Three Thoughts on “This Is It”

My wife and I decided to catch a movie over the weekend and the cheap theatre was showing Michael Jackson’s This Is It, an almost-concert film that doubles as a weird zombie movie.

1. This would have been one of the greatest concert spectacles of all time. The elaborate staging, enormous amount of choreography and the number of expensively filmed mini-movies all display how much of a showman and perfectionist Jackson was. Throughout the film, he demonstrates his knowledge and savvy, noting when cues should come and when the performers should let the crowd react. Considering the number of people employed for the concert — dancers, musicians, fashion and set designers — it’s no wonder they had to release this movie as a way to recoup some of the losses.

2. One of the oddest things in the whole film is the distance between the audience and Jackson which is only brought to light more by the fact that the dancers, director, choreographers, musicians and just about everyone else all get interviewed at one point or another but Jackson never does. While we see a side to him that’s never been showcased before, partially because of Jackson’s carefully constructed persona and history as a recluse, it’s only ever at arm’s length. Michael Jackson, in many ways, existed in a world all his own, and the world everyone else inhabits, even in getting glimpses that This Is It allows, never gets a good look inside.

3. Seeing Jackson practicing the choreography with the dancers reveals the amount of talent the guy has even when he’s not trying all that hard (it is rehearsal, after all): here are muscle-bound dudes and ladies whose bodies are tools that need to be perfected in order to move with the fluidity required to tell a story and it shows; then there’s Michael Jackson weighing all of 110 pounds, looking like he weighs 110 pounds, doing the exact same moves with little effort, sending the other dancers into conniptions as a result. Jacko knows how to move is what I’m saying. Also, comfort was at the forefront of the dude’s mind because who wears a bomber jacket, white t-shirt and Ed Hardy sweatpants? Michael Jackson, that’s who.

Three Not-So-Awesome Things In WWE Smackdown vs RAW 2010

1. Online Community – While this area that allows people to upload and download CAW (create-a-wrestler) characters is one of the things I found to be praise-worthy about the game, the limitations enforced upon it almost make it completely worthless. The level of customization available to the player in the game is tremendous. Players can change WWE superstar costumes, move sets and entrances to their heart’s content. If I wanted to make it so, Mark Henry could perform a 619-hurricanrana combo on Evan Bourne without any problems. Players have even more options when it comes to customizing the created wrestlers. Creating a guy that makes Rey Mysterio look like the Great Khali and vice versa is an option. So why then can’t players (i.e. ME) edit downloaded wrestlers from the Community Creations area? Nothing about a downloaded wrestler is customizable at all. Now for whatever reason — mostly because wrestling fans tend to be jerk-ass little bitches about everything much like the rest of the Internet — folks that upload characters to Community Creations may want credit for or to keep the integrity of their custom wrestler. To this I say, “Fuck your face.” The fact that I’m downloading someone’s created wrestler at all should be enough for those mofos because I’m only utilizing the guy or gal for play on my own console. The fact that I can’t customize it makes the process useless and takes away from the point of the game anyway. For example, I’m using a downloaded version of AJ Styles on my Xbox 360, but the entrance created for him sucks balls and the moves aren’t exactly spot on or ones I enjoy. But I’m stuck with him as is. The same goes for a Kurt Angle I downloaded: I have his music ready to go on my computer and would like to link it to the character because the downloaded superstar enters to silence save for the exploding pyro. In fact, it’s easy to see that the game very easily could let people customize downloaded wrestlers because they appear on the Edit screen; they’re just grayed out and not selectable. A nice compromise would be to copy the existing superstar onto an empty slot, something available for even the existing WWE superstars’ move sets, but it’s not an option here.

2. Storyline Creator – While this seems to be a cool feature, I find it to be an exercise in futility. I already know what’s going to be said and exactly how the story will appear when I play it, so what’s the point in seeing it happen after that? I imagine that’s why I’ll never be a director. This option does, however, really let the Community Creations forum shine because a player can download someone else’s created story and play that, misspelled words and all. Storyline Creator is a bit of a wash, but others might get a huge kick out of it.

3. Physics – Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 attempted to give the characters virtual weight by making it difficult or impossible for smaller, crusierweight wrestlers to, say, suplex or powerbomb bigger, giant wrestlers. Unfortunately, this turned into an utter failure because all aspects were affected. A punch by Super Crazy had no effect on the Big Show, and while that might happen more often than not, there was no way to actually have a competitive match between the weight classes. For example, Rey Mysterio couldn’t even bodyslam Shawn Michaels. THQ and Yukes abandoned this particular aspect of play, but the pendulum swung to the opposite side now because I have Rey Rey giving the Great Khali a german suplex, a feat that would be impossible for John Cena, let alone the world’s most famous luchador. There has to be a middle ground and the creators have yet to find it.

