24 Exposures (Joe Swanberg, 2013)

In 2012, a bunch of directors collaborated on a collection of short horror films called V/H/S, all with the theme of "found footage".  Joe Swanberg, the pater familias of the mumblecore movement and one of my favorite directors, was one of these.  Though V/H/S was itself a bust, Swanberg's contribution was certainly the best of the group.  He was less interested in tinkering with horror conventions.  During most of the segment, it wasn't a horror film at all, but rather an exploration of a couple's relationship through their vacation video.  The dark twist at the end could be read as a breakup in the style of Henry VIII.  It seemed like Swanberg was just using the horror genre to allow his characters to do things that would be considered too shocking in most of his films.

24 Exposures is something of a further exploration along these lines.  An IMDB search reveals that most of the cast is shared with V/H/S.  24 Exposures isn't really a horror film, although there's lots of (fake) blood.  Rather the action centers around a photographer who films naked women in horrifically and realistically staged death poses.  Delighted by the erotic nature of death, he's placed in contrast with a depressed detective of actual homicides when one of his potential models gets murdered.  Yes, that's actually the plot.  Usually, the plots of Swanberg's movies are just window dressing, but in this case there's not much else here. 

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of interesting ideas here, but generally the acting is too poor for me to get too interested in these characters.  The man playing the detective is particularly bad; for the first five minutes or so I was certain that his character was actually "playing" a detective on a TV show.

Chiaroscuro Friday

"Watching the trailers for MGSV makes you wonder if the spirits of Dostoyevsky, Stanley Kubrick, and Caravaggio entered Hideo Kojima's body because, using the art of gaming as his canvas, he boldly goes where no one has gone before." 

- Nicholas Winding Refn, director of Drive, Only God Forgives

 

Professor Layton Series

I'm not done with Miracle Mask, the fifth game in this series, yet, but I thought I'd say a few more words about the series as a whole.

Anyone who's familiar with these games knows that they're a puzzle gamer's comfort food.  Few of the puzzles are very difficult, and there are plenty of hints for the tougher ones.  While they can get a bit tricky, they all need to be solvable on a tiny DS screen, so there's a sharp upper bound on complexity (although I'm starting to hate those damn block-pushing puzzles).

Those who haven't played the games might be surprised to learn that story is also a big focus.  I've never found any of these stories very compelling.  Some sort of mystery is afoot, which is apparently supernatural, but always has a rational explanation.  Never mind that these explanations typically involve hallucinogenic gas or robots impersonating people.  Also, most of the villains are extremely cartoonish, and speak like Liquid Snake ("DEAR BROTHER").  Needless to say, I actually have a hard time remembering most of the key details of the first four games.  I guess I'm supposed to find the anachronistic "old-English" setting charming, but unlike most Japanese takes on the west, this one sort of baffles me, what with all of the contorted Caucasian faces and strange geography (is Miracle Mask set in the midst of an English desert?).  I do rather like all of the beautifully animated cutscenes.  It's no surprise that developers Level 5 would eventually collaborate on a game with Studio Ghibli, as the Layton games have a distinct Miyazaki influence.

In any case, if the Layton games aren't rewarding puzzlers, and the story's so unmemorable, why have I bothered to play so many of them?  Well, I suppose it's because they really are comfort food.  Like the Dragon Quest series, you know exactly what you're going to get with a Layton game.  The model has barely changed throughout all of its iterations.  After Demon's Souls, this was just what I was looking for.

In fact, I'm going to go ahead and throw out the 'C' word - "casual".  In the West, we would reserve that title for games like Bejeweled or Candy Crush Saga, but those games could never hold my interest, because they seemed so goal-less.  The Layton games give you much more do, and plenty to see along the way, but they flow just as smoothly, and work well for bite-sized play sessions.  I think we associate Japanese games with a certain kind of hardcore mentality, but there are plenty of examples of casual Japanese games, if we broaden our definition slightly.  Remember, even the Japanese RPG developed as a more laid-back, accessible version of the Western ones.

