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Category Archives: Other Art and Culture
Kingdom Hearts Is Meant for Final Fantasy Fans, Not for Disney Fans
I don’t think Kingdom Hearts was made for folks like me, who’ve watched a lifetime of Disney films but barely played any of the Final Fantasy games. It feels much more like a Final Fantasy game dressed up in Disney drag than like an interactive Disney tale built around the Final Fantasy structure.
Posted in Other Art and Culture
Tagged Disney, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts 1, Sora, Tetsuya Nomura, Video Games
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S-Town: The Podcast that Shows How One Man’s Life Can Reveal Multitudes
Caution: this article contains major spoilers for the S-Town podcast.
Our lives are not just our lives. Even at our most isolated, or our most misanthropic, or our most closed off, the trudge of seconds and minutes and years which pass through us make a path through other lives as well. In order to know someone, to understand who they are and to feel the weight of their life and death, you have to know the individuals they connected themselves to, willingly or otherwise. And you have to know the place they emerged from, the culture and community that shaped them.
If you want to know someone, really know them inside and out, then you have to examine each gear and lever and pulley, the intricate, interconnected machinery of their lifetime, that moved them, regardless of whether they embraced it, fought it, or even knew about it.
As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist, that’s what the S-Town podcast, created by This American Life stalwart Brian Reed, tries to do for John B. McLemore, an eccentric, tortured resident of the small Alabama town that is his hometown, eternal punching bag, and long-lamented final resting place all at once.
What Remains of Edith Finch and the Awesome, Terrible Power of Stories
When we want to remember someone, we tell stories about them. When we’re processing our traumas, we create representations of them to ease the pain. And when we feel trapped, our imaginations can give us a comfort and a lifeline.
That’s the idea at the center of What Remains of Edith Finch, the 2017 game developed by Giant Sparrow and its creative director Ian Dallas. As I discussed with Robbie Dorman on The Serial Fanaticist Podcast, the game tells the story of the Finches, using a visit to an old family home to trace six generations’ worth of seemingly inevitable misfortunes, and the conflicting efforts to remember the individuals behind them and to avoid sharing their fates.
Harry Potter and the Magic That Fades – Wonder, Escapism, and Adulthood 20 Years Later
Twenty years ago, Harry Potter, and all that comes with him, made its debut. His is the newest “universe” to become an indelible part of our cultural firmament, on par with Star Wars and comic heroes and the other cultural objects that have practically ascended into myth. There are plenty of reasons for that quick ascension: characters who grew up with their audience, the way the novels’ mythology deepened as the saga went on, and scads of merch-able items derived from the work that helped make the property marketable and omnipresent.
But one of the biggest is that J.K. Rowling forged such an inviting and exciting world, one that evinced a sense of wonder and, importantly, escapism, among those who visited it. The greatest fantasy in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is in the idea that there’s an incredible hidden world, just waiting for us to find it. If we can only find the key, if only we were admitted entrance, there waits a realm of wonders to be discovered and adored.
Rowling knew how to adorn that mythic land. She filled it with the sorts of inventive tricks and treats that seem blasé to locals but wondrous to us muggles. She created an imaginative ecosystem of places and spaces much like our own, but with just enough of a magical twist to spur the imagination. Who wouldn’t want to become lost in the Wizarding World, a place filled to brim with surprises and thrills and adventures around every corner?
Posted in Other Art and Culture
Tagged Adulthood, Escapism, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
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The Colossal Divide: Shadow of the Colossus, Roger Ebert, and the Space Between Auteur and Audience
In the years since I first wrote about Roger Ebert’s disdain for video games, he’s been in the back of my mind each time I’ve picked up a controller. He believed, and argued quite strenuously, that video games could never be art. At the height of the firestorm of controversy he unleashed with this statement, Ebert went so far as to declare that no game could ever achieve the same level of artistic transcendence as the great films and novels and paintings from around the world, all of which stood head and shoulders above such a hopelessly shallow medium.
It’s a ludicrous, haughty, even arrogant proclamation. And yet, as I discussed with Robbie Dorman on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, in the years since his death, I’ve tried to at least understand where Ebert was coming from. He is a giant in the world of criticism and a smart and generally open-minded critic at that, even if he has a particular view of what’s required to create “great art.” That makes his critiques, however frustrating, worth unpacking, even if they’re not necessarily worth accepting.
Posted in Other Art and Culture
Tagged Art, Roger Ebert, Shadow of the Colossus, The Legend of Zelda, Video Games
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The Lost Wedding Ring
Many years ago, I made fun of a friend of mine when she recounted the panic she’d felt when she mistakenly thought that her wedding ring was lost. I admit now that it was terribly insensitive, and the only defense I can offer is that it was a product of the naive arrogance of youth, the supreme belief that you’ve figured out the inherent truths of the universe that most folks are too indoctrinated to see or otherwise don’t have the heart to confront. And so, cruelly, I laughed at her.
