Feminazi Tomb Raider and the Unshakeable Curse of Cinematic Adventure Games

With the possible exceptions of Avengers, Avatar, or any reboot directed by J.J. Abrams, whenever a Hollywood blockbuster trades logic and pathos for flashy special effects and chaotic bursts of red, it’s lampooned as a puerile, vapid, Michael Bay explosionfest made by and for an audience of undiscerning teenagers.  Whenever a triple-A video game blockbuster does the same, it’s hailed as a “cinematic” joyride with dazzling “set piece moments” and amazing graphics.

This is OK, because it’s 2016, and video games are still perceived as stupid, expensive toys produced for teenagers’ amusement, while movies’ status as high “art” is never called into question.  This is also the lesson taught by the phoned-in 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, a game possessing neither art nor soul that nevertheless seduced critics and commoners alike into fawning over the high-definition rendering of Lara Croft’s youthful, always mud- or blood-streaked face.  Crystal Dynamics’ Lara is to the gaming press what Scarlett Johansson was to a lot of unfortunate Scottish men in Under the Skin, a pristine and irresistible example of how pretty and “progressive” games have become – look, a strong and hardened female protagonist who does everything Nathan Drake can do and more!  The difference: as strange and mechanical as Scarlett’s beautiful extraterrestrial appeared to viewers of that film, she still made a far more personable, sympathetic, and human entity than this decade’s quasi-Feminist Lara, who’s more of an SJW-inspired construct for a character than a character herself.

Tomb Raider feels very much the same as a game, never deviating from its packaged Indiana Jones-y plot or giving one a reason to care about anything that happens to its “characters”.  Visually it’s one of the better-looking games I’ve played – or shall I say experienced, as getting through its lifeless narrative often feels more like work than play.  As Lara, I virtually dragged myself through the last hour and a half, not out of duty to any boring comrades or interest in solving the mystery but merely out of fairness to the designers who had already succeeded in wasting so much of my time.  In retrospect, maybe I played so long under the delusion that the writer was obliged, or maybe indebted to give me a satisfactory ending, though I like to think I’m smarter than that now.

But I was about to talk about how gorgeous this thing is.  The landscapes and lighting are indeed befitting of a tropical paradise retreat, one where hundreds of well-armed plane crash survivors converge to pointlessly murder and get murdered by you.  There’s truly no greater reward in Tomb Raider than getting to pause and gape at the lovely mountain ranges between one forced firefight or untimed rescue effort and the next.  The weather effects are impressive and varied enough that you can run through a snowy, a rainy, a nighttime, and a sunny level in one hour of real time without leaving the island.  The character animations are astonishingly true to the adventuring life, and I never tired of watching Lara jumping, climbing, somersaulting, grabbing onto ledges while plummeting, and never getting tired through any of it because she’s a weightless “platforming game” character.  The best fun to be had from this title, besides setting scads of random, bloodthirsty lunatics on fire without remorse, stems mainly from charging around wide, open villages where the game isn’t bossily directing you down a tunnel to the next pit stop in the story.

These sections, it goes without saying, are very few and far between.  Most of Tomb Raider’s so-called gameplay involves running and occasionally jumping down a straight path while structures blow up and collapse around you in spectacular, preordained fashion.  To save Lara from falling to certain doom with the rest of the crumbling, largely unexplained ancient architecture, the player follows predictable on-screen prompts to press this or that button or to jerk the joystick back and forth maniacally.  None of these “quick-time events” will challenge anyone who knows the layout of the controller, nor do they amplify the intensity of the scripted cutscenes they replace. Rather, they serve as an obnoxious reminder that one is simply furthering a fictional, deeply linear interactive movie, and a really uninvolving, tensionless movie at that.

The omnipresent non-threat of A.I. bad guys, who are especially susceptible to arrows in the head and can very seldom make it to the end of the map where you’re hiding, also draws attention to the artifice of the game’s world, a lost island infested with savage cultists who have no connection to outside civilization and who ostensibly slaughter anyone who wanders into their domain.  Since there are no female, childbearing cultists observed within the game and the bad guys have a marked hostility to anyone who might prolong the survival of their circle, it doesn’t make sense why there are literally hundreds of bad guys to begin with, bearing literally hundreds of firearms and molotov cocktails.  Are plane and ship crashes such a recurrent phenomenon on this isle that arch-villain Father Mathias is able to recruit enough unfortunate passengers to settle, patrol, and randomly disperse lanterns, scrolls, and arrow quivers (recovered from the wreckage of transports that just so carried such things?) all over the place?  The only logical explanation for the magnitude and prevalence of the cult is that the developers were afraid of alienating anxious Call of Duty gamers who’ve grown accustomed to looking for and stylishly disposing of scores of nameless, mostly impotent baddies.  And disposing of them is pretty fun, up until the point you realize that the only reason you can kill so many people with such ease is because you’re playing a mindless, dumbed-down movie-game, and the people you’re killing exist in such quantities only because the medium of an Uncharted-esque tentpole release calls for them to be there, because the unskilled, unrefined masses would cry foul if they got anything less for their $60.

When performing awesome, death-defying feats is as easy as pressing the X button and the bland protagonist is for all intents and purposes invincible against man and nature, it’s impossible to form the slightest investment in what happens to her.  She’s Superman without a conscience (if I had a dollar for every time she yelled, “Die, you bastards!” or “Go to hell!” or something of the sort), and watching her narrowly skirt catastrophe over and over with little to no agency outside of basic directional commands makes for possibly the least involving experience one could derive from a game.  Even if cutscenes and camera changes didn’t constantly yank the player out of Lara’s boots, the game’s passive method of forcing Lara into a “sneaky” crouching stance whenever danger arises would accomplish that just as well. Tomb Raider doesn’t have a “cover system” per se, as has almost every 3rd-person shooter in the wake of Gears of War and Uncharted, but that doesn’t preclude it from reminding the players at every turn of the sheer disdain the designers held for their basic competence.

Normally I would say that the developer should have just made an uninterrupted cutscene, more commonly known as a movie, but Tomb Raider’s story is so fundamentally broken it wouldn’t work as anything.  I don’t want to ramble too much about the actual script as I’m more concerned with the storytelling methods broadly, but here’s a quick rundown of Tomb Raider’s many inanities.

* Battle dialogue. Again, the Die you Bastards thing, but also creative stuff like:

[Cultist 122] “She’s just one girl!”
[Cultist 123] “That one girl is kicking our ass!”

* Other dialogue:

“Look, I know this is a crazy plan.”
“It is, but right now crazy is all we got.  Let’s do this.”

“You think you’re a hero, Lara?  Everything I’ve done I’ve done to survive!”

“Oh my god.  Sam – a vessel for the sun queen’s soul.  I have to stop this madness.”

* The mythological sun queen plot actually being treated seriously, despite it being the least appropriate thing to put in a story about the formative molding of Lara Croft.  The only adversaries needed were a band of loony cannibal cult-worshippers, some vicious wolves (the wolf-to-human ratio on this uninhabitable, storm-ravaged island is and should be something like 50:1), and the elements of the island itself.  Instead of a bracing, primal survival story about a frightened woman outwitting and fighting men who’ve forsaken any moral boundaries, what we get is a silly, unbelievable fantasy romp wherein the crazed savages are actually right and the hero must appease the angry, mythical sun creature to calm the storms enveloping the island.

