Isabel and I just finished watching the first season of Sherlock, the BBC modernization of, obviously, Sherlock Holmes. This isn't so much of an accomplishment for us since the first season consists of all of three episodes. Anyway, we love this show. The murder mysteries allude to the original stories without playing them out exactly. If you know the original texts, you can anticipate moves in the plot, but the resolutions are never the same. Really, though, you watch the show for the character dynamics between Watson and Holmes. Like most good drama, the show centers itself on conflict of character which produces a sense of theme and story, rather than on over-the-top narrative. The murders or potential murders become secondary to the character interactions -- and the third episode even seems to be aware that there is something unsettling about forgetting that this is a murder mystery that we are watching. Highly recommended. The only thing that might put some A&D readers off are repeated gay jokes -- but these are almost necessary in today's climate. Watson and Sherlock -- two somewhat eccentric men who have started cohabitating on a virtual whim -- are constantly being mistaken for a romantically-inclined couple, and Watson is constantly working to dispel the conjectures...and always having to add a Seinfeldian qualification that there would be nothing wrong if they were. The pilot even has to throw in a reference to an actual gay couple just so that the audience knows the writers aren't homophobic.
This particular recurring joke reminds me of the initial meeting between the main characters in the original Ben Edlund comic book series, The Tick. I've quoted it before here, I'm sure, but it always makes me chuckle. When the sidekick Arthur invites the Tick to move into his aparment, the Tick asks him if he's "funny."
The awkwardness of close male relationships in the late 20th, early 20th Centuries due to Western societies openness to homosexuality is something that we should be thinking more about.
Really, I think there is far less actual homophobia -- if you define that as fear of homosexuals and their behavior -- than there is fear of being perceived as gay.
Next up...RED.
Isabel and I watched this on Netflix. It's the movie about the retired international secret agents who inadvertantly end up having one last go of it. (It's one of those movies that is based on a comic book that only comic book fans have even heard of.) All of the agents are famous actors -- which means I don't think we ever see the entire team assembled on screen at one time. The premise was okay -- Bruce Willis plays a lonely retired agent who has been flirting with a pension services girl over the phone, until assassins try to eliminate him and he has to rescue the girl before the assassins can get to her as a means of getting to him. (I'm not quite sure how that works, but I guess it's a generic convention.) The movie suffered from three main problems. The first was a very fast, clipped, and not entirely logical plot. I know I just said good drama is based on character interaction, not plot, but plot's one of those things that works best when you don't have to think to hard about it. This movie anticipated that the actors interacting and playing off of each other would carry the day, and this led, perhaps, to an overall weakness in narrative and dialogue. Second, and related, the movie never quite figured out whether it was set in a cartoon world or a mimetic world. Most of the cinematography was generally bland and uninteresting -- like just about any standard action flick. Occasionally, however, a sequence would crop up in which characters would do highly implausible things -- like shoot RPGs down with bullets. These sequences had all of the plausibility of a Road Runner cartoon, and seemed rather jarring. Scott Pilgrim got away with these kinds of moments because Edgar Wright is a brilliant director, so even his utterly mundane moments are filmed with just quirky enough direction that they leave us ready to experience the implausible at any moment...but yet don't feel as though they let us down if nothing more exciting than buttering toast happens. Modern directors should all be studying him. Kid knows what he's doin'. The biggest problem, however, requires a spoiler. So...[Spoiler]. The big reveal in the movie is that the secret agents have all been marked for death by a balding weapons manufacturer who has been manipulating the Vice-President of the United States. Yawn. The weapons dealer (Richard Dreyfuss) has been forcing the Vice-President to send out government assassins to take out retired agents in order to cover up some war crimes in Guatemala.
Now, I'm perfectly willing to admit that there are corporations exerting undue influence on American government. I'm also perfectly willing to admit that we occasionally do bad things in wartime.
But during wartime and in the midst of all of the anti-Bush, anti-Cheney media that was produced in the last ten years, was this really the reveal that we needed or wanted to see?
Granted, the movie never directly ties it's characters to Republicans or Cheney, as such. But still. The second the movie started insinuating that the Vice President had been orchestrating hits against our own people to cover up war crimes, Isabel and I let out a simultaneous groan. From that moment on, we were just waiting for the movie to be over.
In other pop culture news...
I think Isabel might be addicted to these new Lego blindpacked mini-figs. I think blindpacking toys is horribly un-American. I like to see what I'm going to buy before I buy it...especially at three bucks a pop. Fortunately, we keep finding sales and coupons, which are American, so we keep wasting out money on them. We jumped in during the second series and managed to snag ourselves two Lego Spartan warriors and a Pharoah. This whet Isabel's appetite. Although we never acquired the Samurai from the third series, Isabel was quite tickled with her Lego Mummy, native American chieftain, and elven archer. Now they are up to the fourth series and Isabel is desperate to snag the Lego geisha and Viking. She's already bought seven packs -- and managed to get seven different lego people without finding the ones she wanted. She was particularly disappointed by Lego soccer man and Lego figure skater. She's moderately satisfied with Lego skater-hipster, but only because we decided we could use his head as a little lego version of me. I am neither a skater nor a hipster, but I do wear glasses.
Gaming...
Isabel and I just started playing Portal 2 together. I think this is the first time we've ever played an online multiplayer game with each other. I convinced Isabel that it was worth the extra $30 to buy a copy for her so that I wouldn't be forced to spend my summer night's with random strangers. Valve recently announced that Portal 2 has taught them to no longer make exclusively single player games. I think this is a mistake. For lonely men like me, the idea of finding one other person to consistently play co-op caused me tremendous anxiety. Granted, this worked in convincing me to buy Isabel a second copy...but my original plan was to hold off on buying the game at all precisely because I didn't know with whom I would play. I only ended up with the game because Isabel gave me a copy in lieu of mass quantities of calories at Easter.
Mass multiplayer games like Warcraft or Team Fortress 2 work because there is a wider social net that the games cast. You can wander into a game with lots of people and no one will care that much (unless you cheat, annoy, or are really, really bad). Small co-op games, though, require too much of the players to comfortably play with other people. It's an awkward experience, especially in a puzzle game -- and especially if you are playing with someone who has already figured out the puzzle. But I'm not the guy running the game company, so what do I know.
Portal 2, by the way, is a great game, and I recommend it if you can find it at the $30 price point. You will beat it pretty quick, but it has a pretty compelling story, and it makes you feel smart if you can clear the game without a hint guide. Actually, it has one of the smartest scripts you will find in gaming. The writers definitely understood passive-aggressive relationships...and psychopathic computers.
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