I can’t tell if I’ve lost any last shred of shame I was holding onto, or I’ve reached some kind of clarity that only comes from true maturity. Either way, I had no problem buying the latest Pokemon game last week.

Common decency suggests I should’ve furtively taken it up to the register, hidden underneath a DVD of some mid-80s-to-early-90s man’s action movie, or some kind of power tool, or at the very least Medal of Honor or Call to Arms or World War II First Person Shooter Tycoon. And then muttered something about how it was for my son or nephew and make some comment about these wacky kids today with their “pokeymans.”

But come on. The whole idea of “hardcore” videogames is pretty absurd. When you’re still in arrested development mode enough to spend your time playing games, it’s a pretty fine distinction between legitimate “bad-ass” games where you’re shooting computer-generated Nazis with virtual guns, and “totally gay” games where you’re catching computer-generated Jigglypuffs and forcing them to fight each other for your own amusement. Let’s face facts, guys: looking to establish gradations of “coolness” in a hobby where you push shiny colored plastic buttons to make imaginary people do imaginary things, is an endeavor just doomed to disappointment.

So yeah, the Pokeymans. The guys making those games obviously know what they’re doing, or else it would never have become such an international phenomenon.

I remembered that I played one of the earlier versions (presumably, after sneaking it in with a purchase of Quake or something) but didn’t get very far in it. Looking through my old games — because you can trade between versions holy cow how awesome is that! — I found not one but three earlier versions of the game. And one of those versions had hundreds of the little bastards collected on it, an “achievement” which must’ve taken hours of effort on my part, but I couldn’t remember a single bit of it.

Characters in movies are frequently waking up from a blackout to find dead bodies hidden in the trunk of their cars, or newspaper clippings of super powers and/or killing sprees, or mysterious suitcases filled with millions of dollars in unmarked bills. I find old E-rated games with hundreds of monsters in virtual imprisonment and I’m left with the inexplicable but very vivid memory that water type moves are super-effective against rock types.

The new version of the game adds a ton of mini-games and even more stuff to do, because apparently it wasn’t enough just to have the normal stuff that it would take you 70 or so hours to unlock. They clearly know enough not to mess with a good thing; all the changes are just refinements and minor improvements, mostly to the interface.

I am really surprisingly pleased with the new global trading system, though. Pokemon has always been about trading with people, but seeing as how I’ve always been at least 20 years older than the target audience for the game, I’ve never had a good chance to try it out. A 30-year-old man hanging around schoolyards asking kids to hook up to his cable and trade pocket monsters is frowned upon. (Of course, I have worked in videogames, and I have had opportunities to trade with coworkers, but the initial novelty always wore off pretty quickly. It became too much effort to go around my place of business asking friends and bosses if they’d be willing to give me a Clefairy for my Geodude).

With this one they’ve added the ability to trade over the internet. You can use your DS to connect to a wireless access point and do auction-style trades. And that ends up being much cooler than it ought to be, for reasons I can’t adequately explain. To try it out, I got one of my lower-level, throwaway monsters and sent it out, asking for one of the starter creatures in return. Within an hour, one came back to me. It was from a player named “Miyuri” and had the name “Pochama” written in katakana. I imagined some little kid lovingly raising her little virtual pet from an egg and sending it off to America, and how delighted she was to see the English name of the one she received in trade.

The reality, of course, is that you can breed the things specifically for trading, and “Miyuri” is probably some shut-in who’s just trying to get an entire set for power-leveling and selling on ebay.jp. Or hell, I don’t know, it could even be some weird fetish thing — now that the vending machines selling schoolgirl panties has ruined all the mystery, maybe repressed Japanese businessmen can only get off paying big bucks to see an innocent young schoolgirl with an English-named Bidoof.

