They recorded it two weeks ago, and here it is. Pretty cool.

First video:

Free Porn

“Be Kind Rewind” is a charming mess of a movie, but a mess nonetheless. It’s a typical story about how Jack Black’s magnetic urine—indie band name alert!—erases the entire inventory of VHS tapes in a small thrift store in Passaic, New Jersey, which forces Black and Mos Def to re-film every movie until the evil holders of copyright stomp out their creativity.

Director Michel Gondry is an inventive filmmaker and one of the most creative guys on the planet, but he needs a blacker soul like Charlie Kauffman to keeps his tendency toward icky whimsy in check. “Be Kind Rewind” feels like it’s mostly improvised, with Black doing his manic Jack Black thing, Mos Def mumbling a lot while trying to be a geek instead of a cool rapper, Danny Glover playing the Danny Glover character, and other people sort of coming and going. Its version of Passaic takes place in some sort of alternate universe, where there exists these kinds of perfectly quirky, idyllic neighborhoods full of contrived eccentric people who get along way too well. And it has a typical message about the evils of yuppies and condos and Starbucks.

Coming from a Hollywood movie that thanks companies like Apple in the credits, that rings a little hollow. Maybe if they replaced the ramshackle thrift store with an Apple store—all those poor people need iPods and Macbooks too!—everyone would be happy.

Ignoring the fact that they could probably re-purchase the entire stock of VHS movies for like $1, the re-filmed—or “Sweded,” as the movie calls them—movies are really funny. Gondry is known for his love of low-budget, analogue effects (see the extras on the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” DVD), and some of the ways they re-create “Ghostbusters,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Rush Hour 2,” “The Lion King,” “Robocop,” “2001,” and others are incredibly cool and creative. I can’t wait to see the low-fi versions of them on BluRay.

(They missed out on an opportunity to Swede “Lethal Weapon,” though, with Black and Def doing Mel Gibson and Danny Glover… or maybe Danny Glover would do Danny Glover. Or better yet, he’d do Joe Pesci.)

Still, it’s hard to wrap your brain around how people recreating existing Hollywood blockbuster movies are an alternative to Hollywood blockbuster movies. But it makes it kind of a cousin to the other YouTube movie of the moment, “Cloverfield,” in that the YouTube generation is supposed to be making stuff and sharing it with others. The touching ending of “Be Kind Rewind”—where the neighborhood gets together to watch the first “original” film from the cast and neighborhood residents—is a stark contrast to the reality of showing original works. In the movie, everyone loves the amateurish creation; in the real world, someone posting something that lousy on YouTube would be savaged. Instead of supporting and rewarding originality—even if it’s kind of sucky—YouTubers are brutal. The criticism you get is just off-the-charts.

A friend of mine was doing a public access show in Vermont, and she edited together all sorts of things, created original segments using Barbie dolls and various other craziness, and started putting them up on YouTube to much derision. (And praise too, but I think the negativity took her by surprise.) People criticized her looks, complained about her being too old… it just got nasty.

Sensitivity to criticism and fear of sucking in public keeps me away from sharing most of the things I create, but my friend sticks with it because, as she says, you have to suck if you’re ever going to be good. And if there’s anything to take from “Be Kind Rewind,” it’s that if you’re going to suck, suck doing your own thing.

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He’d be one of my favorites only for his music videos (like “Fell in Love With a Girl” by the White Stripes, which you can see a documentary on its making right here), but he also direct Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is in my Top 5 movies ever.

Anyway, I particularly liked this comment from the interview: “But sometimes they use the word “quirky” in the pejorative sense. I get frustrated, because they feel like I’m doing whatever I want, and there is no ground, and I don’t really care. They feel it’s cynical. But I don’t think I have any cynicism in me. And if I had some at some point… I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don’t like cynical people. I don’t like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don’t have to justify it. You don’t have to fight for it.”

I totally agree with this. It’s so easy to be cynical, it’s what we lazily fall back to when posting on message boards or when discussing most “serious” things. It seems like everyone is in some contest to be more ironically detached than anyone else from the things that interest them. Like on a message board, someone will post how much they dig something and inevitably, some douchebag pops in to say how much he hates it. And then the conversation follows that path and much of the original joy is lost. It’s one of the reasons I rarely post to message boards anymore; I’m tired of arguing, of everyone trying to out-clever each other with one-liners, of “zings,” of having people pile-on because you dare hold an opinion counter to whatever’s currently in vogue with the hive mind.

Maybe I’m old or naive or an idiot, but I miss being able to be passionate in public about something without people pissing all over what I dig. Yeah, I could ignore them, but I’m kind of hoping all the cynical hipsters will realize that they’re the ones conforming now. Maybe positivity will replace it, and maybe that’s illustrated by the success of Juno, which doesn’t have a cynical bone in its pregnant body and has proved to be a huge hit. (And is now suffering some hipster backlash.)

Anyway, our featured review that month was of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the oh-so-controversial big MMO of early 2007. We had a tag-team, three-man review of the game, by myself, Tom Chick, and Kelly Wand.

I was rummaging through some files and found the text. I think it was a lot of fun to read. (It was especially fun to do; at least it was when Kelly wasn’t getting me killed.)

So, here it is (hah hah, Tom Chick gave it 4 stars):

Epic Game
Three writers take on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the biggest, boldest, baddest, buggiest, and most generic MMO out there
By Steve Bauman, Tom Chick, and Kelly Wand
Ratings: Steve (Gadzooks): 3 stars; Tom (Banshei): 4 stars; Kelly (Fondrus): 3.5 stars

Genre McMMO
Developer Sigil Games Online
Publisher Sony Online Entertainment
ESRB Teen
Requirements 2.4GHz CPU; 512MB RAM (Hahahah… honestly, it’s more than you got.)

