Hi- Fi Rush Review

 

Hi-Fi Rush is a great rhythm action game with popping comic book style visuals and a soundtrack that makes you want to clobber to the beat. You play as doofus teenager Chai, who during a visit to Vandelay Industries (Seinfeld joke!) to receive a robotic arm accidentally has his mp3 player fused to his chest, resulting in improbable rhythmic powers. Immediately declared a Defect, Chai escapes Vandelay's robots with the help of a cybernetic cat called 808 (drum machine reference!) who belongs to Peppermint, a rebel hacker intent on exposing Vandelay's misdeeds. Chai is charmingly arrogant, stupid, and rash, and proceeds to hammer his way through the game like a complete idiot. The incredible visual style really helps sell the comedy, and I enjoyed meeting characters like CNMN (pronounced "cinnamon") and Macron, who join Peppermint's rebellion and aid Chai. Chai must attack on the beat in order to do more damage, and his library of combos will grow and grow, and it's quite the pleasure to trigger a satisfying attack after some strategic button-mashing. Staying on beat isn't hard, but add parrying, dodging, grappling, and special enemies that require a summon from Peppermint, Macron, or Korsica, and you have quite the difficult game after a while. There's a lot of platforming, with much of it timed, but thankfully Chai is fun to move. Learn how to parry, people; if you don't the game will get very hard very quickly. The difficulty curve does ramp up around the half-way mark, but I never found myself frustrated. Hi-Fi Rush could have used a few more licensed songs; The Black Keys' Lonely Boy and Nine Inch Nails The Slip show up early, with recognizable tracks only appearing again at the end. But hey, this was probably a budget-limited affair, and it's a great fifteen hours or so of third-person jiving. Here's to hoping that Tango Games puts out a sequel to this charming game.

Screenshots

Halo 3 Review

Halo 3 is an all-time classic that still holds up today, more so than Half-Life. The campaign is the best of the series and is all killer, no filler. From the opening stage that begins in a dense jungle and ends in an epic rescue at a dam, to the thrill of taking down a gigantic Scarab with a Warthog, to the final sequence featuring a race across an exploding ring-world fleeing from hordes of Flood, Halo 3 pulls no punches. Just like Half-Life, you're always doing something different, but unlike the former, Halo 3 had nine years of technological advancement as well as a much bigger budget to draw upon, resulting in a truly epic adventure. There's really nothing to criticize from a modern prospective, except perhaps the potato faces of the human characters. I played it on my Series S as part of the Master Chief collection, and it has higher resolution graphics and runs at 60 fps, making the gameplay much smoother than players originally experienced on the X Box 360. Halo 3 was also built around co-op, having Halo 2's the Arbiter present on many missions as a second playable character. The golden triangle of melee, grenades, and shooting is enhanced by equipment like the bubble shield and health regenerator, as well as heavy weapons like turrets that can be ripped out of their stands and toted around from a third-person perspective. Some weapons are still able to be dual-wielded, and you'll utilize them to mow down ape-like Brutes, Jackals, Grunts, Hunters, and the mutated Flood. This is a game that feels really good to play, and while the campaign is probably an eight hour experience at best, it's one of the best shooters of all time. Definitely play it on Game Pass if you want to know why Halo is still around. 343 still hasn't come close to replicating Bungie's classic.

New Music: Morning Star

 

This song has been around since my college days. There's an old demo that's full of clipping, but it's much more guitar-based, whereas this version utilizes various drum loops and a short synth riff. The vocal harmonies may not be that decipherable through all the distortion, but hey, what's a noise criminal to do, other than pollute?

Half-Life Review

 

This shot features ray-tracing, as is the rage.

