You Can't Be Nine Again

TELEVISION: Star Wars Holiday Special
Directed by Steve Binder (1978)
IMDB


When I was nine years old, I cared about one thing, only one thing, and (as far as I knew) I cared about it more than any other nine year old in the world did. To save you the math, I'll just tell you... that thing was Star Wars.

Unless you were there, and the right age, you really can't appreciate what it was like. Star Wars was an effing epidemic for us. We walked around thinking Star Wars for years, talking about it, fantasizing about being anything from Luke Skywalker to John Dykstra (special effects wizard on the film), collecting the cards, coveting the toys, resenting the kids we'd heard about who'd seen the movie 96 times. In ways that I'm not going to bother explaining right now, it very probably changed the course of my life -- no exaggeration.

So I was eight when the movie came out, but on November 17, 1978, I was nine years old. That was when CBS aired the Star Wars Holiday Special on TV. This was like a container car full of cocaine derailing in Robert Downey Jr.'s back yard, for us. I couldn't wait. Yet somehow, when the evening came, my parents wouldn't let me watch it. I don't remember the exact reason. It was something like I had to finish my homework first, or I was being punished. No amount of begging, pleading, bargaining or cajoling would get them to back down. I specifically remember my mom telling me "It will be on again."

Of course, if you're a geek, you know that, notoriously, the Star Wars Holiday Special was never aired again, which is why, if you're NOT a geek, you're saying "Star Wars Holiday Special???" Whatever it was I was doing in the dining room (I do think it was homework), I couldn't sit still, I HAD to see the show, I could hear some of it in the other room, and managed to see little bits of it (like the first appearance of Boba Fett) on my trips back to the living room to beg for mercy, but in the end, I pretty much missed it.

Over the years following, I kind of forgot about it. I knew there had been an early appearance of Boba Fett, but the memory was woven of loose threads, like a long-ago dream that gets stitched into real memories, except in reverse. Then one day, thinking about the Boba Fett action figure that you could only get from a mail-in offer (which I could have got, but didn't -- something I'll eventually quit kicking myself for), it triggered the memory, and I asked whoever it was I was with -- John, I think -- "Was there a Star Wars Holiday Special?" Yes, there was, and it was horrible, he told me. He was older than me, though, and he couldn't know the unresolved nine year old within me.

So, more years pass, and then there's the internet. I managed to get a hold of a truly terrible copy of the video, but I had it, and I could finally watch it, even if it was 28 years later.

From this date forth, the yardstick by which I measure terribleness has been changed forever.

How terrible? The central story is built around Chewbacca's family -- that's right, Wookies, who don't speak English -- and their preparations for "Life Day" while they wait and worry about Chewbacca and Han Solo, who have run afoul of some local Imperials on their way home. This central narrative with Chewie's hapless wife Malla, scampish son Lumpy, and face-gumming old father (all of which is just wrong, wrong, WRONG), serves as the framing device for:

* Token cameos from Mark Hammill, Carrie Fisher (who sings the Life Day song in the end), Harrison Ford, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels and R2D2. There's also a brief bit of James Earl Jones' voice over some stock footage from the film.

* Some extremely nelly acrobats in a proto-Cirque de Soliel holographic performance.

* Art Carney as a daffy trader, who evidently got an incredible offer on his comedic timing, because he's entirely out-of-stock of that particular commodity.

* Harvey Korman in THREE agonizing character sketches -- as a four-armed TV chef (female), a malfunctioning android in an instructional video, and as a lovestruck chump who drinks through a hole in the top of his head, pining for Bea Arthur (more on this later).

* Diahann Caroll as the featured act in some kind of psychedelic soft-core erotic music video, drooled over by Chewbacca's father (or is it stepfather?), Itchy. Very creepy.

* Jefferson Starship as a holographic rock band. Very creepy.

* A kind-of-cool cartoon about Han, Luke and Chewie, which is where Boba Fett appears.