Steve: Most people made up their minds about Vanguard: Saga of Heroes before it launched. Their opinions were largely determined by how they viewed designer/Sigil head Brad McQuaid and his dogmatic design for EverQuest.

Since I never liked EverQuest, I guess I’d have to give Vanguard two stars without ever playing it.

Kelly: I played EverQuest for months and got bored once I’d maxed out my Sense Heading. It was awesome to finally find out which direction I was facing, though. Which was east. Some griefers had told me it was southeast.

Tom: I didn’t play EverQuest, but I know McQuaid’s name from reading forums where people complain about him.

However, I’ve always been a fan of hard-ass gaming. You know, iron-man stuff like never reloading, or not restarting Civilization when I don’t start near a wheat field, or playing a song on Guitar Hero for two hours trying to get my name on the high-score list where my buddies edged me out. In some games, I’m OK with struggling against defeat. Dogmatic MMO designs? Pfft. Bring it on.

Kelly: Well, the grinding here is pretty grueling, even for the genre. I don’t understand in game terms why killing defenseless wildlife is considered “adventuring” that makes you a better spellcaster, while shipbuilding and lumberjacking aren’t. Isn’t “adventure” supposed to mean the opposite of routine drudgery?

Ironically, Vanguard’s shtick is to sex up so-called routine drudgery like crafting and diplomacy and make those processes feel adventurous. That’s the only stuff that feels polished.

Steve: This definitely isn’t a Blizzard game. All of the rumblings before launch about its “not being ready” were true. It’s buggy and glitchy. Its network performance is terrible, with monsters and people warping all over the map and randomly disappearing in combat. Quests are broken, some skills don’t work, items are bugged. It’s not pretty.

But it is playable. And Lord knows, you can see that a lot of work has gone into creating this world of… whatever this world is.

Tom: It is a pretty generic place. Even the name, Telon, practically screams to be ignored.

Steve: Telon, Teflon, whatever.

Vanguard is, in most ways, a fairly conventional MMO. But it needs God’s own PC to look halfway decent, and while it delivers some stunning vistas, the art direction is… not so good. The character models look pretty rough, and the world is barren. I think it uses Arial as its text font instead of some fantasy font, making it look like a beta UI instead of a polished final product.

I’m not sure this is a world I want to spend thousands of hours in.

Tom: It’s generic, but at least in the world of—umm, I already forgot what it was called—there are lots of flavors of generic. The three of us are playing Dark Elves, whose lands are populated with tents and pointy architecture. But there are also generic Asian areas, generic people-with-animal-heads areas, generic human areas, and probably some generic Dwarf stuff.

Memorable artwork isn’t a strong point here, probably because Vanguard is aiming for a more photorealistic vibe. It’s easy to be stylized when you’re drawing as broadly as World of WarCraft does.

Kelly: It’s not an ugly game, just austere and not very sensual, like looking at a mummy case under glass as opposed to actually being mummified. And I like how the armor in Vanguard is less flashy and cartoonish than WoW’s; it looks functional and a little dusty, especially on my functional and dusty monitor.

The lag spikes feel the same from city to city, though.

Steve: It’s cool that the game occasionally randomizes your appearance when you login, though. And by “cool” I mean “annoying.”

At least they let you give your toon a first and last name, which means my character’s name is twice as stupid as normally. You can also add a title, like “Amateur Skinner.” I’m kind of hoping I can work on my “Safe Fall” skill so I can run around as “Gadzooks Doofus: Expert of Safe Fall.”

Character creation is daunting, with too little up-front information and too many classes and characters for a game at launch. I’m about as likely to research a character online before starting as I am to read a manual, which is to say not very likely. So I just created a class I’m most familiar with from other games, a Rogue. (The avatar creation gives you tons of options to configure your character appearance, but you always end up with some variation of “hideously malformed.”)

Kelly: There’s a lesson there. You always play these games in third-person, looking at yourself from behind, but the anatomy options in the character creation screens never let you customize your spine. And for all those hundred jawline sliders, every other Dark Elf I run into still looks like my twin.

Steve: I wish more of these games would figure out a way to let us run around and play for a while before making major decisions about class.

Tom: There is. It’s called an alt. You have to do a test character before you do your real character. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten attached to my test character, who’s named Banshei, because “Banshee” was already taken. Now I look like an idiot who can’t spell.

Steve: Sure, you can create dozens of alts (I already have three in Vanguard, just to sample the starting zones). But I also end up growing attached to the first guy I create and don’t want to grind through those lowbie quests again if I pick a cruddy class.

Kelly: You can usually infer the basics of what a class is all about from its name and the colors of its particle routines. If you don’t know what something is, e.g., a Psionicist, that means it’s crowd control.

I actually think the huge range of different races and classes is one of Vanguard’s biggest strengths. It’s a richly textured mythos involving both anthropomorphic lizard guys and anthropomorphic cat guys.

But I’m not sure what’s at stake in this game. Is there a war on? Am I evil? Where is everybody? The leveling in Vanguard feels slow and meditative even for the genre; the landscapes strange and lovely but annoyingly vast and sparsely populated. Running into other players out in the wild counts as an event.

Steve: I get nothing about the lore. All I know is that Dark Elves are prissy and annoying, even to each other.

