Alex Doenau is an Australian film and book critic based in Sydney. His interests include video games, Pokémon, and amiibos as far as the horizon.
“Five Years Gone”
Man, the future sucks. I’m glad I don’t live there. I’ve got to give it to Tim Kring, though: a lot of this episode, despite the full beards and coke bottle glasses, makes sense. I’m kind of ashamed of some of my analyses from the last round.
Spoilers!
Now, on underdeveloped scattershot argument theatre …
While I’ll be the first one to call Heroes silly, I’m not a professional TV critic. Alan Mascarenhas of the Sydney Morning Herald had this to write of episode 14, showing this week in Australia:
However, the show seems caught between different audiences. There are special effects but probably not enough to keep the science nuts happy. Any emotional drama is nobbled by the artificiality of the premise: it’s hard to feel much empathy for a mutant.
For one, Magneto would be furious.
For another, Mascarenhas probably doesn’t understand how any of these genres work, confessing that he’s “not science-fiction minded” and that he had not seen an episode of Heroes before episode 14.
I said of that episode:
I really enjoyed the first half of Heroes. Since then we've suffered at the hands of an invisible Haggard-esque degaying of Zach (I don't know: he still seems pretty gay to me), a general anti-climactic nature, boredom at the hands of Niki/Jessica, and the distinct impression that the writers are just throwing revelations at us for the sake of it.
Yeah; but I knew what I was talking about. On that note, Bryan Fuller
totally confirmed the Zach thing again. Now we’ll never see Odessa again anyway, so it doesn’t matter, but oh, what could have been.
Anyway, this sort of closed-mindedness in this day and age makes me sad. I wouldn’t mind if he were specifically criticising Heroes, but he’s laying waste to an entire genre. Many SF fans don’t watch SF solely for whizz bangery. Even something as frequently smug and annoying as Firefly (or, indeed, any of Joss Whedon’s work [I’ll save my rant against his ruination of Angel for when I feel like tearing someone to pieces]) features characters that one can care for, even if they haven’t first hand experienced hijacking a train of its medicine and then being attacked by conscience and then kicking a guy into a jet engine and then having a statue erected in their honour and then having an ill fated but well conceived film made out of respect for what could have been and becoming a leaf on the wind.
The use of fanciful settings for stories allows authors and directors to bring into sharper relief the humanity of their characters. Many stories are analogous to real life situations, and there’s a reason that comics have a strong following in the gay community: it’s not because of the tights; it’s because of double identities, not fitting in, and general difference.
A lot of good SF (if you can really call superhero stories SF when they’re kind of their own genre anyway) just drips with metaphor, and a lot of the time this works well. I wasn’t much of a fan of the X-Men movies, but their relevance to the gay community was … uncanny (“Have you ever thought of … not being a mutant?”). Then it took a turn for the worse with X-Men 3, which was Brett Rattner’s personal journey into “I have no idea what message I’m trying to get across here … I appear to have made the franchise a front runner advocate of pro-life? Okay.”
These frequently subtle, sometimes not, metaphors and subtexts are effective ways of teaching people about issues in roundabout fashions. I suppose that this common subversion is probably one of the reasons that comic books and SF are seen as negative influences, but there's no shame in learning. Unless that shame is the addiction to magic that made me hate Willow on Buffy for a long time (although that show did teach girls that it's okay to make out with other girls in the event that your boyfriend cheats on you with a werewolf – which in itself is okay because he’s also a werewolf).
This subtext is also important because sometimes things cannot be said, like the gay episode of Star Trek that wasn’t made 20 years ago (I’d give you more sources, but After Elton is a good resource and frankly, a google search for “gay Star Trek” yields Kirk/Spock. On a side note, could the gay Trek characters be any twinkier? I think not).
Genre is a flexible idea; one can’t discount an entire genre because one does not like a single entry in that genre (also, if anyone mentions Sturgeon’s Law, which is the refuge of cynics who hate freedom, I will be forced to … well, don’t push me). Genre can also make something that is absolute tripe, such as X-Men 3, into something marvellous. I loved X-Men 3 because it was completely by the numbers, designed for maximum emotional manipulation with the added bonus of pissing fans right off.
It’s true that fans can be among the most annoying people on the planet, but every field has people who bring it down for the rest of them. This illustrates to us all that not everyone is the same and, while some might like flash bang magic, others appreciate the genuine character that can be breathed into SF, fantasy and the like. Not every appreciator of the genre is a mouth breather; most people want to be accepted like everyone else, even without the desire for the escape that such flights of fancy so readily offer, and good SF can offer real and likable characters into the mix.