Plus, I’ve played international online games before, and had conversations with real live Japanese people, and that was five or six years ago. So it’s not just the novelty of it. But I think that simple trade was so simple that it implied a lot more. It was like a combination of the end of the Spaceship Earth ride at Epcot, where the American boy and Japanese girl talk about baseball; or that Cisco ad where the elementary school classes have a staring contest over videoconference, all made reality. We are all one people, united. United in our cultures of excessive wealth and copious leisure time so that we can spend time and expensive computer equipment doing something as frivolous as exchanging virtual monsters, but still: united.

So they got the connectivity exactly right, and I can’t begrudge them that — I’m sure others will, as it effectively eliminates the last bit of genuine social interaction involved in the game. Every other aspect of the game, it’s fine to begrudge. It’s not the phenomenon it used to be, and the parents have moved on to wailing about Grand Theft Auto and the Harry Potter books, but they’re still marvels of brilliantly marketed social engineering and control. Every bit of it is designed to tap into the obsessive compulsive parts of the human psyche. And I lapped it up and will likely continue to do so at any opportunity.

It’s easier to see just how manipulative Pokemon is when you see other companies try to imitate the success of it. Viva Piñata was Microsoft’s attempt to cash in on the whole thing, and it was all every bit as transparently marketed as Poochie. It had the cartoon series tie-in. It was targeted at as wide an audience as possible. And they even took it a step farther with the aggressive marketing, trying to give themselves some “edgy” cache by having cute monsters that you beat open and let cannibalize each other. It couldn’t have been any more blatant and obvious an attempt to cash in. And still, I bought it and played the hell out of it.

It wasn’t the first, and Pokemon won’t be the last. Any game that requires a minimum of effort and thought, but taps into my OCD and provides a steady stream of objectives and rewards, will have me in its thrall for a month at minimum. If it’s got gardening, I might as well just lock myself in the house and turn off all outside communication. (I could never figure out why exactly the SimCity games could have me playing for 12 hours straight, until I read an interview where Will Wright said it was less a city-planning game and more like gardening).

And the next time I complain about how I never seem to have enough time to accomplish anything, you can ask me what level my Chimchar is up to. And I will punch you in your stupid mouth.

I can’t give out free copies of the Sam & Max games, but i can point you to the people who can. There’s a bunch of contests being run for a free copy of Season 1:

• Telltale’s own contest wants you to make with the arts and crafts
• Wired’s Game|Life blog is looking for a Sam & Max comic (made with the comic generator or otherwise)
• The 4 Color Rebellion blog wants you to send an e-mail describing how the game would be played on the Wii

So if you’re curious about the games but are a cheapskate (or just enjoy feeling like a winner), then have at it.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks locked inside my apartment, hunched over a keyboard and staring dumbly at the deadlines that keep flying by. I’ve got that sickly pallor back, I’m back on the sauce, my days and nights are completely reversed, the laundry and the dishes keep piling up, and even the cat is getting creeped out at having me around all the time.

My current theory is that it’s a side effect of my having worked exactly the wrong number of years as a programmer. At this point I’ve been programming long enough that when I first hear about a project, I can pretty quickly break it down into its component parts. When you’re first starting out, the first reaction is always “that sounds hard.” Now, my reaction is more “that sounds like a lot of hash maps, arrays, and linked lists.” Once I’ve broken it all down in my head, it feels like the hard part’s over.

And the problem with that is I never take into account how much time goes into actually making all of that work. I’ve been working long enough to know to pad my original estimates, but not long enough to remember that my original estimates are always ludicrously, ridiculously optimistic. So I basically start off behind schedule, and it just snowballs from there.

But even as I sit here, knowing all of that and having seen it play out again, first hand, it still feels wrong to me, knowing exactly how to do something and having to say, “I’ll be finished with that a month from now.” At EA you can’t swing a dead franchise without hitting a producer, so there’s copies of Microsoft Project on every screen. And if it’s possible for a man to have a computer application as his nemesis, that program would be mine. It just goes against everything I stand for. All those overlapping bars and blocks of time expressed in terms of months — just thinking about it now gives me a chill like getting a prostate exam from the Grim Reaper. Having a long stretch of work divided neatly into tasks and scheduled out is anathema to me. It just takes all the mystery out of life. There’s a reason I’m not a producer.