Three Awesome Things In WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2010

1. Improved CAW – The biggest problem with creating wrestlers in the Smackdown series has always been that they never look nearly as good as the WWE superstars already made for the game. They look clunky and their clothes and outfits appear to be painted on as opposed to the real-life folks that get all of the cool bells and whistles. This year goes a long way to improving that. Not only are CAWs the most customizable they’ve ever been (It’s possible to choose the pose the wrestler has on the versus screen now!), but the loading times are almost non-existent. Compare that to the 2007 and 2008 versions ofCAW, where waiting for up to two minutes for a CAW’s entrance to load was the norm and it’s a vast improvement.

2. New animations – Past Smackdown games have kept the litany of original animations for basic moves dating back to the first game and then added to those as the years went on. Unfortunately, that lead to a great quality disparity between the older, clunky looking bodyslams and the more intricate, fluid, lifelike moves that came about with every subsequent version of the game. This year THQ and Yukes addressed this by completely overhauling many of the animations, especially the basic quick grapples. Very few of the older animations are gone in favor of the new ones, which is long overdue considering this is the fourth game available on a next-gen console. It’s about time the creators stopped using holdovers from the PS1 and tried to make something that looks as good as possible on a 1080p screen.

3. Online Community – This was the biggest selling point for me this year. When I actually have the time to do so, I love taking existing people from ROH, TNA, the defunct WCW and those no longer employed by Vince McMahon and creating versions of them for the game. This was easy on WWF No Mercy for the N64 because there were fewer options to worry about. Once the Smackdown games started including size differentials for individual parts of the body, I had to quit relying on eyeballing my creations and begin searching for online templates. In the past three years, having a life and a job has proved the biggest roadblock in creating equivalent avatars for people who participate in a fake exhibition sport. I only created one CAW for Smackdown vs. RAW 2009 last year, the one I create every year to represent myself because I am a narcissist deep down inside. That meant I had no Samoa Joe, no Kurt Angle and no AJ Styles, staples for the last few years of my console wrestling gaming. The Community Creations solves this problem. Now players can upload their own created wrestlers, move sets, and entrances for others to download. This saves an assload of time for me, the wrestling gamer fan on the go.

This game is not perfect, as my next planned post will attest, but the improvements are so vast (I didn’t even mention the completely overhauled and fun Royal Rumble match and the ability to edit existing WWE superstar costumes for the first time!) that I feel safe recommending it to anyone who may have strayed from the franchise due to fatigue before.

Three Things That Still Suck About FlashForward (and two it’s done well)

Having just watched last week’s episode of FlashForward, I’m still an episode behind. However, the fifth episode was definitely a step in the right direction. I’m hoping that it sticks but the sole review I skimmed over for its episode grade doesn’t give me all that much confidence. Here are three issues that I still have with it.

1. How many goddamn helicopters were flying during this time and why the hell were they all right next to buildings? One of the iconic moments from the pilot is the image of a helicopter flying into a Los Angeles skyscraper and slowly tumbling down the side without exploding. It was such a terrifying image and an indication that the show would pay attention to the little things that would happen during a black out that leaves the entire world unconscious for two and a half minutes. But then, like this show seems wont to do, it went into overkill. Every shot of a city skyline, mostly those in Los Angeles, but, if I remember correctly, also Germany, has exhibited similar damage to that first helicopter crash. The kicker in the fifth episode is the construction platforms around Capitol Hill displaying the trademark FlashForward helicopter scar. Capitol Hill? I might be wrong, but isn’t that restricted air space to begin with? I’m now waiting for the day when there’s an establishing shot of the White House with chunks of a Cessna airplane in the West Wing.

2. No one, not one person, acts like a cataclysmic event happened. This is something I addressed last time I wrote about the show. The larger issue seems to be that none of the characters act like ordinary people, let alone that they’re living in extraordinary times. Take the lesbians out on the first date. Despite the female FBI agent claiming to still be closeted, she decides to make out with her date in the middle of a crowded restaurant while both are wearing prom dresses. Not only that, but the FBI agent leaves the date at her house after what I can only assume was a night of passionate lesbian love making and explicitly tells her to go through her things. Assuming the two had been flirting in their karate class for a few weeks prior and that this was their actual first date, it’s still an odd thing to do. However, the even weirder part comes up later when the two meet at an art gallery opening. The date reveals that she didn’t rifle through the FBI agent’s things (despite the latter making it clear in her joking tone that it was okay if she had) but instead looked her up on the Mosaic website: a pseudo-social networking site set up by the government to collect everyone’s visions of the future. This, THIS, the FBI agent considers a gross invasion of privacy that cannot stand! Who acts like this other than a character on a television show hoping to service the plot?