* A "Life on Tatooine" documentary that starts with cantina footage from the film, evidently via the cutting room floor, and culminates in a performance by Bea Arthur as the cantina owner, singing a kind of Brechtian dirge called "Goodnight But Not Goodbye" as she kicks all her patrons out, under Imperial curfew.

At times the special is sugar-coated kiddy (or "family") fare, such as you would expect from a holiday special stacked with second tier "stars" of the '70s. At other times, it's like a school play about fascism performed by students who were forced to perform but haven't rehearsed. And there are still other times when I don't know WHAT the hell that was. There's only so much shrugging and going "Eh, it was the '70's..." you can do.

Looking back, I think the nine year old me would have been too jacked up to sleep after watching that. It was MORE Star Wars, which was all I cared about -- nevermind GOOD Star Wars. But watching it now, it was mostly painful, and then funny, and then back to painful. I want to forgive it, but other than the cartoon, there's so little to redeem it.

I no longer have any questions about why George Lucas did his best to keep it from ever seeing the light of day again.


Crosspost Classic!  5.25.2006

Purity Is An Agenda

I was a number of years back that my friend Mike was talking about some narrow-minded twit from the anime message boards he frequented who complained that manga & anime (show-off words for comics and animation produced in Japan) should not intermix with comics & animation styles from the West. Now, of course, this is pure foolishness. The origins of Japanese comics and animation are tied very closely to direct American influences. Comics took off in Japan after World War II as a result of Japanese children being exposed to American comics by servicemen stationed there. The so-called "God of Comics" in Japan, Osamu Tezuka, was primarily influenced by Disney and Fleisher studio cartoons, and one would be hard pressed to find an artist in Japan who wasn't influenced by Tezuka, or at least someone who was. Anyway, long rant made short, the idea that American and Japanese comics and animation should not influence each other is so asinine that I'm kind of embarrassed to have validated it this much by even addressing it seriously.

What I'm actually writing about is the kind of though behind such wrong-minded assertions. Like I said, this originally came up a couple years ago, and it's been on my mind intermittently ever since then, and the conclusion I've come to is...


Purity is an agenda.

More specifically, attempts -- almost ANY attempt -- to keep something "pure" denotes the presence of an agenda -- almost always -- to impose control. It is my further contention that reference to purity should be met with caution and/or mistrust, and that purity itself is, in fact, a wrong thing.

Let us take the anime example. Now there are few people on planet Earth more xenophobic than the Japanese (but hang on, because I'll get around to the ones who are), but without the external cultural influence of American comics and cartoons, there very well might not even BE such a thriving and ubiquitous manga and anime industry in Japan, or, at the very least, not one we would recognize.

The flipside of that coin is that, after the comics crash of the mid-90s (following the glut of trash in the early-90s) both Japanese-influenced American artists, and Japanese comics translated into English, were a large part of keeping the floundering industry afloat. In the case of manga, comics gained a strong female following, which had long eluded "pure" (i.e. superhero) American approaches to comics.

So what does it profit the aficionado to rail against the inevitable winds of change, hoping to keep his beloved artform "pure" and self-replicating? Well, for one, it allows the most fannish of fans to keep the bounds of their chosen medium finite. If new works can only be created following strict limitations, then the fan can enjoy the certainty that he knows the precise limits and definition of the medium. He knows exactly where it begins and ends, and in so doing, can feel empowered by the knowledge, in control of it, utterly possessing the object of his affection. Furthermore, he wants this art to remain exactly as he has known it to be when he first encountered it. By attempting to hold this item in the past, in the place he once loved it, he is trying to hold himself in the past, denying himself the opportunity to grow and evolve alongside the particular medium in question. If he allows himself to grow as the medium grows and takes on new influences and discovers new things to say, his own view might be opened up, and he might grow away from this comforting relationship, in time. This is Life, and the purist fears its uncertainty.

The loss of purity spawns the seeds of Progress.

If that sounds vaguely sexual, then perhaps I'm being too vague. The intermingling of energies is the stuff of Life. Much as we humans wouldn't exist if our biological parents hadn't lost their "purity," cultures wouldn't grow and thrive without soiling the sheets of the creative norms.

