Nick, Jake, Jared, and the rest of the gang are cranking out Sam & Max episode trailers so quickly, it’s almost like there’s a new one every month. (Come on, give me a break. I’m home sick and pumped full of cold medication.)

The next episode is “Night of the Raving Dead”, and so far it’s running neck-and-neck with episode 204 as my favorite of the ones we’ve done. It’s coming out worldwide the day before Valentine’s Day, so it’d be the perfect gift for that loved one who has Windows and enjoys point-and-click adventures that poke gentle fun at Europeans.

Hooray for well-timed blurring!

Book
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Recommended by
Wil Wheaton, plus dozens of commenters on half the blogs I read (including John Scalzi’s own blog).

Disclaimer
I have read very little science fiction (Douglas Adams and Star Wars novelizations don’t count). I’ve read none of Robert Heinlein, who is mentioned in almost every review of this book, and in the author’s own acknowledgements. So I might be missing out on a lot of context, homage, invention, deconstruction and/or re-invention here.

Synopsis
Humanity has begun colonizing planets outside our solar system, but the technology to do so is kept under tight control by the Colonial Defense Force. Anyone at the age of 75 can enlist in the CDF, where he’ll be restored to fighting condition and given a chance at a second life, in return for a few years of service in a war that no one on Earth knows anything about.

Highs
Clear, straightforward writing throughout; the book reads less like hard science fiction and more like a series of well-written blog posts from the future. Various “hard” science fiction concepts are introduced and quickly given a rational, plausible explanation. Good pacing, where the next key moment is always just over the horizon, and you want to keep reading past the chapter breaks.

Lows
The book reads less like science fiction and more like a series of blog posts. The “and then that happened” style and the quick explanations of concepts do keep the book straightforward, but also rob it of any real suspense or sense of wonder. Has frequent passages of Michael Crichton-esque exposition, where a squad of people from each relevant school of expertise happens to be on-hand to give a short speech explaining the next topic. Frequently feels like fan fiction, where the author hasn’t created characters so much as inserted himself and people he knows into the book; anyone with any real distinguishable personality becomes a “villain” of sorts, and is quickly dealt with.

Verdict
Does exactly what (I imagine) it sets out to do: tell a military science fiction story that’s rational, plausible, personal, relatable, and above all, readable. It’s opinionated without being overbearing, light without being silly, intelligent without being tedious, and understandable without being too condescending. Unfortunately, it’s also engaging without being fascinating. I can imagine it’d be welcome to science fiction fans who’ve been overrun with fantastic space operas and ponderous analyses of theoretical physics, and want something in the middle. I’m not a big fan of the genre, and I was ultimately underwhelmed by this book, but I can still see myself giving the other two books in the series a try.

The way I see it, there’s two different groups of people who wouldn’t be completely bowled over by the movie Once:

1. Musicians living in Dublin, who wouldn’t see what the big deal is, and
2. Unholy creatures cursed to walk the earth for eternity after having their souls ripped from their rotting corpses.

I’d been hearing about the movie for what must be months, since it’s gotten nearly universal praise, an Oscar nomination for its song “Falling Slowly” (the second best song in the movie), and fairly frequent breathless write-ups in Entertainment Weekly claiming it was impossible not to like it.

So I had a combination of high expectations and the feeling I’d get around to watching it eventually. I expected a painfully earnest, small and sensitive indie film about two singer/songwriters who find each other against all odds. Two very different people, joined together by their music, their hearts would soar onto the screen, the strings of their acoustic guitars pulling the audience into the screen and casting a spell of heartfelt enchantment on young and old.

The funny thing is: that’s pretty much exactly what it is, and it totally works.

It’s filmed not like a musical, or even an indie-film Sundance-ready romance, but as a “behind the music”-style documentary. In a making-of documentary on the special features, the director says that he didn’t want actors who could half-sing, but singers who could half-act. He got better than that, because their performances are completely believable and their musical performances are astounding.

The scene where the two stars perform “Falling Slowly” in a music shop is pretty much the defining scene of the movie, but my favorite is “If You Want Me.” The girl (both characters are unnamed in the movie) walks back from a corner store in the middle of the night, in her pajamas, where she’d gone to buy batteries for a CD player so that she could listen to the guy’s music while she wrote the lyrics for it. It’s the closest the movie gets to a traditional movie musical, while still feeling so natural and so genuine that it fits in perfectly.