Playing by Heart (Willard Carroll, 1998)

This is an ensemble romantic film.  It's script has some real corny moments, and a couple of the storylines are underdone.  (Or "underwrought", as one of the characters would say.)  But holy crap, get a load of this cast:

Gillian Anderson:  When this movie came out, she was probably the biggest actress on this list.  I remember an interview she gave on Starz's version of "Inside Hollywood" where Anderson said she was looking for a role that was "as far from X-Files as possible."  Which is extremely ironic, since if you try to imagine Agent Scully in a rom-com - extremely reserved, shy, been "burned" one too many times - then that's pretty much how she appears in this movie.

Angelina Jolie:  Did you know that Jolie was in 15 movies before her breakout role in Girl, Interrupted?!  She was the lead actress in Hackers!  I remember her role in this one pretty well from when I was a kid, including many of her key lines, and I had no idea that she played it until I randomly searched for this movie on Netflix.  And she's excellent - Clare thinks it's her best role ever.  She wears incredibly distracting 90's clothes, but dang if she doesn't sell the part.  Worth watching for her storyline alone.

Jon Stewart!!!:  Liberal millenials, eat your heart out!  Stewart plays the absolute epitome of the rom-com male:  witty and sarcastic, but sweet, and can't take no for an answer.  He's even an architect, if you can believe it.  Even the frosty Anderson can't resist his charms.

Sean Connery:  Okay, this one's actually a little disappointing.  I'm a sucker for late-period Sean Connery with his gravelly voice and excellently manicured white goatee, but at one point he makes a joke about "Intercourse, Pennsylvania" and radio station "WWFU" with his wife played by Gena Rowlands.  (He also makes "little dog panting noises", and that's an image you can't unsee.)

And that's just the tip of the iceberg:  you also get Dennis Quaid (who looks like Clark Kent), Jay Mohr (in an incredibly unfunny role), Ryan Philippe, Madeleine Stowe, and "Goose" himself, Anthony Edwards.  Dang, this movie's a treat.

And even if you're not a 90's actor nerd, it's actually a surprisingly decent movie.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple (Kristian Amundsen Østby, 2012)

Escape is a board game - one that Clare and I gave her brother during our trip to Michigan last week.  Clare and I have been getting more into board games lately.  Since our video gaming habits are usually pretty anti-social, it's nice to be able to invite a friend or two over to play something other than You Don't Know Jack.  So far, the games we've played run on the complex side, but Escape bills itself as a family game.  Believe me, it's far more fun than the dreaded Monopoly or Clue.

The goal of this game?  Escape from the temple, of course, within ten minutes.  There's no competition here - either all of the players make it out or everybody loses.  The players discover new rooms, move around, and activate gems (necessary to get out) by means of dice rolling.  But if you roll a "black mask", then the die becomes cursed, and can't be used again until you roll a "golden mask".  Roll all black masks and you become frozen, until another player in the same room lets you use one of their golden masks.  This means that cooperation is key.

So far, this would be pretty dull stuff, but for the game's main gimmick:  there are no turns!  Everyone is rolling their dice as fast as they can.  This is one of those ideas that seems so obvious in retrospect.  Just in the last few years, there are quite a few awesome-sounding games that make use of it.  It makes the game pretty suspenseful, and to enhance the ambience the game even comes with a timer in the form of a spooooky CD soundtrack.

So how does it work in practice?  Pretty well, actually.  The rules are pretty simple, which is important, because everything has to be learned before you start the timer.  But the game is no cakewalk!  It's extremely easy to get locked without much warning, so it's a good idea to partner up and stay in constant communication.  During our playthrough, we were chattering things like "Almost locked", "Got 3 Keys", and "New Room" in a state of near-panic.  Nobody made it out in our first game, but by the second we'd figured out some basic strategies - stay in a group as much as possible, keep near the central chamber to avoid the "gongs" - and we all made it out with minutes to spare.  Fortunately, there are plenty of mini-expansions included to add difficulty and keep the game fresh.