Tom: No kidding. I just did a quest to save some dude’s family from being slaughtered or something. I go back to turn in the quest, and what soundbite does he play when I talk to him? “I detect a slightly foul stench.” Maybe that’s how Dark Elves express gratitude.

Meanwhile, in the crafting area, they’re all hocking loogies onto the floor and making snide comments at each other.

Steve: That sounds like our play sessions.

Vanguard is extremely difficult to evaluate because it’s so big. In fact, it may be too big; it’s like it’s designed for the millions of people playing WoW but is populated by a more reasonable number of players.

It’s also a bit hollow and empty, both in the literal and figurative senses; there’s less wonder in all of Vanguard than in a single zone of WoW. They’d almost be better off blocking off access to half the current game for future expansions.

Kelly: It’s pretty big on desolation as scenery, the way Star Wars Galaxies was. Even my avatar and his horse are insubstantial and floaty, although, since I’m a Necro, it means I’m spectral.

Tom: There are so many areas that need work. It was disheartening to see the pace of the patching slow significantly after the first couple of weeks. The character animations look good, but they’re completely out of sync with what’s going on in the game. And sometimes my feet sink into the ground, which is the exact opposite of what’s happening to Kelly.

Steve: On the plus side, you run really, really fast. And you can get a mount at Level 10.

Still, I’m over 60 hours into it and finding that it pushes most of the happy buttons of an RPG, with tons of content and zillions of systems to futz with. But it has no soul. It’s the wonkiest MMO out there, one designed for players who are sick of being coddled throughout. It’s even more of an interactive spreadsheet than most MMOs. It wears its math proudly.

I can definitely see the appeal; Lord knows, I’m having a good ole time without actually understanding half of the systems—well, the ones that work, at least.

Kelly: I am too, actually. It has an unpredictable quality that WoW doesn’t. I rode into an outpost, climbed to the top of this tall, winding tower, and talked to a female NPC about the nature of life in the desert. Then she threw me over the edge to my death for claiming to be both a rat and a crocodile. This game really captures the flavor of dating.

Steve: She did that to me, too, but I survived and boosted my “Safe Fall” skill.

Nerf “Safe Fall,” Sigil! It’s too powerful!

Tom: One of the things I love is the sheer density of stuff to do. And not just quests, although those seem to be generously sprinkled around the world. There are parallel kinds of character development. In addition to adventuring (i.e., killing wildlife while doing FedEx and collecting quests), there is crafting, harvesting, and diplomacy, each with its own metric for progress and its own inventory on its own paper-doll display. It’s a little weird that you’re wearing four layers of equipment. For instance, the moment you right-click on a corpse to skin it, you pop into your alternate costume. It’s like a jump-cut in a bad ’70s TV show. Think of “Bewitched” when Samantha wiggles her nose and suddenly Darren is wearing a completely different outfit.

Man, did I just date myself or what?

Steve: That cultural reference should resonate strongly with the Vanguard demographic. It even has magic.

Thank God and Brad McQuaid for the auto-swapping equipment for those systems. If you had to create macros to put on your crafting gear, I’d be awfully pissed.

You have to hand it to Sigil for doing something unique with diplomacy. Though I get its mechanics—it’s a card game, right?—I’m almost totally in the dark about the actual strategy. It seems more like a puzzle game than a Magic: The Gathering–style strategy game–like thing. And I’m just not into that particular kind of puzzle.

Kelly: Are you baked? Diplomacy’s awesome! It’s easier than Magic but with the sex appeal of Old Maid.

Tom: It’s absolutely a puzzle game. On a lot of the diplomacy challenges, you have to play a few times to see what five cards your opponent is using, and then choose your five cards specifically to counter them. The randomness comes from how long it takes cards to refresh so you can use them again. Otherwise, it’s almost predetermined based on your and your opponent’s diplomacy levels, and which cards you have available.

Kelly: I’m really curious what the diplomacy endgame’s like, or if it’s even implemented. Like, do diplomats wind up governing cities or hobnobbing with nobles? Can they be assassinated? How many diplomacy cards are there in total? Are they race-specific?

I ask out of eagerness to find out, because I love it. It really is something new and different in an MMO. But it seems peculiar to me that your class and race play no role. It just seems like if I went to a peace summit, the Dwarf ambassadors would go, “Oh, he’s got pointed ears and an abomination on a leash. We can’t trust anything he has to say.”

I think the mistrust of Dwarves would add a lot to my playing experience.

Steve: You said that about Gears of War too, though.

Should I be upset that the cards you play—all of which have cool names like “Forceful Demand,” “Funny Joke,” and “Vile Breath Which Cannot Be Masked With a Mint of Freshening”—do nothing to change the actual diplomatic text? Not that I’d actually read it, mind you, but it’s weird that they don’t alter the flow of the conversation. It makes it even gamier.

Still, I have to hand it to Sigil for doing something this different. And the fact that diplomats can confer world bonuses gives more players a reason to pursue that particular sphere de grind.

At least it’s more interesting than the over-designed crafting. I like making stuff, but I’m not sure clicking a series of buttons in order—with fail states—is more interesting than just collecting the pieces and clicking a single one.

At least there’s one plus: You build up your skill using work orders—which require nothing—instead of consuming your own precious resources.

Kelly: It’s ingenious but a bit restrictive. I’m not sure I get why you’re limited to a certain number of tools and tool belts while you work and can’t swap out during the manufacturing process. Real-life cobblers do it all the time. Or ask someone to hand it to them. You’re surrounded by a crowd of other artisans, after all. Why can’t you hire a slave?