Anyway, today I finished a big chunk of what I’d been working on. It’s not finished, but it’s finally over the hump and the dark looming clouds have broken and I can finally start getting my life such-as-it-is back together. I walked up to the Haight this afternoon, and it was just weird. I mean, even for the Haight. Being out in sunlight, seeing three-dimensional human beings — I actually stepped out into traffic because I forgot you’re supposed to watch the signals. They say it takes a while to get re-adjusted to life on the outside.

It’s an old and tired cliche that Hollywood producers are greedy, clueless, and artistically bankrupt, eager to cash in on something without really understanding it. But apparently it’s not enough of a cliche that there’s a standout example, at least there’s not one I can think of. When you think of gimmicky plot twists, you mention The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game. When you think of TV shows declining in quality, you mention “Happy Days” and jumping the shark. But unless I’m missing something obvious, there hasn’t been an obvious one for doing a movie remake that completely and totally misses the point of the original.

Which is why we should all thank Mandalay Pictures for dicking around with The Birds. For a while it was looking like Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake would’ve been a great candidate (Halloween: coming August 31, 2007!), but re-imagining John Carpenter isn’t quite as a remarkable as completely failing to understand Hitchcock.

The quote from this Variety article is Mandalay president Cathy Schulman talking about their exciting line-up:

A highlight of the Mandalay Pictures’ slate at Universal is the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” scheduled to be in production by early fall.

“We think we have a very contemporary take,” Schulman said. “In the original, the birds just showed up, and it was kind of like, why are the birds here? This time, there’s a reason why they’re here and (people) have had something to do with it. There’s an environmental slant to what could create nature fighting back.”

No, Ms. Schulman, it wasn’t “kind of like,” why are the birds here? It was exactly like, why are the birds here?

Cause you know The Birds is fine and all, but what was the whole point? They had this romantic comedy going, and all of a sudden out of nowhere these damn birds start attacking for no reason. If Hitchcock hadn’t been such a hack, he would’ve put some effort into explaining why the attacks started and how they could be stopped. As it is, it’s almost like he’s saying our hold on civilization is tenuous and that we have no real control over our own fate, and at any moment our entire existence could be threatened by the most seemingly innocuous thing, for no reason and through no fault of our own. Yawn.

While they’re at it, I hope they remember to add in some good music. Hitchcock didn’t even bother adding any music to his version. It was boring and downright creepy.

So far, this stands as the most boneheaded movie remake I’ve ever heard of. (Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was completely useless, and every minor change made was the completely wrong thing to do, but at least it didn’t mess with the original too much). So that’s an exercise for the readers: leave your own awful, completely-miss-the-point movie remake ideas in the comments! Casablanca with an improved ending so that Rick and Ilsa get together! Memento in chronological order! A re-imagining of Planet of the Apes where it’s not set on Earth!

From the Something Awful forums, here’s a link to a clip of a public access show broadcast in Atlanta, hosted by Alexyss Taylor and her mother.

Notice a couple of things: it’s from the Something Awful forums, I haven’t mentioned the title of the show, and I’m not embedding it directly here. You know what that means: it’s not safe for work! And no kids allowed!

It’s kind of like if Jesse Jackson did a performance of The Vagina Monologues. “She’s got a man beside her and he’s a good provider, but he’s not hittin’ the walls or workin’ the middle.” And it’s awesome.

Much like the elder Ms. Taylor, I learned a lot I didn’t know. I still haven’t figured out exactly what a jackrabbit is.