But like any great family game, difficulty is not the point.  It's just great fun, with lots of excitement and no need to wait around for your turn.

Threes! (Sirvo, 2014, iOS)

Back from a vacation to Northern Michigan, and ready to finish off my series on puzzle games.

Dots is initially great in its simplicity, but as I mentioned last week, one can only get so good at the basic game before you hit a ceiling, where the need to move your fingers as quickly as possible competes with any technique you have for generating squares.  And while I don't object in principle to micro-transactions in iOS games, when they're used appropriately, the idea of buying (or earning, through repeated play) "cheats" totally subverts the idea of any real accomplishment.

Threes! has none of these problems.  It's hands-down the greatest "Tetris-like" ever made.  The idea is to match numbered tiles as they emerge on a grid, using a simple mechanic whereby tiles can be pressed together against the edge.  Tiles with high numbers can merge when they match each other, creating a single tile with double the value.  However, the game mostly sends you 2's and 1's, which can only merge with each other to create the titular 3's.  Although the game gives you a score, the real goal is to attempt to create the highest-valued tiles you can, before the grid fills up and you run out of moves.

As you might guess, this involves a fair amount of strategy, and a strong understanding of how the game generates new tiles.  Unlike Dots, there is no time element, which means that games of Threes! can be quite long, especially as you get better at the game.  But knowing these strategies, the principles of which can be learned in fifteen minutes, are no guarantor of success by any means.  What really floored me is that, over a series of ten to twenty games, I was getting better without
really knowing why.  I knew the strategies when I could barely make a 96 tile, but with incremental changes in my tactics and a steadily improving instinct for what a good grid looks like, I was eventually able to get a whopping 768.  If that doesn't make for a good puzzle game, I don't what does.

A couple more observations about Threes!:

1)  The developers posted an astounding wealth of information about the development of this game, which took 14 months in total.  An astonishing amount of that time was spent developing the aesthetics of the game.  Instead of desiging these aesthetics as a "shell" for the core game, the mechanics evolved along with the aesthetics.  I find this remarkable, especially I don't much care for these aesthetics.  It's cute that the tiles have faces that wink at you and such, but it's extremely irritating when they chatter away at you, even going so far as to complain when you take too long in moving (fortunately, that feature can be turned off).  Also, the idea that I would create higher-ranked tiles just so that I could read their pithy descriptions is absurd.

2)  I was astonished to discover that a number of people in my department had not heard of Threes!, but had played its clone 2048.  I have not played this game, but a quick look at its description and some reviews suggests that it is not nearly as complex or fine-tuned.  I can only surmise that its popularity comes from the fact that it's free, and also that the horribly-designed App Store means that its popularity is self-perpetuating irregardless of quality.

King John

The prevailing view of Shakespeare's histories, somewhat oversimplified, is that nation-states are driven above all by strong personalities.  King John, with its constantly shifting allegiances and treaties made and broken within hours, comes near to throwing out the nations entirely.  The play, set long before any of the other histories, begins on a strange note:  France and its king threatens England with war not for the sake of conquest, but ostensibly to restore the rightful ruler Arthur, young son of John's older brother.  The armies meet before the city of Angiers, whose citizens, in the play's funniest line, promise allegiance to the "King of England," leaving it to the combatants outside to decide who that will be.

Putting the word 'king' in quotes seems apropos, since as John himself admits, what makes the king is the crown.  Arthur may have the right of blood, but that doesn't seem to count for much in this era.  France will soon abandon him for a marriage treaty with England, which will itself be almost immediately broken due to a bit of mischief caused by the pope's emissary.

Overall, King's John is a play without much of a center, where the facts seem to matter little in the face of passion and whim.  After Arthur is captured on the battlefield, John, despite an assured victory over France, orders his death out of cowardice.  And even though his assassin can't bear to do it - for some reason, the death was to be "facilitated" by burning the boy's eyes out, which would make Voldemort hesitate - Arthur kills himself in a desperate escape attempt, and John take the blame.  This causes England's nobility to take up France's cause (although not for long).  There is no simple war between nations in this play.

