Guero friends!

Sent to some Latin American jungle with first-time partner, Jack Krauser, on some mission called Operation Javier, erstwhile zombie-slayer Leon Kennedy passes the time by spinning yarns about people he has never met and events he has never witnessed.

Here, Leon regales his partner with the tragedy of Steve Burnside:

“And then, as the lovely Claire Redfield is about to be drawn and quartered by the Alexia beast, an unrecognizably generic Chris Redfield can only swat helplessly at Alexia’s barbaric tentacles. Is this the end for our plucky heroine? Nay! Just when all seems lost, the last shred of human compassion inside gruesome B.O.W. abomination Steve Burnside somehow emerges to conquer the darkside of his diseased soul, and he hacks at Alexia with his mammoth battleaxe, freeing his darling Claire. Alexia is wounded, yes, but Steve has not struck deep enough, and before she retreats, Alexia signals her farewell with a spear-headed tentacle, shot forth and impaling our fair-haired boy monstrosity, a fatal blow. For some reason, Steve shrinks back into the saintly, smooth-skinned young go-getter he once was, even though none of the other infected creatures ever did when they were killed. Claire rushes to his side and speaks words of strength and grit, willing herself to believe that he might actually pull through. Chris stands behind her, trying to remain inconspicuous. She takes Steve in her arms, weeping over this doomed youth who had vanquished the demon inside and saved her life. Steve’s pale head rolls to the side, and with his last breath, so gentle that even a woman could not be that gentle, he whispers the words he has longed to say to her: ‘I love you.’ His voice, as soft as a feather falling on a pillow, can only be heard by her, and the words slip like the last grains of sand in an hourglass, exhaling the final moments of an unlikely hero’s misspent life. . . .

Krauser, did you catch all that? Krauser! Are you even listening to what I’m saying?”

Botched thought for the day

One of the great debacles of human evolution is the fact that we have to eat and breathe through the same hole.

Where no moviegoer has gone before

I’m sure everyone with a television or Internet access or friends who talk has heard of James Cameron’s Avatar by now, which alone indicates a greenback-laden future for the movie. But as far as its grandiloquent claims of changing the way movies are made and even being “something we’ve never seen before,” I’m skeptical. With its release just a few days away, I’ll tempt fate and say that it doesn’t look like the game-changer it’s touted as. Not that it doesn’t look like a good, fun movie. I mean, tall, skinny cat/goat people sure beat the second breakfast out of Hobbits. But for Avatar to really be the movie I’ve never seen but always wanted to see even without knowing it, it would probably have to be something like a Star Wars-style epic narrative delivered through the immersive atmosphere of the Soarin' Over California ride at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. And I don’t mean a juiced-up version of Star Tours. That would be nice, but without visionary storytelling to quicken it, it would just be a nice theme park ride.

Cameron’s the guy who brought us a Universal Studios stage show “sequel” to his film, Terminator 2, so it’s no stretch to think that he might like to bring a bit of that theme park scale to the big screen. I’m not necessarily saying that the next big leap in feature films has to include staged stunts and live explosions, or that your seating area has to lift you off the ground and fly you over the screen. Though all that might constitute a real leap, none of it would be reproducible on your couch/flat-screen setup, and it’s unlikely that technology that further separates the movie theater and the home theater would replace movies as they exist now. But if Avatar aspires to be a turning point in the very nature of cinema, it will have to be much more than Dances With Wolves meets Ferngully, shot with a camera that costs more than most McMansions.

If we’re lucky, we’ll come out of Avatar having seen merely a great movie. And that wouldn’t be so bad, except for Cameron, who may really believe that he’s bringing us into a brave new world of moviegoing.

His Error-ness

I was out doing a little harmless holiday shopping the other day, when I was assaulted by the following fresco:


Now, I'm neither an art critic nor a basketball fan, but I do know that Michael Jordan rarely sported such a lobotomized facial expression. And have we forgotten that he was known for dunking basketballs, not stroking his own balls?

Be like Mike? Sorry, this painting be like crap.

(Painting spotted at Fashion Valley Mall, San Diego, CA.)

Evil has no name

In response to a recent blog post about the “true face of terror in gaming,” I offer another perspective, one that reveals the “true true face of terror in gaming.”


Yes, Phanto from Super Mario Bros. 2 was scary. But did you know . . . there is another . . . Phanto-like thing!