Update: Apparently, the video’s already been removed. It was probably one of those things that seemed a lot funnier at 2 AM anyway. To make up for it, here’s a Japanese animated film about toilet training a tiger cub:

Last night Fox aired the two-part pilot for its series “Drive”, with another episode tonight. It’s about an illegal cross-country Cannonball Run-style car race for 32 million dollars, where the racers are coerced into participating, spies hired by the race operators are everywhere, and death is one of the punishments for finishing last (presumably). It’s got cross-overs into the Joss Whedon universe of TV shows: Tim Minear from “Angel” and “Firefly” is one of the show creators; Nathan Fillion of “Firefly” and Serenity stars as a gardner (or is he?!?) coerced into competing in order to rescue his kidnapped wife, played by Amy Acker of “Angel.”

I’ve watched the first two episodes, and I spent the entire time willing myself to like it. At times, it was like when you’re driving and your low fuel light comes on and you start semi-subconsciously trying to scoot the car forward with your butt to help it get to the gas station. I definitely wouldn’t call it “bad,” but it just kept falling just short of “great.”

There’s a real American Beauty taint to the proceedings; like that movie, the series always one-ups its various cliches… by replacing them with other cliches. By the end of the first two hours, it’s gotten everybody settled into pairs like on “The Amazing Race,” but they’re even more predictable archetypes than on the reality show: the young soldier and his girlfriend, the Latino ex-con and the half-brother he never knew, the Black Girls^TM, the dad reconnecting with his hip teenaged daughter, and a mousy abused wife and an in-it-to-win-it wild girl.

Latino guy drives a Low Rider and calls everyone “homes.” The teenaged daughter refers to him as a “road show production of West Side Story“, which I found out last night is known as “Hanging a lampshade on it.” Normally, I’m all over that kind of thing, but here it just seemed clumsy and bugged me even more.

There’s just something that feels safe and predictable about the whole thing. Even though Fox put frequent “Viewer Discretion Advised” warnings after the commercials, there was never anything particularly shocking, intense, or even surprising. It all seemed like a concept that needed something more than standard network television to really work, but would never work as a movie, either.

Still, I like the main story, as implausible as it is. And while I don’t get the crazy obsessive mania over Nathan Fillion that a lot of internet nerds have, I do like the guy and have never seen him do a bad job in anything. The show’s interesting enough to keep watching (I can’t imagine its lasting longer than a season, and I wouldn’t want to), and I hope it gets an audience if only so I can find out how it ends.

I got even more to say about Grindhouse. Cory made the point that people are trying to claim if you didn’t like Death Proof, you didn’t “get” it. You can see that in a lot of the internet reviews, and I’m sure if I had a job where I actually talked to people, I’d be hearing even more of that. So at the risk of devolving into yet another internet movie nerd shut-in (too late for that), I want to show that: yes, Tarantino did know what he was doing; and yes, we do get it; but no, we didn’t want it. And okay, yes, it does have some pay off.

But I think to appreciate Death Proof at all, you have to be either really, really horny, or have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen in it. (Or both). The trailers, marketing, and reviewers have done a good job of keeping it under wraps; I didn’t realize how good until I’d seen the movie and noticed how little of the movie actually ended up in the trailer. And since I don’t have a way to do spoilers in the comments yet, here’s a separate post.
Read the rest of this entry »

Man, Grindhouse pissed me off. I knew as soon as I heard about it that this was a movie that’d have me shifting uncomfortably in my seat, but I thought it was going to be from the gore and cheap scares. Not out of annoyance.

The “problem” was Quentin Tarantino’s half of the double feature, Death Proof. As predicted, and as mentioned in just about every review, it starts out slow and egregiously talky. (Even the ones that revere Tarantino as if he were a cinematic messiah mention this — I actually read one that said Robert Rodriguez was Salieri to Tarantino’s Mozart.) And after the enormous build-up of the first half, Planet Terror, and the fake trailers during intermission, the second half plays like the annoying boor at a party that ruins everything and just makes everybody cringe. The one where everybody’s talking and laughing and just having a great time, and he manages to say the one thing that just kills the mood dead. (Usually it’s some variant of a dead-pan “That’s funny.”)