3. Meanwhile, it’s getting harder to tell what is worse on the show: the acting or the writing. I’m tending towards the latter since only a few of the former stand out as bad. When the two come together, it sadly doesn’t get into the “so bad it’s good” territory. I’m not sure who sapped the charisma from Joseph Fiennes since he was great in movies like Shakespeare in Love. The fact that his American accent sounds forced and Christian Bale Batman-like might be the culprit. The terrible awful dialogue doesn’t help either. For instance, when confronted with the fact that his flash forward vision was hazy and his recollections aren’t as clear as other people’s were in their visions, Fiennes does his best On the Waterfront Brando impression by screaming at his superior, “BECAUSE I WAS LOADED AT THE TIME!” His consternation at this revelation is robbed of all its impact by his mopey emo character always having a furrowed brow and constantly harping about how terrible his and his wife’s visions were. The lead protagonist of a show should understand his character and play said character with more than one rote expression. There has been exactly one scene where Fiennes has been a believable human being and that was when he was playing with an egg in front of his daughter.

Meanwhile, here are two rays of sunshine that I hope to see expanded in order to have a better show.

1. Someone finally brought up the damned Chinese! Thank you, Senator Super Bitch! You actually thought through something that I thought was a vital aspect to the global approach the show seems to be taking. It was 2am in China when the blackout occurred which lead to FAR fewer casualties in that region of the world because most of their citizens were asleep. That also lead to someone else suggesting that they might have been responsible for the event. This is something a smart PERSON would say and PEOPLE make the most interesting characters.

2. This show so far has very often looked absolutely gorgeous and juxtaposes many of its great looking shots with very effective, yet at the same time, completely odd (in a good way) musical choices. The visual of people in a park fainting set to Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” worked amazingly, especially as the bus crashed into the lake and the world seemingly blew up a few blocks away. The gunfight set to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” was at least entertaining to watch.

So not everything in this show is terrible, although the scale is still tipped in “Terrible”’s favor.

Three Pro Wrestling Entrances Left Off This List

TOP TEN: Best Pro Wrestling Entrances of All Time – Wrestlezone.com.

1. The Brood – Gangrel, Edge and Christian would rise from an elevated platform surrounded by fire. Their goth-techno theme accentuated the vampire gimmick even more with a really heavy synthesized bass line. It’s amazing that WWE hasn’t gone back to the well and created a new version of The Brood lately considering how vampires seem to be the newest “in” thing but I guess that just goes to show how far from the pulse they are as a pop culture company. Granted, three years ago, they attempted to create a vampire character in Kevin Thorn, but he is a black hole of charisma so it failed to take off.

2. New Age Outlaws – In their heyday, Billy Gunn and Road Dogg came out to simple guitar riff. What made their entrance unique was the way in which Road Dogg would utilize a house mic to introduce the two of them. The catchphrase-heavy, late Nineties WWF gave us many memorable ways to threaten or finagle a cheap pop out of people, and not all of them have aged well: chief among those signature lines was Road Dogg’s “Oh, you didn’t know? Well, you’re ass better call somebody.” For it’s time, it was an entrance that everyone in the arena loved for its singalong possibilities. The best part of the team’s walk down the ramp was Road Dogg’s constant stream of insults directed at the local arena fans. Unfortunately, this practice ended the moment the duo joined DX and turned babyface.

3. Kurt Angle – Originally using Del Wilkes’ character’s music from when he wrestled under the guise of The Patriot, Kurt Angle’s music exemplified American patriotism. His goofy smile and self-centered enthusiasm made him a natural heel. However, the big missing component finally came about when The Rock hit upon the idea that Angle sucked. Granted, he meant it in a kayfabe way since, despite losing his marbles a long time ago, Kurt Angle is one of the best wrestlers ever. However, The Rock made the comment in time to Angle’s music. WWE has retconned history into giving Edge the credit, but it was The Rock who first gave the crowd the idea to chant “You suck!” in time to Angle’s music. This became such a huge part of Kurt Angle’s character and entrance that his babyface turn after returning from the first of his many neck surgeries failed in part because it was too much fun for fans to chant it at their then-American hero. It didn’t help that he became involved in an oddly homoerotic storyline with Brock Lesnar that involved lots of ass-slapping and kisses on the mouth but that’s another issue for another day. When WWE tried a second babyface run with Angle as a serious contender sans the goofy overtones his character was known for, they wisely remixed his music, removing the opportunity for the fans to chant the insult at him.

