It's My Life - in Music

It's been 5.5 years since the last time I did a movie soundtrack for my life, so I think we're due. As always, open your music library and set it to shuffle. The first song plays during the first scene on the list in the movie, second song during the second scene, and so on. I've added a lot of music to the collection since then, though I don't think much of it made it in.

Opening Credits: "A Lesson Learned," Limp Bizkit - As usual, not off to an encouraging start. While this is a much quieter song than you might expect, given the band, it's Fred Durst singing about how things haven't turned out the way he expected, becoming a big-time music star, and it doesn't feel great. He got swept up in all of it, hurt some people, and he's figured it out too late. The last line: 'Fortune and fame are disguised as your friends, but I'm lonelier now than. . .I've. . .ever been.'

On the plus side, hopefully this means I at least get a fortune! I can take or leave the fame.

Waking Up: "She loves you," The Beatles - That's some tonal whiplash right there. Also, kind of an odd song to wake up to. I guess if these scenes aren't necessarily in this order, it can work. I wake up, and to my surprise, the one I love hasn't moved out. Or she moved back in. I thought she was done with me (or was I done with her?) But no, she hasn't given up on us.

Although, I could go a darker route with that, if I was trying to get her to go away. The song does say, 'and you know you should be glad,' which, little ominous. Maybe this is an unhappy marriage and I want to divorce and get with my secretary. I will not allow Movie Calvin to be a philanderer, so he's got to do this properly if he's going to shack up with a much younger girl in a futile attempt to stave off the cold fingers of Death. 

First Day of School: "Joker," Requiem - This is from Alex's first album, The Electronomicon EP. Give a listen here! That's Jim Mahfood art in the background, too!

As to how it relates to my first day at school, hmmmmm. I could play the first 35 seconds, where it's building, over the trip to school. All the other kids on the bus are excited, but I'm feeling increasingly antsy, unsure what I'm getting into. After that, maybe a sped-up montage where certain things come into sharp focus for an instant, before receding into the blur.

Are the things that snap into focus good or bad? Eh, we'll play that by ear. Maybe I'm excited for coloring, or I don't line up properly for the slow march to the cafeteria and get yelled at. Maybe I make some friends, or I rip my pants messing around on the monkey bars.  

Falling in Love: "Come Over," Estelle - Estelle's singing to her lover to encourage them to go further with the relationship. While she's willing to give a lot, she's also willing to be patient, and accept if they can't give her as much.

So, who's who in this scenario? If I'm the one falling in love, then I should be the one making that sort of offer. I'll give myself to them, and it's OK if they can't give as freely. Anything they offer is enough. Of course, if we go with the darker interpretation of "She loves you," then I fell in love with this person because they give so much for so little in return, and later broke up with them (or tried) when I got bored/found someone else.

Simply for the sake of not being an ass, I prefer Option 1. Also, I think it fits better with "A Lesson Learned," where I'll eventually learn I can't continue in such a relationship, letting people use me, because it leaves me feeling sick and empty.

First Love Song: "Tigerlily," La Roux - A song about two people trying to have a forbidden relationship. They're trying to hide the attraction and desire, stick to shadows, fearful of discovery, questioning whether it's better to go along with what everyone wants, in exchange for being able to live a less stressful life.

Following Option 1 from the previous song, I'm reading it as my lover doesn't give as much because they're afraid to. For whatever reason, I'm not an acceptable romantic partner. Am I the, gasp, mistress in this scenario? I'm the one being strung along with promises that one day we'll be together openly. Just, not today. How awful. I never thought I would end up as Margaret Houlihan to someone's Frank Burns. I better be hella rich to put up with this shitty turn of events.

Breaking Up: "O Green World," Gorillaz - There's not a lot to this. Mostly guys chanting in the background while the lead singer keeps asking the "green world" to not desert him now. So I had it being the other man and broke it off, and my lover is pleading for me not to leave. Saying we complete each other and a lot of blah blah and I ain't having it. I've got my self-respect! *starts checking pockets* Well, I had it a minute ago. . .

Prom: "getcha groove on," Limp Bizkit - The title certainly fits for a dance, and it's a much more up-tempo song than "A lesson learned." However, it's mostly warning people not to mess with them. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, and if you don't like it, well, fuck around and find out.

Which sounds like a perfect lead-in to a break-up. Either that, or one of us tried to get back together at Prom, and the other was not having it. There was probably some, "you need me," insistence, and then my contrary genes kicked in and I said, "just watch me, asshole." Then I dumped an entire bowl of chip dip on their head. The principal was aghast.

I'm actually starting to dig the direction this movie's going. Very dramatic. 

Mental Breakdown: "Just the Way You Are," Billy Joel - And we're back to something soft and slow. Well, if I had a breakdown, I probably need to avoid overstimulation. After my big display at the prom (or some other event), I tried really hard to be a different person. To show I didn't need that jackass. But all I succeeded in doing was putting a lot of pressure on myself to "win" the break-up, or whatever. Eventually, I collapsed under the pressure of doing things I wasn't really enjoying, because I felt like I had to do them.

Now someone, a steadfast friend or maybe the therapist, is insisting none of that is necessary. I don't have to change to not end up with a jackass like Former Lover, or be successful in my career, and I won't make anyone happy trying to do that. I just need to be myself, and find what works for that me. 

Driving: "Crawl," Staind - This feels like it has to take place before the Breakdown, if only because it's such an ugly song about someone confidently asserting they know what I'm like. Plus the part where he talks about crawling while the other person spits. Oh, and can't forget where he screams, 'Everything falls apart, EVE-RY-THIIIIIIIIING!!!!' Definitely doesn't suggest a great mental state.

I suspect this sequence ends with me upside-down in a ditch, or maybe ramming headlong into a bridge support. Trying to prove this person wrong, to not give them the satisfaction of seeing me crawl back to them and their superior attitude, is really fucking with my headspace. Also, I probably got in a lot of trouble for dumping the bowl of dip on their head. I was the sort of student who would absolutely stress about getting in trouble at school.

Flashback: "Tomorrow Comes Today," Gorillaz - Another appropriate title, given the scene. I think this takes place prior to Breaking Up. Or during the Mental Breakdown stretch? That could be a fun shift. 

At some point, I have to replay everything that's happened, trying to figure out where I mis-stepped. What was the mistake? Even though I can't go back and fix it - or can I? - it would still be a very "me" thing to do, to endlessly stew over mistakes. The question is, am I realizing it was a mistake to ever entertain the notion of a relationship with this person, or telling myself the mistake was breaking up with them? Or is it something else? I should have ditched my job a long time ago, because it was making me miserable?

Getting Back Together: "Oh Yeah," Daft Punk - The song is basically an electronic beat with someone occasionally saying, "oh yeah." Not as a question, not as an exclamation, either. Almost like someone reminded them they already saw that new Channing Tatum movie last week. "Oh yeah, I forgot. *laughs sheepishly*"

How does that relate to Getting Back Together? It's not incredulous, like, "holy shit, how am I back with this train wreck of a person?" But also not cause for celebration. It just sorta, happened. Which makes me think the friend who was helping me during the Mental Breakdown and I got together. Maybe we dated at some point, or hell, maybe getting back together just means splitting the rent. We used to be roomies, and I lost my place during the stretch when I lost my mind. No car, no home, probably no job. They're letting me stay with them until I get rolling again, and even once I did, I just stuck around. We like living together, so we keep doing it. We're in a groove, so we're just rolling with it.

Heck, it cuts their bills in half, and I'm not a messy roomie. I don't like cleaning, but I keep my stuff out of everyone's way and don't take up a lot of space in the fridge. You could do a lot worse for a roommate!

Wedding: "Inner Universe," Orgia - I know this as the opening theme to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, although the version I have is 5 minutes long. I don't know what the singer is saying, having never bothered to seek a translation, so I go by what her tone and the music prompt in me. 

And that's a sense of falling. Given the length of the song, it's falling from a very high altitude. Like I jumped from the edge of Earth's atmosphere and now I'm plummeting headfirst at the ground, trying not to burn up. Then, at the very end, I stop like I canceled gravity, my nose just above the ground. (Certain songs, I have extremely particular visuals that accompany them. This is one of them.)

All of which is to say, there's not going to be a wedding. Maybe I almost let Former Lover (or some other dickhead) talk me into it, and I just went along. I didn't fight the pull, either because I didn't see it happening, or just didn't think I could. But at the last second, I'm going to realize this is not some universal constant force, and I can exert control.

On the plus side, abject humiliation for the Former Lover, as I go sprinting out of the chapel like my pants are on fire. Actually, given my aversion to religion, they just might be. I tend to spontaneously combust on holy ground.

Or there's the option where I'm wistfully watching two people get married, thinking it could have been me, if only my lover's family had approved. Then I see how much of a hell my mother-in-law would have been and realize that actually, I dodged a bullet there. 

Birth of Child: "Addicted to Love," Robert Palmer - Having decided I can pull an audible and ditch the wedding, Movie Calvin is not having a child. So, this is my roommate's kid with their romantic partner. I'm there when the kid is born, because I'm a good friend and I don't mind driving them to the hospital so the docs can handle all the messy stuff. And they're so incredibly lovey-dovey with each other as they coo over the baby that it's almost nauseating, but hell, I'm glad to see them happy.