If you’re going to be a pure crafter, it should be part of the character creation process. And you should start out with tool belts big enough to accommodate all the tools and repair items you need, since a resourceful beginner would have access to these things in real life.

Steve: I suppose you can make the argument that, in limiting the number of tools you can bring in, it forces you to make those “interesting decisions” Sid Meier likes to talk about. But in this case, it doesn’t make much sense.

So far, the complex crafting has created a fairly interesting economy. I’m making a lot of money selling skins to crafters via the Auction House, and using that cash to buy crafted weapons and armor. Unfortunately, the drops in combat and quest rewards are mediocre.

Kelly: How’s the boat coming?

Speaking of combat, my character’s first act upon encountering Steve’s character for the first time was to aggro 10 bandits and get us wiped, because seven of them were obscured by a sand bank. I’m pretty sure I hate the fighting in Vanguard almost as much as I love the diplomacy.

Steve: I like the combat, though it’s pretty vanilla. And Kelly can’t play his class worth crap.

Tom: I’m pretty disappointed at how poorly documented the combat is, because I don’t think it’s all that vanilla. There seems to be a fairly hearty system of chains and counters and special moves on behalf of whomever you’re defending. As a Bard, classified in Vanguard as an “offensive fighter,” my main character gets a fair amount of this stuff, particularly after Level 10.

But I can’t tell what’s going on most of the time, because, like so much of the rest of the game, the combat is just splayed out in front of me without explanation. What are all these combat icons? Soul-wracked? Vulnerable? “Overlooked”! Is this a sword fight or my high school prom?

Steve: You still just click on buttons in a certain sequence, while waiting for other buttons to become available to click on. It’s more like assembly-line work than dynamic combat.

The battles are always challenging. I’ve never felt like such a wimp in an MMO, especially at the lower levels. I die. A lot.

Kelly: I guess those rez stones are supposed to take the edge off, but I really thought “corpse runs” were a thing of the past. I don’t see what the point is. Losing not as many hours of XP and work as some people?

Tom: They’ve worked just fine for me. WoW does a great job of spoonfeeding me, and giving me gold stars just for showing up. But Vanguard creates a genuine sense of risk.

Steve: “Corpse runs” give me night terrors.

Kelly: As the only card-carrying MMO nerd of this little sewing circle, I have to say I wouldn’t mind so much if the game played fair. But the aggro ranges in Vanguard are wildly inconsistent. Guys spawn on you through walls, and in numbers too daunting for even full groups to tackle. It feels random and sadistic, not suspenseful. Speaking as a “weak,” cloth-wearing character class, I hate you all. What’s fun about losing experience?

Steve: It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Even if it’s the same journey, over and over again.

I personally dug having to crawl halfway up to Level 15 twice because I died a lot and couldn’t recover my corpse a few times because it kept disappearing, and my XP eventually went negative.

Tom: It’s like the “save anywhere” argument; a lot of it comes down to your own preferences. How about an anecdote for why I like the system in Vanguard?

Steve and I were doing some quests on the north coast of Qalia when we saw a wrecked ship up in the mountains, far from the shore. Naturally, that’s the sort of thing you want to go look at. Level designers love to put stuff in wrecked ships. In this particular wrecked ship, they put a deep hole. Steve and I looked down and egged each other on to be the first to jump. Since Steve’s a big sissy and wouldn’t jump first, we counted to three and both jumped at the same time.

At which point we were immediately devoured by something called a Burrowing Worm that was 20 levels higher than us. And guess what? There was no way we were going to be able to recover our corpses from that hole. So we summoned our bodies back at the graveyard and took the XP hit.

And now we know there are places in Vanguard that you cannot go. I have no such reservations running around in WoW, where the worst-case scenario is a few copper pieces to pay for the durability hit on my equipment. But Vanguard has dark corners that will steal some of my hard-earned experience. I like that sense of uncertainty. At least, I do at this point. I haven’t run into any situations where the corpse runs pile up and you start going into XP debt. Maybe I’ll change my tune then.

Steve: I have run into such a situation, and it sucked. Did it add more danger? No, just frustration because I had to make multiple corpse runs because of bugs. Folks, if you’re going to punish me, make sure it’s because of what I’m doing, not because your server has serious problems handling transitions between zones.

I also think corpse runs discourage exploration, which is a hallmark of these kinds of games. You have this enormous world, yet you’re afraid to go look in the corner because if you do, you’ll have to spend the next 20 minutes recovering your body.

Tom: It’s also worth noting that corpse runs punish some people—namely, Steve’s Rogue—disproportionately. When he’s soloing, he has to sneak up to creatures. When they see him and kill him, his body is in a really inconvenient spot. As a Bard, I can pull creatures and fight from the periphery, using my magical drums and running song to get some distance before I get killed.

So it’s relatively easy for me to say, “Hey, corpse runs are no big deal!”

Steve: My Rogue can pull too, but I’m more of a support fighter, since most of my combat bonuses only become available when I’m behind the enemy. “Rogues do it from behind” indeed.

Corpse runs aren’t a big issue when I’m grouped. And I think you need to group in this game. A lot. Or at least a lot compared with WoW. That doesn’t make my inner antisocial hermit feel so good.

Kelly: Yeah, mine either. How’s the boat coming?

Steve: I should have mine ready in 2011. Tom’s hardcore, so he’ll probably launch his in 2008.

Kelly: Maybe he’ll let us do corpse runs in it.

