"E3"(?) 2020 Reactions Part 1: The Bad and the Weird

The Coronavirus outbreak destroyed many entertainment industries. Theater, movies, sports, all could not happen. Video games, however, were mostly fine. I could still play The Last of Us 2 and Final Fantasy VII Remake along with everybody else, as normal. Gaming, in fact, only blew up further. It made ass, boat, or truck loads of money depending on your preferred cliché. Some companies, like Nintendo, probably wish the plague would never end considering how much they're making.

However, one thing was ruined this year. That was E3. Games media has a unique yearly cycle not shared by other forms of entertainment. There is one week in early June where about 70% of the big announcements of the year all happen. E3 has been in rapid decline for years. Even in a non-plague year, E3 2020 was going to be a weird event that was a pale imitation of the last few E3 conventions, which were themselves pale imitations of the proper megashows of the convention’s golden years. But even if E3 itself might have sucked; it was a focal point. Sony was not going to the show proper, but it was going to have announcements around that time. Now with E3 gone and social distancing ruling the day, the usual rhythm of gaming news was destroyed. All the shows scattered to the four winds. It’s early August and we still do not know the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X prices.

I was not really sure if I should really do my usual E3 Reaction post this year considering there wasn’t actually an E3. Generally I'm in a bad mood about the immediate gaming future too. I have very low hopes for next year and very few big releases seem that exciting to me. I know good games are coming at some point. Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2 will probably release around the time I finally bother to review Part 1. But that wasn't announced. Warner Bros. still has not shown anything for the new Batman game, to my infinite fury. Nintendo slept all summer.

More announcements are coming, sure. But I'm done waiting for what *might* get shown. I'm doing my E3 Reaction Post now. If you have a big game to show, you missed your chance. And in my general bad mood today, I'm going to start off on a bad foot. Here are the games I am not just unexcited for, I am anti-excited for them. Here's all the worst stories of the "E3-ish Season" 2020.

Top 10 July 2020 First Watches

Assuming we all survive to December, I'll write a Top 15 of 2020. That is going to be a weird list for a weird year. It is not just the fact that all the major blockbuster have disappeared. Frankly, I wasn't all that excited for Mulan or Black Widow, and I could wait years for those. It is just that it is much harder to find movies now. The releases are so infrequent and poorly advertised. My 2020 Top List until July was basically just Emma and The Color Out of Space, with maybe The Lodge, Ride Your Wave, and Harley Quinn in the running.

So thank god that in July movies started coming out again. There are three movies on this list that could very well make the Top 15. Spoilers, maybe, but Relic and Palm Springs are both in the running for my Number 1. It felt like movies mattered again. And then nothing's come out for weeks since. What is coming up in August? I'm a movie-guy and I don't know.

Anyway, July's movie theme was Spike Lee Joints. Here's a confession: I've kinda never liked Spike Lee as a director. I think he's extremely talented, a major pioneer in indie filmmaking and African American filmmaking. He is an icon who makes unique movies that are very often way up their own ass. Da 5 Bloods is one of the worst movies I've seen this year. I feel alone in this. Everybody wanted a truly great Spike Lee movie to answer the Black Lives Matter moment, and I think a lot of us forgave things we should not have with that movie. It completely bungles its themes and treats Vietnam as just war, not a country. For a movie that wants so badly to find humanity in men mistreated by the US imperialism machine, it also misses the fact the they were part of that imperialism machine. The violence they did is treated like heroism, and they continue to do violence which the movie mostly celebrates in a very uncritical way. Da 5 Bloods is as much a power fantasy as Rambo and just as unable to see foreigners as people. I did not like Blackkklansman either and feel even more alone on that front.

So I wanted to explore Spike Lee's filmography more. I wanted to better understand what people saw in this guy. I found quite a few of his movies were great. But just as many are train wrecks, like the hatefully bad Jungle Fever, a movie I'm very sorry to have watched. So assuming you want more of a White guy's opinion on a Black artist's work, I guess read ahead. Obviously I will not be the final word on Mr. Lee and never intend to be.

Top 9 June 2020 First Watches

RedLetterMedia was my theme for June. Not RedLetterMedia's movies (those are terrible and not worth discussing) but the movies they cover. This Youtube channel has been talking about movies for well over a decade across their Pinkett reviews, Half in the Bag, and Best of the Worst shows. I have been watching since college. Their 70-minute Phantom Menace review is one of the best-known in-depth reviews on any movie. Their opinions and their attitude have been massively influential across video criticism for years.

Despite that, I have mixed feelings about this show. Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman, and Rich Evans have a very caustic "fuck everybody" style and I'm increasingly less in the mood for that these days. These guys started back when a big part of Youtube movie culture was finding "the worst movie ever". It is their work that led me to review crap like Jack and Jill because I thought bad movies would make for good content.

As a whole, movie criticism seems to be moving away from "so bad it's good" as an ethos. The Razzies got a lot of shit this year for naming the Worst Movie of 2019. Personally I have tried to cut down on the irony. If I like something, I like it for it's qualities. Even if those qualities are perhaps an unusual form of "good". Last year's Cats is a movie I actually recommend. Yeah, it is terrible on most levels but also it is also a legitimately unique cinematic experience, even if not for the reasons the creators intended. That is more positive than negative. Plus, it is clear through these last ten years that RedLetterMedia got the Star Wars Prequels wrong. They might be "bad" for these aging nerds but they're also beloved by a fanbase who have gained a lot of joy from them.

