gregbrown

Kingsman: The Secret Service was so bad that I'm even grumpy at Film Crit Hulk for his big post praising the film. Just finished it and the only two things I liked were the production design and . Vaughn still directs every action sequence like the speed-ramping warehouse fight in Kick-Ass and so much of the film's content comes off as a mix of trite commentary and gross stuff. It's a mess that consistently squanders its opportunities, uggggh.

Hah, I live in Lawrence now (and grew up in KC) so that book sounds like a trip. Thanks for the recommendation! Relatedly, a former prof of my wife's (John Kessel) was in town this summer for the annual sci-fi writing contest and from the stories he told, getting published in that field sounds so depressing if you're not a young upstart or writing in an established trope. He's the guy who wrote that great essay kneecapping the morality of Ender's Game a while back. Book-wise, I managed to get myself in the middle of reading three huge books, which is going about as well as you'd imagine. The only one I'm making any progress on lately is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is way more epic than even its title promises. It's over 200 pages before Rhodes even gets to scientists realizing that Uranium was being split! It's definitely one of the great non-fiction books of the last century, though, deserving all the accolades it boasts of on the cover—Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc.

I only made it halfway through before I got distracted by another book, but it really is a pretty enrapturing book once you get into it. I need to read some of Markson's other stuff, since it's supposed to be just as batty. As others have said, A Canticle for Leibowitz is excellent and doubles as one of the few sci-fi books to tackle religion in a fascinating manner. Another older, striking sci-fi work is Inverted World by Christopher Priest (who later wrote The Prestige and other critically-acclaimed novels). A more recent one I dug is Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, comprised of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. The first alone is a pretty quick and gripping read, and the others are great as well but shift tonally as they expand the picture of what's happening.

Elizabeth Bruenig has the best defense of teaching Shakespeare I've seen. Though as the others have noted, most of it comes down to good English teachers showing the context. It's why I really am skeptical of assigning classics on summer reading lists, especially for younger grades.

No console versions. :[

Almost done with MY BRILLIANT FRIEND and I can confirm that Ferrante is super-rad. I have no idea how she plotted these books out but the feeling is of an accumulated history of the community, lending every action weight as a reaction to the years prior. Plus some brutal introspection and an outstanding portrait of female friendship. Like Sarah said, she's one of those authors who makes you less a fan than a convert.

We'll always have Commando.

Really enjoyed the starship stuff in his first Star Trek film because he did such a great job of emphasizing scale and using the iconic shapes to do some really cool staging, especially when he willfully violated that space has an "up" direction. (The gorgeous backgrounds also helped.) The second film was a big step back, but largely because there weren't as interesting opportunities as in the first. Part of my frustration with the shot in the trailer is that it's throwing all that out in pursuit of a trademark style. Granted, it may be for a valid in-story reason (like the person flying the Millennium Falcon has no idea what they're doing), but the great thing of the original Star Wars films were how readable the compositions were. So many of these new shots are busy in the same way as the prequels were busy: throwing in background objects, or having them interact in complicated ways that would have been difficult to do with models (wacky camera moves, water spray). Ambient traffic on Coruscant was the worst offender, distracting audiences during already bone-dry dialogue scenes. Anyways, the best thing I can say about the new trailer is it REALLY made me want to go back and watch The Empire Strikes Back.

Caught SNOWPIERCER, and didn't like it at all. Way too cornball for me, which made everything fall flat (except for Swinton's performance and the school car sequence, which both embraced it).

So the best thing to happen recently is GG thinking that Gawker Media is paying off either weird twitter or false-flag GG posters. They are 100% convinced and it is awesome. The evidence: https://twitter.com/Kingofpol/status/529546003436015617 https://twitter.com/Kingofpol/status/529842131989704704 GG pointed this out as fake, but wait... Let's pursue this Chud_fucker connection... My god, it's all real. Gawker is manipulating weird twitter and GG at the same time!!!

Since you like science and military-historical stuff, I'd highly recommend COMMAND AND CONTROL by Eric Schlosser and THE DEAD HAND by David E. Hoffman. Both have really great "plots" and are more addictive than most non-fiction while still being factually rigorous. COMMAND AND CONTROL covers the history of nuclear weapon accidents, and the efforts to ensure there's never an accidental or unauthorized detonation. Outstanding and scary. THE DEAD HAND overlaps slightly, covering the de-escalation of the arms race towards the end of the Cold War, and efforts to neutralize weapons of mass destruction as the Soviet Union disintegrated. COMMAND touches on the subject briefly in the last 100 pages, but there isn't a ton of overlap between the two books.

Kaufman himself touted Synecdoche as his first horror film.

I think responsive games that reward your play style (like Deus Ex, or even The Walking Dead) are more important than any "branching" or "replayable" characteristics. Whether I'll replay a game or not has less to do with unique content and more to do with the richness of the experience, and the varied personal reactions to the game. Despite the temptation to focus on games' interactivity, I'm not sure why we'd use a different criterion than we would for movies we'd rewatch, or books we'd reread.