Most of the play's critics think the best thing about King John is Faulconbridge, bastard son of Richard the Lionheart, common man turned knight.  Certainly he's extremely witty, and something of a predecessor to Falstaff, or even Hamlet.  But I have a hard time figuring him out.  In the first act, after he's first acknowledged by John and given a title, he gives a wonderful monologue wherein he promsies to deliver "sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth / which, though I will not practice to deceive / yet, to avoid deceit, I mean to learn".  I find this highly ambiguous, because throughout the rest of the play, Faulconbridge exhibits nothing but honor, loyalty, and bravery, despite his brash and sarcastic mannerisms.  Despite all the play's twists and turns, he manages to keep his head on straight.

So what are we to make of this monologue?  I like to believe that Faulconbridge has a strong streak of self-interest, and considering that he ends the play as England's foremost military commander and supporter of the young Prince Henry, then it must have served him pretty well.  Very interesting character.

Dots (Betaworks, 2013, iOS)

I have a pretty wide taste in video games, but I generally lean towards games that are naturally finite.  I like to know when I get into a game that it has a clear ending, or at least a point after which I can step aside from it without second thoughts.  The same is true of my favorite puzzle games; I like the solvable kind.  So as much as I can appreciate how great Tetris is, it was never one of my favorite games growing up, and I'm still kind of wretched at it.

The same is mostly true of it's myriad clones and descendants.  You won't catch me playing Candy Crush Saga on the T.  But I have flirted with these types of games on occasion, and since I'm on a puzzle game trip lately, now's as good a time as any to share my thoughts.

Dots, for example, is certainly pleasing in it's minimalism.  For those who haven't partaken, Dots gives you a simple grid of colored dots, and you link consecutive dots of the same color in order to remove them from the screen.  Do this for a minute, and the game scores you on how many dots you've removed.  That's it.  Shortest game summary ever.

Well, not quite.  The hidden twist is that if you remove a square, then all dots of the same color are removed at once.  This is the key to getting a high score.  Well, that's not quite all either, since the game allows you to spend your accumulated points (or real dollars) to purchase all sorts of power-ups that boost your score in various ways.  But these would seemingly make your best score somewhat arbitrary and meaningless, which defeats the purpose entirely.  So I've stayed far away from those. 

Like I said, I like games with a goal, and so I came up with a way to make this game (and other score-oriented games) worthwhile to me; the back-and-forth.  My wife and I would alternate with this game (which we played on my iPod Touch), each one playing until he or she could beat the high score of the other.  Actually seeing someone get to a certain high score gives you the knowledge that it's possible, which motivates you to work to beat it.  We actually had quite a bit of fun getting better at the game...until Clare got lucky, with a score so ridiculously high that I had no chance of matching it (or even coming close, really).

Like I said, the real goal of the game is to find as many squares as possible.  Well, sometimes, you just get really lucky and a whole bunch of them come together in sequence.  Now, if I was really good at the game, then I would know how to choose my matches, so as to create squares.  But as soon as I'm thinking about that, I'm not moving my finger as fast as possible, and my score suffers.  So the game was fun for a while, but I don't see myself getting anything better.  And that's it.  I can understand that it's still a good way to use up a free moment, but I play enough games as it is, that my time-wasters take other forms.

Labyrinth (ThePuzzleFiles, 2006)

Labyrinth is a video game in the loosest sense.  It's one many of online puzzlefests which might loosely grouped under the genre of "tower games".  Tower games, some of the most famous being NotPron or TheFirstDoor, have a simple model; they are a series of increasingly difficult puzzles, accessible by browser, where answering each puzzle correctly gives you the URL to access the next.  They are usually plotless, and rarely give you much of a reward for completion (although I wouldn't really know, since I've never actually beaten one.)  The lure is the brutal difficulty, which can be quite legendary for some of these so-called games.

