My New Sarah Palin Video

Allison Does the Duster

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" Movie Review

I still vaguely remember the night in 1993, fiddling around with my mono T.V.'s dog-ear antennas, trying to find something to watch, and happening across this show on Fox. Spooky music, F.B.I. agents, aliens, UFOs, that guy from "Red Shoes Diaries", and this amazing, unknown redheaded actress (even at 13 I had this thing for smart redheads), and I wondered, What is THIS!? This is science fiction T.V. show, on a -- at the time -- minor network, that had nothing to do with Star Trek.

What I had stumbled upon was the very first episode of the very first season of "The X-Files". A show that defined the iconography of my youth and helped in some strange way to set me on a path that would take me to Hollywood at the age of 21. A show that, despite the disaster of its final two seasons, and the wet carp to the cranium that was John Doggett, I harbor a lot of fond memories of.

So going to see the new X-Files movie was not a choice. It was automatic.

SPOILER WARNING! Do Not Read Past if You Don't Want Spoilers!




Which turned out to be an automatically bad decision. There are times when I wait for a movie to come out on DVD and think to myself, Gee, I really should have seen that in the theaters. In the case of "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" if I had waited for the DVD I think I would have held this film in a little higher regard, because ultimately Direct to DVD is sort of where it belongs.

You'd think in the wake of eight years of George Bush and real life conspiracies by our own government (GITMO, torture, the nexus of politics and terrorism, warrant-less wiretaps, fudging intelligence to get the U.S. into foreign wars) there would be fertile ground for a movie based on a show like "The X-Files", which was already centered around an innate distrust of authority, to take root in. Well, yeah it would be, but that is not this movie. Outside of a cheap shot at Same Sex Marriage and an attempt to minimize institutional pedophilia by the Catholic Church there are no politics in "The X-Files" and precious little conspiracy either.

"X-Files: I Want to Believe" in fact is an effort to get back to the "core" (or at least the Core as Chris Carter sees it) of the original show and go back to those simple Monster of the Week episodes that the original T.V. show did so well. In fact, the entire premise of this film seems to be an lift and extension of a Season One episode of "The X-Files" entitled "Beyond the Sea".

Both are essentially the story of hideous criminals, imprisoned by society, only to be cursed with a psychic connection to a a new killer and his victims that gives them visions that no one believes because, afterall, they are reprobate villains to begin with. But where the original Glen Morgan and James Wong T.V. script for "Beyond the Sea" was a tight, arresting forty five minute thriller with a monstrous Brad Douriff (as serial killer Luther Boggs) in the center of a psychic mindfuck, Chris Carter's re-interpretation is a lazy and disjointed two hour snore-fest with a lifeless Billy Connelly drifting towards the bottom like a marshmellow dropped into a not quite set jello salad.

Connelly plays Father Joe, a de-frocked Priest, who, as Scully is quick to remind us, "buggered" thirty seven alter boys, who know lives at some sort of rest home for pedophiles (I'm not kidding) in West Virginia. Of course, a female FBI Agent disappears and Connelly's Father Joe begins having psychic visions of the kidnapped woman. Amanda Peete's Dakota Whitney (yes, apparently in Chris Carter's world the female FBI agents that aren't kidnapped have silly porn star names) and Xzbit are confused, so an approach is made to Dana Scully to bring Fox Mulder out of "retirement" (which means be hold up in a quaint one bedroom house, being Scully's house boy), because, you know ... he's Fox Mulder.

And about five minutes in ... the plot of "X-Files: I Want to Believe" just kind of stops and idles. This is a thriller where nothing much thrilling happens, this is a horror film where nothing much horrifying happens, this is a movie where people just ... Talk a lot and nothing much happens. When you are lucky enough to stumble into a mildly interesting bit of plot progression that progression only serves as an excuse for more talking.

The script for "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is just plain bad, okay? From the structure to the non-existent progression of the story. I could easily imagine Robert McKee showing X-Files: I Want to Believe at one of his screenwriting seminars as a perfect example of how not to write a script. Ever.

At some point Chris Carter seems to realize that Billy Connelly's Father Joe isn't holding our attention, and the return of Mulder and Scully only goes so far, so he then literally grafts the plot of Frankenstein -- yeah, like Frankenstein Frankenstein -- onto the body of a story that has run out of gas by the hour mark. Only that story goes nowhere either and really doesn't end or climax by the Third Act; more like it thrusts a couple times, rolls over, says goodnight, and then turns out the lights without any real sense of conclusion.