We wouldn't have rock and roll if someone hadn't muddied the purity of blues and country music. We wouldn't have had country music in the first place, if someone hadn't violated the virtue of pure Irish fiddle music at some point. I'm no musical historian, but I know that we wouldn't have most (if not all) of what we have today, and what we'll have tomorrow, if someone hadn't mucked up the moons-old tradition of banging two rocks together by introducing the hollow log to the mix. Take your favorite medium and apply this principle as appropriate.

So far, I've mostly talked about art, but I believe that it applies to purity in virtually all areas of life. Purity sounds like a good and respectable thing, but it still means somebody is trying to maintain control. Of course, one of the most obvious and notorious "purity" agendas is racial/cultural/religious. Many of the same control motives apply here. By keeping races/cultures/religions anchored in the simple form that the individual first digested it as a child, the individual doesn't have to grow or confront challenging and uncomfortable questions. Further, it allows those who hold the reigns of that institution to continue to exert their primacy over those who would allow themselves to consider questions of the finer points. This would be the George W. Bush approach; the facts don't matter, as long as you commit to an unwavering decision. Ironically, we know scientifically that the merging of genetic strains provides an opportunity to make the species stronger.

And finally, of course, there's the sexual purity agenda, which is enforced by the religious agenda, although it actually cuts across cultural lines. The heightened value placed on virginity -- and of course this means female virginity in particular -- is part and parcel of male domination of women. Whether it's maintaining the "precious maidenhead" until marriage, to know that no one else has been breeding your prize heifer, or the premium paid for virgins in brothels, demonstrated in its most ritualized form in the mizuage ceremony for the auctioning off of an oiran's (the courtesan precursors to the geisha) virginity to the highest (and hopefully most socially advantageous) bidder. Transculturally, there is no premium placed on male virginity (BELIEVE ME -- am I RIGHT, fellas?), and male status is improved by planting his seed in any field that hasn't been guarded against him. Women, however, aren't expected to enjoy sex or have any basis for comparison beyond the man she "loves, honors and obeys." This topic has been considered more thoroughly by finer minds than mine, so I'm just going to leave it at that.

Life is impure. I know we'd all like it to be a little more simple, but that doesn't mean we should be simple-minded and unwilling to grow in ourselves and our appreciation for the wondrous variety in the universe.


Crosspost Classic! 8.22.2007

Ain't No Party Like a Lemmon Party

FILM:

The Apartment - 1960

Written by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond

Directed by Billy Wilder

If you're anything like me (and God help you if you are), then you grew up familiar with Jack Lemmon as a primarily dramatic actor who slummed it in the "Grumpy Old" movies, and only occasionally remembered that he was Felix Ungar before Tony Randall. If you've made some effort, you'll also know Some Like It Hot. So it's been with no small amount of wonder and delight that I've been "discovering" more of his comedy work from the 60s recently. How To Murder Your Wife and Irma La Douce were among my favorite films viewed last year, and sometime down the road I'll tell you more of the why to that, but Lemmon was a key ingredient in both those pies. In the early-to-mid 60s, he could have walked away with the title "The Next Jerry Lewis." As Lewis' work was becoming more bitter and unkind (see: Hook, Line & Sinker -- or rather don't), Lemmon embodied a similar nebbishy, loosey-goosey enthusiasm and sweetness that Lewis had choked with sour grapes and pickled in scotch. Lemmon seems to have made a conscious effort to keep betting big on himself and his chops, to great success. The Apartment gives him plenty of opportunities to play with a range of emotions, writ both large and small.

Lemmon plays C.C.Baxter, a corporate cog with dreams of ambition. There are two significant locales in the film, and the one that's not the titular apartment is Consolidated Life of New York; an insurance corporation as soulless and impersonal as its acres of cold, sterile office spaces. Baxter is a minnow trying to swim with the sharks, but it's not his head for numbers that has made him popular with various department heads, but his callow willingness to let them use his apartment for liaisons their mistresses. Their casual disregard for him often keeps him waiting in the cold just to go home to his own place, which they have ransacked of booze and cheese crackers. Meanwhile, his landlady and her husband believe him to be an impossible lothario, owing to the ruckuses made by his self-serving bosses.

