"The American man is neither chiseled from stone nor from crispy-chicken batter. The American man isn't helpless. . . He doesn't shirk on his responsibilities. He does work hard and he does not pick on his friends. He loves rock and roll and he hates Nickelback. He loves football, but he's smart enough to hate the NFL's greed."

You are an idiot. You are an obsessed idiot. You are a zealous, obsessed idiot. You are part of a nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You shall find camaraderie amongst others in that nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You, and your comrades in arms, know of a deeper love than those who are not part of your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots -- noses turned up at you as if their farts smell like Cinnabon and Carebears. You know that even amongst the other citizens in your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots, in your heart of hearts, there is no doubt that you are unique in your understanding. You know how far, and how strong, this empire, your empire, of zealous, obsessed idiots truly reaches. You, idiot, are part of something so grand that you understand your place in the world, despite that those unlike you will see your idiocy as idiocy, and not as a badge of honor.

ExciteTruck

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(originally published November 9, 2011)

"ExciteTruck is the best game created for the Nintendo Wii."

With the grace and civility displayed by a boxcar dweller performing "King Lear" while on acid, the Nintendo Wii, despite its side-show freakery, did not need to exist. It was an inelegant success for a year and a half. You could control it with a bathroom scale and pretend to ski-jump with Bowser and Sonic the Hedgehog. The best thing about the Wii was that it reminded lapsed videogame players that they had once been children that were capable of grinning. The system's design had the word "nostalgia" written on top of every brainstorm document and it was always written in pen. Lines shot out of that one big word, leading out to smaller bubbles that held words like "Mario," "Mario Kart," and "Your Older Sister." The system was based around the same idea that Brad Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, thought up in Fight Club -- level the playing field and take everybody back to zero.

Dark Souls

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". . .we've never seen a girl go as a sexy-marmot on Halloween, but, c'mon, that's a total double-whammy. You'll be all, 'Nice marmot.' And she'll be all, 'I'm a sexy-marmot!' Allow it!"

Halloween is a special day that brings out a person's full potential. The competition is intense. You either step your game up or you die, probably in a gutter, or in a vat of acid, or crushed in a glass-recycling machine. Normally, people are complacent and restrained, uncreative and sleepwalking. Not on Halloween though! No, no, you party at a post-graduate level of child-like euphoria on Halloween. More universal and fuzzy than Mardi Gras, it's the Super Bowl of partying.

Fuck you if you say anything about New Year's Eve! All you have to do is show up on New Year's. That's an exhibition game. They let the pine-riding scrubs come out to play on New Year's. Most of those people will get cut from the party team before the regular season even starts.

No, you have no choice but to show up with your game face on for Halloween. There is no avoiding it. It's the holiday you can actually, truly, legitimately enjoy without suffering contempt for other people, family members, religions, or whatever (more on the religion thing later though).

All you need to survive Halloween is a decent quantum of liquor and a straight-bangin' costume.

"Everything was terrible and none of it was true."

A lot was said in that shortened minute and the problem was that the Organist couldn't hear what the whispering men were saying further up ahead. Then again, if he had, he was sure that they would have stopped him, and everybody else, all just to talk to him alone. No, the whispering men stayed in their invisible voices, looking back at the Organist and carrying on with their conversation as they led the tramp party onward, parting the wire-branches that reached and bent at their arms and legs. They had begun their walk what he estimated was a few miles back inside the hollowed-out crater that harbored their boats and their road had been smooth the entire way with packed mud that left no tracks. The line kept in single-file, two prisoners, then one of the whispering guards, two more prisoners, then so on in the same order. Hungry and weakened, nobody tried to run, even though they weren't bound in any manner to speak of. Their restraints were much simpler. The sky-red rocks reminded the Organist where he was and the air he was breathing would no doubt hold him back, hardening his lungs like treated horse-hair. The oxygen was too hot, he knew he couldn't escape, not right now, and the whispering men hadn't talked to him yet and he wanted to keep it that way.

"An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong."

The trouble with good movies is that people often try too hard to like them. Hungry people try too hard to like them. Students are particularly hungry for identity and for understanding and there's a lot to like in movies they've been told are great and there's no reason not to like them. Like scarves and black coffee, great movies pick up fair-weather fans, and more relevantly, gloom-weather fans. They can be powerful. These movies can cause pretty heavy impact, unloading weighty messages that free minds can't help but cull for meaning. It can be too much though. In the vernacular, they can fuck with young heads.

Vanquish

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(originally published October 5, 2011)

"Vanquish is stupid. It is fighting stupid with stupid."

Know this: the “rocket-slide” button in Vanquish pulls double-duty as the “smoke-cigarettes” button.

First released in 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Vanquish joins the Japanese developer PlatinumGames Inc.’s expanding back catalog on Steam. We need to celebrate this. Vanquish volleyed forth a tongue-in-cheek counter-argument to a decade of western action design sensibilities in 2010. In 2017, the joke is finally landing.

It turns out this joke began in 1992.

"[The Prestige] is a movie about being fooled because we want to be fooled and it doesn't stop there -- we want to be fooled by something complicated and we won't take simple for an answer. . . Don't look closely. Stand at a distance. You aren't being fooled."

This movie is a Monet. It's impressionism. It's clearest when you stop squinting and you back away and you stop trying to examine it because as you examine it, The Prestige is giving you your answers over and over. Let it. In fact, while you're worming your way around the question, trying to match it up with an answer that must, by necessity, be as equally taut and coiled, you have all the answers you need. It is both question and codex, describing itself, and you, at the same time.

"The Scotsman's heart began to feel faint. He had come so far across so much of Scotland to find the bones of the greatest creature on earth, only to find nothing. Had the giant fox lied to him?"

One thousand and fifty years ago in the furthest, coldest reaches of Scotland, there lived a man whose house faced the western seas. Oh, he was a happy Scotsman with a darling wife and their days were rich and full of happiness. There were days of struggle, like when the whiskey was running low, true, those days were trying. There were days of struggle that perhaps turned into years of trouble, like when the wicked men came in from the southlands, burning houses and stealing sheep and raiding the man's tended peet and berry bogs, from which he drew his livelihood. But amidst all of this, the Scotsman remained happy because he had his bog and he always had his wife.

". . .honestly, Shakespeare In Love is not meta enough. . . it is like throwing a bratwurst down a hallway."

An interesting conversation happened at the bar last week when we mentioned to somebody that we would never see that movie Contagion because it would only increase our hypochondria and that it was weird that they give away Gwyneth Paltrow's death in the trailers and that she had been an overrated actress ever since Shakespeare In Love, a movie which we had never seen.

"Oh, you need to watch Shakespeare In Love. It's amazing. It's my go-to feel-good movie to watch when I'm feeling down."