Labyrinth began as a contest, a sort of puzzle marathon.  The puzzles are mostly cryptographical in nature, with the answer to each being a word or phrase hidden in something as bewildering as a knitted thread.  The puzzles are always fair.  Certainly riddles like these could be made arbitrarily difficult, but that's never the case with Labyrinth.  Usually, when the rule for decoding comes, you'll know it right away, and you won't understand why you didn't see it all over the past week.  The game does have some mean tricks up its sleeve.  Like a real labyrinth, there are even dead ends, where a partially correct answer will lead you down a fruitless series of puzzles ending with a trite message telling you to turn around and find where you were mistaken.

Only 117 people, have beaten Labyrinth - I know because the game lists all of these out in a hall of fame.  I am not one of those people.  Only two people beat the game last year - obscurity is partly to blame, but still.  This is not for the faint of heart, but for the incredibly patient.  That said, the community of puzzle solvers is not an unwelcoming one.  A forum for tower games is often provided, where hints can be found.  Direct walkthroughs are usually not available, for good reason, since they very much defeat the purpose.

However, when a puzzle leaves you entirely helpless, and the forums give you nothing but the same seemingly-useless hint repeated, then you're bound to feel a bit of despair.  What's amazing about these games is that it's entirely possible to recover from this feeling, and gain that flash of insight when you least expect it.  Today, for example, while "researching" this blog post, I managed to solve a puzzle that had put me off the game for the past three years.  Now I'm hooked again.

Certainly tower games are not for everyone, but I'm always surprised at just how small the community is.  Certainly the name I've assigned them is not canonical, and they're a bit hard to Google ("online riddle games" might be the most popular moniker, but that it doesn't really do the games any favors).  But I've always considered them, and Labyrinth in particular, some of my favorite puzzle games, so I think they deserve much more attention.

SpaceChem (Zachtronics Industries, 2011)

SpaceChem is an unappealing name for a game, but as the developers try to make clear in the tutorial, the game has about as much to do with real chemistry as Ace Attorney has to do with real law.  Which is to say, extremely superficially.  The best way to describe SpaceChem?  It's the greatest programming teacher you didn't know you wanted.

The history of "programming games" is about as old as programming itself.  One of my favorites growing up was Widget Workshop, a simpler version of Incredible Machine which allowed you to mess around with basic logic gates by disguising them in all sorts of colorful and cartoony ways.  When I was in college, we learned to program in Java by giving Karel the Robot a set of instructions that would allow him to investigate his environment.

In SpaceChem, the goal in each level is simply to turn some molecules into other molecules.  The reason that this is hilariously fake chemistry is that you do this via little robots, or "waldos," that physically pick up the atoms and carry them around.  Your job is to program the waldos, just like Karel.  However, the waldos do not walk around with their instructions, but rather the instructions are written onto each tile of the floor, like a set of street signs that the waldos must follow.  Whereas the complexity of Karel's tasks are limited by however many lines of code you're willing to write, the restrictions in SpaceChem are literally spatial, since each tile can only hold one instruction for each waldo.

But the real beauty of SpaceChem, and the thing that sets it well above other programming tutorials, is in the scale of its puzzles.  Since each reactor has limited space and only two waldos, a more complex job will require multiple reactors, with pipes between them carrying molecules in various stages of completion.  But the flexibility of the design allows you to choose how each job will be split up.  This requires some patient strategizing to say the least, since if one reactor turns out to be impossible to design, you'll probably need to start from scratch.  Even after completing one of these herculean assignments, then you have the option of trying to better your score by making your system work faster or using fewer reactors.

I suppose all of this sounds pretty boring, but let me tell you that each level of SpaceChem that I've solved has filled me with an embarrassingly real sense of accomplishment, that I've built something distinctly my own. Given the extremely open-ended design, solutions to the jobs can vary widely in ways that even the developers couldn't possibly predict, and my jaw has dropped when I saw what some SpaceChem players have managed to do with just one reactor.  And the developers were very smart, slowly introducing additions to the ruleset, and giving you just enough help to get you started.  The interface itself manages the game's complexity as cleanly as you could hope for, with keyboard shortcuts that let you build reactors quickly when you get better.  (You can also save a reactor design for future use, although I was never smart enough to utilize this feature effectively.)  Just stay well clear of the iOS version - this game demands a keyboard and mouse.