As shiny, austere and angular as the office is, his apartment is textural, cluttered and curvilinear -- a womb against an uncaring world which he allows to be violated by the same men who make the outside world so uncaring in the first place. Ralph Waldo Emerson said "I find that Americans have no passions, they have appetites." These are those Americans.

Baxter is interested in Miss Kubelik, an elevator operator at Consolidated Life of New York (an interesting name, given the closed atmosphere in which all aspects of one's life are pursued, and upon which all aspects appear dependent). Shirley MacLaine endows her with that jaded hope that no one else could do quite the same. She knows better, but she keeps following her heart into danger. The danger in this case is Mr. Sheldrake, one of the top corporate brass with whom she's had and off-and-on affair. It being "on" again, Sheldrake (played by Fred MacMurray with Romneyesque white-washed sleaze) takes an interest in Baxter, or more specifically, his apartment. The quid pro quo is that Baxter gets his own office while Sheldrake gets a key to the apartment. Baxter, unaware of the identity of the young lady in question, is filled with the confidence of a rising corporate raider, while his flirtations with Miss Kubelik seem to stall-out on the runway, owing to her renewed relations with their mutual employer.

After Sheldrake's secretary (and formerly featured flavor-of-the-year) Miss Olsen boozily sheds some light on his modus operandi during the company Christmas party, Miss Kubelik heads to the apartment to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. Meanwhile, Baxter, finally giving up on Kubelik, is about to "get lucky" with the floozy-ish wife of a jockey currently detained by Castro in Cuba. She fits the mold of all the corporately approved mistresses -- blonde, blowsy, and unburdened with an overabundance of brains. They all seemed to speak in that "yeah-yeah, sure-sure" Harley Quinn-y Brooklyn movie accent.

That's where things start happening very quickly. The get to his apartment. He discovers Miss Kubelik unconscious in his bed. He has to get rid of his date, roust the landlady's husband, Dr. Dreyfus to pump Miss Kubelik's stomach (later echoed in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous), keep Miss Kubelik awake long enough to be sure she won't die and chase off an amorous executive who did well at the Christmas party. All of these things are themselves made up of smaller comedy bits. It's kind of an atom smasher for "bits," all swirling together -- all the while never denying that it's still an attempted suicide scene. Though the scene is roughly in the middle of the film, it could easily be considered the climax in the story arc, with all previous scenes leading up to it and all following scenes being an untangling and categorization of the messes they've all made.

I'd like to avoid giving away endings as much as possible, so I'm going to leave off there, plot-wise. The Apartment is an unexpectedly adult comedy. I was going to say "for its time," but thinking about it, it's more mature than comedies in our time -- not just in its dealings with suicide, infidelity, and class warfare (well, we don't call it that when it's just the rich waging it), but in the emotional complexity of two people finding the nerve to really love honestly. There is a lot more going on here than the words they say. So much of the complexity is never spoken of, but shared via a continuum of emotional subtexts. Lemmon is harried and hopeful. He's aware of his struggle to become UNaware of the ways that he debases himself to climb, and finds the top to be the lowest place of all. MacLaine's eyes twinkle from within her dense canopy of eyelashes, that pursed smirk that says "Show me something, bud -- no, really, SHOW me something, please."

At Long Last Love

FILM:
Woman of the Year - 1942
Written by Ring Lardner Jr. & Michael Kanin
Directed by George Stevens


Now, me, I never had much use for prissy, unimaginative women. I've always been more of a Lois Lane/Princess Leia/Veronica Mars kind of man. Naturally that put Katharine Hepburn on my radar, but this is the one where she sinks my battleship. Hepburn's character, Tess Harding may well be the ultimate refinement of that archetype. She's a smart, classy, fast-talkin', wise-crackin', tough-as-nails yet warm-hearted newspaper reporter -- because aren't all the best ones? I had assumed that Tess was the proto-Lois, but a little background research sounds like they both owe a debt to the Torchy Blane series from the 30s, and the entire river seems to flow back to Nellie Bly (who, herself, is legitimately fascinating). Regardless, it wasn't long before I was completely in love with Tess. Which works out well, because Spencer Tracy's character, Sam falls just as hard.

