I have a very weird, probably unique, pet peeve. I have never heard anyone else express this pet peeve, and I’m not even sure I can explain it as well as I’d like. I guess you could call my pet peeve the violation of proper drive thru menu protocol.

It’s not a catchy pet peeve (I’m not even sure if protocol is the correct word (etiquette could work as well)), but it annoys me to no end. On days when I don’t feel like cooking, or going to the grocery store to get something to cook, or taking something out of my freezer to cook, I will sometimes stop off for some fast food. Since I loathe the presence of strangers near my personal space, I always use the drive thru. I’m sure you are a familiar with the common drive thru. There is a menu near the ordering intercom, so patrons can look at the menu when they order. And at many of the fast food restaurants in my neck of the barren desert, there is also a menu one or two car length prior to the ordering menu, so cars waiting in line can prepare their order. My pet peeve is when there is no one in line and a car will pull up and stop at the first menu, rather than pulling forward to the ordering menu, like any sensible and responsible citizen would.

Why do people think it is necessary to stop at a menu when they have unimpeded access to a menu that they will have to stop at eventually anyway? And why do people even need to stop and look at a fast food menu? It’s fast food. You get a burger and fries or maybe chicken nuggets and fries. It’s not like the Burger King has a soup of the day.

Now some of you might be saying, “But Shawn, you are clearly understating the diversity of the modern American fast food menu! What if someone wants to choose from a selection of salads or wraps?” A valid point, but anyone who goes to a fast food restaurant for “healthful” selections clearly doesn’t understand how life is supposed to work.

Fast food is not good for you. It never has been and it never will be. Fast food is for when you’re feeling gluttonous or lazy and you just have to get your hands on an overpriced, overcooked patty of preservatives and hormone-infused beef shavings. If you want a salad, go to the grocery store. (The sell salads in bags. Buy a bag, open it, and eat salad.) If you want a wrap, go to Subway. In homogenized suburbia, if there is a fast food restaurant, there will probably be a Subway.

So if you are planning on making a trip to the local fast food eatery, maybe to pick up a 50-pack of McNuggets or the mythical Mc10:35, please, please have the decency to use the proper menu. Unnecessarily waiting at the non-ordering menu is not only a waste of your time, it is disrespectful to the employees and other customers or you local fast food eatery.

The Dumbest Generation cares little for history books, civic principles, foreign affairs, comparative religions, and serious media and art, and it knows less. Careening through their formative years, they don’t catch the knowledge bug, and tradition might as well be a foreign word.

This is a harsh and oversimplified critique of a generation, but I think it explains the Twilight obsession. These kids today know nothing of Stoker’s Dracula, Murnau’s Nosferatu, or Whedon’s Buffyverse. Perhaps that is why they don’t care how the Twilight saga robs and corrupts over a century of great art. And they seem to miss the fact completely that the character of Bella is completely dependent on men for happiness. She doesn’t exist except as the object of desire of random scumbag guys. (I mean, what kind of jerk is teaching a girl he likes to ride a motorcycle and doesn’t have her wear a helmet or at least ride alongside her?) Bella is one of the worst role models for young women that could possibly exist. Maybe if they made her a syphilitic prostitute running a Ponzi scheme it would be worse, but if Bella were a syphilitic prostitute running a Ponzi scheme, New Moon might have been an interesting movie.

As it stands, New Moon is an abomination. It is a 130-minute affirmation of the antiquated notion of a woman existing in entirely in relation to, and under the protection of, a man. Misogyny aside, New Moon is also a continuation of the Twilight’s saga watering down of plots and characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The basic premise of the saga — the new girl at school, who meets a sexy brooding vampire and is challenged by the difficulties of the human-vampire relationship — is straight out of Buffy. But it lacks the tragedy of the Buffy-Angel relationship, as Bella is not a Slayer, so she does not exist for the sole purpose of killing vampires. Bella is just a sad little girl with no self-confidence and no self-respect. Whereas Buffy is the strongest girl on the planet, Bella is one of the weakest. She has no redeeming qualities, nothing to admire, nothing to respect, making her an awful protagonist in an equally awful movie.