If we're going the personal growth ("lesson learned") route, the couple having the kid are the duo I watched getting married and I realize I'm not only OK with not being married to whichever of them I fancied, I'm happy for the two of them to have found happiness together in the family they've created. 

Final Battle: "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," The Ramones - OK, this is taking place before the kid is born, but after the wedding. Former Lover makes one last play to try and suck me in, but it's with the same bullshit they always spewed. That I couldn't do better, that they knew best, that I wouldn't find anyone else.

But just like Sheena's not being guilted into visiting the discotheque a-go-go with her friends when she wants to rock around in the punk scene, I'm not having any of this crap. Whether I find anyone else is up to me, but I'm sure as hell better off alone than with this jerk. Do I throw something? Do I punch them? Do I dismiss them and walk away, and when they try to chase, they trip and land facefirst in something unpleasant? I'd be fine with that.

Or maybe the final battle is with myself, finally coming to terms with the kind of life I'm going to live versus the expectations everyone had for me. And I kick those expectations' asses! 

Death Scene: "Crimson and Clover" Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - If this is my death scene, I feel like the results of the Final Battle were a lie. I never got over that lover, or never really made peace with not living up to everyone else's expectations. Singing about not really knowing her, but thinking she could love her feels like it's of a piece with Estelle promising to do most of the loving in the relationship. I'm charging in headlong, offering all of me, and if I've bothered to consider whether the other person feels the same, would do the same, I haven't let the possibility the answer is "no" deter me.

Which, does not sound very much like me. Apparently Movie Calvin is much more a person to trust their instincts than Blog Calvin. That's not the worst thing. Maybe I died as the result of an impulsive act to save someone I saw was in danger. I didn't know them, not a thing, but I decided they were worth trying to help. And I died.

The moral is, never try.

Funeral Scene: "One by One," Chumbawumba - This starts with singing about a union leader who visited striking dockworkers, but dismissed their concerns. He had his eyes on a seat in the House of Lords, which I understand to be like the Senate with mandatory drinking, or maybe a frat house for old men with non-functional prostates. Which, to be fair, also describes much of the U.S. Senate.

So, people with the power to do something chose not to, because they stood to gain more by doing nothing. I feel this does not entirely go with Death Scene, certainly not if I died acting impulsively to save someone I barely knew. Unless I acted when others who were better equipped did not. Aw hell, did I run into a school shooting to rescue my friends' kid while the cops sat around with their thumbs up their tactical gear covered asses? Those bastards!

Or, rolling back around to "A lesson learned," there were a lot of people who could have helped me, but didn't. Which suggests maybe I had another mental breakdown, and this time there wasn't anyone close enough to pull me out of the spiral. I decided I could go it alone, but that means when I actually needed someone, there was no one. So maybe I slipped in the shower and busted my skull open. An ignominious end, but one that took place because I lived on my own terms. That doesn't keep my pallbearers from feeling guilt. 

End Credits: "Go Go Gadget Flow," Lupe Fiasco - This feels like the complete reverse of the Opening Credits. Very up-tempo, not necessarily loud, but louder certainly. Lupe telling us he's not done, he's barely begun, you can't stop him, you can't even touch him. 'My tank on full, your tank on "E",' or, 'look good on you, look great on me.'

How the hell do I reconcile that with, well, everything? Not the least of which is that I'm dead, so I most certainly am going to S-T-O-P. It doesn't feel like the kind of movie where you play this as an ironic joke. Unless. . .OK, I got it.

The Former Lover turned vengeful, and arranged my death. I was not the first paramour she did this to, and I won't be the last. The police don't suspect, and even if they did, she's too slick, too clever, too able to out-maneuver them in any number of ways for them to catch her. So the credits roll over a shot of her, looking impeccably dressed, walking away from my funeral, giving her current lover - my roomie? someone else? - a look that can only be considered contemplative, as the audience is left with the notion that they know who is next.

Bird (1988)

In my continuing attempts to, I don't know, understand or appreciate jazz, the Charlie Parker (as played by Forrest Whitaker) biopic directed by Clint Eastwood. Probably futile on my part; I couldn't really discern anything wrong when Buster Franklin (Keith David) was playing nothing but B-flats in the scene where Charlie gets a glimpse of what rock n' roll is going to be like. And there were times I wondered if Charlie was playing off-key notes when he was clearly supposed to be killing it. Tone deaf, I guess.

The movie is set near the end of Charlie's life, starting with his attempted suicide by drinking iodine, with flashbacks to earlier parts of his career throughout. Eastwood doesn't spend much time on Parker's life prior to being a success. The opening shot is Parker as a child, blowing on a whistle as an older sibling tows him on a tricycle. A few shots of him practicing on the porch in the same neighborhood. His first encounter of Buster Franklin, where Charlie doesn't play too well and gets "gonged", and run off the stage.

But mostly it's the steady decline of Charlie Parker's career, set alongside his relationship with and his wife, Chan (Diane Verona.) Their meeting in clubs in New York, arguments, his health problems, his drug problems, the death of their daughter. Perhaps appropriately for a movie about a jazz musician, Chan and Charlie's relationship seems all about the things they don't say. Especially on Chan's end. Verona always seems like she's on the verge of saying something, but never does. And I don't mean something angry or hurtful necessarily. When he leaves the house in the countryside where they're staying to head into town for a possible recording gig, Verona looks like it's on her lips to tell him to be careful, to come back, maybe to not leave at all, because she's afraid he won't come back. But she doesn't. She hugs him while trying not to cry, and he drives off into a very different landscape from what he remembers.

There's a conversation between Chan and a psychiatrist at Bellevue, where Charlie ends up after the iodine drinking incident, where Chan refuses the suggestion of shock therapy because of Charlie's gift. That she isn't willing to sacrifice the musician for a husband. I don't think it's money concerns, so much as the musician is part of what she loves about him. But, again, that isn't said outright.

(Chan Parker gets thanked at the end of the film, I guess for providing a lot of information or acting as consultant, but it does make me wonder how accurate some of this is. Not like Charlie Parker was alive to give his side of things.)

Eastwood keeps Whitaker's face in a circle of light most of the time. When he's on-stage playing, the great musician people want to hear and meet, and when he's at home, having another tense conversation. In contrast, Verona's face is often in shadows, especially during those conversations with Whitaker. Like her life's been eclipsed by his, and so she's trying to keep him together so her life doesn't disintegrate along with him.

Whitaker plays Parker as this guy who is talented and witty and confident, but also so certain he's doomed that it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He's shown a body in the morgue of a guy who used heroin and ultimately died, and told that'll be him, but sooner because he started even younger. And he always seems to come back to that mindset. That his sand is running out, so he tries to push now. Make the folks in California appreciate bebop, make the tour, make the recording, make it now. And when it feels like he's stymied, his frustration boils over and he sinks back into drugs, or alcohol if he's trying to stay off the drugs.

The scene where he learns his daughter died and he spends an entire night, just calling Western Union to send telegrams to Chan, then hanging up, dialing again and ordering another telegram. Even after he's gotten strung out, he keeps making calls, keeps ordering telegrams that are alternately formal, personal, desperate. The part where there's a lady he picked up at a party that evening apparently there watching this the whole time, to the point she's crying at the sight of this guy wrecking himself physically to match how wrecked he is emotionally, gave it an element of the surreal I'm not sure was intended.

Sunday Splash Page #362

"Sea Monkees," in The Monkees #9, by Jose Delbo (artist), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

These wider splash pages are always a pain, but you can click on the image it you want to see it without it being cut off.

Anyway, courtesy of my dad's collection, this is the only issue I have of the 17 the book ran, but I assume it's fairly typical. Three short stories where the band gets involved in hijinks that allow the creative team to do a montage of gags based around one theme or the other. Like the Monkees using all the communication possibilities of the late-1960s to spread the word about a hot dog stand to help its business.

I covered this comic in greater depth in Random Back Issues #44, so you can check that out if you're dying for more info. I compared it to Family Guy, but honestly, the attempts at humor here at least relate to the plot of the stories. It's just the plots are wafer-thin.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)

Daniel Radcliffe plays Weird Al Yankovic in this stirring biography, charting the musical wonder's life from a childhood spent surreptitiously learning the accordion when his overbearing father wasn't around, up to Al's heart-breaking death in a burst of drug war-fueled violence.

As far as parodies of musician biopics go, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is still the standard-bearer. Weird is not at that level. Not quite as sharp, uneven in quality. Not as many memorable lines. Although, 'This seems more like a whiskey and. . .heroin crowd,' has stuck with me so far. I thought it was strongest when leaning into its more absurd notions. Getting weird, so to speak.

The romance with a publicity-hungry Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), which in just 5 hours turns Al into an egotistical, drunken prick who insults his band, his fans, and gets himself arrested for lewd behavior (playing an accordion in public.) The whole thing with Pablo Escobar, or Yankovic coming up with the entirely original song "Eat It," after consuming guac laced with LSD, only to have Michael Jackson make a parody of it. A parody that isn't even about food!

I'm pretty Radcliffe is lip-synching whenever he sings any of Weird Al's songs. Either that or he is doing an incredible impression, albeit the version of "Another Rides the Bus" sounded like someone used auto-tune on it. Badly. Either way, it's fine. Radcliffe definitely captures Yankovic's mannerisms and nasally screech he used when especially aggravated or freaked out in UHF.