I was literally left sitting in the theater saying out loud, That's It?

The problems with "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" extends beyond the constructed on the fly story. The direction is strictly lackluster and would fit more on a T.V. show in the 1990s, then a feature film in 2008. The editing is lax and bloated. And all the supporting characters -- like Amanda Peete and Xzbit's characters -- could've been carved from blocks of wood and had just as much impact on screen as real life actors.

The only redeeming part of "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is the reason most diehard fans are going to see it regardless. Mulder and Scully. For all his inability to write a coherent story or give life to supporting characters, Chris Carter still does know how to write Mulder and Scully. And David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson still know how to play Mulder and Scully.

The sexual tension and one-up-man-ship of their T.V. show relationship is largely gone, replaced by this ease of couple-hood. Mulder and Scully are now like the cool couple upstairs that come over every Friday night to smoke weed and watch Netflix with you and your girlfriend. The chemistry is still there. The characters are still there.

But the story that intelligently uses those characters, that chemistry, and still makes you want to believe is gone. And probably forgotten. "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" sets out to re-capture the series hey-day by trying to emulate great standalone X-Files episodes like "Beyond the Sea", and, instead, only serves as a reminder of the series nadir.

And it is a damn shame too.

Personally I still like think there is still good in "The X-Files" franchise. Much like there was still good in Darth Vader in "Return of the Jedi". But for that good to ever be realized again someone over at 20th Century Fox is going to have to metaphorically pick up Chris Carter and heave him down an open reactor shaft. Or relegate him to Executive Producer status and turn the reigns over to someone a little less in love with the sound of his own ideas.

Why is NeoGAF Running Anti-Obama Smear Ads?

For those that know, they already know what NeoGAF is. For those that never had the privilege NeoGAF is one of the largest Forums for the discussion of video games in the World. As of this entry about 3400 people are online at NeoGAF right now. When I type the term “video game forum” I know I lost about half my audience; I know, I know I can hear you saying, NERD! and screaming, Who Cares?! WHAT ABOUT FISA!? through my monitor.

However, NeoGAF is more than jut a home to the emotionally stunted musings of Thirteen Year Olds with anime avatars discussing the plot intricacies of “Final Fantasy X”. NeoGAF's Video Game Forum is home to more than Thirteen Year Olds and Gamers that act the part. NeoGAF is a professional video game forum patronized by leading members of the video game industry. Game designers, software coders, artists, producers from major game developers like Bungie, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft all either lurk or post on NeoGAF.

So in many ways NeoGAF is the watering hole for the entire Video Game Industry. A watering hole that used to be fairly a-political in the past. And a watering hole that appears now tainted by ugly, racially charged Anti-Obama Smear ads.

I was surfing around GAF (as it is normally referred) today reading through a thirty plus page thread filled with outrage and foam over recent accusations by Silicon Knight's Denis Dyack (the developer of “Too Human”) on 1Up Yours that NeoGAF is poorly moderated and needs reform (if you really want to know this piece of backstory you can listen to the podcast here and read about it here) when I glanced up to see this ad:




(Yeah, I know I had to shrink it to get it to fit Kos' Image Width Requirements. You can view a full sized image here or here if ImageShack craps out..)

A banner ad clearly depicting Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad side by side with caption “Is It OK to Unconditionally Meet with Anti-American Foreign Leaders”.

OK, lets stipulate that, of course, this is a gross distortion of Barack Obama's Foreign Policy, and lets also stipulate that John McCain once again demonstrates while he wants to be the Change We Can Believe In Candidate he is content to run a political campaign from Lee Atwater's playbook. The question I pose today is why are the site owner(s) and Admins of NeoGAF taking John McCain's ad money and willfully running Anti-Obama Smear Ads?

There are only two option here. Either the management of NeoGAF is grossly incompetent and doesn't know whose ads they are running, or have a blatant political point of view that they are content on advocating through advertising. No one seems to know much about who owns and runs NeoGAF, and given a track record that has seemed more or less a-political (unless the choice in question is Microsoft Versus Sony) I'd be more inclined to go with the former rather than the latter.