In addition to robbing and diluting one of the main plot points of Buffy, New Moon also borrows other aspects of the series: haunting dreams (Buffy dreams about being attacked by the Master), packs of kids who behave like animals (Oz as a werewolf, the kids from The Pack episode), and the crazy evil vampire chick who has a history with the sexy brooding vampire (Drusilla). There isn’t an original plot line in the entire movie.

To make matters worse, the actors of New Moon have no talent. Buffy wasn’t exactly a course in Shakespearean acting, but holy crap the New Moon actors are dreadful. I don’t know if the chick who plays Bella has a breathing disorder, but her acting style features a wide variety of unnatural pauses. The guy who played Edward, while admittedly a dashing young man, also has an incredibly blocky face. If someone tried to make an 8-bit video game version of a sexy vampire, the character sprites would look exactly like the dude who plays Edward. When the shirtless werewolf dude is the best actor in the movie, you know you’ve got a problem. (For Internets fun, Google Taylor Lautner alpaca (dude looks just like an alpaca))

In short, New Moon is a downright despicable movie. The “happy ending” is that Bella gets to become a vampire. Hooray! Selling your soul and your humanity to get closer to a sexy guy! What a great message for the young people. To think that there is a generation of girls who look up to this tripe–who see it as romantic, rather than a paean to dysfunctional and abusive relationships–makes me weep for humanity.

One of the major selling points of a game like Red Dead Redemption is the open-ended, or sandbox, nature of the game. Yes, there’s a story-based main quest line, but there are also a variety of side quests that a player can explore and discover on his own. But really, as my faux Nosalidas Complete incident shows, a game like Red Dead Redemption is just as linear and programmer-dictated as any other. My open-ended exploring caused me to complete a mission before I was supposed to, so I had to do it again, all so the throwaway bit of dialogue mentioning problem in Nosalidas would make sense. Rather than calling Red Dead Redemption a sandbox game, I propose it and other games of its ilk be called quagmire games.

A sandbox game suggests a child-like joy in creative play. That is not what games like Red Dead Redemption are. A quagmire game suggests a nebulous and misguided time-suck, where the objectives are never what they seem to be. After all, what is the point of playing Red Dead Redemption? Is it to complete the main story quest? Of course not. The point of such games is not the stupid main quest, but the side quests and exploration. But what are the side quests? Delivery packages, picking flowers, hunting skunks, and a variety of other simplistically repetitive tasks. Such activities don’t deserved to be compared to the creative freedom of a sandbox. Such activities are closer to a maze for lab rats than a sandbox. Pick flowers, get a pellet. Shoot skunks, get a pellet. And so on.

Video games used to about challenges. Metal Gear was hard. Bubble Bubble was hard. Battletoads was, well don’t even get me started on Battletoads. The games were linear, all about getting from point A to point B, but there was a challenge in doing that. Now games are quagmires, not about getting from point A to point B, but pressing A when the little pop-up on the screen tells you to or pressing B when the little pop-up on the screen tells you to. Naturally, this isn’t true about all games. When I blew up Megaton in Fallout 3, it stayed blowed up. A game like Civilization is about far more than following on-screen tutorials. But too many of the super popular games, the games that dictate what the sequel and derivative obsessed game studios will continue to make, reward repetitive behaviour, rather than creativity or imagination. Even if I liked the Call of Duty games, I couldn’t play them, because I don’t have the time to memorize levels and do all the other rat-running-a-maze tasks that online play rewards. Video games have become anti-intellectual time wasters, the very distractions video game opponents used to claim they were. Games are mislabeled as open-ended, or free-roaming, or sandbox, when really you’re just doing the same three tasks over and over and over again. When it comes to games like Red Dead Redemption, the game is a lie.

