Doctor Who is back.  Those four words make living the next two months a little brighter.  How?  Well, I suppose the economy still sucks, and there’s that whole war and world hunger thing, but at least there’s new Doctor Who to watch.  This first of eight spring episodes served as the first (actual) introduction of Clara Oswin Oswald, the new companion.  How does it measure up?  Stay tuned to our spoiler filled review below.

“Spoil, you clever boy. And remember.”

The Good

CLARA – There was a lot of weight on the shoulders on this new companion.  The Ponds were the most well received Tardis crewmates since probably Rose (even though I thought Rose Tyler was as useless as a a towards-grass-pacifistic lawnmower).  She (Oswin) had big shoes to fill and fill them she did.  This strange set up with the actor playing another incarnation of the same character twice before could fail really easy in less careful hands, but this really worked.  I loved the shared traits between the three incarnations we’ve seen, but also loved the slight differences and the way Jenna-Louise Coleman has carried the three each a little differently.

The hardest bit though is we are going from extremely well rounded characters with an insane level of depth to a new character that we don’t know much about.  That’s all well and okay, that’s how new characters work, but since the doctor’s companion is used in marketing one assumes to attract whatever the British equivalent  is of frat boys, a companion without much depth is a dangerous thing.  We know she’s got this mysterious Lazarus ability, that she likes to travel, and that she has some sort of leaf fetish.  That isn’t a lot to go on.  I suppose she has the dead parent thing, but so does every Disney princess and I wouldn’t exactly call them deep characters.  Even her high intelligence, my favorite part about her when we first met her back in September turns out, at least in this incarnation, turns out to be artificially created and not really, intrinsically her.  Amy, by the end, wasn’t just some redhead to ogle, but a wife and a kick ass woman who had flaws and passions and really felt like a real lady…you could ogle.  Let’s be honest, we ogled, but it’s a lot easier to not feel horrible about ogling when the target is a person and not just a vapid pair of ….hearts.  Hopefully Oswin develops more in the future.

THE BELLS OF ST JOHN – Title clever is clever.  Also awesome is The Doctor doing tech support whilst dressed like a monk.  That is all.

THE NOVEL EASTER EGG – Did you notice that the novel that Clara and the kid were talking about was written by Amelia Williams?  This is either just a one-note Easter egg for fans or maybe small set ups towards a comeback from the Ponds.  I normally would say this was wild speculation, but with the 50th anniversary special looming in November I wouldn’t be surprised if their return was on the horizon.

THE BAD

HOLY CHEESY EFFECT BATMAN! - It’s 2013.  If you don’t have enough money to show someone driving a motorcycle up a building, don’t show someone motorcycling up a building.  The whole turning the camera sideways trick was hokey back when it was with Adam West and Burt Ward in tights.  I really don’t get it, as it could have been so much stronger had they framed it differently.  Maybe we’re in the baddies control room.  We are hearing the conversation just from their perspective.  ’Didn’t you hear me say Antigrav?” and CRASH.  Some peon says, “I think that was your office,”  and then we see him sitting in the chair amidst the debris.  SO MUCH STRONGER.

UGLY

THE BADDIES/MAIN PLOT – Companion introduction episodes have to do a lot, but even given that understanding, this was rough.  ”Rose” (the episode, not the character that is about as pleasant as a blowjob from a crocodile) is probably better, and that’s really saying something.  That had a CGI dumpster that ate someone then burped.  The notion in this of wifi gone crazy was neat, but it really didn’t go anywhere.  Also, did the doctor really just kill a bunch of people in the resolution?  I mean, they still existed digitally.  He’s not even going to try to save them and, I don’t know, run them back to that massive library computer in which River now resides in digital paradise?  They are all like, “Hey, doc, I get that you want to save your friend, but if you do this all these people without bodies will die!”  And he’s all like, “Mmmkay, as long as I get this chick I barely know back.”  That seems like especially strange behavior considering the one thing he knows about Oswin is that she has this habit of not staying dead.  Maybe you should leave Lazarus to save herself and, I don’t know, rescue the rest of the blokes.

Also, we really don’t get to know much about our baddie’s boss.  It’s all mysterious in that whole “We’ll tell you later” sort of way but with all the Oswin mystery I really needed something to be a little more grounded.  Also, I think the Moffat era is starting to get mystery fatigue.  What does it mean when silence will fall when the question is asked?  Who blew up the Tardis in season 5?  Why was the Tardis blown up in season 5?  Why was Amy so hot?  Who really are the Silence and what are they planning?  Since Madam Kavorian was killed in the alternate timeline, is she alive?  If the doctor was supposed to lay low and stop using his name, why did he sign his protection in this episode?  Why was the Silence ship stuck on earth in the Lodger?  Why is Oswin reappearing across time and space?  Why was Amy so hot?