* The hero having to prove her ability in order to honor her family name, which should mean something to us but depends entirely on unearned nostalgia.  “You can do it, Lara,” says the grizzled beta male companion in a scene sampled by a lot of advertising materials.  “After all, you’re a Croft.”  “I don’t think I’m that kind of Croft,” protests Lara, but the older man quickly rebuts that notion.  “Sure you are.  You just don’t know it yet.”  Before playing the Body Positivity version of Lara Croft, it never occurred to me that I might appreciate an origin story about the legendary tomb buster besting her weak self-confidence or sense of familial isolation.  Tomb Raider made sure to dispel that uncertainty within the first two hours or so of the game, which is equivalent to verbally dropping daddy issues in the first twelve minutes of a mainstream movie without ever bothering to show said daddy in the flesh.  Guardians of the Galaxy kind of did that, twice, but at least it wasn’t boring.  Tomb Raider’s story, however, is a more violent, overblown riff on an American Idol or Chopped episode; all are built around disgustingly manipulative backstories of people losing elder family members and trying to “prove themselves” by overcoming some challenge for the deceased, but while the character development on reality TV offers an antidote for a main attraction – bad karaoke, cooking, wedding dress shopping – that is frankly unbearable, the character development in this video game injects an unbearable distraction from the only possible attraction, which is setting off explosive barrels and stabbing people in the face.

A Lara I cared more about than the one in Tomb Raider

* Internalized misandry, or perhaps just misandry, because the lead writer was a woman.  Right around and subsequent to Tomb Raider’s release, much hullabaloo was being raised on the left side of the interwebs over supposed “misogyny” in the video game industry, by which accusers were referring either to the unsatisfactory proportion of vaginas on game development teams or to what they considered unflattering depictions of female characters in mega-successful game franchises.  Tomb Raider seems to have been commissioned directly in response to these complaints, not just in the way it desexualizes a character once embodied by young Angelina Jolie, but in its larger, subtler scheme of making almost every man in the game a ruthless, sadistic monster answerable to no greater code or principles but the dictates of an even crueler monster.  If GTA can be condemned as sexist because all its female characters are helpless or – less offensively – whores, then detractors of that major series should apply the same logic to the minor Feminist Tomb Raider reboot.  I forget if any one of the enemies go so far as to levy rape threats, but I don’t recall playing as Lara to be a very pleasurable or relieving experience, and I would have left with a profound distrust of all men if I didn’t know that this was fiction.  Goons in Batman: Arkham City often make leery, sexually charged threats against Catwoman, but that game’s prison setting takes for granted that its denizens are the lowest, most far gone drecks of uncivilized society.  Tomb Raider, on the other hand, might as well be labeled a 3rd-person patriarchy murder-fantasy simulator, and one of the worse ones in the genre.

In case I haven’t been clear, make no mistake that killing patriarchs as Lara can be pretty fun, and after an hour, I had gotten really good at killing them.  The problem is, in modern video games, killing people has gotten far too easy.  Any kid, heck, any crazy person who doesn’t even play video games, can walk into a shop, or go on Craigslist, buy any 1st-person action game, and start senselessly mowing down tons of people with assault weapons, and whenever someone tries to stop them, they can just duck down and let their health recharge.

Now there are two ways we can respond to this.  We can pretend the problem doesn’t exist, keep praising crappy military-style games like Tomb Raider, saying that Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Jonathan McIntosh, and other Feminists are trying to take these games away, which… is just not true.  We can tell ourselves that Tomb Raider is an A+ story when it’d really be a C- movie, because we think the jokes are funny, or the violence is provocative, or we like watching buildings fall down and blow up.

Or we can say enough is enough, admit the problem exists, and start working on tough but common-sense solutions to the “cinematic”, self-playing okey doke that is Tomb Raider.  Solutions like a modern Metroid game that isn’t Other M, or even Half Life 3.  We’ve got a long way to go, and the choice of how we go there lies with us.  But the time has long since passed for doing nothing.  The road ahead is clear.  With the courage and determination of the gaming community, Tomb Raider will be just another bump in a very rocky road.


6.5/10.  I have nothing good to say about this game.

True Detective Isn't That Smart

So, True Detective.  Word on the street is that it recently made its return to Hobo, and almost no one involved in making the first season helped to create the second, but the new cast is led by Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, and Rachel McAdams, so nobody’s complaining.  As we’ve seen from stunners like Total Recall (2012 version), The Watch, and The Notebook, these three are well beyond reproach and light up literally everything in which she stars.  If writer Nic Pizzolatto was able to pull together a compelling, self-sufficient story in the short year after True Detective blew up with audiences and critics, Hobo will surely have a winner on their hands.

There are certainly a lot of things to admire about the original season of True Detective, the foremost one being that its creator had a vision for an 8-episode, stand-alone story and stuck with that vision despite the outstanding financial allure posed by various plot-driven dramas that drag on forever with no sense of direction or ultimate resolution.  Both structurally and compositionally on screen, True Detective is kind of a rebuttal to the cheap-looking, cookie cutter murder mystery, and the presence of unexpected struggles and arcs for each of the main detectives is easy is to appreciate when most serials sincerely avoid making dramatic changes to characters whom audiences already love like their real-life friends.  I don’t watch much TV, but a prime counter-example to Pizzolatto’s method would be the pilot season of Fox’s 24, which has either no character development or the shallowest kind conceivable and progresses merely by forcing superhuman Jack Bauer into one high-stakes predicament after another.  Or observe Once Upon A Time, which blissfully wastes hours upon hours of our life meandering in forests with people who seem like they’re going to permanently change for the better or worse but inevitably regress into their old ways at the end of the subplot so that nobody has won, everything is back to normal, and the producers can keep shoveling new Disney characters into the universe.

We probably make too much fun of Time given that it’s a largely irrelevant, relatively family-friendly mashup show, but there’s such a multitude of things it does wrong that True Detective does right it only seems proper to compare and contrast them.  For instance, I like that True Detective uses real locations in Louisiana – swamplands, fields, neighborhoods – whereas a less ambitious show like Time stages long stretches of nothingness in obviously fake forest sets or, worse, shoots actors against a green screen and ineptly attempts to fill in the world afterwards.  The broad, grassy landscapes combined with careful framing, lighting, and film techniques makes the drama much more realistic and emotionally involving than a network show where the director and D.P. just opt to do the bare minimum and call it a wrap.  In fact, director Cary Fukunaga put so much effort into making each scene memorable that one could pull pretty much any clip from the internet and use it as an illustration of how conscious camerawork, editing, etc. can emphasize the mood the script is trying to portray.  Like Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, the show is downright bleak and chilling at times, from the discovery of a cult murder victim stripped and posed as a “paraphilic love map” in a fog-drenched meadow, to the freaky, otherworldly shot of a masked “monster” in the third episode, to one of the most suspenseful and unnerving chases I can remember seeing in any visual medium.

I like that True Detective prioritizes outstanding talent and credibility over appearance in its casting, possibly excepting the multiple women Woody Harrelson beds because he’s tired of his wife, in which case the hiring of superficial, less respected but “sexy” actresses arguably helps us understand Harrelson’s position.  Speaking of sex, the show has its fair share of boobs, though the more salacious scenes are relatively restrained for a Hobo original program.  I’d wager there’s around four minutes of graphic fake sex in the 450-minute season, and while I can’t affirm that showing it on camera greatly alters the way we look at either Marty Hart or Rust, Harrelson and McConaughey both do a good job of making you feel uncomfortable and “disgusted” by their actions.  You hear that?  Let the record show that True Detective is Disgusting and Misogynistic and has a lot of F-bombs I didn’t even notice.