The movie is so strongly focused on Weird Al that most of the other characters aren't more than cameos. Talking props, essentially. Wood does fine with what she's got to work with for the movie's version of Madonna. Playing her as alternately distracted or sweet, but always with ulterior motives which are, of course, meant to be entirely obvious to the audience. Rainn Wilson plays a character Al looked up to as a child, who becomes his manager after a live performance. He gets one good bit late in the film, after he opens himself up emotionally, but too late! Al already had an important emotional reconciliation!

The Best and Worst of Last Year's Distractions from Life

Welcome to 2025. Hopefully you spent the last night of 2024 doing something you enjoyed. With that preamble done, let's get to business.

BOOKS

27 books read this year, 15 fiction and 12 non-fiction. Fiction had more misses than non-fiction, which isn't surprising since I tend to get non-fiction that appeals specifically to a particular interest of curiosity, whereas fiction I'm more grabbing whatever catches my eye.

As far as the best fiction, I'd lean towards Black Sun and Fear of the Dark. The former did an excellent job laying out the world and the stakes for the characters specifically and in a larger sense, while still leaving surprises and mysteries for the subsequent books. And Fear of the Dark kept a lot of threads in the air successfully, without ever letting one of them set aside too long. And I liked Paris as a main character. Smart and insightful, but not in a way where he's always 10 steps ahead, and brave when he doesn't have time to think about it.

For worst, Nasty Cutter and Koko. Nasty Cutter didn't so much let certain threads lay fallow too long as it seemed to just forget about them entirely. And yet, a large part of the conclusion was predictable from early on, so there weren't really any effective surprises. Koko was just too padded out, the epilogue was entirely unnecessary, and the attempts to get us into the mind of the killer felt like Straub tried hard, but just didn't work and made me want to skip ahead until he started writing normally again. There were several others I read this year I didn't like, but Basil's War, for example, had the advantage that it maintained its momentum so I could breeze through it, and Interstellar Empire at least had an interesting concept behind it, even if Brummer didn't explore the part I really wanted him to.

OK, non-fiction. The Great Air Race, because I love aviation stuff, and the stories about all the challenges the pilots faced were really interesting to me. And Lancaster focused on the pilots enough, their motivations and backstories, to get me invested in them, even though the race was over a century ago. After that, there are several possible contenders, but I'm going with PrairyErth. There are definitely parts of the book that work better than others for me, but I feel like I can see what Least Heat-Moon was going for, even if I didn't always enjoy it. I like the way he digs into the history of this one specific place, not only what's remembered, but what is either on the verge of being lost, or already lost. How easily things get hidden or covered by time or ignorance.

But Least Heat-Moon is going to pull a rare feat, because I'm putting Blue Highways on my least favorite list. There are places where he lingers long enough to begin that deeper excavation, but most of the time he's skimming the surface of these places as he passes through. Plus, there's an element of wistful longing that I don't enjoy that I think is absent (or less noticeable at least) in PrairyErth. And then Fen, Bog & Swamp just wasn't what I was hoping for. Too much on history, not enough on ecology, and sometime the ecology isn't even about fens, bogs or swamps.

MOVIES

53 movies, albeit the first three I actually watched in 2023, but I reviewed them in '24, so whatever. My main takeaway is, while I've definitely cut down the number of movies I watch where I deeply regret it, there weren't many that I would say I loved. Maybe I'm just too jaded.

Worst is between movies that were never going to be good, and movies I can see the core of something I like that failed to materialize. A Better Way to Die is in the first category, because it was always just a crappy action movie that feels like it arrived 10 years too late for the genre, while Just Before I Go is in the second. But, Just Before I Go probably did what the people involved wanted it to, I just think there was something better in it. Then there's movies like Extract, which didn't cohere into anything. Whatever it wanted to do, I think it failed (I'd throw Stir Crazy into that category as well.)

With all that said, I'm going with Any Gun Can Play and 5th Passenger as the worst movies I watched this year. The latter was a throwback experience to me watching some shitty Netflix movie to have something to post about, which was not the plan when I picked it. Any Gun Can Play irritated me the way it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a straight Italian Western, or parody The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. When it chose parody, it was a shitty parody. Not funny, not even interesting. Just a dull and unpleasant viewing experience all around.

I'm just going to list the contenders for best, and we'll go from there: Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Lighthouse, Spoor, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Quarry, The Duellists, and We're No Angels.

The Lighthouse and Beyond the Black Rainbow are both on here based on their distinct visual choices, although Dafoe and Pattinson put on a real show in The Lighthouse. Both end kind of weirdly, although Beyond the Black Rainbow's abrupt resolution caught me completely off-guard in a way I'm still not sure whether I like the choice or not.

Spoor and The Quarry are both quieter films, where violence is mostly alluded to, but rarely seen on-screen, as the movies focus on either the aftermath, or what fills in peoples' lives around the loss. Spoor has the advantage that it's also a mystery, and I think it does a very good job of setting out clues without being too obvious that's what it's doing, instead making it seem like a view of how a character is perceived by others. You could maybe throw The Duellists in this group as well, as a lot of it is what Keith Carradine's character gets up to when he's not being challenged to duels by Harvey Keitel, and how those duels harm his life, even as they seem to aid his reputation.

Everything Everywhere All at Once had some real fun with the multiverse concept, while also doing a lot with the relationships between parents and children in a way that didn't seem over-simplified or preachy. It also had some good fight scenes, so that helps put it over the top. Spoor is really making a strong push in my mind, but I think it's going to finish 3rd. We're No Angels was just a comedy with a sort of Odd Couple pairing - although it was really 2 Odd Trios - but it got several laughs out of me, and not a lot of comedies this year can say that - Cadillac Man, Extract, and Stir Crazy all largely failed, for example - and that counts for a lot.

MUSIC

I only got 5 CDs last year. The Red Hot Chili Peppers Greatest Hits, Rozalla's Everybody's Free, My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album, and The Best of Miles Davis: The Capitol/Blue Note Years.

I'd probably pick the Miles Davis album as my favorite. I certainly liked it more than Kind of Blue. It doesn't surprise me I prefer a faster-paced jazz, but I know little enough about jazz I just stumble about until I run into what I like. Least favorite was Rozalla's, but that's my fault, because I was expecting a different version of "Everybody's Free." Needed to go into Aquagen's discography instead!

VIDEO GAMES

Worst game was Alekhine's Gun, because I could not get anywhere in it. Not that it was broken, that I could tell, just, I couldn't figure out how the game wanted me to play it to be successful. In terms of games I actually made some sort of progress on, I'd tap Until Dawn. It was fun on the first playthrough, but the jump scare aspect works contrary to the butterfly effect mechanic that encourages replaying it. There's enough overlap you come to expect the scares, at which point they don't work. Plus, I didn't love all the quick-time button press events. I could also make an argument for The Outer Worlds (felt like a watered-down FallOut), or The Last Guardian (looks great, plays not-so-great.)

Favorite games? Metro: Exodus and Indivisible. Metro: Exodus felt like it combined the gameplay improvements from Metro: Last Light I'd enjoyed, with the stronger story and character beats from Metro 2033. Maybe I was just in a more receptive state of mind, but I cared a lot more about the other Spartans than I did in Last Light, so I actually wanted to keep them alive. And taking the story outside the Metro at least allowed for a change in scenery, even if the actual gameplay is much the same.

With Indivisible, I liked the look of the game, I liked the combat, I liked the variety of skills they gave Ajna to navigate all the platforming challenges, even if the platforming itself often wore on my nerves and my patience. Mostly, I liked the characters beats and interactions. As with Metro, the game did a great job making me care about the characters I was working with, by encouraging me to interact with the outside all the fighting and mandatory cut-scenes. And it worked, to the point I wanted to help them with all their side quests (a marked difference from The Outer Worlds, where I was mostly helping my crew because it might lead to something funny, rather than out of any loyalty to them.)

Year-End Entertainment Rundown

It's time for the Annual Excellence in Time-Consumption Awards! Oh, we've got a full ballot and lots of categories, so all victory speeches should refrain from lengthy digressions. Unless they're funny.

BOOKS

Quite a banner year for books, 36 in total, which is more than I've read at least since I started my current job. In a change from recent years, where I've run close to even between fiction and non-fiction, this year was tilted hard towards fiction, 25 books to 11.

A lot of the fiction, to be fair, were "what the hell, why not?" buys, and that's reflected in the fact that a lot of them were not very enjoyable. No shortage of candidates I'd be pleased to assign the label of worst. Still, as much as I might like to stamp the agonizing experience that was Shibumi with that tag, it has to go to Black Hat and The Beast God Forgot to Invent. If even my usual dogged insistence on seeing a book through to the end can't carry the day, then the book must have been lousy.

As far as best, the authors I either had past experience with or directly sought out didn't really come through for me. Mieville's The City & The City, or Marquez' Innocent Erendira weren't either author's strongest work. Fuentes The Death of Artemio Cruz was interesting to read for some of the stylistic flourishes, but I don't know I really liked the book, exactly. Riding the Rap was my first taste of Elmore Leonard, and was no really what I was expecting.