FINAL THOUGHTS

All in all, not a great episode overall, but hopefully that was just due to a lot of Clara setup that we had to get out of the way.  I’m hoping this season really picks up.  If nothing else, we have a new Neil Gaiman episode!  That’s so exciting, it almost makes me forget that Rose was as lovely as a group hug with Wolverine, Freddy Kruger, and Edward Scissor-Hands.  God I hope this isn’t true.

I talk about the Games as Art debate that’s been brought back up by Bioshock Infinite, Roger Ebert, Feminist Frequency, Adam Sessler, and even some dirty stuff about Gordan Ramsay.

Adam Sessler’s great review can be found here: http://youtu.be/jchIi-vR_js

Extra Credits can be found here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show…

The  closing song was used with permission from the great Blake Robinson. His channel is here:http://www.youtube.com/user/dummeh

So if you care about four month old comic-book spoilers stop reading now.

In what is now being called the final issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker and Dr. Octopus were in the middle of reenacting Freaky Friday when Peter realized that that shit works a lot better with Jamie Lee Curtis because Doc Ock’s body was a touch full of Cancer.  Peter Dies in his arch enemy’s body and Doc Ock goes on living to ruin Spider-Man’s image and career like Lindsey Lohan.  Huh, Metaphor kind of makes sense actually.  I say it’s NOW being called the final issue because, let’s face it, comic book characters make Lazarus look pedestrian.

I’m late to this party, so I’m not going to give a review of The Amazing Spider-Man 700.  If you want vitriol filled reviews in which it is torn metaphorically (and sometimes as a coping mechanism, literally) asunder, there are plenty of those out there on the internets.   What I would like to do, however, is use this as an opportunity to talk shop about serial storytelling versus contained or non-serial storytelling.  Is the current ending to the run of The Amazing Spider-Man more rage inducing and stupid than a Justin Bieber cover band?  Well, yes, but then again, the latter keeps sending you Facebook invites and tries to get you to buy their acoustic version of “Girlfriend” on Bandcamp.  All the writer’s of Spider-Man did was try to do something interesting and compelling with a character arc that has been going on for OVER FIFTY YEARS.

That’s really the rub, true believers.  How many serial stories have been told for half a century?  Does any story really have enough legs to go that long?  Some of you might remember my one venture into serialized storytelling.  Back when I ran “The Daily Tourniquet” I wrote a weekly story called Hooks.  It got into the twenties before, like all of my creative projects, I washed out like I was the plot device for a war courtroom drama.  Serial storytelling is hard.  Like really hard.

Serial storytelling has always faded in and out of style.  The Charles Dickens novels were actually all first experienced serially.  There’s an awesome possibly true story (and if it’s not true, don’t ruin it for me) that as the boat was arriving with the last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities people couldn’t wait and stood on the shore listening to the boatman reading it aloud as they pulled into port.  Now, serial storytelling is becoming prominent again due to internet and technology.  The game The Walking Dead was considered by many to be the best game last year and it was released and experienced serially.

But not a lot really compares to the type of serial fiction being written by comic book writers.    The Dickens novels and The Walking Dead game were conceived as a whole and just released as parts.  TV shows are similar and sometimes you get to see really cool things ruined by poor planning in serialized storytelling (cough cough LOST) but TV shows don’t really expect to run indefinitely like a comic book,  That is, except for soap operas.  WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING MAKE SO MUCH SENSE.

The comic book’s closest narrative cousin is the soap opera.  They plan to run indefinitely.  They feature stock characters that have to carry the action and conflict over and over and over again for sometimes half a century.  Of course they are going to throw the Sami/Lucas stuff to the wind and try to make you care about this rapey EJ guy, they are trying to do something new and they have forever to fix it, EVEN THOUGH HE CAME BACK AND THEY STILL HAVEN’T FIXED IT!!!  Sorry, I try not to reveal I have any Days of Our Lives knowledge in public.