Despite its female characters coming straight out of the medieval age – and I’m talking pre-Roe v. Wade sexism here –, I liked that True Detective gave a morally unambiguous, weighty representation of adultery and the monumental pain it inflicts on people’s lives, as opposed to immature, “progressive” tripe like Once Upon a Time which tries to justify it as fun and necessary and true to the unfaithful person’s heart (“I can’t live a lie by pretending to care for you anymore”).  In one of the police interview scenes, Marty remarks something vague and deflective to the effect of “having to take whatever relief I can get, being away from the family so much of the time”, which reveals both his utter shame in outing himself as a sinner and his proud instinct to view himself as a helpless victim of circumstances, rather than a spiritually weak and fallible man who refuses to govern his impulses.

Come to think of it, there’s not much I didn’t like about True Detective.  The main characters are excellently developed and deeply flawed, the score and soundtrack selections gritty and fitting of the story’s somber tone (especially The Angry River and Young Men Dead), and the writing makes genuine efforts to spur viewers towards philosophical reflection, which is more than I can say of most books and movies released today.  The show is widely known for deviating into long car ride conversations between Rust and Marty which do little to advance the murder mystery plotline but over which we acquire a deep comprehension of each detective’s mental habit and moral or amoral code.  It’s kind of like Boyhood!, but much better written because only McConaughey sounds as though he’s reciting pre-written postulates about life, the universe, and the everything.  Lord knows we could use more TV shows like Boyhood that focus on rich and believable stereotypes without getting bogged down in pseudo-scientific exposition, battle planning, evil monologues, you know, plot stuff.

McConaughey’s misanthropic stiffness and penchant for pessimistic lecturing are simultaneously True Detective’s strongest and lamest elements.  Rust Cohle is a kind of dispensing machine of philosophical conceits he personally correlates with “realism”, a nihilistic worldview holding among other things that humanity’s rationality is a mistake of evolution, everybody is a nobody, and the noblest thing we can do as a species is quit reproducing and walk hand in hand into extinction.  “It means I’m bad at parties,” he says. “Let me tell you, you ain’t great outside of parties either,” retorts his partner.  Indeed.

The problem with True Detective’s intellectual banter is that it never rises to real argumentation or smoothly integrates with the narrative; it’s just there for interested viewers to think about, never artistically meshing with the plot or cinematic landscape.  Whereas stories like The Matrix, The Truman Show, Life of Pi, and Prometheus (I didn’t say “good stories”) make definite, allegorical statements about God, free will, and human insignificance through the worlds and scenarios imagined by their authors, True Detective doesn’t attempt to prove or substantiate any belief.  Nic Pizzolato just throws a bunch of clunky, lofty-sounding sentiments at the audience and hopes that something sticks.  The many loony dialogues about darkness and the light, hope and cynicism, time running in a circle, etc. etc. are simply that, dialogues, reflecting no explicit or internal developments in the story.  In fact, the more I think about the ideas communicated in True Detective, the more I’m convinced that the show and its fanatics think they’re a whole lot smarter than they actually are.  When you take away the hype and watch the show in isolation, it’s abundantly clear that True Detective doesn’t ever argue anything, only poses theories we’re free to welcome or reject depending on our preexistent feelings.

I get the impression we’re not supposed to wholly agree with Rust or Marty, the former because he has a miraculous vision at the very end which turns him into a believer that “the light [in the night sky] is winning” – whatever that means –, the latter because he’s consistently portrayed as blindly optimistic, hypocritical, and logically inferior to Cohle.  Marty’s identity as a Christian plays a much smaller part than his partner’s identity as a freethinking whatever-he-is.  To the best of my memory, we never see him doing anything religious or defending his faith very sincerely, which leaves me befuddled as to why Pizzolato would bother labeling him a Christian in the first place.  Maybe he thought the buddy cop dynamic would be more intriguing if each was a philosophical foil to the other.  In retrospect, the cynic in me thinks that Marty’s only a Christian to show us that Christians are Hypocrites and sinners too… which is actually fundamental to the Gospel of the Bible, but who cares?  I’m sure True Detective is just too intelligent for my puny, religion-dulled brain to understand.  After all, Rust does give a pointed, scathing speech explaining how religion is scientifically proven to retard your critical thinking, and how could I doubt him given how crazy the loudmouthed evangelist minister and his overweight, easily manipulated sheeple sound?

I don’t even want to get into the moronic child molestation/porn subplot that randomly pops up in the later episodes.  All of a sudden I felt like I was watching a silly Newsroom or True Blood kind of show that plays upon all the dumbest stereotypes cultivated about Catholics.  Look, here’s a religious authority figure who funds an evil private school system free of governmental regulation and works in the proximity of children! What kind of dirt do you suppose he’s hiding?  I just couldn’t imagine such systemic abuse and cover-ups happening at a publicly funded grade school.

Suffice it to say that True Detective is a true achievement in cinematography, acting, and direction that’s thrilling, unsettling, and any which way moving so long as you don’t think about how it’s masquerading as something much deeper than it truly is.  It is so far, by far the most visually captivating and only HBO show I’ve pilfered off a friend who had the DVD, but to quote the stupid Christian, “I just want them to stop saying odd s***.”

Samus and the Super Smash Bros: Feminist Masterpiece or Misogynist Male Fantasy?

Cross-applied is a weekly feature in the Beatissima Garbage that takes the most infamous elements of the college paper’s editorial page and doubles them through a point-otherpoint, high school debate-style format.  Two “sensitive” culture critics argue about something no one else is arguing about and try to ascertain whether it’s detrimental to or supportive of equality, diversity, justice, whatever.  If you want to contribute your ideas to a future issue of Cross-applied exclusively for The Author’s Files, please pitch your grievance or stance to theauthorsfiles@gmail.com and we’ll consider whether it’s worth duking out.

Gareth Paltrey: Zero Suit Fights Rapists With Girl Power

2015 is a great year to be a feminist.  For decades there’s been a stigma in our society against feminism, largely because the vast majority of society don’t understand what feminism means, but thanks to the outspokenness of A-list celebrities and actions of concerned corporations, the social attitude towards feminism is finally starting to sway.

In September of last year, the beautiful, talented Teen Choice Award-winning actress Emma Watson used her influence among remaining Harry Potter fans to make a powerful and deeply inspiring defense of gender equality.  Shortly thereafter, Taylor Swift met Lena Dunham and came out of the feminist closet, giving hundreds of 15-year-olds the courage to take a stand and identify themselves as feminist.  Then Hillary Clinton stepped forward despite unprecedented GOP resistance and declared her 2016 candidacy for the U.S. president, making her the first woman who counts to run for president since Hillary Clinton in 2008. Finally, we saw a wave of openly feminist, progressive movies receive widespread critical and financial success, including “Edge of Tomorrow”, the new “Mad Max,” the new “Pitch Perfect,” the new “Avengers,” and the new “Terminator” movie starring Khaleesi as Sarah Connor.

But possibly the greatest victory for women’s equality was in video gaming, an arena which has long been controlled by patriarchy and misogynistic developers.  Feminist bloggers like Anita Sarkeesian brought attention to the blatant sexist stereotyping of women in the industry’s best-selling games, and the hateful underbelly of Gamergate’s defenders rose to the forefront of the public’s discussion.  While some developers continued to churn out the same ugly, male-dominated entertainment they did before (see the horrible “The Witcher 3” for the epitome of disgusting sexist representations in video gaming), Nintendo heard the public’s call for change and answered it with flying colors, giving us one of the best and most diverse games in years.  I’m talking of course about “Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.”