David Handler's The Runaway Man wasn't a bad little detective mystery. The mystery itself is nothing superb, but I enjoyed the style of the writing, so that carries a fair amount of water. Lower expectations playing a part, no doubt. But that seems like the fiction selections in general. Genre stuff executed to various degrees of competency. I really liked Pat Barker's Regeneration, however. Enough I asked for the second book as a Christmas gift (currently sitting second from the top in a stack I haven't yet touched.) I might add John Brummer's Total Eclipse to the list, if I wanted a third book.

With only 11 non-fiction books, it's a much easier field to narrow down. Worst is True Tales of the Prairies and Plains. The information provided is often surface level, the entries to short for any depth, and the writing style is like something from a composition textbook. Very blah. For a second choice, The Cardinals Way, as I knew most of the information already, and the subject matter was already a bit dated at the time of writing, and is only more so now.

As for best, it's a biographical year, apparently. Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back, first and foremost. It's very well-written; straightforward where it needs to be, but clever or funny when the situation calls for it. Nicholas Dawidoff's The Catcher was a Spy does an excellent job trying to tease apart the truth from the fictions Moe Berg threw up around himself, the love of of secrecy combined with the love of attention for his secrecy. And while I prefer Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey's Beyond the Wall contains plenty of his trademark humor, irascibility, and affection for the American Southwest.

MOVIES

49 movies this year. A couple of those I probably watched late in '22, but they got reviewed in '23, so what the hell. Didn't watch as many things at my dad's this year, so fewer movies from before I was born than usual. More recent selections from Amazon or Netflix.

This is always tricky. I may have liked a movie, say Cocaine Bear. But did I like it enough for it to be a favorite, or did it merely exceed low expectations? If a low-scoring direct to Amazon horror movie that I expected very little from was bad, should that make it one of the worst films I saw, or should that go to something I expected better from?

No, Cocaine Bear is not one of my favorite films of the year.

There's a fair amount of stuff that just rolled off me without making an impact. I'd basically forgotten I'll Sleep When I'm Dead until I was scrolling through the reviews, and that was two months ago. Could say the same for The Passage or The Mule. Things where I see the title and a few things flash by, but out of sight, out of mind. Anyway, worst films.

Eden Log felt like it was better suited to be a game, where you could have the fun of guiding your amnesiac character through the challenges, rather than a passive viewing experience. Accident Man was a perfectly forgettable action flick that pissed me off with its conclusion, where the lead character experiences exactly what he's been doing to his victims for years and simply decides to continue doing it in a different town. One False Move felt like it wanted to be about something, but didn't pick a lane and go with it. Troll and The Black Demon were both the low-rated crap that couldn't even exceed my minimal expectations. At least I don't watch as many movies like that as I used to. The Hoodlum Saint's the opposite. I had hopes for it to be good, but it was a frustrating mess that let me down. I don't think it's in any way worse than Troll, but the fact it was bad bothers me more.

I'll go with Accident Man, for that ending, and The Black Demon. Troll at least had some sort of memorable set pieces.

Going the other direction, The Big Steal's one long chase scene, but it has some funny parts to it (mostly involving William Bendix), and some of the driving stunts were impressive, given the era. While all the rules of society were frustrating, watching the characters alternately use or attempt to navigate those rules in The Duelist was more engaging than I thought it would be. Let's Kill Ward's Wife was just funny. Of all the various big budget, big name stuff from the last few years I watched (like the last Bond flick or Bumblebee) the Dungeons and Dragons movie was easily my favorite. 

Waiting for the Barbarians was not a funny movie, or particularly uplifting, depending on how excited the audience was to see the British get slaughtered. But I kind of like how confined the movie is to the garrison, while all these people speak confidently about what they're going to do, or what they know about the nomads in the hills. The reality is not really a surprise, but it's more satisfying. I didn't have high hopes for Black Phone, given Alex's past success in picking horror films, but it turned out to be very tense, and I thought it used the weird phone in clever ways, while not making it too powerful.

Given the options, I'm going with The Duelist and Black Phone. A couple of very different period pieces, where in both cases I was hoping the main character would succeed, but dreading the worst.

MUSIC

To be clear, none of the music I got this year is new. I'd be surprised if any of these albums came out in the last 10 years. But the same is true for the majority of things in all these lists, so we roll with it.

What do we got? The Best of Count Basie's Big Band, and The Best of Duke Ellington. I continue to try and find some jazz or jazz-adjacent music I like as much as I think I should. Throw The Complete Greatest Hits - America into the compilation album category.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's Homebase album. Apparently, when Will Smith says he don't got to cuss in his raps to sell records, he forgot about "You Saw My Blinker." The Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole. If every song were 2 minutes shorter, I'd like it better.

Under the "what the hell" category we have Fall Out Boy's From Under the Cork Tree and Avril Lavinge's Let It Go. The two CDs, purchased at the same library book sale where I picked up The Mule, cost $1 combined, so no harm, no foul. Although I saw a fanfic titled "Of All the Gin Joints" which they said was named after the Fall Out Boy song (as opposed to the line from Casablanca), and I about wept. Wayman Tisdale's In the Zone could go in the jazz appreciation category, but I bought it while visiting my friend in Florida because I was curious what sort of jazz a former NBA player would make.

The other 3 were albums purchased because of a particular song contained on it. I figure if you like one song on the album, you'll probably like others. M.I.A.'s Kala, Tech N9ne's Special Effects, and Spiral Beach (which is also the title of the album.)

Least favorite? Probably From Under the Cork Tree. It's the album with the fewest songs that made it into my MP3 player. Favorite? Special Effects. A lot of songs in the mix, but the thing that impressed me was it felt like they were trying to do something different with almost every song. Some felt a little country, some were kind of alternative rock, some were rapping as fast as humanly possible. They didn't all work for me, but respect for the attempt.

VIDEO GAMES

Welly, welly, well, look who's back? It's been five years since I included a video games section in this post, but with a new (to me) console comes new (to me) game reviews. So we've got Flow, Journey, Flower, Maneater, South Park: The Fractured But Whole, Rime, and Dishonored 2. I guess I can throw 7 Days to Die in there as something I tried then immediately discarded. Apparently resource management survival horror is not my genre.

Which makes it the easy choice for worst game! Nice how that works out. Maybe I can get a couple of bucks in store credit when I trade it in soon.

Well, best game then. Maneater is enjoyable, but quickly repetitive if played for more than an hour or so at a time. The controls on Flower were not always the best. Ditto Flow. I'd rather just use the joystick than be tilting the controller one way or the other. Rime was a pretty enough game, but the puzzles were a bit lacking for something that's gameplay seemed based on puzzles. Dishonored 2 had it's moments, but I probably got too frustrated with my inability to successfully play the way I wanted.

Which leaves Journey and South Park. It's juvenile, but South Park made me laugh the hardest I have all year, several times. And it did a better job incorporating the farting "super-powers" into the gameplay, compared to how Stick of Truth did with its "fart magic." So they actually improved things from the earlier game to the later one! As for Journey, it's a lovely game, and I think it knows exactly the experience it wants to be, and manages it. It feels like you're supposed to enjoy the scenery and enjoy flying and when it strays from those (as during the icy ascent of the mountain), it's a deliberate story choice that works.

The Best and the Worst of My Non-Comics Entertainment

As we have finally escaped 2020, it's time to look back at the best and the worst of books and movies I tried using to stave off the bad vibes. We're skipping video games again, because the only game I really played this year was Chrono Trigger on the DS.

Books

20 books total this year, split almost exactly between non-fiction (11) and fiction (9). Most of the fiction is John Dos Passos, with the other three books being Don Quixote, Lords and Ladies, and Caves of Steel. So clearly I'm not into contemporary fiction.

Lords and Ladies is probably at the top, and then probably One Man's Initiation: 1917. The latter isn't as polished as some of Dos Passos' later stuff, but it also avoids the stylistic approaches I didn't love in those later works. Don Quixote could be in the running, it was definitely better than I expected. But it's also incredibly long, and that starts to wear after awhile.

The Big Money would probably be my least favorite. Not because it was terrible, but it's just very depressing watching the characters make the exact same mistakes, and since it's the longest of Dos Passos' books, there's lots of time for them to repeat those mistakes, again and again.

Of the non-fiction, my favorite was The Beak of the Finch. I loved reading about all the selection pressure on the birds, the way they've adapted to the specific habitats of each island. After that, Desert Solitaire. Abbey's crankiness about people can get a little trying at times, but his descriptions of the landscape and the wildlife, and his float trip down the river with his friend, were really engaging and interesting.

Worst was the two volumes of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway I read. There's some letters in there that over a real glimpse into Hemingway's mindset, like watching him get frustrated with his mother's insistence he's got to financially carry everyone, but there's a lot more that's just not very interesting.

Movies

67 movies this year, and so much crap in there. What else is new. But it's not all bad. I got around to watching John Wick Chapter 3. The Weather Forecast was kind of odd, and pretty sad, but it was a solid movie. The Death of Stalin was hilarious, even allowing that all these idiots are going to keep backstabbing each other because they don't know any other way of doing things. Train to Busan was a fun little zombie apocalypse movie.

But my two favorite movies of the year were The Mad Miss Manton, which managed to have a decent mystery, while also having zany hijinks and a lot of funny bits in it. Maybe that's a matter of me having lower expectations for it than some of those others (although I didn't have any expectations for The Weather Forecast or Train to Busan I can recall.) And the other is. . . Armour of God. 