In later years, we saw Phanto successors like the evil Samus clone who would chase you around Metroid Fusion, and a freak called Nemesis who would hunt you in Resident Evil 3. There was also the ghostly and impatient Baron von Blubba in Bubble Bobble, which pre-dated Mario 2. These and even Phanto are Johnny-come-lately sissy scares compared to the scariest creature in the history of gaming . . . and life.

Some call him the “hall monster”; others call him the “green monster.” Hell, some people probably call him “Maurice,” for all I know. I have my own name for him: “evil green face.” But learn from my example: naming him gives you no mastery over him . . . or over your fear.

The game was called Venture, produced by Exidy and released on the Atari 2600 (among other systems) back when game controllers looked like calculators. Long before Nintendo “created” Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario Bros. 2 and its resident tormentor, Phanto.

Now, by putting quotes around “created,” I’m not saying Nintendo stole this Phanto idea from a crappy Atari game. Allow me to postulate a fictional true story that maybe one day, they were making Doki Doki Panic, and someone, say, Shigeru Miyamoto, says, “You know, when I was a kid, I played a game called Venture, where you grabbed some treasure, and then this evil face would chase you down until you died. And I’m going to steal that face for this game. And I don’t even care if people know I stole it. I yam what I yam.”

And then the imperialist Hiroshi Yamauchi likely said, “Yeah, do it! Steal from those patak!”

And then the enfant terrible, Gunpei Yokoi, who would later be secretly murdered by a Nintendo hit squad for his role in creating the monumental failure, the Virtual Boy console, his death faked as a car accident, probably said, “Haha, man I like to steal things like this from other games and not give credit to the yo-yos who created it.” And then one day, he was dead.

But I digress.

Venture had a main screen with four rooms you could enter. In the main screen, your character was a pixel. For those of you who were born during the Taft administration, a pixel is a small colored square.

Today, we have these silly newfangled words for it like “pixel” and “avatar,” but back in the Reagan years, we just called it a “dot.”

When you went into one of the four rooms, you turned into a smiley face. Now back when I was a sproutling, we called such things a smiley face, but only recently did I learn that the game makers gave him a name, Winkey (sometimes Sir Winkey), and you were obliged by the instruction booklet and/or box art to believe that Winkey was a big muscle-bound clod who shot monsters with a bow and arrow. I didn’t have the game box that showed this picture, so I was blissfully ignorant and untainted by this evil fruit of knowledge.

There’s a lovely phrase about how sometimes things are better if you don’t know so much. I think it goes, “You’re a beautiful retard.”

Can that “noo-nee-noo-nee” background noise even be called “music”? Good gravy. And if he’s supposed to be packing a bow and arrow, why does it sound like a laser?

Anyhoo, if I were the marketing people at Atari or Coleco or whatever, I wouldn’t tell people that you would be controlling a muscular jungle guy with a bow and arrow. That’s just misleading. I’d tell people, “You is controlling a face with a dongle on it that shoots balls.”

And that’s how Faceball 2000 was born. It’s criminal, really, how you people steal.

So first there’s a room with skeletons, and you have to fight past them to grab some blue boxes. Then a room where you shoot snakes and snag a big grape. Then a room with several copies of the robot from Forbidden Planet who are guarding the Lion King’s head. Finally, a room with moving walls that protect the Cullinan Diamond. I guess that’s where Ocean’s Eleven came from.

After you beat these four rooms, there are four more rooms of masochism . . . and terror . . . to go.

But really, you would never beat more than one or two rooms because after your first encounter with “evil green face,” you will wish you were a blind deaf-mute, with all your senses fallen away.

If you linger too long in any of the rooms, he comes for you. If you stop to caress the Lion King’s head, he comes for you. If you shoot one of the skeletons and its corpse blocks the exit from the room, he comes for you . . . and kills you.

Yes, “evil green face” was scarier than Phanto. He came first, and he also had something Phanto didn’t: he was accompanied by the most horrifying and sickening staticky noise since the tipped-over television from Poltergeist.

When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare about being chased by a cactus man on the street where I lived. It was a Halloween type night, but without the candy, and the cactus man wasn’t wearing a costume. He was the costume. That’s kind of what “evil green face” was like, except real.

If you met “evil green face” in a dark alley in Tijuana, you’d say, “Please, I have so much to live for.” And he’d say to you, “I’ll eat you until you die.”

Remember that part in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox has just finished playing “Johnny B. Goode,” and the room full of befuddled 40-year-old high schoolers is staring at him, and he says, “I guess you guys aren't ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it”? I hope nobody at Atari ever looked parents in the eye and said that about Venture.