SpaceChem is a game with a weird selling point, but it's not hard to see why it inspires a great deal of enthusiasm among its fans.  I don't hesitate to say that it's the best puzzle game I've ever played and one of my favorite games, period.  My only complaint is that it's extremely long, so much so that I've still never beaten it.  (Part of that has to do with the fact that it's also extremely difficult, but that requires no excuses in my opinion.)  In fact, we'll find that to be the case with many of my favorite puzzle games.  I take great solace in the thought that there are still SpaceChem levels that I haven't beaten, and that one day I'll conquer those with ingenuity and determination.

?!

So I've fallen behind a bit on the Professor Layton series, and before I play the next one in the series, I've been finishing up all of the puzzles I hadn't finished in the previous four games.  (After all, a gentleman leaves no puzzle undone.)

The Layton games are the first puzzle games in a long while that have gotten "mainstream" recognition, and there's a good reason for that.  They're extremely friendly and accessible.  The puzzles themselves, which range widely from sliding-block puzzles to tangrams to word puzzles to plain, clever riddles, are mostly on the easier side, although there are some optional stumpers.  More importantly, they're all extremely well-hinted, and you can usually skip one if you hate it enough.

But puzzle games remain a niche genre, and many of the good ones are (ironically) still pretty well-hidden.  So I thought I'd spend a few posts outlining some of my favorites, and maybe even some of the not-so-great ones I grew up with.

You can trust me - after all, I'm a mathematician, so puzzling is more or less my job these days.

Sherlock: Series 3 (BBC, 2014)

I'm a fan of Sherlock, but I have to admit that I find its popularity a bit mystifying.  In an age where computers have effectively taken over our lives, it's strange that people would want to watch a man behave like one.  Holmes (in the show, at least) behaves a lot like Watson - the IBM artificial intelligence, not the man - in that he works not by carefully constructing logical chains, but rather collecting huge amounts of data and making free and random associations.  As such, the show would rather we marvel at Holmes' ability and hilarious personality rather than try to follow along with the mystery.

In fact, this season, the mysteries themselves take a backstage - there's barely one at all in the first and third episodes.  Instead, the show seems to focus on...bromance?  Not that I don't care about these characters - Martin Freeman is pretty good (and Cumberbatch is alright, I suppose) - but why bother with the 90-minute format in that case?  I suppose they're just trying to keep things fresh,  yet there can be only so much "personality study" before it starts to seem like they're just spinning their wheels.

Demon's Souls (From Software, 2010, PS3)

As I mentioned a few times before on this blog, I was pretty bad at games when I was a kid.  The games that I liked were the ones, like adventure games, that gave you access to cool content without much work (or at least without much work that couldn't be outsourced to a walkthrough).  When it came to JRPGs like Final Fantasy VIII, I could only tolerate the gameplay because it held the promise of another sweet, sweet CGI cutscene.

Demon's Souls nicely inverts this mentality.  Most of the beautiful content comes early in the game.  Incredibly detailed vistas, giant fire-breathing dragons majestically flying overhead, mysterious characters, and a spare, but not meaningless backstory - with a few notable exceptions, all of this can be found in the first quarter of the game.  But the real content, the real reward for investing yourself in this setting, is a series of challenging, but rigorously fair boss battles.  These bosses run a wide gamut.  Most of them require a great deal of practice with the core mechanics, as well as a not unreasonable amount of leveling.  A few of them feel more puzzly, where simple pattern memorization is more important than your level.  And a couple of the later bosses will feel quite easy, compared to what has come before.