There has been a lot of criticism of Stieg Larsson as a writer—he never uses contractions, every seven words there’s a reference to coffee or sex, and in The Girl Who Stirred the Hornet’s Nest, every female character seems to be wearing the same blandly described red jacket. Despite his limitations as a wordsmith, Larsson’s narration is what makes his novels more than run-of-the-mill airport crime fiction. His Dickensian political and social digressions and use of multiple points of view make the novels great. Without the narration—particularly without the ability to regularly go inside the minds of multiple characters, Alfredson’s film lacks the additional dimension of greatness that the novels have.

Because the film rarely enters the minds of the characters (there are a couple of Lisbeth flashbacks), many of the characters don’t have the same depth in the film as they do in the novel. We never really get a chance to see the struggle between logic and passion that rages inside Lisbeth.  She hardly says anything, which often makes her appear dim-witted, rather than the taciturn genius that she is in the novel. Niedermann, the deranged giant who feels no pain, is just a robotic thug in the film; his visions and paranoid thoughts are completely eliminated. Also eliminated is the role of the police as narrators. The story in the film is told entirely through the point of view of Blomkvist and Salander, which makes sense, although it will be interesting to see if Alfredson continues this approach in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, where the police play a much larger role in telling the story.

Even though Alfredson fails to capture the entirety of the novel, he has still made an enjoyable film. Michael Nyqvist is perfect as Blomkvist, alternating between smarmy, righteous, and protective. All the other characters are faithfully portrayed. I particularly enjoyed the actor who played Holger Palmgren’s performance, and the filmmakers did a wonderful job with the makeup to depict Zala’s burn wounds. Like the novel, the film gets a little ridiculous and unbelievable at the end, although Alfredson did a fine job adapting Larsson disappointing cop-out of an ending.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, while not as good as Alfredson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which did a great job adapting a much less cinematically-inclined novel), is still worth a watch. The pace of the film makes it feel much shorter than two hours, much like the pace of the novels make them seem much shorter than 500 pages. Also, there’s not nearly as much butt-rape as in the first film. Whether that’s good or bad is really a matter of personal preference. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give The Girl Who Played With Fire 3 tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein.

I won’t bother going into too much details as to the plot of the film.  All you really need to know is that George Clooney plays a man who, at the start of the film, is happy.  He enjoys his thankless job and his brutal travel schedule.  He is that rare person who is truly content with life.  But being content with life is not good enough for this film.  Oh no, it turns out that George Clooney is actually an empty shell of a man, living a life devoid of meaning.   Why is this so?  Because George Clooney is single.  Because George Clooney doesn’t have a wife, 2.5 children, a house with a white picket fence, or a life that resembles the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.  Sure, he’s happy, but according to writer/director/nepotism beneficiary Jason Reitman, being happy isn’t good enough.  In the world of Up in the Air, true happiness is secondary to social conformity.

Now some of you might be saying, “But Shawn, what’s wrong with having a loving family?”  While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to marry and raise children, the film posits that the family life is the only life worth living.  There’s even a montage of the unemployed telling how their families are the only things that keep them going.  Now I don’t have a wife or family, nor do I ever intend to, and I find it insulting that a filmmaker would imply that those without the skills to keep their jobs are somehow better than me, simply because I don’t have children and they do.  Just because I choose a solitary life, rather than overpopulating the earth with a quiverfull of gangly, ugly, nerd children, does not make me less of a man.  Nor does it mean that my life is empty or devoid of meaning and happiness.

Up in the Air is a direct slap in the face to me and others like me. To imply that happiness comes from family, rather than from doing what you love, is an ignorant, narrow-minded, and archaic way of looking at the world.  It’s 2010, we have only two more years until the Mayans rise from the grave to destroy us all, so why are the makers of Up in the Air, still clinging to Leave it to Beaver-era ideals?

Even with the looking-down-and-smiling charisma of George Clooney, Up in the Air has no appeal for me.  Some might like the idea of a happy man having that happiness snatched away from him because he can’t conform to clichéd notions of personal fulfillment, but I don’t.  On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Up in the Air the dreaded Evil tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein.

