When Duke Nukem Forever comes out in what is slated so far to be “sometime in 2011,” I reckon that will have been a staggering 14 years between announcement and delivery. I distinctly remember one exciting afternoon when my friend ran up to me breathless in anticipation over the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever. And we were in second grade.

Duke Nukem Forever is being polished by Gearbox Software, famed developer of that Anarchic RPG Shooter thing from last year (which I never played, but may end up doing to see what I might reasonably expect from them). It seems as if 3D Realms did actually create a sizable game in the 12+ years they’ve been handling it, but the job of stringing all that content together has now fallen on the Gearbox boys. It’ll be interesting to see who the people blame should this game not be so good that “it cures all the world’s diseases and rains fried chicken upon Africa.”

I’ll definitely be buying Duke Nukem Forever no matter what. Not so much because I thoroughly believe that the wait has been well worth it, but because I support misogynist alien pig slaughterers who kick ass and chew bubble gum. My concern is that, in a market saturated with gritty shooters with real world tinges and a focus on redefining online multiplayer with every sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, with both its strippers and its adversaries comprised chiefly of bacon, will be unable to thrive. To be perfectly honest, the Modern Warfare direction seems to me infinitely more juvenile than the “alien swine are stealing all our hot women” direction. Indeed they’re both immensely childish, but at least Duke Nukem has always had a sense of humour about itself.

At any rate, between Civilization 5 and Gran Turismo 5 this year, Duke Nukem Forever next year, and Bioshock Infinite in 2012, I’m beginning to wonder why I even bother enrolling in classes.

For all intents and purposes, Machete shouldn’t exist. It was first conceived as a phony trailer alongside inventions like Hobo with a Shotgun and Werewolf Women of the SS to segue Planet Terror into Death Proof in 2007’s Grindhouse, a throwback to trashy exploitative B movies from the 60s and 70s. Three years later and with US immigration tensions offering a a real world cognate, Machete is born as a feature length, ironic, tongue and cheek critique of the trials of Mexican day labourers and the policies that abuse them.

What I disliked

• The Supporting Cast. Robert Rodriguez doesn’t handle auxiliary players terribly well, which is evident by the large, sloppily handled cast. Characters like Lindsay Lohan’s addict aspiring porn star, Cheech Marin’s double shotgun wielding padre, and Steven Segal’s samurai Mexican drug lord, aren’t explored beyond their bland novelties. They just pop in and out of situations at an irrational discretion, with Lindsay Lohan in particular serving no purpose beyond spending the majority of her screen time naked (if the year was 2004 and I was talking about Mean Girls, believe me, I wouldn’t mind).

• Open Air Action Sequences. By this, I mean scenarios in wide spaces with dozens of characters filling each other with bullets and chopping each other to pieces. A grind house flick works best when there’s a sort of intimacy between the murders, an up close “in your face (with a machete)” attitude. Machete featured this extensively during its opening chapters by having the camera no more than a few feet away from decapitations and amputations in narrow rooms and corridors. It made the ludicrous violence and gore that much more visceral. In contrast, the final climax between furious Mexican day-labourers and racist border patrol vigilantes, the massive confrontation towards which Machete is building, consists of an all out brawl bursting with knife fights and shoot outs, but no real focus or gratification. In fact, I would wager that more blood is shown in the first five minutes than in the last twenty. It’s not quite the blood soaked finale one would reasonably expect after spending the first eighty minutes picking up severed limbs and fragments of skull.

• The Narrative. Think of Machete as Shoot ‘Em Up, with blades filling in for bullets. It’s a chaotic and gruesome bit of escapism that all too often lets a convoluted story grind everything to a halt. The narrative of the former is just as preposterous and unsatisfying as that of the latter, but slightly easier to tolerate since it’s trying to make a point: Americans in the southern states don’t treat Mexicans very nicely. I’m not averse to films that carry messages, but the best way for a movie to go about a lecture is to present its subject in a “take it or leave it” fashion. Machete demands more often than it suggests, which makes its strains on the pacing more difficult to overlook. Machete is by no means long, but it feels longer than it should because the message often gets in the way of the movie.

• The Conclusion. So much time and effort was spent staging a war between Mexican immigrants hungry for revolution and misguided racist patriots that for Machete to end with no sense of resolution whatsoever creates a pretty vacuous film. For all the bullets, blades, blood, and guts, there isn’t even the slightest hint that anything was earned or lost for either side by the end of it all. The ending seemed to indicate that the revolution will go back to landscaping and dish washing while the vigilantes will go back to unlawful border guarding, which makes me wonder just what the point of all the conspiring, duplicity, and murder, that came before it was all about.