By the time you get to the final boss, you will be so good at Demon's Souls that it will be not be nearly as challenging as you were prepared for (in my case, I didn't even realize that the final boss was final).  The ultimate reward of Demon's Souls is your own great skill at playing Demon's Souls.  There is no accidentally beating this game - you will feel no more or less than the great demon hunter that your character is.

The Moon Rang Like a Bell (Hundred Waters, 2014)

A terrific album for a rainy day like today.  The background is moody, ethereal electronica, a calmer version of Silent Shout, with a James Blake-style dub influence.  But the real highlight is Nicole Miglis' wide-ranging vocals.  I usually don't have a clue what she's saying, but I love the way she pronounces certain words, with emphasis added mid-vowel, bringing to mind classical Greek cadences.  According to Wikipedia, this group has toured with Julia Holter, and while their stuff is not heady as her's, it does seem like a pretty good match sonically.

There's also some pretty fascinating stuff going on harmonically.  "Innocent" is a real highlight.  The lyrics are about dealing with jealousy, and as the singer wonders if it's all in her head, the rhythm is lost and the key changes up into the stratosphere.  It's haunting stuff.

Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Alexander Payne has gradually become the new "it" director - one which critics of all different stripes have rallied behind.  My feelings about him are a bit more mixed.  I haven't seen all of his movies, but I certainly like all of those that I have seen well enough.  They're beautifully shot, well-plotted, and elicit great performances from their casts.  My problem with Payne is that I never quite connect with his characters in the way that he wants me to.

Take his latest film, Nebraska, which is about an old man, one who embodies the word "cantankerous," and a trip he takes with his son to collect upon an imaginary lottery winning.  Along the way, he is forced into an impromptu reunion with his extended family in the titular state.  The film is quite beautiful, with its crisp black-and-white landscape shots and nouveau-folk score*.  And Bruce Dern and Will Forte give great performances.  Like Emmanuelle Riva in Amour - and more famously, but in an example I haven't seen, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man - Bruce Dern's performance is a bit over-hyped simply because his character lies on the extreme of human experience.  Forte is the real lead here.  But both he and Dern do a great job.

There is a great ambiguity about whether Dern's character really believes the fiction - if you watch his expression when his wife is excoriating him, it seems clear that he knows full well what's going on.  I guess this is the aspect of Nebraska that I relate to the most; my limited conversations with my grandfather reveal that he can at times be extremely lucid, with a good memory, but there are often slips that make one question whether he isn't making things up.

In any case, what I've mentioned so far makes up the reason that Nebraska is my favorite Payne film.  But there's a lot I find unsatifying about it as well.  Certainly, I applaud the decision to cast Forte, but his character as written seems so unnatural to his environment that I immediately have trouble believing him.  (Similarly, I could never quite buy Clooney's character in The Descendants, or Giamatti's in Sideways.) 

I know there's a good reason for this:  Payne himself is a Nebraska native who doesn't fit the mold.  Yet so much of the humor of the film comes from contrasting Forte with his lethargic, simpleton family members, and that contast seems entirely artificial.  I too am a small-town kid trying to make it in the city, and like Forte's character I can't always relate to my family, yet I can still see the similarities.

*The score was actually composed by a member of Tin Hat (formerly Tin Hat Trio), a fact that I could recognize instantly.  It's excellent stuff and it fits the movie perfectly, although it's always distracting when you have a personal, separate attachment to a film's music.

The Evil of the Daleks (Doctor Who serial, 1967)

Evil of the Daleks is a seven-episode serial from the fourth season of the long-standing time travel sci-fi Doctor Who, during the tenure of the "Second Doctor", played (marvellously) by Patrick Troughton.

The Daleks, of course, are alien, fascist robots that wheel around, threaten humans with extermination, and look like a bit like salt and pepper shakers.  They are indeed quite evil.  They were also extremely popular ever since they appeared in only the second ever Doctor Who serial, and by the time of Evil of the Daleks they had already made several appearances.  Evil was actually meant to be their last, although of course, they couldn't stay away for long.

