Then there’s the rest of the cast in the movie as well. Ryan Reynolds as his imaginary friend (who also happens to be a superhero, Captain Excellent. Reynolds can’t get away from the tights, even in movies like this it seems) works as well. He kind of comes off as an asshole in some parts, but mostly as someone who’s at the end of his wits telling Richard (Daniels) not to make all of the bad decisions that he makes pretty much constantly. He also comes off as genuinely caring about Richard in spite of the fact that he’s been making him crazy for the last forty years.

This also leads to the character of Abby, played by the always beautiful Emma Stone (backoffshe’sMINE!) who Richard befriends in the very beginning of the movie. She plays the messed up teenager (in an indie way, naturally) with the dead sister and the guy friend who is constantly pining for her played by Keiran Culkin. There’s also Lisa Kudrow who plays Richard’s long suffering wife. Playing someone oppressively normal and well balanced when all I’ve really seen her in is Friends and the random background characters in chick flicks that always seem to be the quirky ones. Having her play the straight man (or woman in this case) in interesting, and she pulls it off.

I realize that I haven’t talked much about the movie plot yet, but that’s because it’s mostly incidental to what the movie is really about which is Richard and Abby’s relationship. Richard is an author who’s first book sold horribly and is expected to produce a second one and is having a huge case of writer’s block seemingly centered around the name of the main character of his new book. While exiling himself in a small town outside of the city to finally write the book, he meets Abby. They then start a close friendship and ultimately help each other get over their hangups, hers being her dead sister and Richard’s being his inability to figure out what he’s doing with his life.

The ending of the movie is very Hollywood given how the rest of the movie veers more towards being as indie movie as possible as the movie ends on a very high note with every one more or less ending up getting over the greatest of their issues and moving on. This ending feels a little strange given the rest of the movie, but it also works well enough to not pull you out of the movie altogether.

Overall, the film is very good and I highly recommend everyone watch it. Check it out on Netflix instant.

-WC

That said, Captain America: The First Avenger has pretty thoroughly changed my mind. Not that Nazis are interesting movie villains really, but that they do make for a good villain that is apologetically villainous, which, while not necessarily interesting, is a ton of fun. At a certain point, the villain doesn’t have to be tragic and the hero doesn’t have to be flawed. Sometimes the villain can be as evil as evil can be and want to conquer the world and it doesn’t have to be any more complex than that and the hero who is nothing but pure and selfless punches him in the face and wins and that can be tons of fun.

Sometimes you need someone to look up to.

Remember when that was enough when you were watching cartoons on Saturday morning when you were ten? I do, and it was awesome. The Good Guys were good because they were and the Bad Guys were bad because they were and that was enough. Sure, there’s some hidden depth with Cap because he was an genuinely good person who finally got everything he wanted and probably deserved only to lose his best friend and the woman he loved to wake up however many decades in the future and having to start from scratch, but then he joined the Avengers, gets used to the 21st Century, ends up with the daughter of the woman he loved (which is actually kind of creepy when you think about it) and everything is great for him again.

Basically, tragedy and complexity really aren’t a huge part of Captain America’s character (if people actually read my blog, I’m sure I’ll get lots of internet hate for that statement). He’s the big awesome Good Guy punching the big evil Bad Guy in the face and that is good enough. More than that actually, because reconnecting with my childhood sense of good and bad and having good win out in the end gave me this sense of glee that I haven’t felt in quite some time. Sure the dark edgy man fighting criminals from the shadows because his parents were murdered in front of him when he was a child is compelling and makes for good characters and good stories, but sometimes having two very simple paragons or good and evil fighting and knowing that good will win in the end is a good story too.

So relive your childhood for a minute and go watch Captain America: The First Avenger and reconnect with your childhood sense of right and wrong for a couple hours and be happy for it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go look up some Brubaker Captain America stories.

-WC

Speaking of which, it wasn’t too long ago (though now that I think about it, it could have been close to a year, maybe two considering it was at the beginning of the Clone Wars TV show) that Jason said something simple like not caring for the current EU novels and them not really being the Star Wars stories he was interested in and as a result he was met with some very strong words from some people in emails and voicemails to the show that said that he obviously wasn’t a real Star Wars fan because he didn’t read everything that came out; blah, blah, blah. To be fair, I really don’t think he deserved the response that he got for that simple statement. His stance used to be that he didn’t care for them, but if you did, that was okay.