What in the name of Peter Mayhew is going on here?:

It’s like a documentary, a video game review, and an experiential psychological experiment all rolled into one unholy enchilada. I like the intermission where he goes to set up his Atari 2600. Notice that after he starts playing the game, the video turns into The Blair Witch Project.

My God, that is so sad. That numbnuts never had a chance. He didn’t even know he was dead!

Venture, why do you make children cry?

The Greatest Show on Earth

P. T. Barnum uttered the iconic maxim, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or did he? History convincingly says no, if only anyone bothered to check their facts. Huh, isn’t it weird how the false attribution of a phrase about people being suckers has made suckers of us all? (Hmm, is there a word for that?)

So when Britney Spears came to town last month, I couldn’t help but think of Barnum and his bogus saying. If the title and packaging of her latest album, Circus, don’t make the line of descent from Barnum to Britney clear, then surely the stage production of her accompanying concert tour, The Circus Starring Britney Spears, does. Her concert was every bit the spectacle it was meant to be:

Let me first discuss the show, then the compunctions. Britney’s Circus was actually something like a cross between a Cirque du Soleil show and an arena concert. It opened with several genuine circus acts, including a guy who twirled big glowy things above his head, a female acrobat jumping off of and landing back on an elastic beam, and a seriously disturbing legless(!) woman being bounced up and down a trampoline by a strongman:

Oh, there was also a concert wedged in there:

Britney looked shockingly great, and this is coming from someone who never liked the way she looked, even before she went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She sounded . . . well, she sounded like Britney, that is to say, the recorded, reverse osmosis purified Brit, this being an obviously lip-synched show.

Sadly, my favorite Britney song was the one that sounded the worst – “Baby, One More Time,” apparently in a remixed format. It was tediously militaristic, lacking the sparkle and flirtatiousness of the original. They didn’t bother to treat us to my other two favorites, “Oops, I Did It Again” and “(You Drive Me) Crazy.” Alas, alack, etc. New songs dominated the evening. After all, this was The Circus Starring Britney Spears, not the The Circus Starring the Barely Pubescent Sex Object Nostalgia Britney.

The songs were punctuated by the occasional martial arts display, a street dancing interlude (including a brief, obligatory Michael Jackson imitator), and most interestingly, a magic act featuring Britney as the magician’s assistant/victim, in a variation of the “sawing a woman in half” staple, followed by a take on "the transported man":

It was an extravaganza, but in the aftermath of the concert, I wondered to myself: was I a sucker for paying a big head of lettuce to see what was essentially a dancing blond girl lip-synching to a catalog of mediocre songs? I wondered if Britney were the latest in a long line of hucksters, charlatans, and flim-flam artists, a girl after fake Barnum’s own heart.

I’m sure my compunction has more than a little to do with my having to endure the scornful ire of my rock snob acquaintances for having gone to a Britney concert, and on my own dime at that. But if she were at least singing live, the critics might have relented. I guess in my youth, I would have seen this episode in similar terms. You don’t go to a live show to hear pre-recorded music. That’s what CDs (and yes, mp3s, sigh) are for. But as I’ve grown older and gone to more concerts, there’s been a sea change in my views.

I used to think that a concert was the definitive rendering of an artist’s music. An artist who could “bring it” on stage was not just legit, but was sharing his or her music in the most intimate, honest way, naked even. And it was one of a kind because they could never reproduce that exact performance. However, as I saw more and more of my favorite artists on stage, I started to feel that a lot of them sounded a lot better on a recording than they did live. And they weren’t even bad live; they just weren’t quite what I knew them as from the CDs. To be sure, some artists were even better live, but I realized that it wasn’t necessarily because of the music. The best live performers were just that – performers, and they could overcome a bad sound system or shabby acoustics. Passion and charisma made up for the jumbled mess of noise that concerts often became. The greatest concerts inject the feeling of the music into the audience, no matter what the actual aural quality is.

This new paradigm reaches its apotheosis with Britney’s Circus, which carries on Barnum’s spirit of showmanship. At this point in my life, I want to see the spectacle, I want to be blown away. I don’t really care to just see someone strumming a guitar and yodeling into a mic. Hey, her songs aren’t that great anyway, but they generate a manic energy that suits the big top perfectly. And if Britney has to lip-synch so that she’ll have enough energy to dance for two hours, then I say, let the girl dance! I’d rather see her moves anyway.

