Egress from the Winter 2013 Graveyard, or Finally Some Interesting Movies Come Out

Spring Breakers
Try as you might to disassociate yourself from the parts of Spring Breakers that have already entered our cultural consciousness - Disney bikini ass boobs murder gun fellatio piano James Franco??? - there's really not much else to the movie, so you kind of have to accept its lack of substance out of the gate. It is almost totally repetitive, probably a deliberate decision when you take Harmony Korine's enfant terrible status into consideration, but there's a method to this droning madness. Korine's subjects are four girls who flee college toward this soulless liturgy of party-party-party-party-party, under the pretense of "finding themselves" and "changing their boring lives." That this is achieved through scene after scene of constant drinking and carnage, all set to a Skrillex soundtrack, is a fairly transparent irony. But Spring Breakers has a sneaky streak, realized primarily through the fates of these young women. These supposed heroines are delinquents in training, securing their travel funds by robbing a Chicken Shack with sick ferocity. They knowingly exert seductive power over local crime lord/hip-hop demicelebrity Alien, played by James Franco with a degree of conviction that suggests actual interest in this project. And if Franco is involved and intrigued, you can only imagine what kind of raunchy, dopey, entry-level Social Welfare 101 nonsense this unholy alliance will birth. He and his cohort stumble through a series of bizarre events, all linked by the connective tissue of booze and tits on the beach of St. Petersburg and all ending in totally unexpected ways. When the end finally arrives, seemingly half an hour too late, he and the girls splinter from each other in unexpected ways in a climax designed for neither a vindictive nor a sympathetic audience. Selves are found, lives are changed, but these inevitabilities are livened by the details. Harmony Korine's message may be somewhat obvious, but his delivery is not, and the thumping machine that is Spring Breakers chugs on regardless of what anyone thinks of or expects from it. B-

Ni no Kuni: lemme get those digits

The JRPG is a troubled genre in a wild and unpredictable medium. Not one generation ago, the PlayStation 2 was host to everything from obscure one-shots (Ephemeral Fantasia, Tsugunai: Atonement) to celebrated series (Suikoden, Final Fantasy) and just about everything in between. Looking over Sony's RPG offerings for PS3 is a much more dismal enterprise. Most of the notable titles seem to be American-developed actioners with RPG elements, while the Japanese games are uninspired, halfhearted, or DLC packs for Hyperdimension Neptunia. Nearly every new IP released this generation was met with relative indifference, but the franchises have been hit just as hard. Suikoden is MIA, Tales has never been worse than the dismal Graces f, Star Ocean has lost its way completely, and Final Fantasy XIII is Square-Enix's signed confession that they've forgotten what made the series so great.

When Mass Effect 3 came out, I took the successes of the game to mean that the JRPG was obsolete. The genre was born with Dragon Quest to textually represent concepts that were too graphically complicated for the NES's eight bits, but twenty-seven years later we don't exactly have that problem anymore. (On that note, menu-based RPGs are still finding some popularity on handheld devices, which remain partially bound by these limitations.) ME3 revises the systems of its Japanese antecedents with a highly effective show-don't-tell attitude, streamlining combat and character development elegantly. Do you miss combat menus? They're there, but only when you need them to be. Bummed at the presence of skill trees instead of vital statistics? They fulfill very similar functions when you think about it. This quickened approach is in line with what the populace has come to expect from video gaming, but there are few titles that have managed to combine this satisfying sense of speed and immersion with the robust micromanagement that made these games so appealing in the first place. That's the sweet spot Ni no Kuni hits.

No Kingdom Lasts Forever: Enlightened

This kingdom. This amazing kingdom we have made. This monstrous kingdom. Its castles are magic. They are beautiful. They are built on dreams and iron and greed. They are inorganic and cannot sustain. No kingdom lasts forever. Even this will end. And life and Earth will reign again.

I try to avoid talking about myself when I write these posts, primarily because I'm here to highlight media that catches my attention, not the toiling of a disenfranchised quarter-lifer. Most of you are probably within a year's distance of completing college, one direction or the other, and you already know what our lives are like.

But Enlightened resonates with me. So much of the show's appeal to me is a byproduct of how frankly it addresses some serious issues with our world, on both interpersonal and international levels. For those unfamiliar with Enlightened, which is likely most of you given the show's criminally low viewership, it tells the story of disgraced corporate drone Amy Jellicoe. After a manic breakdown and a revelatory stint in a new-age rehab center, she attempts to enter the world once again, her rage and confusion layered over with a new insurmountable optimism. Goal Number One: overnight reform of her previous employers, rapacious megacorpoation Abaddon. Abaddon, we come to learn, is Evil Capitalism incarnate, destroying the environment and inciting violent civil unrest and producing toxic products with no concerns but for the bottom line. They take delight in crushing the little guys and buy off politicians. Anyone who isn't Amy can infer the tremendous challenge present in realizing this degree of change.

2013 Oscar Extravaganza - Seth MacFarlane Presents Three Hours of My Most Flamboyant Nightmares

A big question for the cinema this year, presumably ignited here by Andrew O'Hehir, was whether or not it was dead. I say it is not. At this point in our lives, it is likely that our discussion of contemporary film has slowed, yes. This is all part of the simplification of the form: movies are, as capitalism demands, increasingly industrialized and thus visibly homogenized, but that didn't stop studios from releasing some surprisingly satisfying fare. It's just that most of it is juvenile and we aren't juvenile anymore. Between a spate of typically strong indie efforts, as well as numerous underrepresented and mostly unseen genre flicks, this was actually a decent year. Certainly nothing that merits the apocalyptic cries of Internet culture journalists.