Nintendo’s always been a leader when it comes to creating strong and independent female characters, starting with the original Metroid on the NES and culminating in the dorm room phenomenon known as Super Smash Bros.  They’ve had their stumbles here and there with characters like Princess Peach who exist solely to be rescued by male plumbers, but they’ve always been open to the desires of fans and quickly rectified situations deemed offensive.  When female Super Mario and Donkey Kong fans protested the weak and two-dimensional portrayals of hapless damsels in those games, Nintendo turned the tables on traditional gender roles with games like “Super Princess Peach” and “Ocarina of Time”, the latter of which is often considered the best video game for Nintendo console owners of all time.

Through three installments on the N64, Gamecube, and Wii, Super Smash Bros. added to the company’s roster of tough female characters and proved once and for all that women can kick just as much, if not more ass than men.  As everybody knows, the series’ toughest competitor is actually a woman, the agile and ridiculously OP Princess Zelda, but Zero Suit Samus is a close runner-up.  Zero Suit might look and sound like a cheap porno star to ignorants, but she’s actually the most important and feminist creation of Nintendo.

Zero Suit Samus’ redesign for “Super Smash Bros. for Wii U” reduces her to the skimpiest apparel we’ve ever seen her slip into, but she remains just as powerful and intimidating as she does in past games, impressively holding her own against Luigi, Marth, and Daaaaark Purple Pit.  In my dorm at Beatissima, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that she’s incredibly hot, but all the guys want to play as her because she’s strong on top of being fricking gorgeous.  Zero Suit embraces her sexuality but doesn’t enslave herself to it, using her stunning beauty for self-empowerment rather than exploitation.  In an ironic twist on conventional male leadership in sexual relationships, she even lashes out at opponents with a laser whip, showing who’s the real dominant partner.  Samus Aran is a rare ravishing blonde in video games who isn’t defined as a simple accessory to men and exceeds all three rules of the Bechdel Test.

A lot of conservative, middle-aged mothers have complained (not on the internet, of course; there are no girls on the internet) about her revealing skins, dubbing her combat bra and short shorts “space undies” or “stripper clothes.”  As it turns out, this incendiary backlash is exactly the reason why characters like Samus are a social necessity in modern gaming.  With the risk of making the same mistakes and ignorant generalizations they all make, I don’t want to lump all of Zero Suit’s detractors together.  Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and we should be able to have a civil discussion without namecalling and personal attacks.

With that said, the resistance to Zero Suit’s depiction in Super Smash Bros. is rooted in the same archaic, patriarchal Puritanism that misogynists used to oppress women up until the Voting Rights Act, and I mean that in the most non-personal way.  The Supreme Court has declared free speech to be a civil right, so conservatives are free to say whatever they want about Samus, but that doesn’t mean there’s any excuse for slut-shaming.  It’s 2015.  Isn’t it about time we stop criticizing and humiliating women for the makeup they put on, the food they eat, the clothes they do or don’t wear, and just love each other as fellow fetuses?

Like Katniss Everdeen, Lara Croft, and Rita Virtoshi, Zero Suit Samus provides an inspiring role model for young girls and fills a void in a gaming culture that’s often hostile to female nerds.  With more feminist characters who are comfortable in their sexuality and able to compete with men, gender inequality and rape culture will be seen for what they are, a thing of the past that’s just as outdated as racism and bullying.

Jess Dewon: Hey Nintendo, Michael Bay Wants His Supermodel Stereotype Back

Almost thirty years ago, Nintendo shocked the world with an inspiring and empowering heroine, a female Bobafett of the video gaming world.  Samus Iran made her kick-ass debut in the Metroid franchise in 1986, blasting her way through parasitic aliens and ruthless space pirates.  Samus became instantly beloved by gamers everywhere and went on to empower women all over the globe.  Samus showed us all that a woman can hold her own, even in a dark and dangerous world like Metroid’s, and can be more than just a mere object.

However, Nintendo in several releases for the Wii and Wii U, let everyone down with the release of Samus’ racy “Zero Suit”, an embarrassing tight bodysuit that serves no other purpose than to pointlessly objectify the series’ protagonist.  Nintendo’s continued use of the zero suit is an unfortunate reflection of the current state of women in all current gaming.  Whether Trip needs a leg up in “Enslaved” or Cortana decides to let it all hang in “Halo 4,” women are constantly portrayed as nothing more than either sex symbols or helpless damsels in distress respectively.  Playing Super Smash Bros. is an exercise in chauvinism just as much as any Michael Bay movie or HBO original show (except for Lena Dunham’s “Girls”, which is amazing and very progressive).

But Samus’ skin-tight get-up is hardly Nintendo’s only step back from feminism and sexual equality.  For decades, Mario has had to rescue Princess Peach from the evil Bowser, and Nintendo’s games have forever been flooded with heroic male protagonists, be it Donkey Kong, or the genius Professor Layton. Nintendo has also recently acquired the racy Bayonetta series.  These poor decisions just reinforce the sadly accurate mindset that the video game industry is nothing but a giant, exclusionary sausage fest.

Samus’ zero suit shows that Nintendo can’t see past a woman’s body to create a strong, female lead in a video game without overly sexualizing that character.  When Samus wore an armored exo-suit in the previous Metroid games, she could be seen as a serious protagonist and an intimidating warrior.  Just as Microsoft would never deign to show Master Chief in a skimpy pair of boxers, Nintendo should not deign to take away Samus’ armor.  Stripping Samus Iran of her armor is equivalent of stripping her of her power and gravitas.  Its undeniable that Nintendo’s apparent objectification of Samus is nothing but disappointing and is a huge let down to the whole gaming community.  Far too many games in today’s culture push back against feminism, and to lose one of the industry’s most empowering figures is an enormous step backwards.

Still worse, Zero Suit Samus has brought out the worst in the very gamers playing, leading to racy mods, “sexy freeze-frame” compilations, sexist internet memes, and disgusting fan art on social sharing websites like “Deviant Art”.  While every woman, especially a driven character like Samus, should have the right to embrace or reject their sexuality as they desire, the zero suit feels like nothing more than a ploy to weaken Samus’ image.

Nintendo’s zero suit doesn’t further Samus’ character in any way.  It doesn’t even go so far as to show her emotional vulnerability, an admittedly necessary trait in any hero, male or female, cis or trans.  Needless to say, I find Nintendo’s choices both disappointing and distressing, and I can only hope the gaming industry chooses to reform its current ways and show a little more open-mindedness.

Every Mother's Reaction to the New Taylor Swift Video

So the new Taylor Swift video dropped two nights ago at the Billboard Music Awards, which means that all that anybody’s going to be talking about on the internet for the next couple days is the new T. Swift video, so naturally we just have to join in distracting the masses from stuff that matters.  But maybe we can take this as a teachable moment, about gender roles, femininity, the collaborative process, and society’s declining standards for artistic self-expression.  From the initial teaser posters plastered all over social media to the video’s bombastic, explosion-packed conclusion, it’s clear that Taylor Swift has embarked on a very elaborate and ostentatious makeover of her entire public image, which is entirely within her freedom as a financially independent adult but leaves one wondering what if anything she values in the new image over the old one.  We asked a married mother of two young Swifties what she thinks of Taylor Swift’s evolution as an artist and a role model for the next generation of women. ---

I’m Misty Reeus and I’m a die-hard converted fan of Taylor Swift.  Incidentally, this is the very reason why I’m so offended by the direction that Taylor has taken over the last 18 months of her career, culminating of course in the atrocious and vulgar music video released last night.  After treasuring and watching all of Taylor’s previous videos a hundred times or more with my daughters Cady and Hannah (10 and 8 years old, respectively), I’m afraid I won’t be showing them the latest video by someone who has formerly been a responsible exemplar of female dignity and moral fortitude.  No, Taylor Swift apparently wants to go the way of many fallen Disney Stars before her, quickly degenerating into the next Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes, and other role models gone wrong.  From here on out the only prescription Swiftamine that my daughters and I will be taking is the old, country-girl-next-door Taylor Swift, before the secular media and our decadent culture of carnality corrupted her from an icon of female grace into just another self-objectifying, unobtainable plastic cover girl.