No, I don’t think I’m a sucker for wanting that, and I don’t mind ruffling some purists’ feathers by saying that a concert can (should?) be about more than just the music. I can listen to the music at home or in my car and be just as happy. John Lennon himself said that he “wasn’t that upset that Elvis never came to England.” He liked listening to the records. I think he was on to something. Whether fake Barnum was onto something, well, that’s another story entirely.

The Summer that wasn’t (and was)

The new Stephen “The Mummy” Sommers-directed G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra movie marked the end of the 2009 summer blockbuster season. And what a summer it wasn’t.

In, oh, about April of this year, my brother suggested to me that we had a lot of big movies to look forward to this summer. We’re talking Star Trek, Terminator, Transformers, even G.I. Joe. The first two would be the returns of two mega-franchises, hopefully to glory. The last two brought the supreme favorite toys of every young boy of the 1980s to the big screen. A big summer, for sure.

Until it wasn’t.

I’m not a movie reviewer, but feel free to gander at the hyperlinks above for comprehensive coverage. Rather, I’ll give my short takes in an attempt to understand why on earth I took for granted that this was a summer for the ages, when in fact, it was a summer for ages 4 to 12. (And yes, I know I skipped one or two of your favorites; what can I say, except that I can’t be bothered to see every movie that gets you panting, and even if I did, it probably wasn’t worth my writing about.) There will probably be SPOILERS henceforth.

I thought Star Trek was a great movie, full of emotion and relevance. The summer started big, maybe setting expectations too high for the rest of the cinema season.

Terminator Salvation was about as painful as self-flagellation. Maybe it was the mishmash of bad influences, from Mad Max to War of the Worlds, and I think I even tasted a dash of Red Dawn in there (Patrick Swayze, rest in peace in your great big road house in the sky). Or maybe it was the fact that the only good thing about the movie, Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright, ended up sacrificing himself (with no logical justification) for the overshadowed and unapproachable Christian Bale’s John Connor at movie’s end.

I could legitimately have expected Terminator to be good. I like Bale, and director McG, unfortunate moniker notwithstanding, did some good work on TV’s The O.C. and my recent favorite show, Chuck, though that in itself should have made me skeptical. He should probably know his place and stick to tales of angsty young males, not somber treatments of tortured middle-aged sci-fi warrior males.

But what the Wreck-gar possessed me to think that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be enjoyable? The 2007 Transformers was a real looker, but it was emotionally stillborn, and though the tone of the teaser trailer for the sequel made it seem like a “darker” movie was in the works (maybe following the brooding example set by The Dark Knight for superhero/comics movies), by the time the movie came out, the promotion clearly marked it as more of the same. And yes, it was brutally awful. Between the obnoxious Lebeoufian schlub-stick and the skull-grinding battle sequences, I felt bludgeoned from both sides.

I cannot be one of these Bruckheimer apologists content with deafening explosions, somebody’s daughter in mortal peril, a helicopter, and a scruffy dog leaping to safety just in the nick of time to dodge a firestorm and/or river of lava. No, no, no. Substance is style, though not all audiences agree with me.

G.I. Joe was far better than it had any right to be, and it salvaged a pretty meager summer for me. It wasn’t the G.I. Joe I remembered from my childhood, lacking the mythology in particular, and substituting its own half-baked origin story. But it was fun and breezy, and it made me want a sequel. In short, it was everything that Transformers wasn’t, even if it didn’t necessarily do right by the original cartoon. Memo to the eighties: Stay just the way you were.

Interspersed in the four months of summer were other gems like Harry Potter, the Johnny Depp and Christian Bale-starring Public Enemies, and Pixar’s Up. All dogs. Am I alone in thinking that the shine is wearing off of Pixar’s “can do no wrong” image? And were it not for the assurance of another Batman sequel, I’d be very worried about Bale becoming the next Russell Crowe, intense actor turned misanthropic nutjob. As far as Harry Potter, I didn’t understand half of what they were saying in the movie, so I just kept playing over and over in my head my own fanciful rendition of Harry as a Dickens novel. (Dumbledore dragged the whelp by his ear, saying, “Harry! Harry Potter! Bring me my dinner, Harry! Heed my words, or it’ll be the stables for you tonight!”)

The summer’s best movie stood far outside the blockbuster paradigm (“no duh, Sherlock” you’re probably thinking, but just stay with me here). (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordon-Levitt and my blue-eyed heaven, Zooey Deschanel, won me over with its charming understanding of that old hand – the “failures of the human heart.” It had moments of flippancy and a few comedic misfires, but throughout, it maintained its focus on the quiet way that love can break your heart.