As writers for the same newspaper, on very different beats, they begin at loggerheads. Sam is something of an uncomplicated hump, a sports reporter who is completely at home in his world, with very little interest in shaking anything up -- the everyman. Tess is dynamic, almost a caricature of an FDR Liberal but not derisively so. She falls somewhere on the activity scale between "activist" and "activities freak" with a finger on the pulse of every issue of the era. A flip remark in an interview leads to a war of words in the press as the two debate the merits of baseball. This culminates in an educational field trip to a Yankee game (and an hilarious bit of schtick with a large hat). Naturally, Tess falls in love with baseball, and Sam falls in love with Tess.

Their romance is problematic. Though they both recognize early on that they are headed for Big Love, Sam is often frustrated. He just wants to be with Tess, but Tess lives at the center of a tornado of activities, demands, causes and hangers-on (later abbreviated into her disapproving personal secretary played by Reginald Owen). After a few confusing and/or disappointing get-togethers, Sam (with the encouragement of her uncle) decides to cut-out the time-wasting period of acquaintance and cut straight to the matrimony.

It's not long, however, before the go-go lifestyle of the modern woman gets in the way of wedded bliss. Their honeymoon is crashed by a political refugee and his supporters -- a fire upon which Sam throws more fuel by inviting his buddies from the bar, after having just told them not to expect him. Once Sam explains to an old girlfriend that they JUST got married, word of mouth spreads and both groups excuse themselves with wide-eyed knowing looks. This highlights one of Tess' main flaws; she's just a girl that cain't say no, even if "no" would be a perfectly acceptable answer.

The demands on Tess continue to ratchet up. She's more and more engaged in the cause of Italian refugees, and Sam feels more and more sidelined. This highlights Sam's main flaw; he's a bit of a baby. This part of the story feels very much like The Love Parade (Lubitsch; Chevalier/MacDonald, 1929), with the mas masculino male feeling/acting like a pouty little boy because his strong wife is gettin' it done. I appreciate that this is a very realistic reaction for a lot of men in their times (and sadly, ours), but I have little-to-no respect for that. Fortunately, Sam manages it a little better than Count Renard. Tess, less fortunately, handles it fairly poorly.

What Sam takes to be a discussion of having children turns out to be the very sudden introduction of their new son, an Italian refugee Tess could not refuse. She tells Sam and herself that she believes the child is what their marriage needs to hold them together, but it has far more to do with her own weakness. She can't say no. She tends to want to solve every problem on her own rather than engage Sam on a vulnerable level. Tess herself seems to have come from a fairly WASP-y, Ivy League family where children were often left to the care of household staff, thus assumes that she will be able to do the same after no consultation with her spouse. Granted, the little boy is also one adorable bambino.

Farm-raised Sam has a problem with this, and it will eventually be the element that drives them apart. It was one thing to neglect him -- he's a man, and though hurt, he can take it -- but to throw a child into that world just isn't fair or right. This was my least favorite wrinkle in the movie, because even while scolding Tess, the filmmakers themselves were fairly callous about the way they used the child as a plot device to come and go as needed.

I suppose most of the things that I find somewhat bothersome (mostly in retrospect) can be explained by historical context. In the end, Tess tries -- and fails disastrously -- to become the "perfect wife" that she thinks Sam wants. Of course, if that's what he'd wanted, he never would have married Tess, and finally says so.

Then he immediately treats her as an invalid, because how else is an already-married couple going to round out a 40s romantic comedy other than "expecting?"

The thing I loved about the film -- indeed the predominant thing TO love -- is Hepburn's embodiment of Tess. Tracy stands back and lets her light up every scene with her fire. There's lots of great verbal, physical and situational humor here, but it would all matter far less without her seductive energy.