Three Things I Am Physically Incapable of Doing

1. Touching my toes – No matter how much I stretch, my toes are always just out of reach. This could be because of my tyrannosaurus-like arms or my ostrich-style legs or maybe a combination of the two. A byproduct of not being able to touch my toes is always thinking that those who do are showing off. Bunch of braggarts, the lot of them.

2. Whistle – The old saying of “just put your lips together and blow” is a bunch of malarkey. Think of all of the things I’ve missed out on due to an inability to whistle: I can’t sing along to that Peter Bjorn and John song and catcalling a foxy lady is impossible. Also, I’ll never be able to round up some cattle, which doesn’t sound like the most terrible thing in the world, but I’d certainly like to have the option.

3. Grow a full beard – This one is the most painful. For the entirety of my life, my father has had a full beard save a cup of coffee in the mid-90’s when tried out the Van Dyke goatee. In fact, my mother has never seen my dad sans facial hair, and they’ve been married for almost 32 years. So imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the hair that grows along my chin becomes just patchy enough to make a beard look utterly ridiculous. Sure, I can grow the aforementioned goatee and some sweet sideburns but the part that makes the beard a beard? No dice. It has made me the subject of ridicule when I have tried to grow one and is one of the few things that bring me genuine shame when brought up in mixed company. This also makes me incredibly vain, but I write a blog on the Internet, so it’s not like that was any big secret.

What are some things YOU are incapable of doing? Besides avert your eyes from the computer screen, evidently.

Three Things Teachers Say and What They Really Mean

This has the potential to be a continuing series, I imagine.

1. “Not quite.” – Your answer is wrong.

2. “You have a lot of potential.” – The world is a worse place with you in it.

3. “My stomach hurts.” – I need to drop a deuce but this class is preventing me from doing so.

Three Reasons Why The Movie ‘Couples Retreat’ Sucks Out Loud

The wife and I had a date night on Saturday, culminating in a viewing of Couples Retreat. We had two other options: The Invention of Lying and Zombieland. The latter was my choice and the former was our compromise choice, but I decided to be nice and go with what the missus wanted because how bad could a movie starring Vince Vaughan, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell really be? These folks know how to act, can be incredibly funny, and have been in some great movies with the latter two starring in two of my favorite television shows. The answer, however, was bad. Really bad.

1. Believability  – The obstacle for most of the couples is that they’ve been together for so long that the romance has disappeared in varying degrees. Bateman and Bell are headed for divorce, Favreau and Kristin Davis are counting the minutes until their kid goes to college so they can ditch each other and Malin Ackerman and Vaughan are so caught up in their day-to-day mundane lives that they have lost touch with each other. Unfortunately, it’s hard to buy Bell or Ackerman in their roles. Both of those ladies are my age, yet the audience is supposed to buy them as middle aged. Considering Vince Vaughan and Jason Bateman are in their forties, I don’t find it hard to believe that either would date women their age, but to be married for that amount of time to those guys is another thing entirely. At one point, Jason Bateman even mentions that he and Kristen Bell had been together for nine years. And Malin Ackerman as a mother of two? That’s not out of the realm of possibility, but still highly unlikely given the set-up. The most jarring aspect of these two characters is how they view Kali Hawk’s 20 year old character, both lamenting their supposedly long-gone days of partying and wondering how their close friend could possibly keep up with this wild and crazy young girl. Neither scenario is believable and more of a comment on Hollywood’s youth-obsessed culture.

2. Characterization – Very few of these characters are likable. Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis cheat on each other all of the time. Bateman and Vaughan treat their wives like crap while the wives do nothing but take it. Faizon Love is a pathetic sad sack and lets his girlfriend call him “Daddy,” an aspect of the film so creepy that I physically cringed every time she did it.

3. Pacing – Here’s what really kills me and it probably ties into the believability thing, too: these people all have deep-seated, really ingrained problems in their marriage. Children (whether conceiving them or dealing with them) and cheating huge issues, not ones that are solved with a 30 second speech followed by rigorous love-making in a storage closet or making out on a dance floor. Yet all of the couples reach some kind of consensus with the former and two of them engage in the latter. Movies should be an escape and oftentimes are not realistic, but this film couldn’t make up its mind. Couples Retreat never figures out whether it’s a fun yet realistic look at how couples can attempt to work out the problems that exist in relationships (a la Vince Vaughan’s previous film The Break-Up which is a good movie with moments of drama that ends with, surprise, a break up) or if it’s a zany madcap farce with hi-jinks galore, so instead it attempts to be both. Unfortunately, it loses most of its humor in trying to be both. Also, there’s a five minute extended commercial for Guitar Hero 5 during the build-up to the climax of the film. What the hell?