Does this Jackie Chan movie make any sense whatsoever? Not really. But when you've got Jackie Chan fighting four dominatrices in a spooky cave, or trying not to get run over by a bunch of stereotypical guys on dirtbikes, concerns like story logic or consistent characterization, all just fall away. I'm too busy going "Holy shit, did he just do that?!"

Worst movies? Session 9 felt like it couldn't decide what kind of horror film it wanted to be. Lockout was undercut by Guy Pearce's inability to convey any emotional depth or feeling beyond a smirk. The Cheap Detective did what I think they set out to do, but felt incredibly lazy. Likewise, Hamburger Hill was the most generic-ass Vietnam War movie I've ever seen. Again, I think it did what it set out to do, but what it set out to do had already been done better in plenty of other movies. Stranger than Fiction was just a letdown.

Tempting as it is to put Hamburger Hill as one of the two worst, I'm going with Hurricane Heist and Ghosts of War. The latter was going pretty good until the last twenty minutes, when the big surprise twist completely tanked the movie. Hurricane Heist was just dumb, but not in a fun way, like those Jackie Chan movies, where the story is just trying to get you to the next ridiculous action sequence. Hurricane Heist is just so aggressively stupid with some of the decisions it makes, and it feels like it's trying to take everything seriously, while doing things to absurd to take seriously.

Music

I actually got a lot of CDs this year (you can't be surprised that I still purchase physical media), so we can have this category. Granted, most of the CDs I got were things from my mom's collection, because she figures she's got the stuff she wants ripped and saved elsewhere, but that's OK.

I tried use it as an opportunity to branch out slightly. She had a couple of country CDs, and I reaffirmed that I don't have much use for country music. I bought a BB King album to see if I could get into the blues. That was a mixed bag. Also found out I'm apparently not much of a Bruce Springsteen guy. I thought he'd be a little more hard rock, but most of his stuff seems very, mournful? For the amount of songs on the 3-disc set she let me have, I didn't like many of them.

Best of the year was naturally Alex' album, The Electronomicon LP.  It's only six songs, but he did each one in a different style. So if one song doesn't work for you, maybe the others will. Other than that, maybe the Best of David Bowie, or Big Boi and Dre Present. . .Outkast. All I can really go off is the number of songs I liked relative to the total number of songs on the albums, and I think those two did pretty well by that measure, so there you go.

Random Back Issues #44 - The Monkees #9

Deadpool never had one of his caption boxes try to shove him out of the panel. Of course, I'm not sure Deadpool ever criticized his caption boxes for their limited vocabulary. For speaking in haiku, yes, but not for limited vocabulary.

Welcome to the most random comic in my collection, or at bare minimum, the strangest one left over from my dad's collection. What we've got are three stories in this issue, if they even count as that. In the first one, the Monkees have gone to sea in a raft to find the sunken treasure of Mauvebeard, which they'll use to record an album. They constructed a deep-sea diving suit for Peter out of what looks like a water cooler, a trash can, and some irons tied to his feet. All of which is unnecessary because the water's only 6 feet deep.

This does lead to the line I laugh at the most, as Peter wonders what kind of idiot pirate buries his treasure in 6 feet of water, and Davy responds, 'a short idiot pirate.' Their raft is wrecked by a passing yacht, captained by a Hjalmer, with his niece along for the ride. He's in a race, but the entire crew is down with gooseberry fever. Cue a series of the Monkees trying to be the crew and taking all orders seriously (Michael Nesmith cutting paper dolls as he trims the sails.) They get their shit together, and win the race.

Second story, the Monkees are well enough known that people recognize them in the park, yet they are trying to figure out how to get on a show called Honesty Pays, a candid camera-style thing. It just so happens, some man leaves a satchel on another park bench nearby, then immediately gets in a taxi. The Monkees take the satchel of vital nuclear secrets, thus prevent the Commies from getting the upper hand in the atomic race, thereby keeping them from bankrupting their country for an additional 20 years, and give chase in another taxi, which they leave without paying. 

OK, I'm lying about the satchel having nuclear secrets.

Cue another sequence of one-panel gags about them using a variety of modes of transportation to chase the airliner the man's in. They end up back at the same bench, and the satchel is just full of birdseed. And the taxi driver is the one on Honesty Pays, for letting them ride without paying their fare.

Yeah, I don't know.

In the third story, the Monkees have decided to abandon music, but have no fallback plan. Instead, they distract themselves by helping a guy running a hot dog cart who hasn't had any business for eight and a half days. What, is he in some weird vegetarian commune? Is he literally grinding the rats into hot dogs right there on the street? The Monkees engage in a massive advertising campaign, for which they hope to be paid in exposure. Come on guys, don't fall for that line.

Their plan involves them yelling to each other about Oscar's Hot Dog Stand in a variety of locales, before they graduate to hijacking printing presses and news broadcasts, and culminates in them defacing space capsules and Egyptian burial tombs. Oscar ends up with so much business he's thinking maybe he should get himself some live music, and do the Monkees know someone?

In other words, this comic feels a lot like an episode of Family Guy. Take that how you will.

[7th longbox, 120th comic. The Monkees #9. Jose Delbo (artist). Writer, inker, letterer unknown.]

The Soundtrack of Your Life

I've done this a couple of times before, once in 2007 and again in 2014. The game is to set your music library on shuffle, and each song that comes up is the one that will play during a specific scene in the movie of your life. I've added quite a few things in the last 5.5 years, so let's see how it goes.

Opening Credits: Let's Spend the Night Together, Rolling Stones - A song about a guy trying to convince someone to spend the night with him, because of how badly he needs them. It's a little odd he starts out saying they can just take their time, but then it's all about satisfying each other's needs. Not exactly the sort of thing that puts a person at ease from where I'm sitting. So a major part of this movie is going to be me trying to convince people I care about of the sincerity of my feelings. Or I could be lying, and just telling them sweet nothings to get what I want from them. The former feels more accurate for me, but the latter seems more in line with the song.

Waking Up: Hardware Store, Weird Al Yankovic - Being incredibly excited about the grand opening of a brand-new hardware store? When I was a kid, this would have felt perfectly fitting for my dad, who was seemingly always dragging my ass to Westlake's for more screws or some other damn thing. I feel like with a song like this, you have to just take it at face value. So I am, for some reason I can't fathom, waking up to go to the hardware store. Meaning I either work there, or I've developed a taste for home improvement projects. Or I guess I could be a contractor or something. I'm trying to picture myself roaming the aisles of a hardware store looking at stuff with excitement and awe, rather than confusion at the sheer number of different bolts and washers, and it's just not happening.

First Day of School: Doing It All For My Baby, Huey Lewis & the News - I normally try to picture these movies as moving chronologically from childhood to my inevitable demise, but between the previous song and this one, that's hard to manage. I can't picture this working for Little Kid Calvin. Unless it's really about my one of my parents' day, all the crap they have to do to get me ready before they go to work, but it's worth it because I'm such a swell kid. Either that, or it's about me as an adult going back to school to further my education so I can make more money for my sweetie who believes in me. Or I want them to believe in me, if we're going with the "trying to convince people of my sincerity" approach to the opening song.

Falling In Love: Shaolin Styles, Bar 9 Nero RMX - I don't know, this is like a half-version, or sped-up version of a Nero Remix of "Shaolin Style" I got from Alex randomly a decade ago. It's a thumping beat mixed with dialogue from some old martial arts movie, I think. I have no fucking clue how that plays into me falling in love, unless there's something soft or quiet playing in the background. Then I see the person I fall, this hits loudly, and it's like everything got flipped on its head. I don't think this being the falling in love song bodes well for the relationship, though.

First Love Song: Wanderlove, Mason Williams - At least this is about love. This would be a good song to transition from for what I described in the previous song. It's very soft, with the acoustic guitar, a few other instruments chipping in gently. The guy is singing about 'the wine of loving' and visiting meadows where cold winds never blow. If this is what's going through my mind during the relationship, somebody must have slipped something into that wine, because I'm fucked up.

Breaking Up: Shoop, Salt-N-Pepa - Thank you, Deadpool soundtrack. Anyway, considering this song is all about the ladies ogling various dudes, I'm assuming one of us got a wandering eye and the other was not OK with it. Or one of us thought they were in a serious relationship, and the other was just having a good time. Which would play into the Opening Credits song, either because I was in it for real, and she didn't realize it, or she was, but I was just using her and I got bored, depending on how much of an asshole we're making me in this movie. I'd rather it was the first option, but the last time I did this, Movie Calvin was kind of a creepy weirdo so who knows. Or we could play up the contrast between this and Wanderlove, to show the two of us are just too different to work.

Prom: Papercut, Linkin Park - Oh dear, that doesn't bode well at all. I'm going to cause a huge scene as all my insecurities show through and I self-sabotage to an extent even Deadpool would consider excessive. I'm not sure if I try to bring another girl to prom to make the ex jealous and it fails, or I humiliate myself, or something else, but it's not gonna be pretty. No big surprise, considering the next category.