AFTERWORD: I must admit that, while familiar, George Stevens wasn't a household name for me. It is now. Stevens, if you're equally as unaware as I was, directed Gunga Din, Swing Time, Shane, Giant and The Greatest Story Ever Told (you know, because he was humble) among others in his 30+ year career in feature films. Ring Lardner Jr. was one of the Hollywood Ten; writers and directors who defied the HUAC on the basis of the First Amendment, and thus he was jailed and blacklisted. Much of his work remains officially uncredited, including Laura and episodes of the 50s Robin Hood TV series, but his greatest triumph (and vindication) would have to be the screenplay for M*A*S*H as well as uncredited contributions to the TV series. He won Oscars for both Woman of the Year and M*A*S*H, and is rumored to have won another one using a borrowed name.

Everybody's Got a Hungary Heart

FILM:
The Shop Around the Corner - 1940
Written by Samson Raphaelson (see link for other credits)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch


The Shop Around The Corner is best known nowadays as the movie that "You've Got Mail" was based on.

HEY WAIT, COME BACK! It's really okay!

While "Mail" has become a modern milestone for exceptional achievements in the saccharine arts, its predecessor delivers the genuine sweetness of vine-ripened fruit. The cast is rich and delicious with endearing performances from a cast that knows when to hurry up, when to slow down, and how to share the feeling of love among the family of employees at Matuschek & Co.

Jimmy Stewart is the head clerk at Matuschek & Co., a variety store in Budapest. He's Jimmy Stewart -- what more do you want? Mr. Matuschek, the store owner, is played by Frank Morgan (who you'll know as the Wizard of Oz) in the really show-stealing performance of the movie. Morgan must be at times arrogant, bumbling, suspicious, delighted, self-conscious, affectionate, furious, brokenhearted, magnanimous and suicidal, and he accomplishes all with such tenderness that you can even feel for him when he's airing the grievances of the capitalist.

There's no big-store-little-store plot thread here. Stewart's unlikely/obvious love interest is Margaret Sullavan, a street-smart gal in search of a job and a better class'a fella. The store owner hires her when she manages to flummox the infuriatingly in-charge Stewart. She's suitably sassy, daffy, snotty and adorable. Naturally she and Stewart get along like peas and catheters.

Other charmers in the cast are the sweetly downtrodden Pitrovich played by Felix Bressart, William Tracy as the delivery boy Pepi who becomes an overnight captain of industry when finally offered the chance to take his first step up the corporate ladder, and even Joseph Schildkraut was engaging as the obsequious proto-douche Vadas.

The character relations within the store define the narrative arc here. While the romance weaves in and out with increasing frequency, it's really the activities in the store, particularly the dynamic between Stewart and Morgan that give the story its momentum and heart.

I've Been All the Way to Vorkuta... But I've Never Been to Me

GAME:
Call of Duty: Black Ops - 2010
Studio: Treyarch
Publisher: Activision
First-Person Shooter (2010)

The Call of Duty franchise has become the 500 lb. gorilla of the video game industry, and most of this is due to some very good choices, as well as a not-terribly-imaginative gaming public. Right off the bat, I'm going to admit that I avoided the series for years because I'm just not that interested in the real-world military, but finally, when I found a used copy of COD4:Modern Warfare, I decided to see what all the hubbub was about, gameplaywise. I have very little interest in spending time online getting screamed at by racist 13 year olds, so I was coming at this from an angle of a pure single player experience. I was, quite despite myself, bowled over by the well-balanced combination of excellent choices made by the game's studio, which in the case of the Modern Warfare iterations of the series, was Infinity Ward. Every choice is designed to keep the game dramatic, highly stimulating, easily digestible, and most of all; at all times FUN. Everything that the Modern Warfare games are, Black Ops is even more so.

Black Ops is an intensely ridiculous game, and I love it for that. All the machismo that Duke Nukem Forever wished it had, was here all along. The series has always loved its "Bro Moments" -- the lingering gun-tosses and manly hand-holding rescues -- but Black Ops is Bro-ier than fraternity of soldiers bare-knuckle brawling, which is pretty much describes every character in the game, come to think of it. It's positively Bro-Mosexual.