Now, however, seemingly in response to those same trolls, or ones like them, he’s become a troll himself, albiet on the other side of the fence. It all really started with the whole Karen Traviss thing when the Clone Wars TV show started stepping on the continuity that she had built up with her Republic Commando series of novels, novels that became very popular within the Star Wars fan community because they were such a breath of fresh air within the EU. The characters were all original, the stories were their own and they showed a different side of war in the Star Wars universe that wasn’t heroic or clean, but dirty and a fight to survive by a group of people that had no idea what they were going to do with themselves when the fighting stopped. She was the first, or one of the first anyway, to show the tragedy of the Clone Trooper and make it compelling, ideas that have made their way very much into the Clone Wars TV show we have now, though in a more kid friendly sense.

Now, the way that Karen Traviss handled the changed in continuity was poor, however, you can understand her being upset I think. All of these characters were original and in a very real sense were hers. Having her stories cut short by something entirely out of her control, especially when she was leading the writing duties for the official tie in novels for the Clone Wars TV show but an almost random feeling decision that had been previously said by both Lucas and Filoni that wasn’t going to happen (namely, the inclusion of the Mandalorians in the Clone Wars TV show) would be jarring and disappointing. I’m still not making excuses for how she handled everything, which was badly, but I can understand where she was coming from in that everything that she had written up until that point was based on the established canon of the Star Wars universe. However, the ForceCast, and Jason in particular took what I felt to be extreme offense that some stupid EU author would dare claim any kind of ownership over anything that says Star Wars on it. After all, it’s Lucas’s story and no one else’s.

That is where they are both right and wrong on quite a few levels. Sure, Lucas created the universe and it’s his to play around in as he sees fit. However, whether there is or not, there definitely feels like there’s a little bit of a lack of respect for what has come before. It’s Lucas’s universe, but he let other people come in a play and change things. If he didn’t want to have to pay any attention to those changes, he shouldn’t have let them happen in the first place.

I’m not saying any one party is wrong. The Star Wars EU has become bloated and boring and the characters and stories within the EU have become stagnant which is why my personal readership has fallen off considerably of late, especially after the nine book series became the standard format. I have neither the time nor the money to buy and read nine hardcover books telling a story that feels drawn out and uncompelling anyway.

So, the opinion that the Star Wars EU isn’t very good is maybe not entirely unfounded. However, the way that Jason takes exception to the end of a character he personally cares about even though he is now, effectively, a different character being used in stories that Jason has, admitedly, never read and taking offense to the idea that the all wise editorial team at Lucas Books could have ever been even responsible for anything going wrong in the Star Wars universe (it’s all obviously completely the writers’ fault. I mean, they’re just incapable of doing their jobs, right?) Because there aren’t any stories out there of writers wanting to tell compelling stories only to get shackled by the editorial staff in charge of their licence. Sam Raimi forced to put Venom in Spider-Man 3 springs to mind, among others.

Ultimately, the idea that Star Wars only belongs to George Lucas is a bit outdated. Star Wars is way bigger at this point than one man. Star Wars belongs to all of us, which is probably why people react so strongly to stuff like this. It’s been something that has gotten me through some rough times myself. Jason says that Star Wars needs to be one big franchise, but apparently fans of the franchise don’t deserve the same treatment. Instead, those that do care about the EU are part of some fringe of Star Wars fandoms that consists solely of “kooks”. It’s been said by others, but the exception that Jimmy took to be called a nerd is fine, but then turning around calling fellow Star Wars fans kooks is okay, I guess?

You’ll realize that I mention Jimmy very little in this whole thing. I think Jimmy is the levelheaded one, but at the same time, as a cohost, he shares some of the blame for the extended, unneeded, and overly confrontational EU rants that Jason keeps going on on the show. Basically, I don’t listen to podcasts to be insulted by their hosts. I originally started listening to the ForceCast because it was fun and because it represented a community of people that I could share Star Wars with. Jason’s loud hatred of the EU, however, has turned the ForceCast into something that isn’t fun anymore. They can’t keep hiding behind the idea that it’s all just commentary when also presenting themselves as a legitimate source of Star Wars news.