The plot of Evil is actually quite convoluted.  Suffice to say that it takes place both in modern-day (i.e. 1960's) and 1860's Britain, as well as the Dalek homeworld Skaro, and stars a 19th century aristocrat (complete with top hat) obsessed with turning iron to gold, an antiques dealer posing as a Victorian fob who sells suspiciously accurate forgeries, and a mute Turkish strongman with a fez.  Of course, it's marvelously cheesy even for 1960's sci-fi, but Troughton is a fascinating Doctor to watch, and the unusual plot keep things from getting too staid.

Unfortunately, watching the serial is a bit tricky, given that only one of the seven episodes currently exists in full.  Due to the BBC's policy of wiping their video tape archives in the 60's and 70's, a total of 97 early Doctor Who episodes are lost.  What we do have from the first few seasons exists pretty much by accident; the second episode of Evil was a fan-made recording found in a garage sale, according to Wikipedia.

But, in fact, full-length fan-made audio soundtracks exist for every Doctor Who episode.  In addition, we also have "tele-snaps," which are photographs of certain scenes made to put in the actor's portfolios.  Remarkably, Doctor Who fans have stitched these together with the soundtracks to reconstruct the missing episodes.  (The BBC has done this themselves with particularly important episodes.)  These reconstructions can be found online.  I've actually found these pretty watchable.  Where the soundtrack fails to clue us in, a bit of text scrolling will narrate the action.  Quite amusingly, there's even a few live-action shots, with actors who hide their faces, and some just to replace a shot of someone walking down a corridor.

I know this doesn't sound fun to watch, but remember that early sci-fi was filled with inventive premises that were usually quite disappointing in execution.  Consider the Daleks themselves - although the idea of a Nazi robot frightened the heck out of British schoolchildren, actually watching them roll across a floor yelling "Exterminate!" is pretty giggle-inducing.  So with these reconstructions, it was a pleasure to use my imagination to enhance what was on-screen.  Frequently, I would close my eyes, and recreate the scene in my mind, probably making something much better than the BBC could do anyways.

Does that make Evil in the Daleks an essential sci-fi classic?  Well, not really - like I said, the show is still pretty cheesy.  But it's still very cool to see fans add something worthwhile to their beloved franchise.

Unexpected Humans

At the end of the Queen's Tower level of Demon's Souls, you climb a spiral staircase to a chapel-like area.  It's oddly covered in chairs (perhaps an Almodovar reference?).  Anyways, just before you enter the area, you see a cutscene, where the ancient lord of the tower summons some kind of phantasmic human to fight you, before collapsing from agedness.  The cutscene's actually kind of annoying, since unlike most cutscenes in the game, it's quite long, and you're forced to watch it every time you die and restart from the bottom of the staircase.

Oddly, most times I began to climb the staircase, I would get a notice that a Black Phantom has invaded my world.  A Black Phantom is a human character that has come to try to kill you.  I have only a little experience with them, since Demon's Souls is four years old, and probably not a lot of people are online with me.  The Black Phantoms couldn't seem to get on the staircase with me.  They must not be allowed to interfere with this part of the level.

In any case, the first time I fight the summoned monster I'm destroyed almost instantly - he carries a giant sword and fights extremely well.  The second time he's changed to a smaller sword and shield.  I notice this but don't think much about it, because Demon's Souls requires quite a bit of concentration while you're fighting.  This time he's running around like crazy.  He's not doing a lot of damage, but he's pretty good with that shield, and it's quite difficult to get hits in.  Plus as his health goes down, he starts shooting magic bullets from around his head.  So it's still a pretty challenging fight, although eventually I get him.

When I win, I get a message "The Black Phantom was Slain".  I'm stunned.  That whole time, I've been fighting against a human opponent.  Of course, it's easy to see in retrospect.  There's no reason I shouldn't have guessed, except that the boss just didn't seem like a human opponent.  Sure he was running around like a fool, but he used the same tactics the whole time, even when he was low on health and it was clear that things weren't going well.

I've never confused a human for an AI before.  It's definitely an eerie feeling.