What finally completely won me over was a scene at a party, where all the guests are required to perform songs for each other. Now, any claim I could make to knowing what life in Dublin is really like, would be hopelessly false — I spent a total of four days in the city, visiting only the most tourist-laden places, and I was half-full of Guinness the entire time. But it’s what I want Dublin to be like — dark rooms packed with indiscriminately friendly people sharing drinks and some of the most incredible music you’ll ever hear.

In another part of the making-of documentary, Glen Hansard says that he and his costar, Marketa Irglova — who recorded an album in 2006 that provides several of the songs in the movie — were friends, so the most difficult parts were acting as if they’d just met. My favorite quote from the documentary is when he describes the casting; he says he recommended Irglova for the part because he knew she could act, only because she can do everything else so well.

You seldom get the chance to see the characters’ relationship as anything but genuine, since it’s so simple and straightforward. And there’s absolutely no question that their music is genuine — if I had just heard it, I might’ve dismissed it as overwrought Coldplay-style pseudo-folk pop. But when you see how music just seems to flow out of Irglova as if it were simply another language, and when you see the passion for these songs played out on Hansard’s face, it strips away any sense of artifice.

I have only two complaints about the whole thing: first, that they overused the song “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” when there are at least three other songs in the movie I would’ve preferred to hear more of. Second, there’s only one false moment in the entire movie, when the gruff recording engineer at a studio has dismissed our plucky band as talentless oddballs, but is quickly won over by the passion of their music. But both of these are nitpicks, brief and barely perceptible flaws that keep the movie just short of perfect.

It was a perfect time for me to watch this movie, because I’ve been getting more and more discouraged at the state of pop culture lately. The internet is a hateful place, and spending too much time on it has a corrupting cynical influence — to the point where you could even read a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a father’s relationship with his son and the nature of goodness, and just start picking out faults in it. I was starting to wonder if it’s even possible to make an earnest, sincere movie anymore, without its getting dismissed as schmaltz. As it turns out, it is possible, and the result is amazing.

Book
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Selling Points
Oprah liked it! (And it won a Pulitzer Prize, too.) But look! Oprah!

Disclaimer
I tried to be open-minded and objective while I was reading this book, but I was definitely prejudiced against it from the start, because of all the hype and because of how much I disliked the No Country for Old Men movie. Also, I don’t like post-apocalyptic stories in general.

Synopsis
Ash cold gray ashes the man the boy dark scared okay fire. Repeat for 300 pages.

Highs
Quick and pretty easy to read. Excellent pacing, conveying long stretches of unchanging tedium punctuated by unexpected terror. Dialogue between the boy and his father seems genuine. Aggressively literate, with occasional descriptions that are surprisingly vivid. Subtly flows between gray reality and the dreams and memories of the main character using stylistic changes from terse and straightforward to nightmarish and verbose.

Lows
By “verbose” I mean it’s often self-consciously over-written. Sometimes feels sabotaged by passages of vapid nihilism, or a wordy but empty description. As a result, it often feels like someone writing with a thesaurus open, as if the author didn’t trust his honest, genuine message not to come across as trite or maudlin unless it were padded with “edge” or “literary merit.” As much as I liked the book’s ending, it was like a stunt pilot pulling out of a 270-page nose dive right before the moment of impact. I still can’t tell if the sections that struck me as pointlessly cynical were momentary lapses of the narrator’s character, or if they’re the author’s genuine attempts to make a point.

Verdict
Ultimately a masterfully written, honest story of fatherhood and allegory about morality. It creates a powerful image of “goodness” as a force that simply exists — independent of religion, society, privilege, or even sustenance — and survives, despite any attempts to extinguish it. I just wish it didn’t keep making me think, “So this is what it would be like if Larry McMurtry had grown up as a goth kid.”

Last night I went to see Cloverfield again. Surprisingly, it’s still as good the second time, and I highly recommend seeing it in Digital Projection if possible, because the clear picture and better sound system make it awesome. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in all the backstory and alternate-reality game stuff surrounding Cloverfield, there’s a wiki page summing all of it up).

When I got home, I watched the RiffTrax version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The casual observer would think these two incidents are completely unrelated, which is why the casual observer is lucky to have this blog to point out the similarities:

Raiders and Cloverfield both have the same basic inspiration at their core: filmmakers paying homage to a pulpy, shallow genre of movies they grew up loving. They’re not spoofs or parodies, or self-important “re-inventions” or “re-imaginings,” but sincere attempts to get the feel of the originals in a contemporary movie.