Sunnyside

As mentioned earlier, the best parts of Sunnyside are those that focus on Charlie Chaplin.  Although I will admit that the Chaplin plot made me feel pretty ignorant.  I thought I knew a thing or two about silent film short comedies, but it turns out I recognized more of the Mary Pickford references than I did the Chaplin references.  Now I have to go back and watch whatever Chaplin shorts I can find on Netflix to better my understanding of Chaplin’s transition between simple comic shorts and the more profound longer work.  Best I can tell from the novel, Chaplin is frustrated by the emotional response people have to Mary Pickford films and wants them to have the same type of response to the Little Tramp character.  Chaplin struggles to find his happy place (Sunnyside is basically a metaphor for the happy place the main characters are trying to find) which mirrors the struggle one of the other main characters faces on the Western Front of WWI.

The secondary and tertiary plots of Sunnyside take place in World War I.  The better of the two focuses on Lee Duncan, a wannabe actor who gets what he thinks is going to be his big break in the States, only to be framed for a crime and forced to enlist in the service.  As he works as a mechanic in the Air Service, he struggles to deal with the betrayal of his mother (which also mirrors Chaplin’s problems with his mother) and what appears to be the end of his film career.  Eventually the combination of a flamethrower, two puppies (one heroic, one deceitful), and a film of a lame-trick performing great dane, motivate Duncan to follow his dream in Hollywood.

The second plot works well because Duncan’s problems relate to Chaplin’s.  Although one is a struggling actor and the other is arguably the world’s biggest movie star, they both have a love for the cinema and want to devote their lives to it.  The third plot, excepting the final few moments, has little to do with the cinema, which makes it a tad extraneous.  The third plot details the exploits of Hugo Black, a Private assigned to Archangel, Russia.  Unlike, Chaplin or Duncan, Black doesn’t seem to be seeking anything specific.  He wanders from minor adventure to minor adventure, driving trains, dancing with exiled princesses, and shooting people in the head with a crossbow.  Head-shooting crossbow antics notwithstanding, Pvt. Hugo Black lends nothing to the novel.  At the very end of his plot arc, his commanding generals sees a roomful of Russian peasants overcome with emotion while watching a Mary Pickford film, which is a wonderful way to tie the plot back into the main Chaplin plot.

The superflous third nipple of a plot aside, Sunnyside is a wonderful novel.  It captures the obsessive genius of Chaplin and the popularity of the Little Tramp and Mary Pickford, taking the reader back to a time when movie stars were charismatic and awesome, not dumbass frat boys and coked-up skank.  A time when men were men, women were submissive objects of affection, and dogs could throw hand grenades.  A simpler time.  On my scale of one to five tiny Ludivine Sagniers, I give Sunnyside four tiny Ludivine Sagniers.

For example, if I say that I’m reading McSweeney’s 29 (which I just started), you might say, “But Shawn, what is that?” To which I would respond, “It’s a collection of short fiction.” That blurb doesn’t say all that much about the book. It could be a collection of great short fiction (like Babylon Revisited, or it could be a collection of bland, overrated trash, like Winesburg, Ohio. However, if I tell you that I just read The Terror, by Dan Simmons and you respond, “But Shawn, what is that?” I could reply, “It’s a book about the 1840s voyage of two ships to find the Northwest Passage that get stuck in the ice for over a year and are attacked by a giant spectral polar bear that may or may not be controlled by a tongueless Esquimeaux girl.”

And that blurb doesn’t really cover the scope of The Terror. It’s historical fiction, so much of what’s described actual did happen to Sir John Franklin and his ill-fated expedition. I doubt the whole giant spectral polar bear thing is based on fact, but the scurvy, food poisoning, and other maladies the crew faced certainly did happen. The contrast between the real and the supernatural is what helps make The Terror such a great book.

Now, I realize that some of you might be saying, “But Shawn, how can a book about a bunch of cold, malnourished sailors languishing on an ice floe for over a year be exciting? I mean, won’t the giant spectral polar bear just devour them all, since they have no place to run or hide?” That’s a great observation, but fortunately author Dan Simmons anticipated such a response and makes the giant spectral polar bear more of a tormentor. The giant spectral polar bears takes his time hunting and mutilating the ships’ crews. This methodical torture, along with the novel’s narration, helps The Terror stay suspenseful and engaging throughout its 800 pages.

