Public Enemies Review

To continue my plug at the summer movie hit parade, Jamie and I spent our Fifth Anniversary partaking of a fine meal from a new restaurant in Owensboro (excellent) and checking out Public Enemies.  Again, I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but keep in mind that the film is based upon an historical account of the same name by Bryan Burrough. I now intend on reading the book.  Plenty of people know John Dillinger’s story as bank-robber extraordinaire cum Depression-era Robin Hood (kinda sorta).  He was the classic criminal with principles.

Very early in the film, Dillinger (Johnny Depp delivering yet again) tells a bank patron that “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours.”  Of course, the smart person would ask, “What’s the difference?”  But Dillinger came by his folk-hero status at a time when many Americans looked at banks as enemies to the people.  While the common man struggled to survive (quite literally in many cases), bankers in their tailored suits became symbols of the growing economic divide.  Many people in the midwest saw Dillinger as a kind of equilizer.  And the film definitely plays with this angle of Dillinger’s cultural status.  Depp has even referred to it in more than one interview — I’m sure playing up the theme within the context of the current economic decline. 

 

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review (Minor Spoiler)

UPDATE: Here is a link to a Yahoo! article in which Bay tries to justify that Mudflap and Skids are “posers” who have adopted a racial identity not their own because the robots learn their human language skills through the Web (a fact dropped into the first film).  He’s arguing, in a sense, that he’s really taking potshots at people like Kevin Federline.  I could buy this if there were even a whiff of it in the movie.  But there isn’t.  They’re racial caricatures, no matter what Bay’s intentions may have initially been.

Reading the reviews of Revenge of the Fallen, I was perfectly prepared to hate this movie, in spite of my expectations.  What were those expectations?  Simple:

First, make me nostalgic for beloved toys from my childhood.  Optimus Prime and Bumblebee were significant heroes for my 10 year old self.  And Soundwave was my favorite Decepticon as a kid; his appearance in the movie (altered as it is) along with Ravage helped etch a pretty huge smile on my face.

Second, if you’re not going to make me think, distract me in a fun way for a couple of hours.  I don’t expect every summer popcorn flick to be the next The Dark Knight.  That film established a brand new standard in the ADD-riddled summer blitz.  It was brilliant on so many levels, and transcended every convention of its genre to be not just a good summer film, or a good superhero film, but to be a good film — no limiting adjectives needed.  But, I don’t ask that of all summer movies.  I loved the first Transformers, in spite of its many flaws.  The plot was paper thin and the characters weren’t much more than targets that cracked a joke every few minutes.  Nothing radical about that.  But, I smiled — a lot — and chills creeped across my spine when I first heard Peter Cullen’s voice intone, “I am Optimus Prime…”

 

More Signs of Sony Trouble

Sony has been getting a press beating in the last couple of weeks. After getting hammered over the PSP Go!’s pricepoint, and offering no hint of a price drop for either the PSP or PS3, Activision’s CEO, Robert Kotick fires another shot over Sony’s bow:

‘I’m getting concerned about Sony; the PlayStation 3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don’t make it easy for me to support the platform. It’s expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation.’

I have a hard time thinking Activision would really pull their support of Sony’s hardware. But just the threat by someone like Activision’s CEO is enough to carry some weight here.

 

Pearl Jam on Conan (06/01/09)

Because, damnit, it’s frikkin’ awesome!

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

 

Weird Convergence

Below is a cropped screengrab off of MSNBC’s front page as of 11:49am CT.  Under the “Tech and Science” section they covered this stuff:

It’s a bit fuzzy, but you get the gist:  the Iranian elections and how the Web is influencing them, several links to information/reviews on the new Ghostbusters videogame, and some video of “gay penguins” adopting a chick.