Cloverfield is an an OK version of Godzilla, where the Japanese people are replaced by the most diverse collection of people assembled. We have generic 20-something hot guy, generic 20-something hot girl, generic 20-something hot girl 2, generic 20-something ethnic hot girl, and generic 20-something not-so hot but funny and endearingly goofy guy. There’s the 20-something athletic guy, the 20-something kind of athletic guy, the 20-something arty-looking but athletic and good looking guy…. These people probably exist in some alternate universe in Manhattan, but for the normal people of the world, this is an alien culture of attractiveness and perfect teeth. (There isn’t a single gap or yellowed bicuspid on display.)

The first 20 minutes are torturous. They’re literally watching someone’s home movie, which is as boring and mundane as the real thing. No one’s interesting, no one seems to have a brain, no one is particularly funny… it’s just, “Oh, Rob, you’re so cool.” “Oh, that girl is hot.” “They slept together.” “OMFG, NO WAY!” It’s like the movie version of The Real World or Laguna Beach, without the contrived drama.

And then the contrived drama shows up, in the form of a giant lizard thing that attacks Manhattan. There’s no explanation, which is a good thing; the kids in the movie wouldn’t know what was going on, so why should the moviegoer? As soon as the monster shows up, the movie kicks into high-gear. The next hour is another 9/11 homage/parable as New York gets trashed while the main characters do stupid things and the guy holding the camera “documents” their actions. People are dying around them left and right, but the guy keeps filming his friends with his super camera.

(I need this videocamera. Seriously. It never breaks, has amazing image stabilization and focus, and manages to go for about 12 hours on a single charge, despite running its light and switching to night vision. Good job, unnamed Japanese company.)

And then it ends, after about 80 minutes. It’s a decent enough time, a solid B-grade movie that will no doubt be elevated to something bigger by the geek contingent who’s pumped because it’s produced by JJ Abrams. (He’s another guy that “gets” us, or something.)

But Cloverfield is also the ultimate expression of Generation Narcissist. There’s a running gag about the camera dude “documenting” the action, but it’s really what sets the movie apart from its obvious b-movie-ness. Writers and journalists have been “documenting” things forever, but today we have the unprecedented ability to share it with anyone as quickly as we can turn on our computers and type it into a document. This allows news to travel at light speed, but you have to wonder if it’s making us all more passive.

Think of the Don’t Tase Me, Bro” video. It was funny, sure. But more interesting to me was the fact no one helped the guy. It’s as if all of the outrage in the room was being put on hold so they could see how it played out. And within minutes, you just know all of those people posted angry screeds on their blogs and MySpace pages to express their outrage. Outrage!

Now take one scene in the movie. As people have seen in the trailers and commercials, the Statue of Liberty’s head rolls down the street at one point. The first thing dozens of people do is whip out their phones and start taking pictures; mind you, this is before anyone looks around to see if it hit anyone. If this was a real event, I’m sure some of them would have it up on YouTube before the first lizard sighting.

So, maybe it isn’t just a B-movie. It nails the age of YouTube, and how it’s creating a generation of narcissists who feel a compulsion to share and “document” every single detail of their lives in public. It’s the idea that nothing really happens anymore unless some guy documents it with a camera and uploads it somewhere, Twitters about it, or writes an angry forum post or blog entry. And what happens, in the global sense, isn’t nearly as important as how the event impacts individuals and their direct circle of friends.

Our office went to see the “movie” on Friday, and it’s another triumph for “filmmaker” Uwe Boll. Highly recommended. See it twice. Buy the DVD.

So, here’s the list, with occasional videos and live performances:

10. Feist, “The Reminder”/Emma Pollack, “Watch the Fireworks”
A lot of people are thoroughly annoyed by “1234” because of the iPod commercial, but I’m not one of those people. It’s a fantastic song, and Ms. Feist won some well-deserved success from it. But people who dug that shouldn’t forget Ms. Pollack, who mines similar territory (maybe?) and should be equally popular. Or at least sell more than five CDs.

Samples: Feist, “1234,” “My Moon My Man,”

Emma Pollock, “Acid Test,” “Adrenaline,” “Paper & Glue”

9. Len Price 3, “Rentacrowd”
Blimey, it’s The Who and/or The Kinks and/or any British invasion band circa 1968. It’s great garage pop, where 12 of 13 songs clock in under 3 minutes. Oddly enough, no one in the band is named Len Price.

Samples: “Sailor’s Sweetheart,” “Rentacrowd,” “With Your Love”

8. Radiohead, “In Rainbows”
For what it’s worth, I paid $8 for the download version. Radiohead is back to songs instead of “sonic soundscapes,” though there’s still some nutty stuff in here. It’s somewhere north of “OK Computer,” but south of “Hail to the Thief.” And I can never remember which song is which. Gah.

Samples: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” “15 Step”

7. PJ Harvey, “White Chalk”
This kind of came and went, but it’s too bad. Ms. Harvey trades in her guitar for a piano and ups the heartbreak, making this one of the sadder records of the year.

Samples: “White Chalk,” “The Piano,” “Silence”

6. The Apples in Stereo, “New Magnetic Wonder”
The polar opposite of PJ Harvey, it has to be said that The Apples in Stereo sound like ELO with a shorter, fatter, and balder singer. Which can get annoying at times, especially when lead Apple Robert Schneider decides to harmonize with a digitally created female version of himself. But when they get it right—as they do more often than not here—it’s three minutes of pure-pop pleasure.

