Admittance

Local political debates are always fun. I stayed at the one hosted here at my college for about five minutes - long enough to see the Green Party candidate get thrown out. Good to see the open forum American democratic system at work.

Anyhow.

Admitting you are an M. Night Shyamalan fan to anyone who considers themselves movie-savvy is a bit like admitting you're gay to your absurdly Republican, right-wing, Christian mother, or telling your black girlfriend that you recently decided to become a white supremacist. It doesn't fly. He is one of a collection of public figures who, to borrow the title of an Offspring song, is cool to hate. Shyamalan has joined the ranks of Rob Smith of The Cure and countless others who everyone likes to aim at when they make another movie or release another album.

My interpretation behind such uninhibited dislike is that, despite the fact that lightning never strikes the same place twice, the viewing public seems to affix the task to whoever makes it strike in the first place. The Sixth Sense was great; however, whatever film comes after it (in his case, Unbreakable) is by and large expected to be The Sixth Sense. While it seems that M. Night, and countless others, are intelligent enough to understand that, short of becoming Ahamenatuku*, The Rain God, himself, the task of making movie lightning hit the same target twice in a row is impossible. The catch 22 they inevitably fall into is that "fans" of the first movie don't actually want a new film: they simply want to sit in the dark and watch The Sixth Sense over and over again, and crank on the flamethrowers so hard IMDB's corporate headquarters might burn to the ground when the next film doesn't measure up to the first.

Fine for them: not for someone who, say, actually wants a fucking career.

Which brings me to The Happening. M. Night's latest movie, in a word, was a total dissapointment. Okay, two words, one noun. The acting was campy - I couldn't really figure out of he was aiming for that fifties horror film campy - but it did not work. Plus, far too much emphasis was placed on the fact that it was his first R-rated movie. Some of the suicide scenes were pretty creepy, but a majority was a little to hokey to believe. For example, in the opening, a girl comments that people were clawing at themselves. It makes sense if one's brain is being eaten apart by plant chemicals. Never do we actually see a person actually clawing at themselves. Instead, the chemical doesn't so much induce self-destructive behavior, so much as it makes people think of creative ways to injure themselves. It was a stretch.

The centerpiece to Shyamalan's movies is always the twist. But there really wasn't a twist. The explanation of the Thirty-Seconds-To-Kill-Yourself drug is given in the first five minutes of the film - obviously. Attempts to mislabel it as a terrorist attack are so thin and full of holes that it does not do justice to his normal skill in covering his movies in thick layers of Mystery Cream. Plus, Mark Whalberg? Come right the fuck on.

Admittedly, I'm a fan of M. Night's movies, and my hope is that this film is a fluke - a shock-jock fluke to show that the director is capable of appealing to the bloodlust of modern teenage audiences.

Since they're the only demographic that can actually afford a movie anymore.

*Not an actual God.

Back... again!

Now that I can finally think again, I'll use up some precious drops of Brain Goo (highly scientific language here) on bloggin'. I've been keeping away from writing for the internetz since my departure from The Fhiz, because I am working more and working on harder classes, and because I'm getting every last viable drop of fecal matter sued right the fuck out of me.

Personally I have not been up to much. I've been keeping tabs on this Sarah Palin chick and getting a much-needed giggle every time the bitch opens her absurdly collagen infested mouth. And note that bitch isn't a word I use often - I find it very sexist, and ironic that it is the #2 term used by women to describe other women. I only load up the word cannon with bitch bullets for the truly deserving, like frat boys, Tipper Gore, and now Sarah Palin. And yeah, okay, we get it, she's hot. Who the fuck cares? Maybe McCain's penchant obsession with being surrounded by models who might as well have "Made In China" stamped on their foreheads for how much fucking plastic makes up their bodies speaks to the overwhelming amount of males in this nation who never got past the kind of women they thought were sexy when they were still embarrassingly pitching tents at age fifteen. Maybe it's just a masculine fuckwit kind of thing? I don't know, but just so you know, male populace, it makes all of us thinkin' men look bad. The Biden/Palin debate is tonight and I've already made plans with my roommate to watch. Might even order Chinese.

And speaking of roommates, I have new ones, and they are good. I'm now surrounded with more video games than I can handle, and of course this has to happen when I'm swamped with work. I still do a majority of the cooking and more domestic tasks, but what the fuck: at least this time I'm appreciated. Two of them are up in Rhode Island this weekend for an anime convention, which I get to stay home and paint pretzels.

I wish I was fucking kidding.

I've been playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, which has proven to be a bit of a treat. It has a system of working with two characters at once, and adds a nice change to the sub weapons by making a metric fuckton of them, making them easy to find and making them equippable items. Johnathan, the male character, uses the classic Castlevania culprits: a knife, an axe, a boomerang and a spear, among others. He also gets martial arts attacks, which adds to his capabilities as a fighter. Charlotte, his travel companion, is the spell caster, and can charge her sub weapons for more deadly effects (just so you know, Konami, Ice Fang is way overpowered.) The two characters need to work in tandem to get to new locations. For example, one ability allows you to jump off of the inactive character's shoulders for more height, and is fun to do because it looks like you are kicking them in the head for a boostie. My only complaint is that use of the pen and touch screen is almost absent, but there is already enough in the game to make it rather unneeded. Which also begs the question: when the hell is a decent 2D Castlevania going to hit for an actual console system so I don't need to subject my eyes to squinty, squeezy pain to see a three-inch screen? Also, I would have liked the female's name to be Mina. Figure it out.

I also got my equivalent to video game black tar heroin, Stalker: Clear Sky. I have not spent too much time with it thanks to school, but by my estimate, I'm about 1/3 through. The fighting is much improved, as is some of the more annoying aspects of the first, such as items being far too overpriced and individual artifacts being kind of useless. Now, it only takes one artifact to stop bleeding or increase healing, which is rather nice. There's a new system of finding them too, which involves detectors, that is pretty intuitive. I guess intuitive would be a good word for the game overall. There are guides which take you to far-away locations. There are mechanics who repair and upgrade your items, and each weapon has it's own set of upgrades. Some missions are a little annoying, like the fact that when you must run from an emission, you need to run to one specific place to avoid it, instead of finding any number of locations that match the required one. Some of the missions are buggy and there seems to be a problem with save files getting corrupted, but it doesn't make the game unplayable. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about... too bad. More on that mess later.

To follow up on my last post, so many months ago, yes, I am now required to tutor the kids I worked with over the summer, and yes, it's as bad as it sounds.