Perhaps I should start by noting what the heinous video in question did really well.  The whole concept of cramming a ton of “celebrities” and cultural references into one mega video is pretty brilliant from both a marketing and a creative standpoint, encouraging multiple viewings, shot-by-shot playback, and group analysis just to ensure that you’ve correctly acknowledged and identified all the bullpucky that’s happening on-screen.  You’ve got a bit of the Watchmen introduction here, some leather-clad Sucker Punch-like girls there, a lot of visuals blatantly taken from Tron: Legacy, The Hunger Games training room, Leeloo from The Fifth Element, a smattering of Sin City, any Michael Bay production at the end, and a bunch of other stuff like the snow warriors or the pair in the hallway at the end that I just didn’t get because I’m a busy, stay-at-home mother and don’t have time for reading silly comic books.  Every aspect of the production from the CGI to the costume design to the title graphics editing to the color palette is spectacular, and inasmuch as the purpose of “Bad Blood” was to convey a sense of hugeness and make Swift’s inaugural “King of the world” address even more overstated and boastful than that of King James Cameron himself, it has “succeeded” marvelously.  The video feels massive, sometimes stupidly so with the inclusion of people who are downright obnoxious in any other context (Selena “*itches of Waverly Place” Gomez & Lena “I love Planned Parenthood because they were there when a made-up college Republican raped me” Dunham) but whose presence we’ll tolerate just this once because we’re all Swifties at heart.

It doesn’t hurt that the music is also really good.  Aside from the art of Lecrae and TobyMac, I don’t know much about hip-hop and prefer to listen to more wholesome, safe-for-the-whole-family material around my daughters, but Kendrick Lamar’s first verse complements the song perfectly even if the second doesn’t really work with the musical progression, and the remix deftly avoids becoming just another Pitbull-esque guy rapper-girl singer radio jam about shaking booties and getting down on the dance floor (don’t tell my daughters that I compared Kendrick’s lyricism to Pitbull’s; they don’t think I know who either of those people are, and just between you and me Kendrick can roll all over Pitbull’s hiney any day).  I think that Swift’s producers cranked the bass track up to ten for this edition, and while I tend not to like heavy programming in songs because Kendrick raps, “These beats of a dark heart use bass lines to replace you,” the whole arrangement sounds wondrously complex for an electro-pop tune.

With that said, I don’t know what the holy heck Taylor Swift was thinking when she planned this video.  I know that we women aren’t supposed to criticize each other for the way we dress and yes, feminism means you should be able to wear (or not wear) whatever you want in public without being disturbed or nonconsensually approached for your apparel, but from the very first scene Taylor’s clearly pulling no punches in going for the full harlot look, and it doesn’t get much better as the video moves along and she dons several midriff-bearing outfits along with high heels and the kind of eye makeup that’s practically screaming, “Come and get it.”  My daughters have always looked forward to reading the weekly People Magazine just to see what Taylor’s wearing and until now I would freely encourage them in their research, knowing that Taylor is very conscientious about the way she presents herself to society and to men whose eyes may cause them to stumble.  Apparently I was wrong and Taylor has become just as promiscuous and classless about her fashion as her peers.  I suppose I could have seen it coming if I had paid attention to the twerking “dancers” in “Shake It Off”, all the 1950’s bathing suits, or the Victoria’s Secret show either of the times that Taylor sang for that, but I always try to avoid watching programs that I know will feed my daughters glamorized images of unrealistically tall and skinny supermodels, clad in most unflattering attire.

To those of you who will inevitably try to shame me for shaming Taylor for shaming her fans by dressing like an s-l-u-t, why are you telling me what I can or can’t say about another person’s behavior?  Why don’t you write your own letter to the Author explaining why you think that Taylor Swift’s new skintight, Sucker Punch-inspired wardrobe is a very appealing showcase for her feminine physique and should be replicated in the fashion statements of all her younger, mini-Swifts?  What gives you the right in your mind to tell another person what they can write on the internet?  It’s not your internet, it’s certainly not your blog, and unless you’re capable of articulating a contrary opinion as well as this article does my own, saying that I shouldn’t argue this point of view without saying why is kind of pointless and lazy and unintelligent.  The greatest thing about the internet is that people can write whatever they want to on it without worrying about whether it’s the “right” thing to say; the internet is an open arena of ideas which roots out uncompetitive ideas by its nature. This is why I laugh whenever any of you interject, “Misty Reeus, Misty Reeus, you can’t say that,” because I obviously can.

A gruesome photo from the “Bad Blood” video.

Coming back to the video, I’m also disappointed that Taylor and her girlfriends think they have to fight like men in order to be equal with men.  Not a single woman is present in “Bad Blood” without a weapon or an armored suit of some sort, which is just as offensive and sexist as making an action movie without a single woman in an armored suit.  I think Miss Swift and her (bad) blood frenemy Gomez wanted to get the idea across that they’re not just little girls anymore and they’re playing with the big boys now (i.e. Lena and Kendrick), but did they really need to punch and kick and bazooka each other or any of their actress-model minions to make that point?  Why is there a character named Mother Chucker or Cut Throat in the video? Was it really necessary to pin Ted to the wall with a knife so that teddy blood graphically spilled out of his throat?  Did Taylor ever question the director about the kind of message this will send to her legions of adoring and imitating fans?  Why should women act so catty and ill-tempered towards one another when history has shown us the amazing things that women can accomplish as a team?  By creating a video that glorifies hostility and pugnacity over friendship and harmony and love, Swift is essentially broadcasting to all her fans a faux-girl power pablum that women need to be just as destructive and violent and mean as men to measure up to them.  In reality, by making all the women in the story/trailer/porno thing as masculine and hardened as the Iron Rita from Edge of Tomorrow, Taylor has stripped the female identity of anything that made it uniquely powerful or desirable in the first place.

In the fantasy universe of Bad Blood, women can do all the things that men can do but nothing else.  Gone is the elegance, the modesty, the sophistication, the youthful innocence that Taylor Swift embodied before she got the whole 1989 video series into her head (and wrote that horrible song 22), and gone are all the higher qualities that led so many girls (and a couple boys I know) to fall in love with her.  Guys didn’t dream of dating Taylor Swift because she had a big sword or boxing gloves or Black Widow ninja acrobatics but because… I don’t really know why.  I guess she just seemed like a really honest, relatable, kind-hearted, down-to-earthen person who respected herself and thereby made it easy for everyone else to respect her as well.  By the same token, my daughters don’t look up to Taylor because they someday want to go to war or fight a bunch of comic book gladiator biker ladies.  The rest of the world wouldn’t have that either, as there are only about a dozen countries which allow women to serve in military combat roles.  Acknowledging that our good Lord Jesus endows women with separate skills and stations than men isn’t sexist or degrading; it’s the most empowering admission we can make.