Samples: “Can You Feel It?,” “Energy,” “Same Old Drag”

5. The Polyphonic Spree, “The Fragile Army”
I saw them twice this year and, wow. On record, they can be a big too… big, with their 23-members flailing away, the swelling choruses, the exuberant shouting, etc. But “The Fragile Army” also includes less flashy songs, like “Light to Follow” or “Younger Yesterday.”

Samples: “Running Away,” “The Fragile Army,” “Light to Follow”

4. The White Stripes, “Icky Thump”
I have a rather irrational love of the Stripes. This is almost like a “greatest hits” kind of record, with songs that are “in the style” of their previous discs. But it’s still rockin’ in places, weird in others, and full of enough curves that keep it from sounding as same-y as it should. And “Rag & Bone” is really funny. And the video for “Conquest” (linked below) is awesome.

Samples: “Icky Thump,” “Conquest,” “Rag & Bone,” “A Martyr For My Love For You”

3. The New Pornographers, “Challengers”
It’s a bit slower and moodier than previous Porno CDs, but this one has some legs. There are the usual amazing songs from my future wife Neko Case (like the title track, though its video blows), a Dan Bejar song I actually like (“Myriad Harbour”), and plenty of other toe-tappers. The slow stuff like “Adventures in Solitude” and “Go Places” are amazing, and they almost make sense. If Carl Newman ever stops hiding behind self-consciously weird lyrics, maybe they’ll be a world-beater band.

Samples: “Challengers,” “Go Places,” “All the Old Showstoppers,” “Myriad Harbour”

2. Spoon, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”
This actually debuted in the Billboard Top 10, which is pretty amazing. It’s another terrific Spoon record, more like “Girls Can Tell” and “Kill the Moonlight” than “Gimme Fiction.” The songs are stronger, the performances somehow mix looseness and tightness, and the songs just sound really cool. I’m not sure what it is about Britt Daniel’s voice, but it just works for me.

Samples: “Don’t You Evah,” “The Underdog,” “Don’t Make Me a Target”

1. Sloan, “Never Hear The End Of It”
So, you’re this Canadian band that’s huge in your home country but virtually unknown in the states despite years of turning and various attempts at selling out. So what do you do after a layoff of a couple of years? Release a CD with 30, count them, 30 songs… only which 4 of them clock in at over 4 minutes long. This is the best pop/rock band out there right now, a goofy bunch of guys who trade off instruments in concert, share vocals, and generally write great, sloppy guitar pop songs. The opening twin salvo of “Flying High Again” and “Who Taught You To Live Like That” sets the tone for what follows. Though a couple of tracks are seriously bad (“Golden Eyes,” I’m looking at you), there’s the usual head-shaking stadium anthems like the terrific “Ill Placed Trust” and the killer “Ana Lucia.” There’s even a strong ballad—never the band’s strong suit—with “Live the Life You’re Dreaming Of.”

Samples: “Flying High Again,” “Who Taught You To Live Like That?,” “I’ve Gotta Try,” “Ill Placed Trust”

So, here’s the list:

10a. The Simpsons Movie
I’m such a fanboy that I have to include it. It’s worth seeing more for all the throwaway gags in the periphery, which is generally true of all great Simpsons episodes. Best line: Ralph Wiggum, upon seeing a naked Bart Simpson riding through the streets of Springfield, saying “I like men now.”

10. 28 Weeks Later
I assumed this would suck, but was pleasantly surprised. It works as a straight horror thriller, or as a story about betrayal. It’s brought down a bit by the super zombie dad, but its opening setpiece is even better than the one in the Dawn of the Dead remake.

9. Hot Fuzz
Less of a straight comedy than Shaun of the Dead, this homage/parody of every action movie is half funny/half really, really funny. And the ending just pushes past stupid into cool.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum
It loses the plot a bit, er, plot-wise compared to its predecessors, but it still delivers the thrills, chills, and spills. People can bitch all they want about Paul Greengrass’s spastic camera, but when you see others try to emulate it, you’re reminded how hard it is to shoot this way and maintain any sort of visual coherence.

7. Knocked Up
While Katherine Heigl’s character is underwritten and too gorgeous for Seth Rogen, I still bought the romance. It’s a slovenly guy fantasy movie—hey, I can be an immature goofball and still get the chick!—but I liked the point about how much of that is the blame of our parents. (Take that.) And I want to see a movie with Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s characters.

6. Juno
We’d all like to think we’re as clever as the lead character, rattling off bon mots and pop-culture allusions at will, well… we weren’t, especially at 16. But Ellen Page’s winning performance sells the movie, and once again, Michael Cera is amazing. With this and Superbad, it’s obvious he owns that particular type of character, the fumbling, bumbling, nice kid who gets in over his head.

5. Once
It’s lighter than air. It cost something like $10 to make. The plot is literally, “Boy meets girl. Boy makes music with girl. Boy leaves town without girl.” But the boy and girl have an amazing, off-handed, realistic chemistry together. And the music they make together is fantastic. And the fact their relationship is unconsummated just gives the movie a romanticism that a more obvious “and they lived happily ever after together” would never have accomplished.

4. Ratatouille
The genius of Brad Bird is that he made a movie I loved despite having almost zero interest in its premise. (I didn’t even see it in a theater.) It’s not quite on the level of The Incredibles, but its simple tale of finding your place in the world still resonates. And the scene at the end with Anton eating his meal and instantly being transported to his youth (voiced to perfection by Peter O’Toole) is phenomenal.