I don't mind genre fiction as long as it's aware of what it's doing, and I feel the same way about literary fiction too. But I still end up avoiding fantasy/sci-fi because so many use tropes just because they're obligatory or familiar, rather than dealing with their implications. It's not so much that I find them BAD, but instead that I find them BORING. Literary fiction has that problem too to an extent, but at least there I'm more familiar with the different schools of thought and am able to avoid the stuff I find gross. Also, a lot of the more sophisticated genre stuff gets sucked into literary fiction, for some reason. For example, Murakami is pretty fantastical in some books, but he's considered to be firmly in the literary fiction camp.

There's plenty of evidence that: A ) Levine was a Really Bad Boss, and allowed or even enabled(!) a toxic culture to take over Irrational Games, and B )The game was delayed (by that very same culture) to the point that it was impossible to recoup the money, making it impossible to justify keeping the studio open. Both those points strongly weigh in favor of the theory bandied about—and certainly give plenty of reason to doubt the sold line that Ken Levine was the one thing holding the studio together.

Ideas by Peter Watson is probably the closest you'll find (along with its 20h century follow-up The Modern Mind). It's not purely focused on technology, but more an intellectual history of all innovations. Fascinating, for sure.

Valve is another studio that seems less-than-healthy these days. The Steam & F2P bundles of money has led to (and in some sense, disguised) a total lack of creative vision. At this point, they should be considered less as a game studio, and more as a tech company like Google or Facebook—with expected behavior set accordingly.

My guess is that Bioshock Infinite's tortured, lengthy development—which from all indications, was Ken Levine's responsibility—led to the game being a financial loss, and Irrational was liquidated as a result. Ken Levine's new smaller team is most likely a big golden parachute to keep him in 2K, and that's the favorable theory! (Levine willfully firing dozens to pursue his creative dreams is the unfavorable one.)

I scanned that story from my omnibus. It is indeed anti-immigrant and racist as shit. https://www.dropbox.com/s/cxs7wr7rbocxjoj/TheStreet.pdf

The Act of Killing is available on US Netflix Instant now and hooooooly shit it is the craziest movie I have ever seen. It starts out interesting and just gets weirder and more affecting as it goes on. Amazing documentary, maybe my favorite that I've ever seen. If it doesn't win the Oscar this year I will riot. The premise is Joshua Oppenheimer, the director, goes to Indonesia and talks to two of the organizers of the mid-60s genocide against "Communists." He asks them to help make a film re-enacting their killings, and the movie just gets crazier from there. Best if you go in not knowing more than that.

As far as collaborative editing like in The Witness, the closest widely-available thing I can think of is Clara.io, a free (for now) web-based 3D modeler, texturer, etc like Blender/Maya/etc. Unity needs to buy/partner with them. For example, real-time collaboration: Rage dev tools also had multi-user editing, a necessity for their crazy universally-unique megatexture folly.

Oh man, I totally forgot about Building Stories. Really something special. (Jimmy Corrigan would work too as something more conventional.)

Alan Moore's From Hell is a good complete graphic novel.

I feel like I've gushed waaaay too much about my real favorite—My Struggle: Book One by Knausgaard—so I don't want to be annoying. My other favorite books recently, Warlock and Building Stories, were both finished in the last week of 2012. :[ So I'll recommend one of the most surprising books I read this year: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. It's a story that carefully, perfectly captures the alienation one can feel in a small town, where everyone knows you and you're locked into your identity. I know it's a common trope, but I changed up who I was considerably while I was at college for a while, simply because I had the ability to start anew—and then again after I dropped out as I slotted into various new social situations. The thing is, though, that the story gets very... different... after the first half, in ways I don't want to begin to spoil. Suffice to say, it turned into an astonishing read that I wouldn't have expected from the first half, yet was handled so well by Jane Smiley that it she sold the emotional arcs throughout. If you'd told me ahead of time, I'd have said it sounded like two books pasted together—but she pulls it off tremendously well. Again, this is a book you want to go into knowing as LITTLE as possible for the maximally-enjoyable experience. If you don't know anything more than what I've said so far, you're in for a real treat—a book so good, I'm kinda surprised I hadn't heard of it before my wife's recommendation.

I'm with you on being annoyed by the plot showing up towards the end of the book. To me, the book's best when it just dwells on the lives and personalities of Emmit House residents and Academy students—the middle 300 pages or so. DFW clearly loved Pynchon, but I think he's best when he shies away from that mode. The Entertainment may be an initial hook for readers, but it eventually drags down the novel. (The middle 300 pages seem ripe for television adaptation, though Orange is the New Black is probably the closest we'll get and that's fine by me.)