For example, one scene in particular trumps virtually all other Bro-Moments -- not just in the series, but it gives Michael Bay a run for his money. Both MW1 and MW2 have the hand clutching rescues, but in Black Ops, one intensely dramatic scene (MID-LEVEL, mind you!) has THREE men in a chain of white-knuckle rescue, hanging high above Kowloon streets, on TOP of which, one man is shot through the head, mid-rescue resulting in a Slow-mo Triple Bro "Nooo-o-o-o" Mo. It was SO dramatic, I had to pause the game for laughing. Don't get me wrong -- this is what makes the game so bloody awesome.

How else is it awesome? You get to kill EV-ER-Y BO-DY. If the United States of America has killed them, YOU will probably get to kill them here. Cubans, Russians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Germans & British -- all jump out for you to mow down as the CIA operatives and Russian soldier players will steer through the conflicts of the 20th Century. Oh yeah... AND zombies, in a separate mode. It's a masterpiece of gratuitous excess.

Yes, if you have a conscience, murdering the rainbow can be disturbing -- but that's not what you came here for. From a gaming perspective, it's nice to have a little more variety of targets than the primarily middle eastern palette of the MW games and the entire Bavarian population killed off in the series' previously WWII-centric titles. What this also means, however, is that the levels are the most widely varied in the series -- and scores highly against the FPS genre in that regard. Levels range from the Arctic to the jungles of SE Asia, wild to urban, exploding battlefields to tight rat holes, flat to hilly to outright vertical, engaged in stealth ops with a single partner to a mass prison break from a Soviet gulag. It has the kind of spirit of adventure more commonly seen in pure fantasy.

As such, there's always another new twist on the gameplay in service to narrative. Mostly, these are great at adding a new layer of experience, and I loved them. Unfortunately, there are a few places where the variations are implemented badly, the net effect of which yanks you hard OUT of the experience rather than tugging you deeper into it. One example of this is a level in a Vietnamese river where the player character and his partner swim under some boats to pull a stealth attack on a group of VC. The on-screen directions tell you to do this, but they don't tell you HOW you're supposed to achieve it unless you're in just the right spot, and the game's radar does not direct you to the correct spot. This resulted in several very confused and frustrated deaths for me before ultimately turning to the internet for answers. That really interrupted the experience for me, as well as a clumsy run-and-jump moment hampered by controls with priorities other than run-and-jumping and a few other lesser distractions. These aggravations are ultimately mitigated by all that DOES work. The swift boat level alone makes up for the swimming glitch. Yes, they ponied up for the Rolling Stones.

One of the things that the Duty franchise is most known for is its use of heavy "scripting" in levels -- progress-triggered events from the release of the next wave of enemies, to lines of dialog, cutscenes, explosions, helicopter crashes, and so on. Now me, I mostly love 'em. A lot of gamers don't because they interrupt the action, and siding briefly with them, the levels DO tend to include a lot of unskippable scenes, which is an unfortunate choice for a series that so consistently makes fast, fun choices.

Despite the numerous references back to previous entries in the franchise, and the passing mention of Duke Nukem, the game that Black Ops REALLY reminds me of is the original GoldenEye 007 for N64. There's an uncanny similarity -- snow, jungle, rappelling into a Russian installation, not-terribly-clever enemies, distinct levels that don't drag on forever...

At the end of the day, no, Black Ops isn't the hardest game, and that gains it a lot of scorn from the boy-men who want to keep the rest of us out of their club, but in terms of just plain having fun, that's exactly the way I like it. It's a speedball mixed from pure Bolivian Michael Bay and uncut Afghan Paul Greengrass, wrapped in bacon and fired up your ass with a roman candle to the beat of "Like A Rock." It's intensely dramatic, or maybe dramatically intense, yet impossible to take seriously except when it breaks. The story is the best in the series, which isn't saying much, and the always good story-TELLING (game narrative) is the best its been -- aided in no small part by the best defined and best expressed characters yet. Call of Duty: Black Ops isn't so much a game you PLAY, as much as it overwhelms you in a manly fashion -- and like most "manly fashion," it can be thoroughly silly to behold.