Something that does not help this argument is the Oscars. In the last decade they have fallen somewhat out of vogue, their ratings considerable but still falling from previous peaks. They are routinely mocked by just about everyone watching, be they notable pundits and Twitter laymen. Once the most visible accumulation of notable events in the preceding year's film output, the glitziness of the Oscars has never felt less like a way to celebrate movies, but rather the increasingly burgeoning mantle of celebrity culture. Oscar has never been about the films, of course, nor the performances therein. The problem is that even in a year where the categories are relatively strong, the illusion doesn't hold up anymore - the ceremony is often too frothy and hokey and out-of-touch to accurately represent the championing of some Very Serious Drama. At a point in our lives where most of us are probably too grown up to derive much enjoyment from the Academy's three hour barrage of in-jokes and lame skits, it is increasingly up to us to develop our own film culture, which some simply don't have the time to do without the Oscars' guiding hand. No shame in that. I will probably always watch these goddamn things, because I love the formulas and analysis that go into championing a Best Screenplay, Actress, Picture. I just don't place much faith in them, regardless of the quality of their selections.

GOOD WORK IS ITS OWN REWARD.

Alys Brangwin, hero of capitalist Motavia

Maybe give Community a chance to breathe, guys?

Who's missing?

Salvo 1

Salvo 2

Salvo 3

Salvo 4

Look at all of these proclamations of a slow death! Community's season premiere was tonight, and to hear some of the big critical voices tell it, the episode was the first horseman of what would be a disappointingly average season. The once-adoring fanbase, based on 320 AVClub ratings, bid it a similarly dismissive B-. "History 101" was a rough sit sometimes, don't get me wrong, but seeing a sitcom falter to find a new take on necessarily predictable characters is something typical to its fourth season. Parks and Rec did a little; Archer is feeling it right now; 30 Rock sure as hell did, especially in its sixth. Community itself was stretched a bit toward the end of its third season.

Let's not damn the genre, but the medium: nearly every show sustains these hallmarks of decay, especially considering how the very act of running and producing a show is such a volatile task. In a way, avid watchers of the show had primed themselves for a potential disaster right out of the gate. Dan Harmon was gone, Chevy Chase was pissed, and there was little satisfaction when we learned that the premiere would be something as trendy and cheap as a Hunger Games parody episode. When you love something long-running like a television show, you owe it to yourself to be objective about the changes that accumulate around it; losing its distinct auteurial voice and the illusion of interpersonal harmony were two that just didn't register well with most people. Harmon was crucial to the show's vision, and without him the best I was hoping for was a muted (at least relative to Community standards), sweet bowing-out.

This was not muted, nor was it particularly sweet. It was oddly loud and those end-of-the-episode affirmations, powerful if sporadically graceless, fell heavily here. The laughs were there, but minimal. The Hunger Games stuff was dire as expected, and barely had anything to do with The Hunger Games in the first place. The subplots accomplished nothing. Bearing all of this in mind, it's important to remember is that the show's season premieres, as Sepinwall points out in that second article, have never been its strongest episodes. Each season takes such a radically different perceptual tack from the one that precedes it that they need these episodes as a sort of readjustment time. What aired tonight was a public examination of the show's anxieties, an entity fully aware of the impossible space of satisfaction it must fill. Abed's regressions into his own mind, spurred by anxiety or disunity in the real universe, reveal a similarly pitched but entirely artificial multi-camera sitcom. We see the sort of show that Community was always concerned about becoming, a gradual distillation of something much smarter, and its recognition that a sitcom must broaden in order to become more commercially viable should shade the initial flatness as ground to grow upon. There are elements of an arc here, a multileveled examination of the necessity of change - hell, the episode is called History 101, begging for an understanding of the genre's failings - and that's enough for me to not write the season off as some thoughtless back 13 of a dying sitcom.

I understand the desire to take this attitude toward the show; it isn't a particularly flattering one, but it's common to just about everyone. Those who are able to systematically demonstrate why what they once loved isn't good anymore feel they are proving, simultaneously, both their love for the original show and their disdain for the assumed breach of principle that this new and inferior version has brought about. "Kill your idols," in this critical climate, has become a proving ground. Art evolves through criticism, but not through melodramatic proclamations of a show's death upon its first episode of a season.

Harmon is gone but not forgotten. Community still knows this. Let it have its say.

Sneaky July update: Season 4 was essentially a disaster, start to finish. Some cute moments, a few nice ideas, and exactly one big laugh. The rest is poorly-made, exsanguinated comedy flotsam. So you can disregard this entire entreaty, I suppose.

"You Wanna Suck a Brontosaurus Dick?", or How is American Horror Story Good?

There's a huge difference between horror comedy and horror camp. The names alone should leave this division apparent; it's all a matter of intention. As a positive example of the former category, let's look at Drag Me to Hell, by far the genre's most successful entry in the past few years. It's goofy, but it's also sad and sinister, with a really cruel perspective on karma informing the story. The comedy works because it supports the absurdity of the horror. Horror camp, meanwhile, is often produced as a result of singular horror elements that are not executed well enough but are treated as if they are. Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp delineates the relationship between two oppositional creative impulses in a camp work: "the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice." And as Sontag says, "intending to be campy is [probably] always harmful" - look at the repetitive, tedious deluge of Z-grade failures produced by SyFy, who are content to throw us paint-by-numbers shittiness and have the temerity to pass it off as a good time. Troll 2 is an awesome example of unintentional camp, a prime example of why bad horror movies brought us so joy in the first place and why intentionally bad horror movies are usually just desperate in comparison. It clearly meant something to the people creating it, but their complete lack of talent rendered it "artificial" to anyone watching.