So is the death and switcheroo from Spider-Man 700 shitty and a reason to stop reading Spider-Man comics?  Yes and no.  It’s certainly shitty, but so was the retcon in One More Day and although I still think that wasn’t a great move it established a world that I think there’s been some great and interesting storytelling in.  As you all know, I love Doctor Who and there is an oft said phrase in Doctor Who fandom, “We all live to see our show cancelled.”  See, Doctor Who has also been trying to tell one long story for fifty years and just about every four or five years everything about the show changes when different writers, directors, and actors get involved.  It’s just how it’s done.  Part of being a fan is learning to roll with the changes.  And that’s what we have to do right now.  Eventually Peter Parker will come back, he and MJ may or may not get back together, and Days of Our Lives will continue to be awesome, but not as awesome as Passions was.  Timmy was the shit.

]]> http://jeffreyconolly.com/jeffthegreat/bloginess/thoughts-on-spider-man-700-and-serial-storytelling/feed/ 0 http://jeffreyconolly.com/jeffthegreat/bloginess/tomb-raider-video-game-review/ http://jeffreyconolly.com/jeffthegreat/bloginess/tomb-raider-video-game-review/#comments Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:47:58 +0000 jconolly http://jeffreyconolly.com/jeffthegreat/?p=801

So the new Tomb Raider came out this week.  It’s a sort of a snake eating its own tail situation.  The Uncharted series refined the formula of the old Tomb Raider games and now Tomb Raider is a revision of those.  Does this reboot hold up and set the series on brand new ledge-grabbing ground?

SPOILERS are Born

The Good

The Character: Lara Croft is a gaming icon, but one invented in a far more juvenile, less socially cognizant era of gaming.  A reboot had to bring the character back into the  gaming spotlight, but treat her as a heroine for female and male gamers to admire and not just for male gamers to ogle at.  This is accomplished in spades, as the newly minted Lara Croft is someone that any gamer, male or female, will want to hang out with for the duration of the game and save the world with.  She is kick ass and she’s vulnerable.  I’ve heard some list her vulnerability as a bad thing, but trust me, this is a Die Hard kind of experience.  At the end of the last act, she’s bloodied, beaten, and metaphorically limping in to see Hans with a gun duct-taped to her back.  This is the best female game protagonist we’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.

And a note on female protagonists and vulnerability: there was a lot of kerfuffle about this game and a scene that was previewed long before it came out.  Notably, this “Press Y to not get raped” inspired a lot of feminist discussion for and against.  In my opinion, the scene was maturely handled and in context worked very well.  The reality is, if we are to create a well rounded female protagonist in these kind of adventure scenery, to not acknowledge the rape culture that we tread in would be more irresponsible than acknowledging it.  That being said, although the game is full of misogynistic triggers to those sensitive, when the player fails to press Y Laura passes out and further violence is implied rather than explicitly shown.

The Story: I get a bad rap as a gamer sometimes because for me, narrative trumps gameplay.  I’m weird, I know, but I’m always interested in video gaming as interactive storytelling first and as a “look how good I am at pressing x” thing second.  All this preamble is just to establish the weight to the statement that this is one of the better handled game narratives I’ve ever seen.  This game hits the sweet spot that so many games miss between a plot that is too simple or too convoluted.

Where this story hits a little harder than the others in the same genre (Uncharted for example) is that it borrows a lot from Lost (in a good way).  Laura and her crew are shipwrecked on an island full of mysterious “others” that sort of want our hero a little more dead.  Where it’s different than Lost (again in a good way) is that all of the mystical qualities of the island and others actually have a really cool. well thought out explanation behind them.

The Bad

Millions and Millions of Enemies, Oh My: There’s a bit of a narrative disconnect in the fact the shear amount of enemies you face on the island isn’t really supported by the story line.  Just where do all of these soldiers come from?  And where do they get all of the ammo to shoot you with?  All this is fine/usual video game stuff except the act in which you actually storm the castle, which you’d expect to be enemy heavy, is so over populated with baddies that it slows the game down to a crawl.  The game difficulty spikes here and you have to take a few smoke breaks just to get through it without setting the game aside forever.  It’s a bit of a nitpick, maybe, but I felt these sections stunted what was otherwise a 10/10 game.

The Ugly

Don’t really have anything UGLY for this game.  It was a solid experience.

Final Thoughts

Tomb Raider is a very good game.  If you are a cheap bastard like me, you’ll rent it because it’s something you can get through in about 12 hours.  There is a lot of extra collectathon content for the completionist and a tacked on multiplier.   If that is your sort of thing or paying full price for games is something you normally do, there are far worse ways to spend sixty dollars.  In any case, I highly recommend it.

