Old School Internet

In conversation I’ve taken to preceding the words Facebook and Myspace with unnecessary definite articles.  “I don’t use the Facebook,” I’ll say, or, “The MySpace is for idiots.”

It’s an effacing acknowledgement of how deliberately, stubbornly (even curmudgeonly) out-of-touch I’ve become with the popular online landscape.  Whenever I express this distaste towards self-styled “social networking,” I am invariably challenged for a reason.  People act as if I should want to tie my Internet presence to my corporeal person, to cast myself as a celebrity-in-miniature.

I see little to no value in this.

The Internet is intangible by nature, a gloomy sheol populated by disembodied ghouls, each trying to carve an ephemeral fiefdom out of its ever-shifting sands.  If the nihilists are right, and all human achievement is but written on the winds, then that is doubly so for the Internet.

“The Internet is our generation’s Vietnam,” I often say, and I am only half joking.  The online shadowplay is how our spoiled, weak and feckless generation gives form to its peculiar demons: entitlement, consumption, selfishness, and unbounded ego.  Every man on the Internet is a little ersatz god, carving meaningless commandments onto illusionary tablets of stone.  The allure of “social networking” is the illusion of teeming Israelites waiting at the foot of the mount for you to bless them with your wisdom.  Cobweb of cannibalistic sycophants, strangers and egomaniacs form, feeding one another through mutual attention.  Sheer numbers of believers—and whosever believeth in me, I shall also believeth in—give form to the shadow, to bring corporeality to the incorporeal wastes.

This pleroma quickly threatens to become kenoma under the influence of a million little demiurges.

Yet the times change, and despite my crabbishness I am something of a neophile.  The day may yet come where I abandon my snobbish “old school” mentality and set up a tiny outpost of flesh amid the sea of electrons.

The day may yet come.

Until then I will stare unflinchingly into the unformed chaos of digital space, delighting in the power that anonymity affords one in a world of ubiquitous celebrity.

A Dark Obsession

I have a problem.

Inklings of it first crept into my waking mind some months ago, as I slid a copy of “Next” into my DVD player.  It came as a kind of itch, buried in the depths of my brain, a vague sense that something in my life wasn’t right. 

I next felt this sensation while watching “Left Behind.”  The feeling still had no name, and no fixed identity.  It floated freely within me, this nebulous unease, and I had begun to think of it as a newly developed aspect of my personality.

Only a handful of weeks ago I was watching “The Room” when I suddenly perceived a new dimension to this presence.  It had a distinctly puritanical character, by which I mean it was composed largely of the feeling of “wrongness” and the intense desire to set things right.

Then it struck me.  The full force of it exploded in my mind, flooding my consciousness with a wailing, irrefutable truth:

While I was watching “Next” I could have been watching “Touch of Evil.”  While “Left Behind” was vomiting forth from my television in wave after wave of inanity, I could have been bathing myself in the warm, clean waters of “Ikiru.”  While “The Room” was doing things to my mind that could possibly be irreparable, I could have been watching any number of films by Welles, Kurosawa, Bergman, or Truffaut.  I could even have been watching any of the silent classics that sit inert on my shelf, purchased on impulse and then never watched.

I was deliberately watching bad movies, while ignoring ones that I had reason to believe would actually be good.  I had become a cinematic coprophage, gleefully consuming offal, and delighting in the bitter, hateful taste.

The feeling that had plagued me these last months was the very essence of good taste, bursting free from some psychic prison built out of improbable action sequences, shallow characterization, plot stupidity, murky cinematography, and bad writing.  It rose out of me like a fire, and I can feel it battling the dark presence that drives me to fill my eyes with the polluted light of bad cinema.

This monstrous presence has a terrible power, and I am not sure that my better nature will prevail.  I have not seen “Aguirre: the Wrath of God,” but I have seen “Twilight.”  I have watched the entire oeuvre of Uwe Boll, when even the weakest works of Hitchcock would be like dreams made real by comparison.

I haven’t watched “Battleship Potempkin” yet.  It’s only 75 minutes long.

In a few hours I’m going to watch “Push.”  I think it will be awful.  No.  No, I hope it will be awful.  If I have any power over this beast at all, I will watch “The Third Man” instead.  I feel a great heat that threatens to consume my body, and I know that it is born from the fire of conflict between these two aspects.

There must be a balance.  Part of the joy of cinema is, after all, stimulation.  Must every flim experience be an artistic enthusiasmos?  Is there no place for disgust, hatred, or even schaenfreude toward a job poorly done?