I laughed not simply to be mean, but because I was, and still am, an essentialist.* I’ve struggled to define that term, but at base I think it means being the kind of person who is concerned with what’s at the heart of a an experience or a goal or an idea. It comes down to the root word — essence. What is the essential point underlying what I’m doing or what I believe? Why is it important? What about it really matters? These are the questions at the core of the way an essentialist looks at the world.
And so I laughed because there is nothing essential about a wedding ring. I may be paraphrasing the exact words I used, but my haughty mockery of my friend’s legitimate anxieties over her misplaced ring took roughly the form of “Gee, I sure hope I didn’t lose my eternal commitment to my husband.”
The Merry Margin: Santa Claus in the Board Room
“Santa, I appreciate your position. Really, I do. But what you’re talking about is theft.”
Susan shifted uncomfortably in her new chair as she waited for Saint Nick to respond. Too many of Benton’s awards and photographs were still on the wall for her to feel comfortable doing business in this office. The near-empty mahogany desk stretched between her and the red-suited sprite on the other side of it like a still black sea. Santa looked back at her with a quizzical expression.
“Well I don’t know about that, Suzie. I don’t suppose we’re taking anything from you. You have just as many iPhones to sell as you did before.”
“Yes, but that’s not really the point.” Susan cleared her throat. “I know you’re not sneaking into our warehouses and filling up your sleigh with purloined phones.” She deliberately let the silence hang in the air for a moment. The company had done an extensive five-year study and could find no hiccups in their inventory beyond the usual shrinkage and minor employee infractions, but security had been increased nonetheless.
Lagunitas Sonoma County Stout | The Andrew Beer Review
I’ll admit off the bat that this beer, which I received on tap at The Ginger Man in New York City, was just not my style. In short, the beer tasted like stale wine that had been left sitting on a radiator. No one at my table could stand more than a sip. My craft-loving friend was vehement that the bar’s keg had gone bad, and he was aghast when the waitress insisted it was supposed to taste like that.
I’ve come to understand that grape-y sewage may have been the flavor Lagunitas was going for when it brewed the Sonoma County Stout. If so, then I congratulate them on the achievement, and I can confirm that they have not only concocted a beverage suitable for anyone who enjoys the taste of skunky Guinness mixed with a jug of Welch’s that got left in the garage over the summer, but also potentially violated the Geneva convention.
Laughing at Sincerity: The Room, Tommy Wiseau, and The Earnest Failure
The Room has quickly become one of my favorite movies. I cannot, and could not, begin to call it a good film, but it is enjoyably and transcendently inept. The movie’s premise is a love triangle between Johnny, a well-meaning banker, Lisa, his fiancée, and Mark, his best friend. But that basic description does not begin to capture all that is The Room.
The internet has exhaustively documented the film’s numerous flaws and the insanity going on behind the scenes, but in brief, Tommy Wiseau, the film’s writer, director, star, and overall creative visionary, produced the perfect storm of terrible movies. The writing is embarrassing; the acting is weak and wooden, and the dialogue is quotable for all the wrong reasons. Plots are picked up and dropped seemingly at random; characters emerge and disappear for no reason, and the film is so poorly directed and edited that it could be considered avant-garde if people believed it were a deliberate departure from the norm.
I’ve watched this unintentional masterpiece five times. I have shared it with my fiancée, with my parents, and with multiple groups of friends, because it’s one of the movies that just has to be seen to be believed. It’s the type of film that you would never expect to actually come to fruition. Its vision is too singular. Making a movie involves too much effort from too many people for one individual to be able to create something so unique and so awful. In short, The Room is a cinematic train wreck that is as breathtaking as it is bewildering.
But recently, a comment about the movie’s questionable notoriety gave me pause. Greg Sestero, one of the film’s “stars,” is writing a new book about the film. In an article about the book’s release, one online commenter complained about Sestero capitalizing on Wiseau and the movie’s infamy, arguing that,“at some point it feels like he’s exploiting a man who’s not all there.” It made me wonder if there’s something wrong about the joy I derive from The Room.
Posted in Classic Films, Movies, Other Art and Culture
Tagged Abed, Anne Hathaway, Community, Earnestness, Greg Sestero, Irony, Oscars, Seth MacFarlane, The Room, Tommy Wiseau
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The Martyr
Today is the day that I will die.
And I am okay with that. I’m scared. I can’t lie about that fact, but I’m okay. The fear in my heart swells, but then it fades. It invades my thoughts in the few quiet moments I have to myself, but dulls and winnows in the times that should be the most daunting.
That’s what bothers me. They sell it you as this straight line. They tell you that everything in you will rise and rise and rise until the big moment. That you’ll just keep going up and up and up. But it doesn’t, and you don’t. It rises and falls, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, never so focused or so direct, even when it feels like you’re headed in the right direction.
But I will be a martyr.