Wonder Strikes Twice

BOOK:
"Wonderstruck"
Brian Selznick
Scholastic Press, 2011
http://www.wonderstruckthebook.com/


Selznick is the author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the adaptation of which, "Hugo" is in theaters as of this writing. Wonderstruck uses the same "novel in words and pictures" format as Cabret, but employs it in a much more calculated way. Where Cabret flowed back and forth between text and picture pages within a single narrative, Wonderstruck uses them to tell analogous narratives about a boy named Ben in Gunflint Lake, Wisconsin in 1977 (words) and a girl named Rose in 1927 (pictures).

Both Ben and Rose travel alone to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in search of lost parents, which ultimately represent searches for themselves. Selznick used the images in Cabret to make the action more immediate and to capture the reader in frozen moments of wordless wonder, where Wondestruck (title notwithstanding) uses the pictures to separate the narratives as well as adding a deeper layer of shared experience to Rose's tale. I don't want to over-explain that because I'd rather have it open up to you slowly as a reader.

Much as Cabret used a love letter approach to early film history as catalyst for a quest tale, Wonderstruck wraps itself deeply in a merged museophilia/bibliophilia like an heirloom comforter. It's a very learning-positive air, and one that parents aiming to instill such attitudes in their children will appreciate for its tasteful, authentic approach. Don't get the idea it's a drily intellectual work, however. The book is filled with emotional highs and lows, creating unique experiences for the reader to share. Many of the same themes resonate through both books, but Wonderstruck may well be the better crafted narrative. Such choices are pointless, however, as both books and the film are all top-drawer additions to the narrative arts.

"Best" of "2011"

The "best" of everything I read, saw, heard or played in 2011, regardless of its year of origin...

Books:

Wonder Struck by Brian Selznick (2011)
Fat Vampire by Adam Rex (2010)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 2: Kingdom on the Waves by M.T. Anderson (2008)


Comics:

Habibi by Craig Thompson (2011)


Film:

Hugo, directed by Martin Scorcese (2011)


Films on Video:

Near Enough:
Cedar Rapids, directed by Miguel Arteta (2011)
Love and Other Drugs, directed by Edward Zwick (2010)
The King's Speech, directed by Tom Hopper (2010)
Tucker & Dale Versus Evil, directed by Eli Craig (2010)

Dipping Back a Bit:
Sullivan's Travels, directed by Preston Sturges (1941)
Singin' in the Rain, directed by Stanley Donen (1952)
Remember the Night, directed by Mitchell Leisen (1940)
Topper, directed by Norman Z. McLeod (1939)
Irma la Douce, directed by Billy Wilder (1963)
My Man Godfrey, directed by Gregory la Cava (1936)
Ninotchka, direct by Ernst Lubitsch (1939)
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, directed by Irving Reis (1947)
The Lady Eve, directed by Preston Sturges (1941)
The Great Dictator, Directed by Charles Chaplin (1940)
Trouble in Paradise; directed by Ernst Lubitsch (1932)
How To Murder Your Wife, directed by Richard Quine (1965)


Television:

The only thing I HAVE to watch in a week is Community, but I have to give credit to Parks & Recreation for a REALLY good season so far.


Music:

Too little new stuff I've wanted to hear and too much good old stuff to choose either way. Dennis Coffey had a good one and I really enjoyed the Wake Up! RADIO remix of John Legend & The Roots' album from the previous year. The Roots' own Undun is pretty fantastic, and I really enjoyed following Madlib's Medicine Show releases.


Games:

LA Noire
Fallout: New Vegas
Call of Duty: Black Ops

the entire Nintendo DSi XL experience


Movement:

Occupy

I have never seen a movie with Cary Grant that I less-than-loved him in.

UPDATE: I really disliked That Touch of Mink all over, and felt he phoned it in.