The story of The Terror is told by its crew. Each chapter tells the point of view of a different character. At first, it’s just Sir John Franklin and Captain James Crozier, but soon the narration expands to include other officers and crew members. The point-of-view remains in the 3rd person throughout the entire novel, so this isn’t a Faulknerian exercise in investigating the real truth of a situation. It’s simply Simmons’ way of involving all the major players on the expeditions, from the Captains to the Ice Masters, all the way down to the lowly, mutinous sodomites. Oh yeah, The Terror has sodomy, plus mutilation, decapitation, amputation, astronomical calculation, and even an Edgar Allan Poe inspired celebration. Clearly, The Terror has a little something for everyone.

The one problem with Simmons expanding the scope of the novel to cover a wide range of characters and topic is the issue of resolution. Simmons does a fantastic job of crafting captivating character. With each new chapter, I’d actually be excited when a new character point of view came into the story. Unfortunately, Simmons doesn’t cleanly wrap up all the various narratives that he starts.

Since The Terror is historical fiction, it’s pretty much a given that all the characters will die. But Simmons’ engrossing characterizations made me want to know how the characters die, to know how close they came to getting away or to rescue. With the last few chapters of the novel, however, Simmons chooses to abandon some characters in favour of concentrating on Captain Crozier and Esquimeaux mythology. Spoiler alert: the giant spectral polar bear is a actually some sort of malevolent spirit, out to punish those who do not show proper respect to nature, or some shit like that. It’s disappointing.

I honestly don’t give two shits about what the giant spectral polar bear is or where it came from. In fact, leaving its origins a mystery makes things more interesting. Is it a familiar? A summoned demon? The physical manifestation of fear? The evil in the heart of man? Having all these possibilities makes things more intriguing. I would much rather have found out what happened to all the characters in the novel than having what should have been Shakespearean in magnitude ending turn into a lesson from a 9th grade cultural studies class.

Fortunately, there’s more than enough of The Terror to make up for the unsatisfactory conclusion. If you like Poe, Hobbes (the philosopher, not the tiger), Darwin, botulism, colonialism, and people losing their limbs to both frostbite and giant spectral polar bear bite, then The Terror is the book for you. On my scale of 1 to 5 tiny Ludivine Sagniers, I give The Terror four tiny Ludivine Sagniers.

I found the offerings impressively bad, as though some schlock curator from an Ivy League cinema studies department was called upon to select the dreckiest soft-porn screwball comedies ever made

I’ve never studied film at an Ivy League school, but I did take film classes at a school just up the road from one, and I take offense at the suggestion that soft-porn screwball comedies are somehow an anathema to the cinema.  A world without Jewel Shepard is a world I don’t want to be a part of.  

In fairness, that Slate review came out when the service was brand new.  Title selection and quality has greatly improved since then.  Sure, there’s still loads of stuff like The Double-D Avenger, but there’s also a metric tonne of quality flicks, the type of movies that even the fuddiest of Princeton fuddy-duddies would have no problem adding to his syllabus.

In addition to fourth-rate titty flicks, there’s Eisenstein, Herzog (including Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, which took me forever to find back in the days of VHS), Hitchcock, Kubrick’s finest (Paths of Glory and A Clockwork Orange), and a handful of kickass Westerns.  In 10 minutes of browsing through genres, I found about 37 movies that I would legitimately like to watch now.  And isn’t that what the “Watch Instantly” service is all about?

Earlier today I configured my Xbox, Again? to work as a media center extender capable of watching Netflix streams.  The UI is painfully slow (I don’t know if that’s the fault of the plugin, Vista, or the miserable service I’ve been getting from Cox), but after queueing up some movies online, I can sit down in my faithful recliner, Osama bin Loungin’, kick back, and enjoy quality movies at any time.  More importantly, now I can watch Real Genius at my leisure, without having to dig out the old laserdisc player. That’s worth my Netflix subscription right there.