I’m not for one second saying that Cloverfield is going to become the classic that Raiders of the Lost Ark is. But watching them back-to-back does show what advances we’ve made in self-awareness in the past 26 years. Watching Raiders in 2007 is a little bit like visiting Tomorrowland before the well-intentioned but poorly-conceived rehabs: you’re struck with this weird sense of double nostalgia, seeing a dated homage to an even more dated source. For all the perfect set designs, costumes, props, etc., it feels more like 1981 than 1936. And not just 1981, but Steven Spielberg’s version of 1981.

The most obvious point to make here is that if you’re watching a movie while listening to a bunch of people make fun of it, of course you’re bound to notice flaws. I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t get the point of RiffTrax for good movies, but for me, making fun of the movie was never the focus of “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ or any of the side projects. The movie is just a straight man; it’s an excuse to give a bunch of people 2 hours worth of set-ups for jokes.

For something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the Lord of the Rings movies for instance, it reminds me of when I was a teenager and looked forward to the Mad magazine parodies of my favorite blockbuster movie of the moment. It never “broke” the movie, but was just another exercise in fandom. And like those, the RiffTrax makes all the comments a fan would make during the movie anyway — he totally ate that fly! And how DID Indy hold his breath on top of that submarine for so long? (The one that Mad magazine got that the Riffers missed was: how come those snakes are crawling up the other side of the wall and pushing themselves through mortar?)

But there’s still a good bit of Raiders that seems jarring now, if you’re watching it with a fairly jaded, critical eye and not just letting yourself get caught up in the movie: The Spielbergian reaction shots to Alfred Molina when Indy’s grabbing the idol. The odd expository scene with the feds getting lectured on the history of the Ark. Pretty much all of the comic relief moments. And, as the Riffers are quick to point out, the fact that Indy spends 20 minutes smirking his way through a car chase, something that seemed so bad-ass at the time but now comes across as “Wow, Indiana Jones is kind of a douchebag.”

At the time, they all worked to make the movie feel contemporary; now, they just serve to lock it in a time when Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan ruled the Earth.

I say that Cloverfield is another very earnest action movie, without heavy-handed commentary or clumsy comic relief or pandering to the audience. But watching it after hearing other people talk about it, I’m struck with how high the bar has been raised for suspension of disbelief, how much self-awareness is just built into movies nowadays.

(Very minor spoilers for Cloverfield follow, in case you’re wanting to go into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about it).

It all relies on, and even takes advantage of, the knowledge that the audience is completely savvy to pop culture in general and how movies work in particular. The central gimmick of the handheld camera ostensibly lends an air of believability to the whole thing, but in fact it does the opposite: it distances the audience from what’s happening, keeping it in the realm of fun horror movie instead of just ghoulishly watching real death and destruction as entertainment. It works because we’re all so accustomed to the unreality of steadicam shots that that is now what we perceive as “realistic.”

The character of Hud — well for starters, there’s the fact that it’s the best-named movie character of the last decade, and the name depends on the audience’s familiarity with videogames. (In case you’re not a videogame fan, the “heads-up display” is your health/ammo/etc view in a first-person game, and at this point it’s become synonymous with the camera or the view screen). But making him into a character, instead of just an unseen narrator, was genius for several reasons: 1) It adds another layer of distance, because you know that the guy whose POV you’re seeing is not you, partly because he’s kind of an idiot. 2) The comic relief gets “baked in” to the movie, because you have the cameraman making the comments the audience would usually be making. 3) It adds a layer of “safety” to the movie, because you’re always reminded that somebody is still there with us, filming everything.

That’s not even mentioning the self-awareness implicit in basing your story around a bunch of good-looking, self-absorbed 20-year-olds, the type that call each other “bro” and have seemingly never known a world without video cameras, cell phones, and the internet. They’ve seen these stories, they know how they work, so there’s not a lot of staring in wonder while John Williams flares up in the background. Instead, they’re unrealistic people who react realistically — the characters are actually no more or less interesting than the plot and pacing warrants, a bunch of people who are just pretty enough to hold your interest for an hour and a half, but not so deep and complex that the movie grinds to a halt whenever one gets offed.

I have to wonder if a movie like Cloverfield could have been made 10 years ago, and how it would’ve been different. If we hadn’t had Scream come in and wallow in irony and self-reference for three movies, would we have gotten it all out of our system in time for 1-18-08? And is it really even out of our system, or has the bar been raised for how much postmodernism is required in a movie before we’ll allow it to be sincere?

I hope nobody else has used that title to talk about Cloverfield, because I’m inordinately proud of it.

This movie is definitely one that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in, so if you’re interested in it, I recommend seeing it soon and avoiding trailers and reviews. I’ll just say that it’s excellent, I was literally biting my nails and on the edge of my seat (seriously!) for most of it, and I’m already interested in seeing it again. And there is something at the end of the credits, but it’s not all that great, and probably not worth waiting for.