Unfortunately, from now on the only music videos we’ll be watching in this house are vintage Taylor, the I Knew You Were Trouble goat remix, and anything by Lindsey Stirling, who has never let me down yet. Taylor has taught my girls a lot of valuable lessons about life, such as how to look more feminine by grooming and painting their faces with commercial, mass-produced cosmetics, how people shouldn’t base their self-worth on what others think about the way they look, or how one shouldn’t hesitate to discontinue a relationship that’s clearly going nowhere in the long run, but I’m afraid this video marks the end of our relationship until Taylor once again realizes she has a responsibility to set a good example for the young and impressionable Swiftie community.  Some people may challenge my discretion as a parent for putting so much faith in celebrities to teach my children good manners and moral right from wrong, as if they have any sort of obligation to conduct themselves decently just because they’re public figures and a lot of people happen to hold them in very high esteem.  I mean, you can’t print that!  Just, no… These people also probably think I used to let my girls watch Disney Channel or its gosh-awful sitcom equivalents on Nickelodeon, but they’re dead wrong because I never let Hannah or Cady watch the Disney Channel because none of its series had any good role models.

I originally fell in love with Taylor Swift because she was different and took her job as a role model seriously, but now she’s just churning out the same vapid pornography I’ve been trying to shelter my daughters from all their lives.  You’ve changed, Taylor.  I don’t know you anymore.  And you’re going down a path I cannot follow.

Taylor Swift's weirdest video.

Taylor Swift's best video.

Editor’s note: Despite giving room to Mrs. Reeus’ thoughtful thoughts, the Author believed the Bad Blood video was both stupid and awesome – and sometimes stupid awesome – and he enjoyed reviewing it a dozen times in the process of proofing Misty’s writing.  If he had to marry Taylor Swift, though, he’d much rather marry the Taylor Swift of Red or Speak Now or Fearless than the Taylor Swift of Bad Blood, Hey.  He just wishes that the real Taylor Swift would please stand up.

What Is Jack Bauer's Middle Name?

If you’ve looked at a magazine or watched a football game in recent days, then you’re probably aware that the TV phenomenon known as “24” is returning this week to Fox, with the somewhat major amendment that it’s no longer strictly 24 but more like 24/2.  After eight seasons of flexing the self-explanatory formula that lends the show its title, the producers have opted to halve the season’s run duration, continuing to cover a fictional time span of one day but doing so in an abbreviated 12 episodes.  Their stated rationale for changing the approach would probably be the same claimed by any author or artist who purposely woos attention for “stepping outside his comfort zone”.  We’ve all heard the spiel in one variation or another: Fox just wants to keep things fresh and explore bold new frontiers while simultaneously commemorating the original framework that fans fooled themselves into liking.  The more satisfying explanation to entertain is that Fox finally recognized how much the original framework sucked.

Let me preface this article with a disclaimer: any attempt to review even a single season of 24 is an inherent and total impracticality.  While most of the outstanding flaws encapsulated in a 2-hour feature film can be condensed without trouble into a 2000-word evaluation, the presentation of a serialized television drama of such magnitude as this presents unique difficulties that aren’t as easily surmounted.  Being eight times the length of an average Hollywood thriller about espionage, terrorism, and political corruption, the pilot season of the interminable hit understandably has at least eight times the plot holes, implausible character development, poor editing, and deus ex machina moments, far too many to mention in this brief (ha ha, NO) review of only the show’s most pivotal events, of which there are also far too many.  For example, I simply don’t have the time or space to question the reasons why:

* Gaines shoots the unfortunate second kidnapper Dan in the chest at point-blank range for landing the second girl in the hospital when she was always just an expendable tool whose sole function was to lure Jack Bauer’s daughter into the villains’ clutches for leverage and whose injury, in fact, was a prerequisite to getting Jack within sight of a hospital camera which could then be utilized to bug him.  If he really knew what he was trying to accomplish, shouldn’t he have thanked his underling instead of, you know, killing him?

* The jerkface of a senator and presidential candidate assumes he has the authority to boss federal intelligence agents around just because he’s a politician, and why the agents actually stoop to oblige him.
* All the characters, including the candidate himself, assume that the senator is going to win it all just because he might possibly win his own party in the primary of the state of California.
* None of the characters ever eat or use the bathroom other than to contact people from a relatively private location.

* We’re introduced to some random lesbian terrorist girl who blows up a plane in the first couple episodes only for her to exit off-stage the rest of the season following 4:00 AM.

* The real mole in the agency does nothing but help Jack and cover his behind until the last episode.

* Kevin takes a detour to the hospital to murder the mentally traumatized and completely ignorant York girl instead of just delivering Bauer’s wife directly to his employer.

* Kevin, who has since proven himself to be a highly professional assassin for hire, lets Bauer’s wife jump out of the car and leave his sight so as to take a vomit break, then lets her hit him over the head with a rock and bind him to a tree.

* All the drug dealers and gangsters are always blasting screamy heavy metal in their cars and in their homes.
* The writers make Jack’s wife lose her memory only for her to regain it approximately 3 hours later when a bad guy puts a gun to her head.

* Nothing even happens from 12 PM to 2.

* It takes the characters all of fifteen minutes to drive virtually anywhere in and around Los Angeles.

* The younger foreign-accented killer spends so much time sleeping around with the senator’s campaign staffer instead of preparing to kill him.

* It seems as though all the women in the show have their belly buttons or boobs partially exposed at some point.

* The I.T. guys are able to instantly pull up or hide away so many windows on their computers just by swiping two or three buttons on the keyboard.  Likewise, how do all the characters manage to set up innumerable calls between themselves just by tapping their phone controls once?

Alas, all those thoughts will have to be excluded from the final draft for purposes of concision, something 24 is altogether lacking.  It’s the kind of show that seems to have an awesome premise at first glance but later reveals itself to be fundamentally unworkable.  On the one hand the writers must ensure that each episode is an individual success, and so they must keep the action moving along at a brisk enough pace to sustain the audience’s interest, but on the other they have to maintain the illusion that audiences are bearing witness to real events playing out in real time in real space at a realistic tempo.  In order to fulfill both obligations, they’re forced to invent so many dull and frivolous subplots that more discriminating viewers will be either nodding off in boredom or groaning at the rank absurdity of the developments they’re asked to accept without question.

The crux of the first season revolves around a plot to assassinate a major presidential candidate and the efforts by Counter-Terrorism-Unit agent Jack Bauer to counter the terrorists’ schemes, or so we think for the first 2/3rds of the story, as the writers lead us to think that the assassination is being orchestrated by a rabble of white supremacists who “don’t like the idea of a black man in the White House”.  It turns out that the murderers in question don’t have a political axe to grind at all, thus precluding them from the broadly accepted interpretation of “terrorists”, but are really just heavily accented foreigners who want to exact vengeance against the senator for ordering Jack to kill one of their family in a secretive operation years ago.  They also speak English quite fluently and comfortably, even when there are no Americans in their midst who would stand to benefit from their usage of a secondary language.  But that doesn’t become an issue until later on.  In any case, rather than adopting a plan that’s truly foolproof and reliable, the bad guys inconceivably choose to make enslaving Bauer (the very man entrusted by CTU with protecting Senator David Palmer) an integral part of their conspiracy, thereby opening as many doors for it to catastrophically fail and backfire as possible.  The only way they can think of how to execute this is by kidnapping Bauer’s wife and daughter and holding them at gunpoint while issuing him orders.  In the event that Bauer somehow outsmarts them or the hostages escape the killers’ clutches, which they manage to do eventually, Plan B is simply to kidnap them again and start the whole process over, which they also do eventually.