But exposing simple incompetence isn't enough for me. For a site that counts members from major game developers and console makers to video game journalists and the average gamer NeoGAF needs to be held accountable for playing politics instead playing games. 

I'd encourage NeoGAF members, fellow gamers, and those that work in the video game industry capacity to email NeoGAF's admins, tell them to take down the Anti-Obama smear ads and keep politics and gaming separate.

You Can email NeoGAF at: staff@ga-forum.com

My Metal Gear Solid 4 Review

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a beautiful failure for a game and an extremely average CGI Anime extravaganza. If it wasn't called Metal Gear Solid 4 or made by Hideo Kojima MGS 4 would be getting roundly booed.

Where Metal Gear Solid 4 has a game (and not a student film animation project) there is a lot of potential that sometimes gets realize, but most of the time does not come to fruition. Where MGS 4 fails it fails because the game hangs on design choices ten years out of date -- monster closets, infinite respawns, the illusion of emergent gameplay where your choices as a player are reduced to one correct method of doing something, stupid enemy A.I., right down to an antiquated save system that appears to save anywhere you want but amounts to a checkpoint system you have to save yourself. Where MGS 4 succeeds it succeeds just because there are some hellishly fun moments that remain hellishly fun in spite of those poor design choices.

As for the story ... it is complete comic book bullplop and not even very well told comic bullplop masquerading as a 'Very Important Story'. The plot is riddled with massive holes in logic, the characters are paper thin, and the narrative structure is bogged down in the minutia of explanation for items (guns, robots, the godlike nanomachines) that never called for any explanation at all.

If you can find profundity in Metal Gear Solid 4's babble about nanomachines or the Deus Ex Machina of the conspiratorial Patriots, well, you can probably find profundity in G.I. Joe and Robotech Cartoons. Hell, I bet you could take a dump in a dry bush, rub to leaves in the dump, then rub the leaves together, stare at the smeared dump on the leaves and tell me how profound those smear markings on those leaves are.

But then again MGS 4 is not the first game to fail completely at weaving a logical, entertaining tale. Games are meant to be played (well, ideally; this game often has a nasty habit of deciding to play itself) as games. Right? I mean, no one really cared about the narrative structure of “Doom”? Well, yes and no, because in Metal Gear Solid 4 the story consistently swamps the game like a needy girlfriend demanding that you watch “Desperate Housewives” with her. Or Else.

I was about forty minutes in when I realized I had yet to actually do anything in the game. You know, like play it. Instead I had watched a lot of cutscenes featuring soon to be repeated buzzwords like “PMCs” and “war economy” and I presume much anticipated story points delivered with all the subtlety of pork roasts raining from the sky. After a while I was beginning to silently plead with David Hayter's “Old Snake” to not mumble another “HUH?” or ask another leading rhetorical question because every time Old Snake mumbled huh or posed that leading rhetorical question it would provide an opportunity for Otacon or Colonel Campbell to start talking again, and at this rate I'd never actually get to play the game I bought. Then I stopped caring, set down my controller, and flipped over to Sports Center until the cutscene was through with. This is a ritual I found myself repeating throughout the game when the game stopped being a game and reverted to “Final Fantasy: Spirits Within”.

Metal Gear Solid 4 finally dropped me, the player, into a war torn Middle Eastern Country. Which country? They didn't have the balls to say. Why was this country at war? They didn't have the balls to say. Why are the “PMCs” fighting the Rebels? What are the rebels rebelling about? Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't have the balls to say. The entire hook for Metal Gear Solid 4 desperately wants to be “High Concept, Big Idea” by alluding to real life issues like Blackwater (in the form of Private Military Contractors), but the story of Metal Gear Solid 4 refuses to claim any deeper reasoning or press the issue further to back up the thesis that War is Bad, MmmmmKay. War is simply trotted out as something that is sort of bad, and then put back into the cupboard again until it is time to trot it out again.

As I crawled and snuck around Act 1 I realized that while war has changed Metal Gear Solid hasn't really changed all that much. You sneak around, get spotted, run, hide in a barrel or a bush, wait for your spiffy Octo-Camo to kick in, wait three minutes, rinse and repeat. As with every stealth game I play I eventually got bored and wanted to try my luck like a punk so I snuck up behind one PMC soldier and shot him point blank in the head. Alarms sounded, hell broke loose, and this time I actually got a way by running into an invisible trip wire that triggered a cutscene.