I listened to the episode of the ForceCast in which they talked to FanGirl about the blog that kick started this whole thing, and I’ve listened off and on to the show since. I’m still subscribed in iTunes and it’s something that, currently, I’m listening to only when I’m out of other podcasts to listen to on my iPod while I’m walking to work or campus. I’m not as angry as I was when I first started writing this post a couple of weeks ago (it’s been sitting in my drafts for a while). To be honest, I’m kind of over it.

So, while I’m not going to be boycotting the show, I’m not going to be going out of my way to listen either. As I said before, Star Wars had gotten me through some rough times and the ForceCast was a big part of that. I remember when I waited with bated breath for the newest episode of the ForceCast, and I don’t do that anymore, and that bums me out. It really does.

-WC

I personally think that calling someone a name calling hack is a bit of an oxymoron; however, it does make me realize just how touchy a subject like this is. I can’t promise I’ll tread especially lightly, but I promise this is only my opinion and in no way do I think it invalidates yours. Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, just that we disagree. With that said, I’ll get onto the actual post.

The good old days...

The Star Wars EU has become a convoluted mess, and the stories have, accordingly, started to collapse under the weight of their own continuity. As such, I’m of the opinion that the Star Wars EU timeline is in serious need of a reboot. Either that, or authors need to stop feeling the necessity to pay such close attention to the overall timeline. It’s keeping the stories from being great, and it keeps new readers from jumping on for fear of being lost.For the most part, their fears would be justified.

While Luke Skywalker’s death would be a good way to shift the focus of the Star Wars EU away from Skywalker and let the other characters that have been created in the Star Wars EU a chance to shine, I think that a back to basis approach, similar to what DC is doing with their comics timeline, is necessary. I think that the Star Wars EU needs to go through a refresh. It needs to be streamlined, cleaned up and improved upon.

The improved upon part I think is the most important. The editorial staff at Lucas Books needs to set up a clear path for where the Star Wars EU is going to go. They need to go through the Star Wars EU timeline and decide what to keep and what to pitch, if they’re going to keep anything at all. While time travel might not be a good fit for the Star Wars universe, an event to end the current continuity and provide a starting point for the new one would be a good idea. Given how crazy the Force powers in the Star Wars EU have gotten, I don’t think it would be that out of the ordinary for there to be some big bad that has the power to change the universe in the way that could reset a lot of the stuff that has happened in the EU.

Then, people need to stop caring so damn much about canon. It’s waste of everyone’s time. Character development over time is good, but the idea that “this can’t happen here because according to canon something else is happening at this time, so this has to happen at a different time so we’ll have to move the time that this happens to that it all fits and then we’ll have to explain it for two paragraphs in front of the thing in the story we actually want to talk about.” It’s dumb. Have books happen, keep them to single books, duologies, or trilogies and have anything happen either before or after the stories that are already in place. You don’t need to know that the character went through something 2 months, 4 days, and 16 hours ago, just that they already went through it or they haven’t yet. That’s all that matters.

The nitpicking needs to stop and the timeline needs to be streamlined. They can keep some stories, like the Thrawn books or even just the basic beats from some stories to keep certain characters and events in place, like the solo children being born, but everything else needs to be fluid, and redesigned to fit into a universe that actually has room for more stories in it, because the current Star Wars EU simply doesn’t.

-WC

If that showing was the popular one, I’d hate to see what the unpopular showing was.

I think part of the relative financial failure Green Lantern was partly due to the fact that maybe a crazy sci fi superhero movie is maybe not as accessible as DC and WB were hoping, but I think these days, when the mainstream audience or critic sees a DC logo in front of a comic book movie, they think The Dark Knight, and anything that isn’t that tends to disappoint.