I will religiously keep watching Best of the Worst and Half in the Bag the moment those shows update. However, as for Mr. Plinkett, I can't watch him anymore. I don't care what toxic shit he has to say about the new Star Wars movies anymore. Still, as I whole, I like RedLetterMedia. They have helped me find a lot of legitimately great movies even while they have gone out of their way to find nothing but terrible things. I discovered Xtro, Chopping Mall, and Brian Yuzna's delightful Faust: Love of the Damned thanks to these guys. So this month I set to see how many of their "Worst" movies were actually great.

Five of my Top 9 were featured on Best of the Worst or Half in the Bag. The other four are just movies I saw because. I'll include show links to RedLetterMedia's opinions on the movies too.

'The Last of Us Part II' Does Not Solve its Violence Problem (Spoilers)

SPOILERS inevitably are coming. I recommend you not read AT ALL if you do not want to be spoiled.

Violence is increasingly a problem that video games have to deal with. As graphics become more realistic, gamer writers feel their stories must also adhere closer to a realism. The most classic video game idea is a competition between you, the player, and the computer. Whoever survives wins. Now that was no real problem as long the bodies competing were small abstract pixel forms blipping out of existence. Even as technology could produce 3D graphics and recognizably human bodies, it was no real issue. Those weren't people, they were cartoon blobs in a humanoid shape. However, now that video game humans look very convincing, their bodies can be destroyed in disturbingly realistic ways. This issue has reached the point that game devs have reported real psychological trauma while working hard to design all this carnage.

Naughty Dog, the developers of the new video game, The Last of Us Part II, are of course, aware of this contradiction. They have been on the cutting edge of "cinematic" gaming since the PlayStation 3, and have done as much as any studio to craft realistic violence. Even as early as Uncharted 2, our hero, Nathan Drake, was confronted by the final bad guy. This hulking brute of ruthless Russian muscle, Lazarevic could mock Drake (and implicitly the player) by asking "How many men have you killed? How many just today?". This is a good point that the hero was no better than the villain. Naughty Dog kept moving in this direction, making games full of the contraction between hero and monster. Uncharted 4 is very much a game taking Nathan Drake to task for everything he's done. The Last of Us 1 ends on an infamous and brilliant finale where everything you've done through the story may have in fact doomed humanity.

So when The Last of Us Part II is an especially gruesome experience, that's not a massive surprise for this franchise or this developer. They are too self-aware to miss the violence problem. They do not want to be the 2012 reboot of Tomb Raider (which was an Uncharted game in all but name anyway). That game saw the character Lara Croft, transformed from just a gamer pin-up girl to an believable young woman. Then she went from a grounded start as an everywoman to basically the motherfucking Terminator by the end. She murders thousands of people, and the game never notices. It's hilarious. The Last of Us Part II wants to use that contradiction between your apparent heroic goals and the actual results as the apex of its story.

The result though is... let's just say not for me. I don't think The Last of Us II has the solution to the violence problem.

Top 10 May 2020 First Watches

My movie theme for May was Sports Movies. Like last month when I did musicals, I wanted to focus on an aspect of social life that the plague mostly has taken away from us. In an alternate reality, with perhaps a functioning government, I would have seen the New York Yankees play the Mariners this month. Instead, nobody saw the Yankees or the Mariners. We are all poorer for it. But, I think this will be my last wistful theme. I'm getting a bit depressed mourning normal life one entertainment at a time.

Anyway, as genres go, Sports Films have never exactly been a favorite of mine. The stress and excitement of a real sporting event is much more dramatic than a fictionalized version. No screenwriter can replicate the sheer joy I had when the Broncos defense held Tom Brady twice at the goal line in the 2016 AFC Championship. I've never felt worse in my life than back in 2004 when the Yankees blew a 3-0 lead in a playoff series against the Red Sox. I was twelve years old and until then, did not actually know what sadness was. A movie needs a structure, it needs arcs, it needs meaning. Real sports are random statistical noise upon which we add the arcs and meaning. That's what creates the excitement. You can't manufacture that.

So ultimately if you're going to make a great sports movie, it cannot actually be about the sport. I know in the real world there is a selection of people who demand athletes only play ball and then shut up. You can usually find those guys calling in to ESPN radio to complain about Odell Beckham Jr. and they all sound like your racist uncle. But it is really the stories behind the ball-playing that make for good drama. The balls don't matter, the cultural weight we give to the balls matter. Winning and losing is interesting, but not exactly proof of any justice or your worthiness as a person. Robert Kraft owns the Patriots and is a billionaire. He wins every day, and he's a piece of fucking shit.

Interesting humanity does not come from winning or losing. Heroes lose, monsters win and that doesn't make for good fiction. I don't care about the home runs or the triple doubles as an abstract feat of strength. I care about the story behind the home runs and triple doubles. So never shut up and play ball.