Oh, and this might count as a whole other number, but can we please put a moratorium in theatres of laughing at the jokes that show up in the commercial unless the context somehow makes the jokes funnier than the first 100 times it was shown on the commercial? The patrons of this particular viewing obviously had no taste because they laughed at several very unfunny things and laughed loudest at the lines from the commercial. Yes, the kid nonchalantly saying, “I peed” has its appeal and all but not only was it in every commercial, but there was no expansion on the joke in context to make it funnier. Why laugh at that again?

In conclusion, run far away from this movie because it is bad.

Three Reasons Why I Sometimes Won’t Update For Long Stretches of Time

1. These papers aren’t going to grade themselves.

2. My wife is ridiculously good looking so I’d much rather look at her than a computer screen when she’s home.

3. Shut up, that’s why.

Three New TV Shows That Appear To Suck Less Than Others

1. Community – Set at the fictional Greendale Community College, Community focuses on a group of students that vary in age and ethnicity who inadvertently form a study group for Spanish class due to Joel McHale being an asshole. While not a big fan of The Soup, McHale’s acerbic wit has always appealed to my sensibilities. He’s quick on his feet and gives off equal parts charismatic charm and weaselly dickishness. Chevy Chase has been funnier in the first three episodes than he has been in the last decade. So far, the show demonstrates a voice and focus that most shows don’t get until midway through their second season, and a case can be made for each character being the “break out” of the group. My lone concern is that the nature of community college means that they’ll all be done with Spanish 101 by January, leaving no need for a study group, but the writers have been good enough so far that I doubt that’ll be a big enough problem to hold them back from telling good, funny stories.

2. FlashForward -  The premise is that the entire world blacked out for two minutes and seventeen seconds. Those that didn’t die during the blackout experienced a vision of themselves six months into the future. Unfortunately, the creators seem to be in such a rush to get to an end point of the story that they don’t seem concerned enough to show the interesting parts of the story they already have. For example, the first half of the first episode was so awesome beyond words that I wanted to keep watching THAT show as opposed to the one that kept going after the half-hour mark. Think about how interesting the idea of the black out is all by itself yet they gloss over it without dealing too much with the consequences outside of the visions. Hell, call the show BlackOut as opposed to FlashForward and then slowly reveal that people had visions of the future as time goes on. Deal instead with the chaos that ensues from such a huge disaster. If people all over the world pass out for two and a half minutes, there are plenty of stories about the immediate aftermath of that event to fill half of season one. Consider the semi-trucks that are the lifeblood of the country’s food and drug supply and how many of them crashed during that time. Not only would the roads be tied up for weeks, but there would be widespread panic over the shortages that resulted. Think about the economic advantages some countries have over others since half of the globe would probably be asleep during the black out period anyway, so the damage they incur would be minuscule by comparison. All of the principal players are treating the event as if it were a minor inconvenience as opposed to a global or near-global catastrophe. This is a time when decompressed storytelling would work better, but they seem to have locked themselves into telling the story without regard to what makes the story fascinating and have even locked themselves in for the real-time April 29-30, 2010 date that everyone envisioned. That blows. These are a lot of complaints for a show just two episodes old, but I like the premise (and John Cho) and I want it to be good, yet David S. Goyer seems determined to undermine my desires at every turn. I’m giving FlashForward at least six episodes in the hope that they find a good rhythm, mostly because Lost is ending around the time the first season of this will be over and I would like something smart and intriguing to replace it.

3. Bored To Death – After his girlfriend leaves him because he apparently smokes too much pot and drinks too much white wine, Jonathan Ames decides to deal with his depression by solving mysteries from clients he finds on Craigslist. Besides utilizing Jason Schwartzman, an actor I find adorable and endearing, Bored To Death also incorporates a regular dude into a film noir setting. Zach Galifianakis and Ted Danson play supporting roles and both guys have enough talent to be great supporting players in anything. The fact that HBO broadcasts this show gives me a lot of hope that it’ll not only grow into something really special but confidence that the network will actually give it the time to do so.

Honorable Mentions: Cougar Town, Modern Family and Glee