Though the villains’ gameplan is fairly clear-cut and straightforward, what is much less apparent is why Bauer even bothers to comply with their demands.  His high-school girl Kim is the kind of headstrong dumb blonde protagonist who in spite of being constantly tied up, locked in a shed, and almost getting raped never loses sight of her greater purpose: to provide counseling for poverty-stricken street criminals and to promote a tough message of personal responsibility for one’s actions, as in this unabridged exchange from episode “5-6 PM”.

“You have so much going for you Rick. You’re smart, you’re good-lucking, you’re funny. How did you get like this?”
“I’m doing all right.”
“All right? You’re wanted by the police, you got shot in the arm, your friends you hang out with are criminals. Do you really want to end up here?”
“I do the best I can. I didn’t grow up like you did.”
“That’s just an excuse. I have a friend named Todd. He grew up in two foster homes and he has a scholarship to Stanford now.”
“Well, good for Todd.”

Jack’s wife Teri (I had to look up her name because I forgot), on the other hand, is not just dumb as dirt but a walking, talking magnet of unresolved subplots.  When the season starts, the couple are in the throes of recovering from an arduous “separation”, during which Jack struck up a largely unperceivable affair with his co-worker and other major character Nina.  Though we aren’t informed of it until later, Teri also became attached to another man who appears in at most three or four episodes before disappearing and never having an impact on the plot again.  Further complicating matters is her discovery upon escaping the bad guys’ compound that she’s pregnant with another child, which precipitates a heated argument with her daughter over how she could possibly shirk her parental responsibility to properly use birth control.

“You and dad were trying to have a kid and you didn’t tell me about it?”
“No, honey, it wasn’t like that… dad and I use birth control – it’s protection, but it’s never 100%.”

Um, right.

Despite the initial disarray of these seemingly disconnected developments, all the narrative strains are conveniently tossed together in one frying pan when Jack’s ex-flame-turned-Serbian spy shoots Mrs. Bauer dead in the final minutes of the show, thus leaving us feeling cheated and baffled as to why the writers wasted so much of our time elucidating these rabbit trails in the first place.

They didn’t stop with the Bauer family, though, as a good half of the show or thereabouts is dedicated to the personal and professional woes of the embattled first-black-president-to-be.  Blindsided by emerging allegations that his teenage son accidentally killed the man who sexually assaulted his sister seven years ago (piling still more layers of stupid sentimentality onto the script), David Palmer must confront a) all his campaign advisors who want him to cover up the incident, b) all the reporters who want to break the story before he does, and c) his very own power-hungry first-black-first-lady-to-be, Sherri, who has been concealing the ugly truth from him and everybody else for as long as she’s known of it.  As Mr. and Mrs. Bauer are artificially drawn closer together by their experiences, Mr. and Mrs. President drift ever further and further apart as they continually fight each other for the right to lose and win their race respectively. David only decides he’s had enough of his devious wife after she encourages one of his staffers to commit adultery with him so as to… distract him… or something.  It doesn’t make any sense, but Palmer won’t have any of it, saying curtly “I never want to see you here again” after 24 hours filled to the brim with as much bickering and deception and betrayal as a single fictional day could possibly accommodate.  The senator’s plot arc gets to be so convoluted and muddied with extraneous political scandals that it took an immense resilience from your own author not to skip through every scene involving him in the latter half.

Indeed, probably the greatest undoing of the show besides its unfathomable length, banal dialogue, and the stunning idiocy of its characters’ actions is the unduly emphasis it places on the candidate, who honestly would have better served the program if the writers had relegated him off-screen and made him a faceless symbol of American representative government.  As he is in this script, the more closely we get to know him, the more intensely we find ourselves rooting for the “terrorists” to wipe him out.  Constantly losing his temper and blowing up on others, Palmer bribes, blackmails, and threatens to unleash the executive authority he has yet to attain upon anyone who gets in his way.  An unprincipled thug and self-inflated cad who’s perennially lording his “former slave” victim-status over everyone, he has neither the maturity nor the poise of one aspiring to lead an entire country, and his endless pretenses of self-pity over his skin color exemplify liberal whininess of the lowest order.  And yet I think we’re somehow supposed to like him for this, even with show creator Joel Surnow’s self-identification as one of Hollywood’s only open conservatives.  As for the actor’s part, Dennis Haysbert has gushingly attributed Barack Obama’s ascension to the popularity of his own totally made-up TV character.  Thanks a lot, dude.  The financial future of my future children really appreciates that favor.

Split at many points between up to six parties at different places, 24 exploits the toggling-narratives-trick to the point where it no longer amplifies suspense or serves any discernible purpose but to create gratuitous commercial cliffhanger cuts.  It’s annoying, it’s lazy, and it interrupts the natural flow of the story, which is supposedly the main draw of a show that purports itself to play out in real time and avoid the more cinematic flares of typical scripted drama.  In a kind of weak desperation to tie all these disjointed characters together, the writers organize the scripts such that half of the dialogue is delivered via phone in splitscreen conversations, most of which are jumbled and pointless meanderings that do nothing but cement the action which the audience has already seen firsthand.  24 violates the rule of Show, Don’t Tell out of routine along with what I’ll call the Don’t Show Conversations That Defer Themselves To Later Occasions rule.

“Jack?”
“How ya doing?”
“I’m doing OK.  Just trying to get some rest.”
“No, I’m fine… a lot’s happened and I really need to talk to you.”
“Fine, then let’s talk.”
“No, not now.  Now’s not the time.”
“Why not?”
“You do what you have to do and we’ll talk when this is all over, OK?”
“OK.”
* Hang up.

Even outside of the phone talks, most the dialogue consists of “Is everything all right?”s, “What’s wrong?”s, and “Wait, are you saying that repeat whatever just happened on camera in another location?”s.  Think of the wordplay as some kind of experiment in electronic dance music where the same line cycles through over and over again… but it’s just electronic music, no frills attached, and its actors have all the musicality and prowess of a D.J. who has autotuned all the soul out of his own voice.  Keifer Sutherland is the one fleeting glimmer of competence in the cast as Bauer but this isn’t even his finest performance, paling in comparison to the demented biker vampire he played in The Lost Boys.  “You’re eating maggots, Michael.”

If Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’ Sherlock represents the pinnacle of television screenwriting, then 24 must be the trough.  When a rare critic does dare to step out of the marching line on this tripe, he’s usually some kind of left-wing Pacifist who’s disgruntled at the program’s resounding jingoism or machoism or attempt to justify torture techniques in interrogation, but I think those protestors are giving the creators too much credit for their ability to articulate and advocate a rational idea.  24’s most outrageous and offensive transgression isn’t its depiction of torture; we saw that in Zero Dark Thirty and nobody much threw a fit about it then except for the anti-Bush ideologues who would sooner cut the head off of an innocent infant than see our country’s sworn enemies suffer any physical pain.  Nor is the show’s worst crime its excessive portrayal of violence against women, which we also saw in that slave movie last year that nobody much threw a fit over either except for conservatives who didn’t feel like buying into a white liberal guilt trip frenzy.  24’s unredeemable offense is that it thinks you’re stupid: stupid enough to gape at the reveal of a mole who was never forecast as a mole or even decided upon as such until halfway through the show, stupid enough to believe that the criminal masterminds would ever settle for such a foolhardy plan and that intelligence agents would so ineptly respond to it, and stupid enough to mistake such a hurried and forced conclusion for something remotely dramatic and heartbreaking.