Now, Green Lantern has a couple of issues just from a film school standpoint. There’s a little too much going on in the movie and while it manages to all remain cohesive for the most part, it still feels sloppy. A lot of the nerd rage some comic fans have directed toward the movie doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Sure, it’s different from the comics in certain ways, but comic movies always are, so if you’ll be upset by tweaking for the big screen stop going to comic movies and stop writing about how you hate them on the internet so I don’t have to read it anymore.

With that out of the way, The Dark Knight set a very high bar for comic movies that it felt like all coming after had to live up to. The Dark Knight made the mainstream, both critics and moviegoers, view the superhero movie as a legitimate genre of film, not just a big dumb summer blockbuster. As such, comic movies that don’t achieve that same kind of gravtias tend to be looked down on, even though that really shouldn’t always be the point.

Sometimes you need serious character examination...

Ultimately, comics are supposed to be fun, especially superhero comics. This is not to say that they can’t also be intelligent, there are plenty of comics that are, but if I want self-serious fiction or commentary on society or what have you, I can get that from other kinds of literature. It’s one of the reasons that I enjoy Batman comics so much. A well done Batman story toes the line between a very serious story about very human characters and the entertainment value of a superhero comic.

Not all comic characters lend themselves to that kind of storytelling, and that’s fine. Different characters lend themselves to different stories, so the expectation that every superhero film be The Dark Knight is incredibly unfair. Green Lantern was fun. It wasn’t self serious and it wasn’t deep, but it was entertaining to watch Hal Jordan throw semi trucks at space monsters and blow them up.

...and sometimes you need a gatling gun in space

This, I think, is part of the success of Marvel Studios’ recent success with its comic movies of late. They made them fun. They also made them feel fairly consistant across the board. I seriously doubt that Thor would have done as well as it did if it didn’t have that connection to the Iron Man movies. Green Lantern probably wouldn’t fit very well with the current way Batman is portrayed in Nolan’s films, but looking forward, I think DC would be wise to give the next Batman series of films a lighter feeling and take a page from Marvel’s book and make their movies fun.

The Dark Knight is a great film, but it’s ruined other comic book movies. Not all of them have to be so serious, not all of them have to feature tormented characters and psychological examinations of those characters. Sometimes they can be fun and entertaining and have dudes  throwing semi trucks at space monsters and that can be just as good.

I’m still holding out hope for the Green Lantern sequel that it sounds like WB and DC are still planning. While I love me some Batman and I love Nolan’s Batman films, I want to see the other DC characters I love up on the big screen as well, and I want them to be successful there if for no other reason than it’ll make people quit asking me if I’m in a frat or something when I’m wearing a Green Lantern pin.

-WC

Yeah, I know, right?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but just running around a city collecting stuff or shooting dudes doesn’t hold a ton of appeal to me. It kind of holds none, actually, which is why recently the open world games that I have played have become very few and far between. I need a story based motivation in my games in order to have the personal motivation to keep playing and the side stuff in things like GTA has never been enough to make me care.

Anyway, I read the review for LA Noire on Giant Bomb and saw the Quick Look that they posted of the game the day it came out (which also happened to be my day off) and I’ve been sitting on a bunch of Game Stop credit for a while so I decided to pick the game up kind of on a whim because of how good the game looked.

I finished the game in two days and there was a solid 20 hours of gameplay there.

Yeah, the thing sucked me in, grabbed me by the throat, and refused to let go. Now to be fair, I’m a huge fan of a good detective story, and the noir trappings are gravy. I loved Heavy Rain and the story it told as well as the way the story continued to play out even when you kind of messed up an action sequence or whatever. LA Noire felt very similar, which some light GTA trappings on top and it blew me away.

First, the writing and the story in the game are top notch. The performances in the game are equally amazing. I say performances and not voice acting because that’s exactly what they are. The crazy facial animation tech that Team Bondi has been developing for the last seven years payed off big time. The way characters emote is absolutely unbelievable and pushes past (for the most part) the uncanny valley completely into entirely believable characters. It is bar none and it makes for storytelling of a kind that I haven’t seen ever pulled off in a game before.

And the gameplay, while kind of video gamey (in a very adventure game way) also works really well. In the beginning you’re definitely just wandering around waiting for your controller to vibrate and tell you there’s something there for you to look at, but about halfway through the Traffic desk (there are four desks, Traffic, Homicide, Vice, and Arson, in the game; and a beat cop bit in the beginning that serves as a tutorial) I was actually scanning the environment looking for stuff that I actually thought would matter. It really does make you feel like a detective.