The ability to run and gun through levels without a lot of risk is the largest change to the stealth based Metal Gear Solid franchise this time out. However while the ability to run and gun carries little risk it also carries no reward either. After my first few tenuous kills I decided to kick the action up a notch and I spied a perfect place for it. Up ahead in an alleyway was a cluster of three PMC soldiers the game design seemed to beg me to sneak past, I instead whipped out my M4 and sawed the three in half. The alert alarm sounded and three more PMC soldiers rounded the corner looking for a fight I gave to them, then three more ran around the corner from nowhere and promptly were sent back to nowhere. Then three more, and three more, and three more. The pile of digital bodies and stack of weapons to be scrounged eventually clued me in, and I once more resigned myself to go and hide in my oil barrel in disgrace until the alarm passed.

I tried a similar strategy in the Second Act of MGS 4 where the time came for me and my Rebel Buddies to raid a villa in the middle of a nameless South American jungle. I decided to play sniper with an eye towards the stratagem of knocking off enough of the PMC soldiers so that the Rebels could make a push on the villa and clean up the resistance for me. Ha! Would've been a brilliant video game moment ... except for every soldier I shot, two more would respawn out of thin air and the Rebels wouldn't move from cover to take advantage of the opportunities I was opening up for them. I got the message when I died the third time. The correct way to play the level was let the Rebels have their big Movie Moment stand-off at the Villa as I snuck around back.

Metal Gear Solid 4's Eyes said Yes, but her Lips Said, No. No matter what clever ways I thought of to approach a tactical situation I was eventually given the Cock Block by a game's design that seemed to be saying, 'We wanted you to think, but not think that much! Really the choices and mechanics we are giving you are largely for show but this is how it should work.'

And when those mechanics work – as they worked in in the first three games – Metal Gear Solid 4 can be a lot of fun punctuated by a massive amount of nonsensical cut scenes. When those mechanics fail, or when I could think of a better mechanics that the game simply refused to let me execute, I was left thinking This could've been so much better IF.

When I reached the dreadful Act Three, which features an overly long sequence where you have to follow another anonymous Rebel Leader through a completely lifeless mock-up of Prague and then a equally lifeless rail shooter, the story and game runs itself out of gas. The plot shifts from a story about Private Military fighting a War about Something and that's Bad to looney conspiracy theories about Artificial Intelligences that control the world clumsily lifted from the pages of "Neuromancer". The game shifts to a greatest hits collection as Solid Snake revisits Shadow Moses Island (the setting for the first Metal Gear Solid) in Act 4 and a "battleship submarine" in Act 5 which is reprise of the tanker level in Metal Gear Solid 2. Luckily by the end of the game Hideo Kojima the Wannabe Filmmaker has overtaken Hideo Kojima the Game Designer so you can almost put down the controller and just watch for most of the last half of the game. Or watch Sports Center, like I did, waiting for your video game to finish playing itself.

Metal Gear Solid's war might have changed, but the way it approaches the game of war hasn't changed. An approach that worked astoundingly well for the series debut, Metal Gear Solid, in 1998, but ultimately fails in the face of open world games like “Crysis” and “Grand Theft Auto IV”. Whether by intent or coincidence Metal Gear Solid 4 suffers from the same malady as its main protagonist, old age, and in the wake of newer, younger competition faces the same fate, obsolescence.

Keep it Sexy, America.

John McCain's Greatest Hits

Bye, Bye Kittens

I've been bouncing between Los Angeles and the Midwest since last Fall thanks to the Holidays, the writers' strike, an unsteady living situation back West, and (lately) a couple of script projects that have taken me to Missouri and back again. So I've been crashing at my Parents' place in Indiana, an old farmhouse with a lot of land.

Since I was little my family and I have always been animal lovers. I know I've mentioned that before a couple of times on KOS. We've taken in dogs and cats, and even when I left for California my Mom and Dad continued to feed and care for the strays the Rednecks would dump in the adjacent wooded areas. I do not know why people do that -- dump cats and dogs off to die, or to be other people's problems -- but they do, particularly the further out you go into the country.