As Iran sits on the verge of total social upheaval, Twitter has become one frontline in public information warfare.  Iranians are tweeting from the street disseminating all kinds of information before it ever hits the mainstream news, Andrew Sullivan keeps filling my TweetDeck with a new update about ever minute and a half (literally six since I’ve started typing this), and Twitter users from around the world are trying to manipulate Twitter’s features to subvert Iranian censorship in regards to the #iranianelections, as it has come to be called in Twitter-space.  Sullivan’s blog is providing a significant amount of coverage, most notably some catalogued tweets from Iranians in the middle of the mayhem.

The subject is massive on Twitter — you can even trace people’s political philosophies as they meta-tweet the ways others are using Twitter on the subject.  The blogosphere is, as always, running all the information it can find and asking questions.  Yet, checking the front pages of the three major network news organizations (FOX, CNN, and MSNBC) the story doesn’t have as much traction.  The Iran story is placed alongside other stories, and sometimes in ways that rehtorically link it to odd filler (like the MSNBC example above).  It’s not that I will suddenly start thinking that gay penguins are fomenting a coup in Iran (although, that would be one hell of a story).  But the rhetorical implications of visual strategies that set the Iran-story alongside a review of Ghostbusters undercuts the story’s validity.  And, it’s one reason people on the web are turning away from mainstream sources for information.  Why do I care what Anderson Cooper or Bill O’Reilly say when I can see Iranians and their experiences via more immediate social networking means?

To be honest, and account for my own personal failure, I wasn’t paying much attention to Iran’s upheaval until I started looking at the Twitter streams on it last night.  Then, it became riveting.  I wasn’t listening to Rachel Maddow and some American “expert” pontificate on the implications.  I could learn through a more immediate experience in from which people were participating in the event, albeit from a distance.

It’s easy to dismiss Twitter’s place within the phenomena, and I hold some level of cynicism about it.  But, one thing that Americans should never forget is the importance of information and how it is used rhetorically.  Without their keen awareness of this, revolutionaries in America would never have mustered support either domestic or foreign for a war by farmers against the mightiest military force on earth.  But, a sharp sense by people like Thomas Paine (Common Sense) of using rhetoric and public spaces to address the issue allowed it to grow.

I, in my cubicle at a small community college in America, have no idea the real nature of Iranians demonstrating in the streets and dodging bullets.  But, I can at least sympathize and help that information spread in the name of free speech and personal rights.

Though most use Twitter for mundane updates designed to pander to an audience (I’m looking at you UKCoachCalipari! — and myself), this is what something like Twitter and the blogosphere are capable of.  And frankly, in this day and age, they are far better equipped to deal with the issue than most mainstream news outlets. These resources can quickly mobilize a community-born/driven response to major social phenomena.  The community rallies around an idea and focuses other community-members’ attention, disseminating information at lightning speeds.  The rhetoric remains intact because the space itself is a simple one to use, unlike the visually complex pages at places like CNN, FOX, and MSNBC.  Social networking and Web 2.0 spaces don’t feel the constraints of needing to cover everything at once.

Of course, Dr. Liza Potts has been telling me this for six months, now.  But it’s riveting to actually witness it in action.

 

More on Project Natal

Man, if Microsoft really has Project Natal working well, and can have it on the shelf by Spring, I might have to break down and get a 360.  But apparently, Jimmy Fallon is “special” and he gets to play with one now…

(Follow link to video.  Sorry, couldn’t Hulu’s html code to embed.)

 

Do you suffer from “simulation fever”?

I have been slowly and purposefully plodding my way through Unit Operations: an Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost.  It was published in 2006, which means I’m a bit behind the times for a scholar.  But, in my defense, Bogost’s other book, Persuasive Games, has received more attention.

Unit Operations melds together a wide ranging set of technical concepts in mathematics and industrial design (the origins of the term “unit operation”) with a number of cultural/interpretive theories in the humanities.  His idea is to posit a way in which videogames can be approached critically without overtly privileging one form scholarly discourse over another (a debatable project on a number of levels).