I was ready to hate this movie.  Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to get dragged out of a house for the midnight premiere, smuggle gas station Mountain Dew and Sour Patch Kids in, and settle down among this series already die-hard fan base (my small town theater had it showing on 5 different screens at midnight, and they were all packed to the brim).  But this was Summit Entertainment, the production company that stumbled on a goldmine with Twilight, but had still yet to make a good movie.  Eclipse was maybe the closest, but that’s like saying that Stephen Hawking is the best walker of a group containing him, Franklin Roosevelt, and Christopher Reeve, because unlike the other two, he’s still alive.

But they finally did it.  This movie is good…not great…but good.  Spoiler filled review time….cue the quote with SPOILERS slammed in their inappropriately…

“I’m sure the arena will be full of bags of SPOILERS for me to chuck at people.”

THE GOOD

NECKBRECKINGLY GOOD – My biggest problem with the Twilight books was that every battle happened off screen.  In the last book, when they actually got down to the point where they couldn’t have Bella just catch the sniffles or faint or be out for tea when the battle took place, they just didn’t have a battle.  It was underwhelming to say the least.  The films have done better at this (the third being the best) but since they don’t have an awful lot to work their still left showing that vampires do little more than hiss at each other when it comes down to fisticuffs.

When the first few deaths happened off camera, I was terrified that this movie would be pulling punches left and right to not scare away its tween audience.

I was wrong.  I was awesomely wrong.

It is actually a plus that they don’t show the deaths early in the film.  It makes the actual deaths more cringe-worthy and awesome.

WOULD PUT HIS NAME IN 1000 TIMES FOR A TWINKIE - Woody Harrelson was amazing in this.  I said after his first few frames that I wished the whole movie was about him (and I still kind of do).  He steals the show as the drunken mentor character to the two “star crossed lovers” (more on the idiot romance later) and has almost all the best lines in the movie (half of which are written and sent to the chick in little blinky ball things, but when I read them I heard Woody in my head dictating them in all his swagger).

AS POPULAR AS JOHN CARTER WASN’T - So many people tonight, it was crazy.  They were a huge, energetic crowd that clapped when the movie was over, cheered when it was appropriate, and balled their eyes out when sad things happened on screen.  A couple even answered some questions that my friend and I had after the film.  It’s a huge and incredibly nice fan-base.

I’m sure the backlash on these books is coming.  Soon it will no longer be “cool” to like them (which is fine with me, I haven’t been cool since being fat, having a beard, and being nerd was a thing…so like never).  But for now this is just great for the economy, the entertainment industry, and the book industry.  For those (like myself) who would like to work in some form of entertainment this is all great news.

THE BAD

RAMBO’S NOT HER NAME O - Although I respect the writing prowess it took to make every kill Katniss made passive or in self defense, it got really old after awhile.  They spent the first half of the movie telling me how much she has these Seal Team 6 assassination moves (especially effective against apples and bags holding apples precariously placed over explosives).  She is really kick ass, so kick ass that I wan’t to see First Blood type massacre of those less worthy than her, but instead she plays with wasps and sleeps in trees.  Even the final battle, where you just want her to shoot that D-Bag in the head so bad, it’s the dogs that really get him (not counting her mercy kill at the end).

THE “ROMANCE” – This is where this movie started to really fall apart for me.  I know I’m not the target audience.  I know that, even if this was well written and directed, they couldn’t make me care about the silly love triangle (one supposedly fills the alpha male paradigm, but couldn’t be bothered to co-volunteer, the other tells jokes and audiences like him…oh and he’s strong I guess…..but not as strong as Alpha Male Guy).  It’s silly and stupid.  Sadly it is the reason 90% of people will see this movie.  But it is BEYOND dumb.

They do hint, however, that the relationship between angle A and angle B might be fake for the TV audiences.  I can’t imagine they are going this direction, but I really wish they would have.  It would establish this world as a dark world with dark consequences that you have to sacrifice some moral integrity to survive.

THE UGLY

SHAKY CAM - What are we, a flurry ( ice cream joke((a bad ice cream joke)) )?  The camera is all over the place so much I”m surprised JJ Abrams didn’t make this.  Some of it is almost unwatchable.   I was there at the theater, but I felt like I was watching a bootleg recorded off the screen by some guy with Parkinson’s.

FINAL THOUGHTS

People should see this movie.  It’s pretty darn good.  I don’t know if it was “see at midnight” good for me personally, but it’s a good flick to fill your time before Avengers comes out.