3. There Will Be Blood
Now this is a horror movie. One man’s descent into madness… well, he was clearly on the way, but oil gives him a nice catalyst. And it’s about power, focusing on capitalism and religion. It says more about humanity than any other movie on this list, but it’s long, slow, and ponderous. But I’m not sure what I would’ve cut. Daniel Day-Lewis will win the Oscar for his savage performance—listen as the cadence of his speech never changes, but see his body start falling apart as he descends further into the abyss of his own creation—and Paul Dano should probably receive a nomination too. If Boogie Nights and Magnolia were Paul Thomas Anderson’s Altman movies, this is his Kubrick movie. It’s beautifully shot, the phenomenal score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is positively frightening, but it’s nasty and cold.

2. Superbad
The funniest movie of the year is a love letter to the penis. As with other Judd Apatow joints, there’s a lot of heart underneath the dick jokes. Michael Cera delivers another understated performance of pure hilarity, and while Jonah Hill pretty much just yells the entire movie, he still manages to be believable. If every douchebag didn’t end up saying, “I’m McLovin,” it would be the year’s catchphrase.

1. No Country for Old Men
People are getting hung up on the ending, which is really fairly straightforward: The movie was never about Llewellyn Moss, which the specifics of his fate (and the controversy about what happens to him) mostly irrelevant. It was always about Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his perception of how things were getting worse, and he needed to get the hell out of Dodge. (It is, after all, “no country for old men.”) And Barry Corbin shatters that particular myth for the sheriff, pointing out how evil has always existed, and evil will always exist, and all you can do is try to survive.

But there’s a lot more fun stuff in there, about luck, fate, the corruption of money, random violence, etc. And it has Javier Bardem in the year’s most chilling performance (though Daniel Day-Lewis decided to screw that up a bit) and Kelly Macdonald breaking your heart at the end when she fucks with Chigurh’s logic. And Tommy Lee Jones. And Josh Brolin. And perfect cinematography, sound design, and direction and writing from the Coen Brothers.

Notable games that didn’t make the cut: Crysis and Call of Duty 4. The former made the latter’s linearity and heavily scripted gameplay feel very, very tired, and I’ve already documented how much Crysis ultimately disappointed me.

So, here’s the list.

10. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
I knew I got this PS3 (for free) for a reason other than watching movies. The only game I own aside from Motorstorm, which came with it, is one of the best games of the year. It looks great and has solid controls, and the gameplay is a terrific mix of shooting and running and jumping.

9. Crackdown (360)
This game pegs the stupid meter at 11 throughout. It’s all about running and jumping and throwing cars at people, in a completely unscripted, open-ended world. This is the direction more games need to go, though maybe with a wee-bit more polish and a few more structured things to do to advance… something.

8. BioShock (PC)
It’s good, but the pretentions of its story write checks its somewhat pedestrian gameplay can’t cash. Love the world, love the ideas behind the story, but I kept wishing it would end because after a few dozen splicer battles… I was kind of done with it. Still, it’s impossible not to admire how it feels carved from granite, how everything in the world supports that story.

7. STALKER (PC)
I want to turn Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” into an RPG. You explore a wasted landscape searching for survival goods for yourself and your son. And you’d spend the entire game waiting for all of the combat that’d never actually happen; there’d be exactly one fight in the entire game. STALKER is kind of like that, only with more combat. It’s horribly broken in so many ways. It’s too hard. It’s buggy. It’s nonsensical. It has bad writing. But when you’re creeping along, freaked out that some soldier or (worse yet) some mad radiation thing is going to attack you, well… it totally works.

6. Peggle (PC)
This is the gayest game of 2007. “Ode to Joy.” Rainbows. Unicorns. Pachinko. Bust a Move. Breakout. Luck. Why does this work? Because PopCap rules. I reviewed this for our “lost issue,” and it started with this: “Now that we’ve all rediscovered the joy of physics thanks to rag dolls and breakable environments, it’s time to turn our attention back to geometry. It dominated gaming back in the days of pool and pinball, when you were conscious of the physics of the ball but mostly interested in finding the right angles to hit all the targets and max out your score.”

5. Lord of the Rings Online/World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)
I kind of view MMOs as one continual experience with a few variations depending on which game I feel like playing. So, the two MMOs I played this year were the best, since… well, they were the ones I played. (I suppose the month I spent in Vanguard might count too, though I’d rather forget that experience.) I was the first person in Outland on my server (love those review copies), and I was immediately besieged by hundreds of “ohmygodhowisit? Do you work for Blizzard?” messages. The new classes are fine, the new areas fine… bah, WoW’s a machine. And LOTRO does WoW almost as well as WoW, only it substitutes Hobbits for Tauren. And sorta dies at level 25, though I understand patches have addressed that somewhat.

4. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (PSP, 360, PC)
I must’ve liked this game, since I bought it three times for three different platforms. It managed to put an interesting wrapper on match-3 games, and turned a lot of people on to why casual games can actually be high-quality and closer in depth to “real” games without losing their casualness. But it has the weirdest difficulty curve, starting “difficult and frustrating” before moving on to “cakewalk.” That might not be ideal.

3. Portal (PC)
Yeah, it’s brilliant. But it has one flaw: Its story. Wait, what? It’s not the narrative or dialogue itself, both of which are brilliant. (I hate that no one will ever be able to write a whacked-out computer again without being compared to GLaDOS.) It’s that when you give a puzzle game a story, it affects its replay value. The same thing happened for me with Bookworm Adventure, and to a lesser extent Puzzle Quest: When I “finish” a story game, I rarely go back and play it because, well… it’s finished. When puzzle games are just about solving puzzles or the joy of playing, I tend to replay them more frequently.

2. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
I have exactly zero emotional involvement in Mario. I never had an NES or SNES. I don’t own a DS. But I did get a Wii, and I did get Mario, and without the baggage of past Marios, it stands alone as a fantastic game. It’s about the pure joy of running and jumping, and of totally fucking with your perspective. This is the most 3D ever made, forcing you to constantly re-orient your brain. But it delivers so many visual cues that it’s never very hard. I stopped playing at around 90 stars, but I plan on going back in once I get through my backlog.

1. Assassin’s Creed (360)
Who saw this coming? I certainly didn’t. In fact, I hated this game for its first couple of hours. And I hated it again for its last couple of hours. But everything between just gave me warm fuzzies. I’m not 100% sure I’d recommend it to a lot of people, because they’d get hung up on its failings. Me, I’d pay another $60 just to be able to climb up to the tops of more multi-story buildings, hit “Y” to survey the landscape, and then do the “leap of faith” into a pile of hay. (That bit just never got old for me. And yes, I got the achievement for finding all of them, thankyouverymuch.)

A few years ago, I had a conversation with John Cutter, who was the designer of Betrayal at Krondor (amongst other games) and was at the time working at my current employer. I asked him why there’d never been a modern fantasy RPG set in a single city, a la Grand Theft Auto (going way back, there was Alternate Reality). He made a terrific point; without a car, traveling from point A to B isn’t very interesting.

Assassin’s Creed tests that theory. It’s very much an action/RPG/parkour simulator, with a world that’s structured a lot like San Andreas, with three main cities and a connecting world. That these cites are Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre and the game is set during the Crusades in the 12th century certainly gives it a unique look and feeling… well, OK. It looks like a fantasy game.

Some people criticize the repetition of its gameplay. You basically do the same thing nine different times; the setups for each of your assassinations involve “gathering information,” which involves a handful of different possible tasks. It’s really no less repetitive than a GTA game; you’re usually shooting someone or driving around. However, those games do a better job making you think you’re doing something different; Assassin’s Creed is just more literal. And once I figured out that combat was more rhythm game than button-mashing, it got a helluva lot more enjoyable and easier. And easier yet when I discovered countering with my hidden blade. (And the combat animation is phenomenal; this is a case where pulling occasional control from the player works, because you’re rewarded with complete badassery that’s often breathtakingly brutal.)

The storyline is crap. The modern wrapper is even crappier. Despite being set during the Crusades, it dodges all of the interesting questions raised by its premise… maybe cowards out is a better way to view it. (Come on, let’s just call people Christians and Jews and Muslims and not do our best to ignore what the Crusades were really about.). Maybe if Ken Levine writes Assassin’s Creed 2, we’ll see the greatest game ever.

The less said about the ending the better. Plot-wise, nothing is resolved. Gameplay-wise it tosses aside all of the awesomeness of the beginning of the game in place of wave after wave of combat. And Ubisoft’s designers clearly hate its players and don’t want them to finish games, so they placed the checkpoints too far apart. Seriously, people. Let someone else play your game. And let everyone finish it. It was plenty tough throughout, and plenty long; just let us all finish it without flinging our controller across the room in disgust. (I did this; it survived.)

But I could pick apart all of these games if I really wanted. I just didn’t get sick of running around the three cities, engaging in random mayhem, going on 20-minute chases through the streets, across rooftops, up and down walls. I took out hundreds of guards in secret, I rescued all but three citizens (gotta go back for those)… in short, I just

But the real star in the level design, the art direction, and the animators. This is easily the greatest world ever created for a videogame. It’s just perfect. Ubisoft has been leagues ahead of everyone in these areas—just look at the Prince of Persia games—but the folks there outdid themselves this time.

This is one game that didn’t always play by the rules and, flaws and all, is my favorite game of 2007.

It’s hard for me to gauge my feelings on this game because I played it in its entirety after I’d started Crysis (but hadn’t reached its sucking bits). Its linear, heavily scripted gameplay—even when implemented with as much skill as Infinity Ward delivers here—feels tired and dull compared to the open-endedness of Crysis. Yeah, all of those in-engine scripted scenes are amazing. But we all get the same amazing scenes, and we all play it the same way. (I didn’t try multiplayer, and I’m told it’s fantastic. I also played it on the 360 instead of the PC, only because I borrowed it rather than bought it.)

Still, a few segments stood out. The sniper mission is brilliant, beautifully capturing a feeling of dread and panic that you’ll be detected. (The fact that you and your companion look like Treebeard is a bonus.) The only goofy part is crawling under a parade of cars in the open; in a “real” scenario, you’d probably just go around the soldiers.

The second is an airborne attack, where sit in a plane high above the action coldly launching bombs, rockets, and various other implements of death at little white dots that scurry about. That those dots are people—and the fact your fellow soldiers in the plane are constantly offering accolades when you score a good hit—probably says more about modern war than any Hollywood polemic. And it was so obvious that there’d be collateral damage, though that’s never discussed.

Whether or not Infinity Ward designed it to be unsettling or not (and in the context of a game that’s mostly “rah rah, soldiers are fucking badass!” I’m going to go with “no”), it disturbed me. While the game makes it clear you’re fighting against “very bad people,” it made modern war seem horribly unfair, particularly when contrasted against most games being forced to “balance” the US versus its enemies for gameplay purposes.