I claim to people who want to know the vague direction that my life will take once I leave university that I would like to become a journalist. Yet mainstream journalism hates the fringe, and it fears the internet, couching everything in terms of condescension that sneer at people who use computers or like video games. It happens, even in the more intellectual presses, and it’s not good. Unfortunately, the apathy that has become the zeitgeist for internet users means that the well meaning but ill informed will rule for a while yet. If SF is going to be as routinely awesome as Eric Cartman 2546, then the ignorami are the ones suffering.
The image of Flash Gordon with Ming the Merciless was one of the first page results for “science fiction sucks” on Google Image Search.
“.07%”
I preferred my old theories.
Spoilers!
Perhaps you are familiar with my friends the Pokémon. I have been friendly with them since 1998, and they have rewarded me by winging their way into my home come tomorrow. Expect to never hear from me again!
… unless I come back, triumphantly riding on a Torterra. You never know with me. One second I’m gone, next second I’m astride a tortoise that has a tree and a mountain on its back; just like US Network Television.
Welp, Scissor Sisters have released their new video, which in Alex town means it’s time to drop everything and put them up. Oh yeah.
What more is there to say apart from the obvious? Ana Matronic is divine. Damned Scissor Sisters, too good for their own good.
Bang-b-bang-bang! Kaboom! Ra-ta-ta-ta! Whompf-whompf-whompf-whompf! Screeeeeeeeeeeee!
This was precisely the movie I needed. I can’t be serious all the time, I need some levity in my writing. What better source of levity could there possibly be than Mark Wahlberg shooting stuff until it explodes? The only real problem with Shooter is that I had to wait almost two hours before Mark Wahlberg started swearing at people. That’s easily what he does best.
This was a great show. I don’t think I even really need to say anything. I’ll just plagiarise my friend Pangle, quoted from his journal:
Warning! Contains Mild Profanity!
Further in the series of Danish serendipity, it turns out that my Aqua revival ties into the recent discovery that bees are dying out. Theories abound, like it’s the fault of mobile phones. So calling your mother to tell her to pick you up is right out if you want some honey!
This, of course, is ridiculous. If you listen to the Aqua song “Bumble Bees”, which at first sounds like nonsense pop from a group that really, really likes to sing songs composed almost entirely of choruses, you will find that it contains the true secrets of the conspiracy.
Watching it is entirely optional, particularly as the video was apparently made to distract the audience from the lyrics:
That said, if you freeze at 2:01 you can see Lene holding a baby.
If you haven’t picked it up already, the reason bees are dying out is this: monogamy. Jealous flowers have demanded that bees stop going around with the whole “pollination” bit. The bee of the song reasons:
I’m a true believer, that goes for what I see
And one little flower is not enough for a bee
Yet the flower can’t help but say:
Bumble bee, bump into me
I am in for pollination
Bumble bee, take what you see
I’m in need for your donation
You don’t need no invitation
So … uh … wait, did you actually read those lyrics? This is some pretty high brow (and filthy) stuff!
The theory goes that the bees finally succumbed to the nagging of the flowers, and as such have not been meeting their quotas, and have been dying off from having to fly around with so much pollen and nowhere to put it. This also explains why bees have been so low and slow flying this year (expect Joanna Newsom to sing about that part of the phenomenon on her next album).
Basically, bees are being pansy whipped. I’m sure that Brokeback Mountain is the cause of this, somewhere. Back in my day, if flowers weren’t interested a bee could sting one right in the face and then high six its bee friends on the way back to the hive while the Queen shook her head and chuckled “drones will be drones”. Damned Sensitive New Age Bees. We need to put the good old disrespect of flowers back into them! Divide and conquer, boys!
True, this completely irrefutable theory doesn’t explain why flowers aren’t dying out, but don’t look at me: I’m just a beeologer, not a botanist!
Next on Alexander Doenau’s Animal Kingdom: The truth behind Baby Seal Clubs!
Pulazumaaaa!
You may recall that in October I said of Dead Rising
As it stands, I don’t feel like playing Dead Rising ever again.
Times change. People change. The moment that I finished Dead Rising I lent it to a friend. The moment he gave it back, in late January, I played it through again. Twice. The moment I finished it the first time on my repeat play (from level 1, because I figured out how to do that), I played it again on my level 50 save.
Since then I’ve played it through, what, five or six times? That may be an exaggeration, I don’t know; the impetus for my recent spate of play throughs was the introduction of an HD TV to my home. Now I can actually read the text rather than simply make it up!
It’s probably no surprise to a lot of 360 users that the achievement system is a stroke of genius for replayability, if they feel like achievements you could be bothered achieving. Dead Rising makes you feel like a king amongst zombies.
I am now thoroughly convinced that I am a king amongst zombies.