• Jessica Alba. Honestly, I find it adorable how she tires to act and thinks that she contributes anything to her projects beyond a pretty face.

What I liked

• Close Quarters Action Sequences. See above, but to reiterate: the closer the camera is to dismemberment, the stronger such scenes are. It’s easier to appreciate creative killing sprees one at a time instead of en masse. Machete seem to have forgotten this fact the further along it goes.

• The Beginning. Despite the ill conceived lunacy that will follow, the first sections of the film, from minute one in Mexico to the soon to be infamous intestine repelling scene, truly give the sense that Machete will deliver all the grind house goods it promises. Had I known where the film would end up taking itself, I probably would’ve walked out then and there while the note was still high. The unfortunate truth is that Machete simply doesn’t get better as it goes along.

It’s disappointing, really, how the gleeful anarchy of a fantastic exploitation throwback is bogged down by the weight of contemporary political criticism. Ethics in film work best as a “take it or leave it” component, not when they’re hogging the spotlight. Machete has a lot to say about US immigration policies, but when a lecture threatens to get in the way of bloody carnage  and idealism restrains the rampage, I feel like it starts to miss the point of its own existence.

Is it a legitimate claim to say that an exploitation flick is artless? Probably only as far as one can possibly complain about its trashy nature. I wanted to like Machete, and indeed I do like it, if only for the primal, instinctive appeal of ultra-violence and tits. The problem is that Machete confuses itself, both deliberately with an agenda and accidentally through its presentation. As it stands, Machete is only worth a look because it’ll be a miracle if ever an exploitation flick with Hollywood polish should hit theatres again.

(I also saw The American yesterday, and let me just say that I definitely recommend watching that over Machete, believe it or not. For whatever reason, I’m feeling more gracious towards the slow burn yet wholly generic Euro-style thriller as opposed to the bloody trash that’s normally right up my alley. Who would’ve thought?)

Well, in a film, at least. A gangster is a gangster, and while I myself may be more at ease in the face of a calm fellow with an afro than one who shouts while flailing a weapon, it doesn’t change the fact that, in real life, I’d probably leave the situation with a few bullet holes. Yet as romanticized characters worthy of empathy and admiration, the man who courts coolness as if it were a trivial accessory is far and away a more endearing creation than the one who courts it in seeming desperation for peer approval. It’s hard to imagine a brotha’ in a fuzzy felt hat deeming it necessary to prove his worth by jacking a few cars, yet that ugly background image is par for the course when it comes to the brotha’ with gold teeth and an aggressive swagger.

“Can you dig it?”

Having said all that, the best way to think of Black Dynamite is as a vulgar Shaft. All the classic blaxploitation trappings are here, from funk and soul vamps to a slick ebony and gold gloss, yet it presents itself  far too aggressively, as if it were trying with all its might to impress. The ostensible reason for this is that it’s not exclusively a blaxploitation throwback, but rather a blaxploitation parody, and is worse off for it. Simply put, satirizing a genre that in itself was never terribly serious and arguably all too well aware of its inherent silliness just doesn’t work.

This isn’t to say that Black Dynamite fails outright. It’s drenched in genre fidelity and visual panache, and from time to time even manages to evoke truly the sort of cool it’s trying terribly hard to execute. But throughout the entire film, I was far more interested in watching its inspirations (Shaft, Superfly, etc.) than watching what comes next. Part of this has to do with its woefully underdeveloped story – even by blaxploitation standards – but it’s mostly to do with the schizophrenic, jerky nature of parody, which more often advertises interest in the films it satirizes than interest in itself.

Black Dynamite is less than 90 minutes long, yet still overstays its welcome regardless of such brevity. The satiric novelty of a novelty genre wears thin after 20 minutes when it’s revealed that there is no narrative structure beyond thin excuses to string tired gags and brawls together, and the jokes themselves are bland and extraneous. Without a story both to keep the affair moving and to make the entire experience worthwhile, Black Dynamite merely fizzles when it should’ve been explosive.

Note: Black Dynamite was released in theatres in October 2009, in home release in February 2010, and is now on the Movie Network, which is how I watched it.