Also, the atmosphere in the game is bar none. They’ve talked about the huge amount of time they devoted to getting the look and feel of the city to be as authentic as possible and it pays off here in spades. The city is absolutely breathtaking. More and more, Rockstar seems to be moving away from open worlds for the sake of having a big map to screw around in and more as a storytelling device itself. All of the little details, from newspaper headlines to the random stuff on the radio and people muttering as they pass you on the street sells the entire setting and saves the game from too much expository dialogue. It doesn’t have to set up the world of the game much because it set’s itself up, which is the best way to handle open world gaming, I think.

This game is fantastic. If you’re a fan of a good story in a video game, or even just a good detective story, LA Noire is worth every one of your dollars. I couldn’t recommend it more.

-WC

Anyway, we’ve taken to recording a podcast, after a bunch of time spent talking about recording a podcast. As servers cost money, I think I’ll mostly just be posting the things on the YouTube as videos without any actual video, for now anyway.

I’ll be setting up the requisite blog to go along with the podcast some time later this week and both me and the other two regulars on the podcast will post there occasionally.

I think tomorrow we’re going to be recording the first official episode of From the Fortress of Solidude tomorrow after we go to the midnight showing of Fast Five.

See you then.

-WC

They seem to be a bit more produced than they were on their last album, but definitely not as much as the first one. I find the people that call this album evidence that the band has sold out to be rather amusing, as Augustana’s first album, All the Stars and Boulevards felt way more produced and “pop”-ish than this thing is. There’s a bit less of a focus on piano lines here, in that there are hardly any at all, but the guitar driven sound isn’t a bad thing, and it helps maintain the sound they’ve had in the past. I always felt like they were two twangs and a pickup truck away from a country band, and this puts a little more emphasis on that sound, but I still enjoy it. The more jam band sound of the last album is more or less gone here for more structure in each of the songs. The lead vocals also feel a bit more polished than they have in the past.

All in all, it’s another Augustana album, so if you’ve liked the stuff that they’ve done in the past, you’ll probably like this, as such I’d recommend it.

-WC

Sure, on paper, but lets look at the phone bit for a second. The thing is running a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a newer version of the CPU the HTC Incredible runs, a phone that reached it’s end of life earlier this week (or late last week, I can’t remember off of the top of my head). The Incredible 2 is supposed to be coming out with a dual core Snapdragon that is supposed to be clocked at 1 or 1.2 GHz. So yeah, way faster. And if rumor holds, it’ll be coming out around the same time the Play does, maybe a month or two later. Combine that with the various different Tegra 2 “superphones” that are also supposed to be dropping, or have already dropped, in the next couple of months, the thing is incredibly underpowered and already halfway on its way to being obsolete, and the thing isn’t even out yet.

And then there are the games they are talking about, namely PS Suite. All I have read about PS Suite is that they are planning on selling old PS1 games on the service (which is also supposed to be coming to the NGP, the new PSP proper). Yeah, home console games that are all over ten years old. At least. First of all, I don’t want console games on my handheld. I’ve got a PS3 and a great big TV at home. When I’m not there and I have time to kill, I want something that I can play for 15 minutes and then put away, which old PS1 games aren’t.

The only way this thing is compelling is if they build in support for PS Minis for the thing. As a PlayStation Plus member, I get a whole bunch of the things for free every couple of weeks, and some of them are actually pretty fun and perfect for what I’m looking for in a portable game. Currently, I don’t have anything to play them on besides my TV as I don’t own a PSP and I don’t have any plans to purchase one. So, the Play would be perfect for that.

While the phone is a bit underpowered, phones with a similar CPU (the HTC Thunderbolt comes to mind) are still coming out, so the phone wouldn’t be immediately obsolete, but it’s far from future proof, and they need to talk about the games that they are going to put on the thing. All in all, while I want to love the Play, I seriously doubt I’ll be picking one up when I decide to cash in my upgrade in the next couple of months.

WC