Yes, my good sirs, I have saved fifty plus survivors in one run and, thanks to My Name is Earl and picture-in-picture, I achieved zombie genocider. Now I can shoot things like a true Megaman.
I’m not sure why I came back to my old friend Dead Rising, with whom I had parted on bad terms. It’s the sort of game that you master; the sort that you just keep on playing because you’re so dang good at it. Unlike something like Oblivion, you can get harder, better, stronger, faster, but the zombies and psychopaths stay as they ever were. Unfortunately, the survivors are permanently stupid, running into walls and whatever, but if you know all of the mall’s secrets, then you can outfit them well enough to make them not suck to hard. If you’re good enough, you can save every last one of them without compromising the storyline.
This is just like the olden days of video games, when the game content was so limited that you had to keep on playing and improving on your style for the benefit of … well, who exactly I don’t know. In my personal experience, video gaming has become so broad that you can’t bring your friends around to say “hay check out what I did in this game” or tell them about it at “school” the next day. Kids still go to school, right?
I’d say that the days when you could lie about having done something in a game are done, too, thanks to the internet, but rumours and scuttlebutt are really easy to be perpetuated amongst the stupider classes, I suppose (“Hay guys Luigi is total in Super Mario 64 if you stab yourself in the eyes and jump forty seven times on Bowser’s shell.” This does not explain how the N64 accepts the knife-eye interface and I’m lucky that I was able to worm my way to the top of the transplant list).
Basically, in the last thirty years (only 21 of which I have been a party to), many video games have remained exactly the same: exercises in rote learning! The only difference is now you can kill in excess of 53,594 zombies and then tell everyone on the internet how great you are.
Because believe me, I am freaking magnificent.
Update: I have been informed that Luigi was in Super Mario 64, and unlockable by the method I described above, only I couldn’t see him on account of my eyes being stabbed. I apologise to the heroes who have managed to achieve such a feat.
There must be some sort of serendipity involved in the fact that the week that I looked into Junior Senior for the first time in ages is the exact same week that their second album came out in Australia. It was also the same week that I developed a brief, morbid fascination with that other Danish band, Aqua.
Why it took nigh on two years to make its way to my fair shores, I’m not quite certain. If you recall our friends Junior Senior at all, you probably remember them from “Move Your Feet”, which featured such memorable images as a smiling hotdog and a squirrel spinning in an X-Wing.
This Danish duo is like a singing gay-straight alliance poised to sing songs about parties and dancing but also to reinforce their playful distaste for the others’ proclivities (“Hey gay, get out of my way!” “Hey straight, you’re always too late!”). This was a new idea to me when I bought D-D-Don’t Stop The Beat in 2003, in my first week of work, and it’s a message that has stuck with me since.
I’m not quite sure why I bought the album beyond liking the “Move Your Feet” video, but these were the days when my musical tastes were not defined very far past Roxette, Kylie Minogue, Björk, and anime songs with excessive guitar solos.
In the same week I bought Daft Punk’s Discovery, which probably goes to show that having a disposable income leads to wild musical experimentation. Unfortunately it also leads to the disposing of said income, but that’s a story for another time.
I listened to D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat a lot back in the day, before it was replaced in my heart by Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand (damn them and their self-titled albums). Stumbling across the existence of Hey Hey My My Yo Yo of course led to the discovery of a couple of new music videos.
The first is “Can I Get Get Get”, which is edited together from fan sources and raises a smile for world love:
The idea of people just putting videos of themselves lip-synching on Youtube is still pretty alien to me (hello, “Peach Plum Pear”?), but when people put effort and editing into their fandom then magic happens.
The second is “Take My Time”, which is notable for two things. The first is that Junior drew it himself, and the second is that backing vocals are provided by the female portion of The B-52s. Watch out for the volcanoes, because they’re a kind of magic:
Junior Senior are clearly big in Japan, like several notable acts before them: Queen and Scissor Sisters are the two that strike me the most. There are some others that I can’t recall off the top of my head, but with Junior Senior making it to #2 on the Japanese charts clearly they’ve got something going for them over there. Perhaps the fact that they’re an awesome happy band.
I’ve already got a great fondness for these two songs, and when I checked the track listing I found that there’s a song called “Dance Chance Romance”. One of the key phrases in the City Hunter ED “Super Girl” (and, if you’ve read Anime Pilgrimage at all, you’ll know that City Hunter is among my favourite titles ever) is “Dance Chance Romance”.
This is a sign: a sign that I must go out and buy this album. How could I refuse anything released by a label called “Crunchy Frog”?
Come on in, leave your coats. Grab some chips … they’ve got loads!
Even if they had money they’d still be white trash, yeah!