Now stop reading unless you’ve either already seen it, or are never going to.

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There’s been a bit of a hullaballoo on the internets about this doofus’ ill-informed ranting about the game Mass Effect, and his equally goofy followup.

There’s no shortage of attention-seeking ignorant people on the internet, and there’s certainly no shortage of excitable and belligerent videogame-fan blog-readers who lap that stuff up. (It has already been made into a comic strip, for instance.) And the article itself is comically ludicrous, but not quite enough to provide epic lolz, so there’s not much of note.

Except for this part:

It’s called “Mass Effect” and it allows its players - universally male no doubt - to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game “persons” hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.

The objections to such filth should be simple to understand.

Starting with the disgusting idea that one can “create” their own versions of what people look like, removing warts, moles, and bald spots while enhancing - shall we say - the extended features of the game’s characters tends to objectify women, sex, and human relationships.

“The most realistic sex acts ever conceived” is a standout, of course, simply because of all the layers of imagery the phrase suggests. A less-imaginative writer, by which I mean a sane person, would have simply said “realistic sex acts” and be done with it, but this guy feels that Mass Effect has blazed a trail into undiscovered territory. You have to wonder if these are the most realistic sex acts ever portrayed in a videogame, or if in fact they are the most realistic sex acts any person has ever even thought to do. In which case: damn, I have got to get a copy of this game.

But as it turns out, I do have a copy of this game. And while every sentence of the guy’s article contains at least one factual error, his description of the infinite diversity of the character-customization system is the one that caught my eye.

Because of the hour or so I’ve spent playing Mass Effect, I spent at least 30 minutes of that using the character editor. And the best I could manage was a slightly more grizzled Bobby Flay.

Maybe I just got spoiled by The Sims 2’s character editor, but every attempt I’ve seen in other games of letting you modify your main character, has ended in wretched disappointment. To the point where I wonder why they even bothered. In a game like The Sims 2, which depends on having tons of modifiable characters, you can see how investing so much energy in the character editor paid off.

But if all I’m doing is seeing the back of this guy’s head for most of the game, with the occasional pause so I can watch him stare blankly at another bland character droning on about some galactic war or some such, then he can look like Steve Buscemi for all I care. The character editor in Mass Effect just lets you choose between male and female, each with a limited section of equally-unappealing pre-generated faces, variations on 5 or 6 hairstyles, and like ten billion different scars. Why?

Even assuming you are desperate enough to try and create a character who looks like yourself, so you can live vicariously through your avatar as he or she makes sweet sweet love to a pixelated, long-winded alien, you can’t. I know, I tried. At least, you can’t unless you happen to look like a weird cross between that guy from “Burn Notice” and Michael Biehn and you can’t manage to grow a beard that connects in the standard places.

Seriously: take another look at the FlayShepard at the top of this post. Is that someone you want to witness committing virtual orgasmic rape? I think not. I don’t even want to see that guy buying car insurance online. I want that guy to go back to his bit part as “Space Marine 2″ in made-for-Sci Fi-channel movies and leave me alone.

Which all goes back to my prejudice against BioWare in general and Mass Effect in particular: their obsession with meaningless choices. It’s clear that they put a metric (’cuz they’re Canadian, see) ton of content into the game, and there’s a ridiculously detailed (if somewhat dull, so far) backstory, and what must be hours and hours of reasonably well-written dialogue.

And yet they insist on undermining that content by delivering it in cheesy “Mad Libs” format. At the start of the gamel, you can choose one of three different backstories for your character; I chose “Orphaned by an alien invasion and picked up by a passing freighter.” Thirty seconds later, during the game’s prologue, an unseen voice says, “He was orphaned by an alien invasion and picked up by a passing freighter, which filled him with rage and an independent spirit. Is this the kind of guy we want saving the galaxy?”

When I was around eight years old, my parents bought me a personalized 45 (that’s like an MP3, kids!) for my birthday. It started with “Hey Charlie, it’s your birthday!” and then went on with the rest of the song without mentioning me directly. Even at that age, I could sense I was being pandered to. It was still more satisfying than my backstory decision in Mass Effect.

Now, from what I’ve seen so far, Mass Effect isn’t a bad game at all. It’s just not particularly compelling, partly because I get no real sense of character from it. So far, it just alternates between dumping the story on me, and letting me make insignificant choices in the story, and there’s nothing that pulls me in. I don’t think I’d mind being limited to one pre-generated character, as long as it was one of the most imaginative characters ever conceived.