The original Hotline Miami was something of a sleeper hit: a top-down, 16-bit, hyper-violent, 80s-themed twitch-massacre-simulator with an awesome electronic soundtrack. The game looked simple but was packed with a variety of actions and tactics, all of which were necessary to tackle its twenty punishingly challenging “chapters.” Coupled with an insta-restart upon death, there was rarely any downtime for the player, allowing for each level to be a constant adrenaline rush. It was not until every single enemy was a corpse that you were given a moment of rest: the music would die abruptly, and you were left to navigate your way out of the level with nothing but an unsettling hum for audio and a violence-fueled guilt hangover.
Monthly Archives: March 2015
The Last Man on Earth Won’t Settle
(The following article contains spoilers for The Last Man on Earth, up through episode
The Last Man on Earth is currently halfway through its first season, which makes it an unusual candidate for my blog. Typically, I like to write about TV shows at the beginning or end of a season, but The Last Man on Earth is doing something that I’m not quite sure I’ve ever seen before. In short, it is a sitcom without a status quo.
As I’ve stated in this blog before, the sitcom formula is built on stasis. Since the core of a “situation comedy” is a specific situation, it is difficult for characters to change or advance because that very change threatens the show’s premise. The Last Man on Earth, however, has been functioning since the pilot as a show where change IS the status quo. It’s been exciting to watch, gaining some ground from the “what will happen next?!” feeling that’s usually reserved for dramas, but also makes it very hard to get invested in the show’s future. We’re now halfway through the first season, and still have no idea what the show is about.
Cinderella and the Importance of Complex Villains
Last week, I posted a podcast I recorded with my friend Jason about the movie Patch Adams. In the film, Robin Williams plays a med school student who upsets the medical institution by caring about patients and clowning around the hospital. In the podcast, one of my biggest complaints was that the movie completely failed to make the “established” doctors into anything more than villainous straw men for Patch to knock over. When questioned as to why they hated Patch (a man who, given his outright illegal actions throughout much of the movie, they have every reason to hate), they would say absurd things about him sinking to the patients’ level, or being too happy.
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Community Yahoo! Premiere Review
There is a clear feeling going into the start of Community’s sixth season that the show may have outlived its usefulness. The audience knows it, the cast seems to know it, and the writers most definitely know it. This is a show which has lost its showrunner, reclaimed him, gotten cancelled, been picked up by a channel known primarily as a search engine, and lost three of its seven leads. Abed puts it best when explaining his apprehension to the premiere’s new character, Paget Brewster’s Frankie Dart: “My umbrella concern is that you, as a character, represent the end of what I used to call ‘our show,’ which was once an unlikely family of misfit students, and is now a pretty loose-knit group of students and teachers, none of whom are taking a class together, in a school which, as of your arrival, is becoming increasingly grounded, asking questions like ‘how do any of us get our money, when will we get our degrees, and what happened to that girl I was dating?’ as opposed to questions that I consider more important, such as ‘what is real, what is sanity, is there a god, where’s that Pierce hollogram?'”
John Wick Review
(This review contains spoilers for the first 30 minutes of John Wick. However, it should not lessen your enjoyment of the movie)
John Wick’s plot is thus: John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a family man who is devastated by the loss of his wife to a long-time illness. She leaves him a puppy for him to care for, and he begins to bond with it. Then some Russian thugs led by Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones) show up, steal his car (a 1969 Mustang), and kill his puppy. So John Wick kicks ass and takes names for the next hour-plus.
Well, maybe there’s A LITTLE more to it. When Alfie Allen’s dad finds out about what he did and who he did it to, he immediately realizes his mistake. You see, John Wick isn’t just some schmuck with a puppy, a sweet ride, and a dead wife. He’s John Motherfucking Wick, Badass Extraordinaire. As Alfie Allen’s dad says, he’s not the boogeyman. “He’s the man you send to kill the boogeyman.” And Alfie Allen killed his puppy (a very Theon Greyjoy move, if you ask me).