Mental Breakdown: For a Few Dollars More, Hugo Montenegro - I have no idea how this relates to a mental breakdown. Best I can figure is I've tried to focus entirely on work and maybe transient, fleeting pleasure, while shutting down entirely on any deeper emotional level. All that "feelings" stuff was too much work, so I'm just not going to bother. Sincerity is futile, so just forget it. Probably a lot of me sitting at home alone, eating cheap pizza and watching Clint Eastwood movies.

Driving: Carry On Wayward Son, Kansas - If we're being optimistic, a song about not giving up yet. There's still people and things out there worth caring about, and it's a matter of figuring out what those really are. Not letting myself get fooled or bogged down with pointless crap. I'm picturing deciding to get out of the apartment and drive someplace out in nature, a nice grassland or a bluff overlooking a river. And it turns out to be a beautiful day, great drive, not too much traffic. I end up sitting wherever I went for a long time, just appreciating the scenery. It makes me decide to do more of that to try and find something I'm excited about.

Flashback: 100 Years From Now, Huey Lewis and the News - This feels like a joke sequence. A song about the future, playing during a flashback. I guess it's really about how people wreck their relationships by getting hung up on petty shit that doesn't matter in the long run. If the relationship really matters, I wouldn't let those things make me throw it away. So let's revise. The previous song will strictly be for the driving portion of that trip to some natural splendor. Then this plays while I'm sitting there, my mind drifting from the scene in front of me to points in the past where I made too big of a deal of something that wasn't worth it, and understanding what I threw away as a result.

Getting Back Together: Ten to Twenty, Sneaker Pimps - There's a nice echo effect to the guitars in this that I really like. Although in general I like songs that have that aspect to their music, I don't know why. Just hits some part of me right. I'm not entirely sure what this one is about. Insecurities and flaws. The song mentions fear, contempt, vanity. Things being too fragile to say. Maybe me searching the places I know the significant other liked to go, still thinking about how I tripped myself up. Or trying to explain that to her when I find her. Honestly, it doesn't feel like a song about two people who would get back together, so much as two people who figure out they don't fit. Because they feed off each other's worst tendencies. And yet. . .

Wedding: Rich Girl, Hall and Oates - See? This is not a good song for a wedding! A person who has always relied on someone else's wealth or whatever to take care of everything. Who is indifferent to the suffering of others because their life has been so easy they don't understand what suffering is. I guess it's possible that, assuming this isn't about me being a sociopath (fingers crossed), it's about my significant other having gotten engaged to some other person while I was having my mental breakdown and whatnot. And this other person is a domineering prick, so I'm going to do the big "I OBJECT!" thing during the wedding a make a complete ass of myself. Probably by barging into the wrong wedding.

Birth of a Child: Mudshovel, Staind - *Maniacal laughter* Is our child the Anti-Christ? Although the song is about one person being unable or unwilling to feel the other's pain, about that person just being a taker. I'm kind of picturing a comedy pregnancy sequence where the mother-to-be is not having a good time of it and is yelling at me in a nearly demonic voice about how this is all my fault and she's going to castrate me so it never happens again. I'm going to point out I didn't even want kids, and she's going to throw me through a wall.

Final Battle: If This Is It, Huey Lewis and the News - Oh come on, I have 12 Huey Lewis songs out of more than 900 total songs. How the fuck did I end up with three of them in this thing, but no La Roux, Gorillaz, or Blood Red Shoes? Apparently between the questionable wedding, and the outbreak of violence and accusations at the hospital, we're going to be breaking up again. She's avoiding me and ducking phone calls, basically ghosting me. I'm hitting the bottle, not that I would have to hit it very hard for it to take effect, and just wishing she would tell me the truth. That it's over again. We can't get past our hangups. Our poor child, product of a broken home.

Death Scene: Don't Take Your Love Away, VAST - Great, I'm trying for a last second, deathbed reconciliation with her. That feels kind of cheap on my part, try and get her to make up with me when I'm about to croak. Unless she's dying, and I'm torn up about it, because now I'm out of chances to fix my past fuck-ups. Maybe there was someone else I really fit better with all along, but we kept missing each other, and that's gone. But maybe at the end, she really knows how much I care? Don't know if that's better or worse, to not really know it until it's too late. What are you left with then, after all? Thoughts of what could have been? Can't get anywhere like that. Maybe I shouldn't be typing this at 1 in the morning. I'm more morose than usual.

Funeral Scene, Believe Me, Fort Minor - There's a line in this I like: 'I was on the right track, but I was on the wrong train.' Not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds good. A song all about someone finally realizing the other person is not what they thought they were, is only dragging them down, and so they're just done with that person. Well, I'm dead now, so yes, they're done with me. I guess it's finally sunk in on everyone that I'm never going to be what they expected/hoped I would be. Or maybe I've always been frustrated that they didn't live up to what I expected, and I happy to be done with them. Just couldn't handle all the imperfections that come with dealing with other people.

End Credits: Touch Me, The Doors - And we're back where we started, a song about a guy trying to convince a lady to move pass a threshold of some sort with him. He's making promises, this time about loving her until the stars fall from the skies. At this stage, this song would almost be mocking. Like people couldn't touch me, because I couldn't lower the barriers enough for them to do that. We may or may not have loved each other endlessly, but if the distance between us is greater than between earth and those stars in the sky, it doesn't matter a heck of a lot.

I Was 50 Percent Recognizing Music For Scenes Among Dead People

Of all the episodes of this recent return of Samurai Jack, the second one, XCIII, is my favorite. I could go on for awhile about it, and I might someday, but I wanted to focus on one particular part, right near the end.

Jack's on the run from the Daughters of Aku. He's outnumbered, weaponless, and seemingly outclassed, fighting with his own inner demons while trying to contend with this threat*. And he ends up in a massive tomb. Here's a video of it, at least until it gets pulled down someday.

So the thing I noticed, the first time I saw that scene, was what I thought were two different pieces of music, or parts of them, that I recognized, both of which seemed appropriate. I'm still positive I'm right about the first one, but I was off on the second.

The first is that it's using the piano portion of Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold", from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, although in a different key, I think. The piece that plays when Tuco reaches Sad Hill cemetery, and begins running among the thousands of graves, trying to find Arch Stanton, and that hundred grand in gold. Not a bad choice for this scene. The Daughters believe serving Aku's will is all that matters, and to do that, they have to kill the Samurai. This quest, the years or tortuous training they've been subjected to, have led them finally, to this place of the dead. He's somewhere out there, find him, and they reach their goal. Nothing else matters.

The other piece, the one I was wrong about, is the theme to 28 Days Later ("In the House, In a Heartbeat", by John Murphy). It'll take about 45 seconds to a minute before you get to what I thought I was hearing. In my defense, it had been a lot of years since I'd heard the song until I went looking for it to see if I was right.

And my primary memory of the song goes with the end of the film, where Cillian Murphy's character has returned and is wreaking havoc, and that one soldier drags Selena into an upstairs room. Then Jim enters the attic above, and the camera's pulling in close on the wild-eyed soldier as he scans above his head, looking for the source of the noise. And you know he's about to end up dead, and he does.

Jack fares better*, but his scene had a similar vibe, him trying to wait it out in the coffin, eyes cast upward fearfully, death steadily closing in on him. It evoked the same sense of dread and anticipation as "In the House, In a Heartbeat".

* Although it's notable that even with a total advantage, the Daughters still couldn't finish him. Even off his game, entirely on the defensive, Jack is just good enough to stay alive. 

* There was a post on a blog called Zombie Mallet that noted that in Namor's '90s series, at least in the early issues, he seemed to be much stronger the fewer clothes he wore. Put him in a suit, or a coat, he'd get KOed pretty easily. If he could ditch the shirt, watch out. Jack seems to operate on similar principles. Once he's down to a loincloth, he could probably beat up anyone. The Guardian of the Time Portal hit on the key: Beat Jack into unconsciousness before his clothes get too destroyed.

Violence Set To Music Sticks With Me, Apparently

Simple question for a post tonight: What are songs you link with a particular movie? Not songs written for that movie, but preexisting ones the film used, and now you think of that film when you hear the song?

I was watching a show with a bunch of music videos, and realized I hadn't seen several of the videos before. Instead I had scenes from films I associated with the songs.

At this point, both Salt-N-Pepa's "Shoop" and DMX's "X Gon' Give to Ya" are linked with Deadpool, for example. Or The Beat's "Mirror in the Bathroom" is tied to the high school reunion fight scene from Grosse Pointe Blank.

So what are some for you?

Just Arguing About Smashmouth In Cracker Barrell

Spent the weekend at Alex, so did not get as much done as I intended, but it was a good weekend. On Saturday, we were having breakfast with one of his other friends on who was hanging out with us, and a music argument started up.

 I don't remember how it started, but Darren was speaking disparagingly of the music of the '80s and '90s, and the 2000s as well, he was undecided which of the three were the two worst decades for music. Especially in comparison. For the record, Darren's a little younger than me, so it isn't as though he grew up through the '60s or '70s, which he touted as being much better. He seemed annoyed especially by what he felt was a large number of one-hit wonders.

Anyway, he somehow settled on Smashmouth as indicative of everything bad about the more recent eras, because they made, quote, 'the douchiest song possible,' which I think was a reference to "All-Star", but could have been "Walking on the Sun". That everything was about just trying to cobble together something that would be super-popular, and there was no artistic drive involved.

