series have made reference to the movies, but this is more direct, what with its story about a sky pirate and an orphan going onto a giant ship to rescue a princess who’s leader of a rebellion against an evil empire. But even though it’s the most blatant, it’s so well told — the art is phenomenal, the world-building is perfectly done, the voice performances are solid, and the characters are genuinely interesting — that it never feels like a rip-off. And the familiar Final Fantasy elements, when they appear, are so well-done that they don’t get overwhelmed by all the other stuff going on (the bombs just look cool).

What surprised and impressed me most is that “gambit” system, where you don’t control all of your characters directly but instead set up their AI to perform actions during combat. It was pretty ballsy of them to include it, because it sounds like a horrible idea; it takes away the last bit of control from the player and plays itself. In practice, though, it’s just what these games need. There’s nothing compelling about choosing “Attack” over and over again from a menu. The only interesting part of most console RPG combat is when you could figure out a great tactical combination and pull it off.

The system in FF XII automates all the tedium while still giving you the level of control that’s interesting. And even more surprising is that both the boss fights and all the easy level-grinding fights up to that point are made more exciting as a result. The only thing that would’ve made the gambits system better is if they’d included pre-generated versions for different character classes, like healers and black mages.

Overall, I get the feeling that this is finally the successor to Final Fantasy Tactics (which, I remind everybody, is the best videogame ever made). Even though it uses a different battle system, and it’s set in the same world only in name, it feels even more like the original game than FF Tactics Advance did. It borrows the best elements from Advance (the hunt side-quests, the new character races, the judges), ditches the stuff that sucked (the cards and rule system, the lack of focus, the cheesy child-sucked-from-the-real-world storyline), and keeps the best from the original (the general setting and European feel, the epic scope, the variety of character creation, and the odd-ball combinations like Lancer-ninjas and Calculator-green-mages).

And of course, the writing and translation are the best yet for the series, and there’s a level of polish in everything from the transportation system to the bestiary (which is, for the first time ever in one of these games, interesting on its own). I do wish there were more variety in the main characters — so far I miss the black mages, and the weird specialized characters like moogles and Red XIII, but you can’t have everything.

So far, I’m loving it. Now I just need five or six extra hours each day to get everything done and have time to play a videogame.

Oh boy! My blog’s first post-by-request. Granted, it’s about “Lost,” so I would’ve ended up talking about it anyway, but still.

It looks like the “Lost” backlash is in full effect on the internets, to the point that even the complaints have gotten stale. For my part, just over the last four or five weeks I’ve gone from being excited enough to stage an ill-fated “Lost”-watching party at my apartment, to being disappointed, to even forgetting that it was on last night until I was reminded. Still, I think the episodes this season have steadily been getting better.

I’m not the gushing fanboy that I used to be, but I kept thinking last night that there was some really cool stuff going on, stuff that reminded me of a show I used to like an awful lot. I didn’t really care about the big developments last night, and/or I saw them coming from a mile away even without the internet spoilers, but I still thought it was a very well-done episode.

The episode could just as well have been called “The Cost of Success,” because at this point, the show is clearly a victim of its own hype. The production quality and the performances haven’t gone down, and the series still has one of the highest cool-stuff-per-episode ratios on TV, but they’re just not delivering on everything they promised, and it’s wearing down viewers’ patience. I kept being reminded of the series “Heroes.” It’s really not a good show. It’s got enormous plot holes, terrible terrible dialogue, mediocre performances, and is full to bursting with tired cliches, stereotypes, and gimmicks. “Lost” is better in just about every conceivable way — so how come I’m more interested in what’s going on with the former than I am with the latter?

Now, the “Lost” guys have painted themselves into a corner, and they’ve got an obscene amount riding on the next episode. It’s going to be the last for a long while, so they stand to lose a lot of viewers. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve been hyping it even since before the season started, saying that it’s going to be the most stunning thing we’ve ever seen on television. If it doesn’t deliver on a lot of the mysteries left dangling since the pilot episode, then there are going to be a lot of pissed off viewers, and those of us who are still watching the show are going to have to hear about it incessantly for the next four months.

I still have faith they can pull off something good, even though there’s no way it’s going to be everything people want from it. I thought last week’s episode was pretty cool if forgettable, and last night’s showed they can still hand out the reveals when they need to. But for that I need spoilers, so don’t read the rest of this post if you haven’t seen the last two episodes.
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