Planet Terror delivers on all the bad-assery the trailer promises. It’s over-the-top gore, cheesy characters, ridiculous dialogue, explosions, and full to bursting with all the gimmicks that come with the concept — scratchy film, missing reels, even the variations on the theme song are funny. I’d been a little worried, since movies never live up to the potential shown in their trailers, but Planet Terror is like the Grindhouse trailer turned up full blast and sustained over an hour and a half.

And then comes Death Proof with at least forty solid minutes of a bunch of women talking like Quentin Tarantino talks. It’s not just a sudden cold shower, it’s more aggressively annoying. Maybe a cold shower filled with bees.

But here’s the really annoying part: Death Proof pays off. There’s about 30 minutes of just totally bad-ass movie in there. First car scene with Rose McGowan: pretty cool. Second car scene with the girls: very cool. Third car chase with the girls: annoying (why doesn’t anyone in these movies just pull over?) but cool. Final car chase: absolutely incredible, with Kurt Russell doing stuff I totally didn’t see coming, and one hell of a final shot. This isn’t like the interminable talking in Kill Bill Volume 2, which just fizzled out to the conclusion; this was a real pay-off that just felt right, a moment that Planet Terror never quite reached, a moment where you think “now that is exactly what was possible from these movies.”

There are plenty of people who’ll insist that all the talking was necessary to get the pay off. That it builds sympathy for the characters. That it was necessary, after the frenetic pacing of the first half, to slow everything down and build back up to an explosive conclusion. Or, simply, that it’s truer to the spirit of the grindhouse movies that inspired it. The first point is just wrong — you don’t feel sympathy for the characters, you’re eager to see them get killed. The second, I’m highly skeptical about — I still believe they could’ve cut Death Proof to 45 minutes or less and still get as satisfying a reaction.

The last point, I can’t really say much about. Apart from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and maybe the movies from “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” I haven’t seen any of the movies that inspired or are referenced by this one. But from what I do recognize, I don’t think either of half of Grindhouse really gets it exactly right.

Planet Terror looks the part on the surface, but its plot is a little too coherent, and its production values are a little too high. I’ve already forgotten where I read it, but somebody on the internets described it as “what the grindhouse movies wanted to be, not what they were.” Death Proof, as the self-important internet film critics will point out, dispensed with the surface-level gimmicks and instead captured what the originals were really like. Lower budgets meant less action and more talky scenes that went nowhere. Editing rambled and meandered to make the most out of the film that was shot. There was only enough money for a couple of expensive action sequences. Using a stunt person as a cast member was a bonus.

But I’d counter that while that makes for a more genuine recreation/reinterpretation, it goes too far down the path of movie nerd wankery and loses sight of the big picture: big, stupid, fun movies. And Planet Terror is simply more fun. I just saw it yesterday and already I’ve forgotten most of it, while there are elements of Death Proof that still stand out in my mind and just seem cooler and more bad-ass the more I think of them. But that feeling of just plain anything-goes fun has to be what attracted these guys to those movies in the first place.

But all of that is just written under obligation; when a movie has two halves, you just have to compare them. While I’m at it: you’re also supposed to pick your favorite of the trailers. The Machete trailer is gold, but my favorite is the awesome one for Don’t.

I wish I could say I were surprised the movie isn’t making as much money as they’d hoped. It’s definitely a day at the movies, and there’s a reason double features fell out of favor in the first place. But although it’s not a surprise, it’s a shame, because annoyances and all, Grindhouse is a blast. It’s a great homage to these movies, and like Kill Bill it’s made me seek out a lot of the originals that inspired it (in particular, I want to see Vanishing Point now). And it’s proof that a movie can be filled with movie nerd wankery and experimentation and not end up with too-clever post-modernism or indie self-indulgence. It can just be fun.