In its defense, 24 is very addictive programming, especially when you don’t have to wait a week between installments to start the next segment.  Like many before me, I found myself racing madly through the final hours, not because I cared what happened next but because I couldn’t wait for the mess to be over and done.  What can I say?  ’Twas the longest day of my life.

The Elder Scrolls (Is) For Dummies

“Better with kinect sensor.”  Now there’s an oxymoron.

Twenty years of technical fine-tuning, at least three critically adored blockbusters, as staggering a breadth of world-building as any practiced by Tolkien, Jordan, or Jacques, and a particularly epic (violin cover of a) musical theme in the making, the role-playing high fantasy series called The Elder Scrolls remains one of more prestigious and celebrated labels in all of video gaming, and yesterday it left behind a heritage of massive single-player worlds in order to explore the online territory previously scoped out by lengthy and perennially updated MMOGs such as World of Warcraft or Guild Wars.  And yet for all my lamentable immersion in the realm of interactive storytelling, somehow I hadn’t even touched one of these scrolls until about two weeks ago, when I popped the fifth and latest title released thus far into the old Xbox 360 and cautiously steeled myself ravenously dove in to see whether all the hype was well founded.  Having played Skyrim for about five hours now and watched some friends play it for much longer periods, I can’t fathom for the life of Brian why it’s, you know, the most important thing that ever happened to video games since the Uncharted 3 Wal Mart/Target/Best buy demo, Batman Arkham Asylum, Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Halo: Combat Evolved, Myst, Doom, Zelda, Super Metroid, or Ms. Pac-Man if you want to go really far back.  Maybe Betheseda felt unduly handicapped by the mere 17 buttons they had to work with on the Xbox controller, maybe their chief story editor got eaten by a dragon in the middle of development, or maybe I erroneously expected that this would even slightly attain to the grandeur of that astonishingly beautiful Lindsey Stirling (music video) I watched a dozen or so times, but so far Skyrim doesn’t add up to anything more than the sum of its virtually harmless hordes of giant spiders, wolves, bears, R.O.U.S.s, walruses, and other non-threats.  None of its grotesquely animated characters are all that pleasing to look at, for one, which is an immediate albeit expectable letdown for me given my only past acquaintance with the game, but I’m sure these questions would still torment my mind even if I hadn’t taken a Cupid’s arrow in the knee.

* Why is that quote even funny?  Or the one about the sweetrolls?

* Why do I have to pause the game and toggle through a menu if I want to swap one utensil or incantation of destruction for another?  Why did the programmers reserve an entire button just for drawing and sheathing your weapon instead of for doing something truly practical, like substituting your longbow with a proper, close-quarters sword and shield when you’re on the brink of getting gutted?  Why didn’t the people behind this take some extremely basic pointers from Halo or Call or Duty or pretty much any other shooter, which all enable players to switch weapons with a single button press?

* Emendation: I just figured out how to assign two separate equipment groups using the left or right positions on the controller’s D-pad.  That’d be a great function if it worked the way it should in the course of battle, which it doesn’t.

* Speaking of weapons, why did the developers give you so many weapons to craft, loot, and show off while giving you hardly any opportunities to actually use them?  Why are there vast stretches of land in this game that have absolutely no monsters or bad guys to kill – only peaceful townsfolk whom you would feel guilty for randomly slaughtering out of unquenched bloodlust?  Most of the things you get to fight look like this:

Or this:

* Why isn’t there a proper jump attack or sprint jump ability?  I mean – get with the 21st century.  Gosh.

* Why do women comprise so large a percentile of the robbers, hostile soldiers, and other enemies who attack you?  Is this the designers’ inept way of suggesting that women are just as savage, strong, and kickbutt as men in their idealized fantasy universe?  What a flattering and ‘progressive’ image, Betheseda.

* Why did they incorporate feline and reptilian humanoids in a potentially serious fantasy universe?  Orces, elves, and dwarves I’m totally fine with, but where did they get the idea for these sorry jokes?  Was the art team watching Star Wars: Clone Wars with the primitive rabbit-headed tribespeople when they came up with this idea?

* How come none of the characters respond negatively when I rouse them from slumber?  Is there a reason why they all just sit up and stare blankly as if they weren’t at all busy beforehand?

* Why are there so many mundane, non-violent diversions like cooking and fishing and home decorating and sewing and potion brewing and forging and lumbering and mining in a video game that’s ostensibly about slaying dragons and striking into the wintry wilderness with sorcery and steel?  Why did the live-action and gameplay trailers emphasize the dragon-culling aspect if dragons only rarely materialize and most of the mighty dragonborn’s adventures actually consist of trading goods and dressing himself up different ways in the improbable event that a dragon does show to terrorize a village?

* Why are useless household items strewn all around the varied environments? Am I really supposed to pick up all those baskets, urns, brooms, and bottles of wine lying about in dungeons, towns, and palace halls alike?  What am I supposed to do with this junk anyway once I stuff it in my backpack?  Sell it to a merchant in return for more junk or extract its natural materials so that I can build junk of my own design?  Why do game designers instinctively equate realism to fun and deliberately structure their products to make unreal, fictional events look as realistic as possible to consumers who by and large couldn’t care less about cooking or weaving or basket-collecting in a game that allows them to indulge their long-bred, vengeful dreams of running a sword through a massive arachnid’s brain in slow-motion?

* On the subject of realism, why does the player avatar quickly run up against physical exhaustion at the beginning of the game whenever he tries to run across open ground for more than ten seconds but nevertheless possess the endurance and resilience to swim indefinitely across freezing-cold bodies of water without exhibiting a sign of fatigue, let alone succumbing to hypothermia and death?

I could doggie paddle out here for hours.

* Why do characters in this medieval world of Norse tradition so often slip from their thick accents and high English dialects into gratingly modern American refrains like “Jarl so-and-so is in way over his head”?

* How did the dragons that fly backwards ever make it past beta?  I haven’t seen them myself of course, as you have to wander around for much, much longer than five hours to find an unscripted dragon in Skyrim, but I’ve seen other people see them.  On the other hand, I can testify to witnessing goats swim underwater, giants slam people hundreds of feet into the air, and horses ride up nearly vertical cliff faces.

A blurry Bigfoot photo of the underwater goat.

* Most egregiously of all, why did the writers pour countless irredeemable hours into composing and dispersing hundreds of historical, mythical, poetical, and expository texts that no one with full-time, real-world employment can afford to read if they wouldn’t even bother themselves to observe the proper punctuation of “its”, which in this case would be no punctuation at all?

* Is that supposed to be a guitar, a harp, or a trident?

* And if the developers were really set on putting bards in the game, why did they go with losers like the guy above instead of choosing someone like this?

If you’ve got no obligations to a wife or girlfriend but feel comfortable burning two hundred hours of your life on a single, $20-40 video game, by all means read one of the aptly titled Elder Scrolls, since that’s mostly what you do in the game: read grammatically incorrect scrolls, read dialogue, and read the contents of your backpack.  I personally think a young man could devote his time to much richer endeavors than the study of long, exhaustively detailed papers about the dominion of Tamriel – noble, romantic endeavors like finding and settling down with a nice girl, or scholarly, societally beneficial endeavors like writing long, exhaustively detailed papers about the stupidities of studying even longer papers about the dominion of Tamriel.  Not that those are in any way exclusionary.

Fun rating: 5/10
$$$ rating: You could play this for the rest of your earthly life without ‘beating’ it, but you’d probably switch to Titanfall before that happened anyway.