Which, hell, could be true, probably even is true, but I countered - out of contrariness than any desire to defend Smashmouth - by asking if he believed that, for example, Creedance Clearwater Revival had made every one of their songs from a place of deep artistic vision. He conceded the point, sort of, though he and Alex both argued that CCR was writing their own songs, and there weren't a bunch of producers involved.

Again, sure, that's true for all I know. And I'm not going to try to argue for Smashmouth over CCR, but that wasn't really what I was interested in. I was more interested in the idea that the music from before Darren was alive was better than the stuff he lived through. It reminded me of the discussions about pitchers I see in baseball arguments. About why pitchers today can't throw as many innings as pitchers used to. But the arguments - while also ignoring differences in the game, ballpark dimensions, tape study, better drugs, whatever - cite the few pitchers who were able to do that. The Bob Gibsons, the Nolan Ryans, and so on, but ignore the legions of pitchers who were contemporaries of those guys who never came close. Who managed one, maybe two of those years, and then collapsed, or the guys who blew out their arms in the minors and never got close.

Survivorship bias. We look back and see the pitchers or bands that made it and think that's all there was. But for the stuff we lived through, we remember the ones who didn't have sticking power, and so there seems like a much lower percentage of big successes. Darren remembers all these one-hit wonders and bands he liked when he was younger he now knows were terrible, and sees an ocean of crap. But if he'd been alive in the 1960s, he'd have encountered a bunch of different bands he would have loved that faded into obscurity or that he hated once he got older.

Which doesn't dismiss his feelings about Smashmouth, but it was a discussion I enjoyed. Plus it prompted Alex to pose a poll online about Smashmouth vs. CCR just to tweak Darren, which CCR ultimately came from behind to win (after Darren posed a video of Alex scratching "Down on the Corner" on his turntables), which was funny to me.

"Sounds of Silence" Was Just A Song Title, Not A Suggestion

On more than a couple of albums I've bought, the final track will consist of a song, then a long stretch of silence, and then another, "hidden" song. The length of the silence varies, from two minutes up to seven on some of them.

I usually listen to music when I'm driving, so it isn't the worst thing, except that I put the album in to listen to music. If I wanted silence, I could have put nothing in and kept the radio off. Mostly, though, I'm just curious at the logic behind it. Is it a tradition going back to live performances, the performers seemingly leaving or being finished, then starting up again to the delight of the remaining crowd? A special reward for sticking around until the very end? It doesn't require any effort on my part, all I have to do is keep driving and letting the album play. It's oddly placed for an intermission, which I've also seen on several albums. Little bits that are under a minute, maybe a conversation or bit of music, but those are normally somewhere in the middle, and there's still something going on during them

The Misunderstanding's Between Him And Reality

I was listening to "Misunderstanding" by Genesis a couple of weeks ago, which isn't unusual in itself, but I started thinking about the lyrics, and I'm wondering if we're sure the guy in the song is actually in a relationship.

Ostensibly it's about this guy who doesn't know it's over between him and his partner, because (take your pick) said partner won't come right out and say it, or because he's too dense to take the hint. So he waits in the rain for hours, but she never shows up. But then there's the whole section that ends with him seeing some guy "just leaving" her place. He's been looking for her, but started in the places 'they always go', before trying to call her at home, and only after all that's failed, does he actually go to her home. This strikes me as an ass-backwards way to go about finding someone you are allegedly in a relationship with. I could see, depending on the time of day and their schedule, visiting where they work first. But not just wandering through various bars and parks hoping to run into them.

It makes me think this relationship is all in this guy's head, and he's actually some creepy stalker. She should probably have called the cops on him by now, but has been opting to avoid him, not answer his calls, change up her schedule, stuff like that. Which isn't healthy for her, or for him, since he needs to deal with the truth, but some people are too nice for their own good.

UHF (1989)

Saturday post to compensate for the lack of a post on Monday! At the same time I picked up John Wick, I also found a copy of UHF. The movie Weird Al made back in the '80s, that Roger Ebert notably gave zero stars. I heard of it originally through the "Behind the Music" episode on Al, where he said he was pretty sure Ebert thought he was the Anti-Christ. I mean, even the second Charlie's Angels movie got a half star. I got to see it some time later, but I'd mostly forgotten about it until I bought the 2-disc Essential Weird Al collection last year, which has the film's theme song. Then I wanted to see it again, so here we are.

Besides, Ebert's taste in comedies always was garbage. He said Tommy Boy had no memorable lines, which, well, did you eat a lot of paint chips as a kid?

Which isn't to say UHF is a great movie by any stretch. It's story is roughly the standard one about the oddball that feels his talents are unappreciated, who finally finds a chance to shine. In this case, it's Al as George Newman, getting the chance to run a crappy local TV station, and turning it into a massive success with hit shows like "Wheel of Fish", and "Druids on Parade". There's a national affiliate that tries to crush the station through underhanded means, leading to the desperate attempt to save the station, for the community. I wasn't ever real clear on how Channel 62 was serving the community exactly, but sure, why not?

Mostly, though, I think the plot's there as sort of a loose connective tissue between skits almost. There's George's dream that opens the film, which is just the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the one that turns into his "Beverly Hillbillies" music video (which I like, so that's fine), or the Rambo sequence. At times, it almost feels like the whole film is a montage, that we're just seeing small excerpts of what's going on, to give us a general idea. In the deleted scenes section, Al explains all these scenes were cut because they're crap, like one of him and Victoria Jackson (playing George's girlfriend, Teri) having a romantic dinner. As he puts it, "Would you really want to see me do a love scene?" Actually, kind of? For novelty purposes alone, if nothing else. I think if it wasn't an attempt to be funny, he didn't want to bother with it, but sometimes you need the not funny stuff for the purposes of story. I did laugh a lot at the Rambo sequence, between Al mugging for the camera, with expressions I could really see Stallone making, and the blowing up of random monuments, just because. Leaving out the subplot about the one goon being afraid of bugs was probably the right move, though.

I may be grading this on the wrong scale. There were times I thought a scene would have been more effective if Al had pulled back a little on his reaction to some crushing news. But it's not like he's Robert Redford, trying for some subtle, nuanced portrayal of a man struggling to find his place in the world. He's trying for laughs with comical over-exaggeration. Taken on the merits I think it's trying for, it's not bad. I've seen worse movies of that type, and there was a lot in there I liked. I thought George and Teri were surprisingly believable as friends, if not necessarily as a couple. Michael Richards as Stanley was about as bizarre as I vaguely remembered. The guy playing R.J. Hunter, the evil national affiliate station owner was chewing that scenery like a pro. Very good portrayal of Evil '80s Businessman, right up there with Dick Jones from Robocop. I'd forgotten Fran Drescher was in there, she didn't get to do a whole lot - Richards' character kind of dominates the second half of the movie - but she does well with what she gets to do, mostly being indignant or sniping at assholes. I can appreciate that.

My coworkers were doing a Star Wars rewatch, and so they were watching The Empire Strikes Back. I'm comfortable with my choice.

And This Is Why I Listen To CDs In The Car

I haven't posted on a Saturday in a while. I have some posts ready available, but I've been holding them back in case the well ran dry during the week. So it would have to be something immediately and massively annoying to get me to go ahead and throw one up.

Since I've been on this job, I've struggled to find a decent local radio station. Everything is either country or church stuff. The former I can tolerate under certain circumstances, the latter is a no-go. I did find a classical station earlier this week, but the reactions of my coworkers convinced they were not receptive (I generally operate on the rule it's driver's choice, meaning me 90% of the time, but I try to not torture the others).

I did find a decent classic rock station, the only problem being that in the morning the station plays/runs/broadcasts/whatever you call it the John Boy and Billy Show, and it is terrible. Perhaps this isn't news to you. I've heard of the show, but never actually listened to a station that played it. It's like listening to an NFL pregame show. None of the jokes are funny, but that doesn't stop the people on the show from cackling constantly at everything.

'The fat lady walks up to the parrot -' *everyone laughs madly*

The Joker wishes he could get those kinds of results. Every segment is interminable, and frankly, country music sounds pretty good in comparison. Hell, commercials sound pretty good in comparison. I've gladly changed the station and stayed on one that was on a commercial break.

It Is The Listing Time!

Just like the last two years, I'm going to talk about the best and worst of the non-comics media I consumed this year, while I wait for comics to arrive. Next week, hopefully. I would really like to do the Year in Review posts before February this time. Decided to add a category this year, though it won't have nearly as many candidates as the returning ones. I was going to do music, but I only bought about a half-dozen albums this year, and half of those I haven't listened to enough to have a strong sense of one way or the other (offhand, I'd say the two-disc Essential Weird Al Yankovic collection was my favorite music buy of the year). I'm not going to recap all this stuff because every one of these things got its own review post here on the blog at some point in 2014. As always, this is restricted to stuff that was new to me. If it came out 50 years ago, but I just read or watched it now, it's in the running.

Books

So yeah, I read a whole lot of books this year, but a lot of them covered the same ground. A lot of World War 2, a lot of Stuart M. Kaminsky detective novels. On the plus side, all those WWII books treading similar ground, but from different angles, with different interests, combine in my head to form this much larger picture. Eisenhower's Lieutenants, Roosevelt's Centurions, Marshall and His Generals, and Walter Borneman's The Admirals (as opposed to Andrew Lambert's The Admirals on the Royal Navy). They all had good and bad points, but they're more illuminating when taken together. You could even add Ricks' The Generals and Clodfelter's The Limits of Air Power as a continuation of certain themes in later conflicts. Makes it hard for any one of them to stand out, though.