When I came back in their was a new litter of dumped kittens hanging around. Combined efforts over the Winter managed to get two in-doors and later fixed. The third ... something awful happened to her in the past because she just would not come near human hands, settling instead for an old doghouse in the garage.

You do not need a biology degree to figure out what happens next. Kitty-O-Me (as my Mom had taken to calling her) got pregnant and eventually had five kittens in a doghouse on a stormy morning early last week. The plan was to wait until they were all weened and take the kittens to the Human Society, and then have Kitty-O-Me to a vet to get spayed and remain as the local garage cat.

Then Thursday, late in the Afternoon, we discovered that the smallest of the litter had died. Poor little black and gold fellow barely had a day on the planet before he (or she) went. Another kitten that resembled the one that just passed away was having a rough time breathing and I knew he probably wouldn't make the night. The next morning my Mom told me two more had died. The one that I suspected would pass on, and a black kitten who seemed fine the Afternoon before.

We all took it hard. I took it hard. Sure, kittens die sometimes. Just happens. It had never happened to me, or My Mom and Dad before, but we all knew that with a big litter sometimes... But three in less than two days felt surreal. I felt like I had been kicked in the teeth and punched in the groin by some strange karma. You do the best you can for a stray cat and her kittens that no one else seemed to give a crap about, and you are "rewarded" like this ... Three dying in quick succession, well thanks.

I've always been one of those people that waivered on the razor's edge of permanent despair. I like to think I see the world as it is, or maybe I just see the world as I like to see it, and that's a place that is filled with remarkably cruel, bittersweet beauty but in the end a world were nothing anyone does means anything in the grand scheme. I find myself always fighting urges to fall completely into a nihilistic hedonism that tunes out everything except the most immediate means of gratification. The random deaths of three kittens was not doing anything for my disposition or my typically grim view of life.

Kitty-O-Me seemed worse. I say seemed because I don't know, no one does. I can guess and, with a healthy glob of my own anthropomorphism, and say "Oh, that cat is depressed" or "That dog is sad", but one never really knows what an animal is thinking. But Kitty-O-Me definitely seemed ... something beyond sad, or depressed, like a postpartum shellshock. I guess it would be the sort of things human parents experienced before the Industrial Age when six of their eight kids suddenly die of whatever people died of back in those yonder years. Kitty-O-Me did not want to go near the doghouse until her dead kittens were buried and all the hay that was packed in for insulation was removed. Kitty-O-Me finally seemed to come around when my Mom held up her remaining babies, squealing for Milk and Momma. She returned to the doghouse to nurse the remaining babies. Worries of orphaned, two day old kittens abated and plans were set in motion to make sure these remaining kittens would have a shot at a decent life.

Once the two kittens and Kitty-O-Me had made it through the weekend we'd go out collect her and her kittens in a pet carrier and bring them inside, keep them isolated in a spare room until the kitties were weened, and then most likely adopt them.

Here-in lies the great danger whenever you get emotionally invested in an animal that is mostly ruled by winsome ways of nature. Their plans and your plans are not planned on the same page, or drafted from the same playbook. Nature's and instinct's often win.

This Saturday as I was playing Ninja Gaiden II and sipping a Diet Dr. Pepper (yes, I know, I am a man-child and I make no apologies) my Mom came pounding at my door. Apparently, as my Dad was trimming trees, he spotted Kitty-O-Me making a completely random break from the garage with her remaining kittens, secreting them off into the woods. A couple acres of trees and brush that once she got them into it, there would be no way anyone could ever find two tiny kittens. We will keep looking though. Well, I will, at least until Monday or Tuesday when I have to leave again.

The rejection of a stray cat after emotionally exhausting ourselves for days trying to take care of her felt a gut punch. Quickly followed by another gut punch when Kitty-O-Me silently returned back to the garage sans kittens like nothing happened, like all those kittens never existed. I hope she goes back to the woods, and has simply hidden her kittens for safe keeping, but the expression on that cat's face reads something chilling. She's orphaned those poor kittens in the woods where no one can get to them, I know it.

I've got nothing for you. I feel like I've told one of Aesop's fables without a proper moral to tie it all up. All I got for you is the obvious tropes that every Goth-y high schooler knows. You know the ones; about how life isn't fair and nature being cruel. Personally I do not know what to think, or make of this entire sad story. Just life I guess.