God help me, but the trash calls out.  Like a sleazy carnival barker, it offers me access to a world of intellectual outrages that give me every bit as much pleasure as great art.

After all, if you never watch a truly terrible movie, how will you ever recognize a great one?

The Good, the Bad and the Ataxic

Let me begin by saying that I enjoy “Call of Juarez – Bound In Blood.”  As far as Western-themed shooters go, I like it almost as much as Lucas Arts’ “Outlaws.”  Almost. Which isn’t saying much, I suppose, since that was over ten fucking years ago.  You have to understand that the pickings during that intervening decade have varied greatly: anywhere from utterly execrable (“Western Outlaw: Wanted Dead Or Alive”) to passably diverting in a bland, manilla envelope full of tapioca pudding kind of way (“Gun”).

The original “Call of Juarez,” of which “Bound In Blood” is technically a prequel, was a competent, not-too-hideous gunfight simulator marred by stealth sequences of the “stay hidden or die” variety.  Still, it allowed you to shoot faceless goons in ten gallon hats with one hand while reading fire-and-brimstone verses out of a Bible in the other.  There was no gameplay benefit to doing this, it was simply awesome.  Sadly, the amusement factor of playing a fundamentalist lunatic on a rampage of revenge lost all of its charm after four hours of gooey controls, “Oh, who gives a shit?” plot, and plasticized, zombie-faced character models.

“Bound In Blood,” in addition to (marginally) improving these areas, is also a frank depiction of the hardships endured by two brothers cruelly stricken with Klumpke’s palsy.

Ray and Thomas McCall—our designated protagonists—both suffer from sudden-onset hand paralysis, kicking in every time there’s a one-on-one gunfight.  Considering that every single mission ends in such a showdown, you begin to see the great hardship under which the outlaw brothers endure.  The gunfighting mechanic is as such: the camera drops down to ass-cheek level, with your adversary in the center of the screen, and your character’s hand hovering over his holstered shooting iron.  Your opponent moves right, then left.  This goes on for an eternity until somewhere, someone decides to ring a church bell.  That is the signal for you to reach for your gun by moving the mouse.  The problem is that every inch of on-screen movement requires about a foot and a half of mouse movement, regardless of sensitivity.  So the church bell rings, and your character begins to move with agonizing slowness toward the butt of his pistol, his hand jerking inch by inch across the seemingly vast interstice between man and victory.  While you are dragging the mouse across your desk again and again like you’re reeling in a garden hose, your enemy has effortlessly unholstered his weapon and perforated your character’s spleen.

You will repeat this process many, many times until finally you get lucky and your ataxic character manages to grip his gun and bring it to bear on his opponent. Inevitably you will shoot as soon as possible, which has the hilarious side-effect of making all gunfights end in crotch shots.

Now, despite the crippling disability that nature has bestowed upon the McCalls, their true downfall is pride.  They never turn down an offer for a gunfight, knowing as they must that every gunfight is an exercise in excruciating pain and humiliation.  It is inevitable, in fact, that your character will die several times during these events, in what is either a clever parody of the wild west anti-hero’s eternal flirtation with violent death, or just REALLY SHITTY FUCKING GAME DESIGN, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.

Every single mission in the game ends with somebody wandering out and demanding a gunfight like it’s constitutionally mandated.  That the greedy, cruel and dishonorable McCall brothers heed these requests is all the more baffling.  Solitary enemies stumble out from behind cover, outmanned two-to-one, and aren’t unceremoniously shot in the face from a hundred paces. 

Nobody in this universe has ever been shot in the back of the head while playing cards.

Thus we come to my primary complaint, and it is the same complaint I have lodged against every western-themed game ever: this is not a depiction of the American post-Civil War frontier period.  It is a depiction of what Italians in the 1970s thought the American post-Civil War frontier period was like.

Western shooters need to give up spaghetti like military shooters need to give up brown palettes, or RPGs need to give up Tolkien and giant spiders.  It’s time to move on.  A whole generation of homegrown western films have raised the bar, introducing some of the real moral grayness that characterized the period (beyond simple not-so-nice guys shooting at other not-so-nice guys).

Is it necessary to keep going back to the trough for grizzled, scarred and stubbled villain-protagonists to shoot historically inaccurate weapons at mighty Apache warriors over lost gold?

Hopefully not for much longer.