But as yet another summer season comes to an end, I can’t help but feel unimpressed with how the year has turned out. This isn’t to say that I’m hopping on the “Hollywood has run out of ideas” bandwagon, especially since I’m normally first to defend the mainstream film industry when people lament an apparent sea of remakes, adaptations, and cynical cash-ins. It’s just that as I glance through my stack of neatly organised ticket stubs for 2010 so far, I come to realize that most of my favourite movies were ones which technically came out in 2009 that I only had the opportunity to watch during the winter. I’ve always been more of an autumn/winter person than a spring/summer person, but I never thought my tastes in films would seem to reflect that.

The last Friday of the Hollywood summer calendar arrives tomorrow, and, so far as I can tell, neither Takers nor The Last Exorcism will be particularly noteworthy. Normally, I would say something along the lines of, “Well it is August, after all. What was I expecting?” Instead, I find myself saying, “Well it is the summer, after all. What was I expecting?”

I was recently asked by a coworker what my favourite movie of 2010 so far has been, and no matter what answer I came up with, none of them felt genuine. I love Iron Man, but Iron Man 2 was a step down. Ditto my adoration for Pixar, yet even I walked out of Toy Story 3 less than smitten. There has been no Moon or The Hurt Locker this year to triumph as a minor genre masterpiece (at least not as far as I can tell), and even Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a movie which seemed to be made ostensibly with a comic book loving rendition of myself in mind, failed to impress. The only candidate left seems to be Inception, but even that movie only stands as a B+ in my internal evaluation system. To be entirely honest, summer’s best for me was Knight and Day, but frankly I feel that I should be careful to whom I divulge that.

How wonderful it would be for a movie to be just as good as it seems.

There’s normally at least a couple of films from the summer block I can proudly call a favourite, but summer 2010 just hasn’t had anything like that. I was sort of hoping that Machete could fill that gap, but it’ll belong to the autumn by the time it comes out on the Friday after next. In order to identify my favourite film of 2010 so far, I have to go all the way back to How to Train Your Dragon in March, a film, I should admit, which took me completely by surprise. But it must be said that if I had to stumble upon its ticket stub to be reminded both of its existence and of my feelings towards it, then truly it’s not all that special to me.

“The point I’m trying to reach is that playing games, as entertaining and fascinating and beneficial as it might be, is just something people do, not something they should be defined by. People don’t call themselves moviegoers, or TV watchers, or book readers. That’s the job of marketing agencies.”

- Ben Croshaw

Recently, I’ve been holding a similar mindset myself, and it’s nice to see that some people, especially people with a considerable amount of influence, think the same way. Although to be fair, I applied the notion not to playing video games, but rather to a person’s sexual orientation, and sort of further expanded upon it from there.

Last month, I met a friend for a couple of drinks. For whatever reason, one of the topics we began to discuss was the recently passed Gay Pride celebrations in Toronto, to which I concluded that it was pointless and damaging. Not because I’m helplessly homophobic and dread gay folks the same way I dread serial killers or spiders, but because it’s my belief that a person’s sexual orientation is something of which to be neither proud nor ashamed. Ideally, such celebrations would be unnecessary since there would be no use for them in a society where people of all orientations are comfortably integrated. In the same way that being persecuted and discriminated against due to orientation is a step backwards for the offenders, so to is it a step backwards for those once victimized both to celebrate overtly their standing and to allow themselves to be defined fully by what set of naughty bits they’re attracted to.

It’s difficult to express the extent to which MovieBob makes things worse.

The same concept seems to work well when taken beyond lifestyle choices and applied to media consumption. Naturally, the topic here is how “gamers”, of all sub-sects of popular and mass media consumption, are the ones who take the most pride in their passion, and thus do themselves a massive disservice by isolating themselves from the fairly sizable chunk of the world who couldn’t care less about Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy VII. Their fanaticism can be ruinous.

It wouldn’t be fair to say, however, that such a phenomenon is exclusive to the world of video games, as Ben Croshaw seems to have expressed casually. There are “moviegoers” and “readers” out there who are just as eager to base their social interactions on whether or not you adore the same movies and books  that they do. The truth is that so many people of so many different hobbies and interests are guilty of such discrimination. It’s just that “gamers” are, far and away, the most vocal, shameless, and childish.

This is why I’ve been doing my best to see people beyond what they like and dislike. Interests may form a familiar starting point for the development of relationships, but some people seem to take that several steps too far by using hobbies as a recruitment barometer for popular culture warfare. The genre fans of music, film, video games, and literature, seem poised to quarrel among each other perpetually, which is why I yearn for the days (if such days ever existed) when labels categorized products and not people.

Read Full Article (Extra Punctuation: Don’t Use the Word “Gamer”)

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