In non-fiction,  The Collapse of the Third Republic by Robert Shirer would be tops, and more engrossing than I expected for a 900+ page book. I figured it would be a slog in places, but maybe the sense of all these people just leading their country into doom gives it a momentum, even if that was driven by me yelling, "What are you idiots doing?!" at the book a lot. It's hindsight, but that didn't make it less maddening. I'd also throw in the two sports-related books I read this year, The Breaks of the Game, and Achorn's The Summer of Beer and Whiskey. A lot of cool stories about players and owners and such in both those books. Toss Irving Stone's They Also Ran in there as well. His writing can be a little nauseating, when he starts waxing too rhapsodic about his subjects, but the discussion of their lives and actions, and the fact Stone is willing to actually state whether he thinks they'd have been better Presidents than the people they lost too, and why, was appreciated.

As far as worst non-fiction, I'm going to tap Lambert's The Admirals, because of some of his biases towards his subjects. It was a little too obvious it was coloring his perspective. Also, Halpern's A Naval History of World War 1. I understand some history books will not be written with engaging language, Ki-baik Lee's A New History of Korea had dry writing, though I attribute that at least in part to being a translation. But with Lee, it felt like he wanted to cover everything and tell the reader about interesting things, whereas Halpern kept ignoring things that sounded interesting to talk about stuff that was not. Oh, and Stashower's The Beautiful Cigar Store Girl, which felt like two books with not enough to them roughly combined into one. That one felt like the biggest waste of my time.

Fiction doesn't have many positive standouts. Lot of mediocrity, a lot of weak books - Circus Couronne and Purgatory Chasm were consecutive ones, and combined with Stashower's book, my dad's collection really let me down there in the middle of March - Douglas Preston's The Impact was disappointing, but I guess I expected something very different from what I got. Maybe it was OK for what it was trying to be. 

Of all the Stuart M. Kaminsky detective stories from early in the year, the best was probably A Cold Red Sunrise. I enjoyed the Soviet Union as glastnost was starting up as a setting for the particular challenges it presents, and I liked Porfiry Petrovich as a character. Clever in that quiet, understated way, careful about not pissing off the sorts of people who would make him disappear, but still seeing justice done. I'm always a mark for Asimov, but I'd rate Pebble in the Sky well ahead of Prelude to Foundation. The latter was too obviously an attempt to connect the various stories he'd written previously, so a little forced and constrained. I liked the first half of The Hot Country, but it was too uneven. Follett's The Man from St. Petersburg was pretty good, but Lydia's indecision was so frustrating. Her unwillingness to even make the decision to do nothing was just maddening. It made me hate her, when I felt like I should pity her instead. So if I were doing a Top 5, A Cold Red Sunrise would be the only piece of fiction, to go with the 4 history books I mentioned earlier.

Movies

About half the movies I saw this year were from the last 25 years, which is more than I thought. I figured it was going to be tilted to '70s or older films because of spending time with my dad. But there were a lot of films we watched I didn't care enough about to bother writing up. As for the ones I did write about, there were several I didn't like, but often because they wanted to do something different from what I expected (Black Dragon the most notable example, where I expected the romance to be the centerpiece, and it turned out to be about helping the rose lady maintain an illusion of affluence), and they did the thing they wanted well enough. Can't fault them for that. There were films with some good stuff, but weaknesses. The Heroic Trio didn't always make sense in places, and the action scenes were limited by budget or technology. I liked parts of Bite the Bullet, but it's edited and paced oddly. As far as worst, I just found A Man Called Sledge unpleasant in a stupid, inconsistent way, and Casanova Brown was a mess. The Last of the Comanches suffers because it tries to be Sahara (the Bogart film, not the Mcconaughey one), but doesn't do it as well. That doesn't make it bad, just mediocre, and Dad and I got a lot of laughs out of "they find the well, and it's filled with more rifles", so it has that going for it.

Look, I'm picking Amazing Spider-Man 2 as the worst movie I saw this year. It was long, frequently boring as hell, had so many different plot threads that it still wasn't long enough to keep most of them from feeling rushed, or insufficiently developed. It was a film that wasn't even much fun to make fun of.

Barquero and Drop Dead Gorgeous were two movies I liked, but it was as much because I had low expectations going in. The latter film is better, but I like Lee van Cleef, even if that one sequence with Mariette Hartley's character was ugly for stupid reasons. But it's a story where you have all these people thinking big, thinking of the future and what's to come, but they're all hung up by these two guys (Lee van Cleef and Warren Oates) focused on right now. I haven't gotten around to rewatching Seven Psychopaths, but I remember liking it for the same reasons I liked In Bruges. That ability to move between strangely touching scenes involving screwed up people, and in the midst of that, shift into something completely absurd. Or vice versa.

But if I'm being honest, my two favorite movies of the year were Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and The Legend of Drunken Master. I had concerns about the Captain America movie going in; I had loved the first one, I have no real affection for the Winter Soldier story arc. But it surprised me. Some of it was probably because I watched it right after the tire fire that was Amazing Spider-Man 2 - it certainly was helped by that comparison - but it kept things moving, there were rarely any lulls, and the ways in which they kept things interesting changed. Action scene, dialogue sequence that advances the plot and establishes characterization, car chase, maybe some humor. Everybody got chances to look cool, and Chris Evans is a good Captain America. I don't really care whether it's trying to make some larger point, I'm ultimately concerned about it as an action film (and a Captain America movie), and it delivered for me in both regards. As for Legend of Drunken Master, it has great fight scenes (which I expected), there's a lot of humor in it (which I sort of expected, but not always in the form it took, there are some great punchline/reaction bits), and Anita Mui steals the show (which I didn't expect at all). She's great as this theatrical, sneaky badass, who deeply cares for her stepson and is maybe a little too willing to encourage his risky behavior. It was her presence in Black Dragon, opposite Chan, that made me want to pick up that movie, though it wound up not being what I expected.

Video Games

This isn't a huge field. Handful of XBox 360 games, handful of XBox Live Arcade games, maybe a couple of things I fooled around with once or twice on my coworkers' older consoles, but I didn't play Silent Hill: Shattered Memories or Castlevania 4 enough to really consider either of them. I played Paperboy a lot when I was a kid, so that's out. As far as games I bought physical copies of, we have the following candidates: Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, Sonic Generations, Tales of Vesperia, Deadpool, Fallout 3, and I guess, Diablo 3. Heck, throw in Resident Evil 6. I didn't play it for very long, but I played it enough to know it was poorly designed and not fun. In fact, RE 6 wins worst game hands down. From the stupidity of setting up a co-op game where one of you can't do anything for the first 5 minutes, because your character is too injured to do anything other than get dragged around, to the idiotic "find the car keys" mini-game (and then they don't let you have any fun driving the car and hitting zombies while your partner leans out the window and shoots, what the hell).

I mean, Deadpool was formulaic, repetitive, and not really original, but it owned that, even played it up, and it didn't take itself seriously. Metro: Last Light generally failed to establish most of the story and emotional connections it tried to play up, because it didn't spend enough time on them, but they improved the gameplay (especially by adding the option to knock out people you sneak up on, rather than always having to kill or avoid them), and the setting is still very cool. I'd compare the experience of playing the two Metros to Resident Evil 2 and 4, actually. 2 had the better developed characters and stronger story beats, but some serious gameplay flaws (camera actively working against you), whereas 4 was a much smoother playing experience, but the story felt weaker, and I didn't care about the characters as much.

On the Arcade side of things, there's Aces of the Galaxy, Sonic CD, Comix Zone, Braid, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game. I've played Scott Pilgrim more than the others combined, so it wins in a landslide. I usually struggle with older Sonic games, I'm bad at puzzles (which makes Braid a real struggle), and Aces of the Galaxy is an OK rail shooter flight game, but you know, my N64 is right there, I can just play Starfox 64 again instead. None of them are bad games, but none of them have given me as much enjoyment as Scott Pilgrim.

Favorite game of the year, though, is easy: Tales of Vesperia. Most JRPGs I've played are successfully at getting me invested in the characters and the story. It's kind of the nature of those games, since they usually devote time to cut scenes for dialogue between the party, or to show the outcome of some fight that advances the plot or whatever. I don't always like all the characters (there often seems to be some young kid in the group who's kind of an annoying goober), but I get to know them, and still try to look after them, even if it's just in a proprietary, "they're mine, you don't get to kill them" way. The only potentially new thing Tales of Vesperia did there compared to other ones I've played was they didn't designate one character or pairing as the funny one. Lots of characters got busted on, or were the butt of jokes, which does help in some ways (it feels like more of a real close-knit group, where no one is off limits), but it's hardly vital.

However, Tales of Vesperia is the first RPG I've played where I didn't regard level-grinding as some horrible and tedious necessary evil. The whole Synthesis thing for items, and the fact it even included stuff that didn't help your character, but could alter their appearance, so just for kicks, meant there was another reason to run around fighting monsters. And since some of the items would give your characters new skills, that was another reason to want to make things, so it all tied together well.