Half-Life is easily one of the most influential games of all time. Its iconic opening, in which theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman rides a train alone to work, only to later accidentally trigger a resonance cascade, ushering in an extra-dimensional alien invasion, has been copied a million times. I'm currently playing through Atomic Heart, and it opens similarly, with your character getting to explore the world briefly before everything goes to hell. Half-Life was also one of the first games to heavily feature scripted sequences that enhanced its atmosphere and made the player feel as though they were really experiencing an escape from a government research facility. Scientists fall down elevator shafts, get gunned down by military grunts, and get torn apart by zombies. The soldier AI is still impressive sometimes over twenty years later, with the grunts throwing grenades, taking cover, and popping out to shoot at poor Freemen. The level design was also revolutionary, featuring huge caverns full of nuclear waste, hidden laboratories with secret weapons, and desert canyons overrun with tanks and helicopters. There is a real feeling of progression while playing Half-Life, of climbing out of the crumbling research facility and emerging into the hot Arizona sun. It is, in many respects, a modern game built with late nineties tech.

However, there are some warts. Half-Life was built using a heavily modified Quake engine, and the fast movement from that game is featured here. Gordon feels like he's sprinting with roller skates, and while that's fine for Half-Life's combat, it's not great for its frequent jumping puzzles. And there's quite a bit of platforming, more than I remembered. The closing Xen section gets lambasted for over-relying on platforming, but Xen is very short, and the troubles start much earlier. Gordon has air control and momentum, and you'll slide off ledges very frequently. Also, some of the level design is labyrinthine, and had I not played this game to death over the years, I probably would've been lost, especially in the later part of the game. 

Yet of all the classic shooters, from Dark Forces to Quake 2, I think Half-Life has aged the best, with its modern design elements and excellent atmosphere. You're always doing something new in Half-Life, from riding on a rail cart through flooded tunnels to burning a giant tentacle monster to death in a missile silo. A lot of people will recommend Black Mesa, a fan-created mod that brings Half-Life into Half-Life 2's Source engine, with many sections redesigned. And while Black Mesa is excellent, I'd still recommend the original game. Black Mesa somehow made Xen worse, making it a six hour experience full of wandering level design, instead of the brief otherworldly detour it is in Half-Life. Modder Sultim-t has just released a ray-tracing mod that replaces all of Half-Life's lighting with path-traced rays, and it's really fun to experience this game with cutting-edge lighting. I've put a few screenshots below, along with a video showcasing this mod, and I recommend it if you have a ray-tracing capable GPU.

The Esteemed Critic Reviews The Hangover

 

The Hangover is a curious relic from 2009. It can charitably be summed up as "a bunch of men approaching middle-age lose themselves in Vegas," but that doesn't erase the misogyny, the racism, and the lack of a grounded main character who is relatable. This movie launched the careers of Ed Helms, Zack Galifianakis, and Bradly Cooper, yet none of them have a particularly good showing here, besides Galifianakis. Helms plays a pushover dentist that acts exactly like Andy from The Office; Cooper is in smarmy douchbag mode as a teacher who advises his friend not to get married because "your life is over." Cooper's character is the worst; on morning of the eponymous hangover, the trio find a baby in their suite that Cooper wants to leave unattended. He bullies Helms' "Dr. Faggot" (yeah, 2009) into using his credit card to pay for a forty-five thousand dollar a night villa, and he never gets his comeuppance or learns a goddamn thing. If you have a comedy populated by detestable folks, they have suffer for their evil or become better people, otherwise the morality of the whole enterprise is called into question. And that's really it; The Hangover is a movie with a rotten core. Even Galifianakis' man-child is a convicted sex offender; that's a "joke" that I missed the first time I saw the thing. Watching The Hangover in 2023, you'll be shocked at how unfunny it is. There aren't really any jokes; it's all shock-value bits, like Mike Tyson cold cocking Galifianakis, or Ken Jeong jumping out of a truck naked and swinging. To understand how this movie made 600 million dollars, you have to take a trip back in time.

By the end of the aughts, douchebag masculinity was still running wild, baby. Gross-out comedies like American Pie had ruled the decade, and while the WWE was retreating from the edgy soap opera of the attitude era, everyone still remembered it. There would be a reckoning shortly, and the double-edge behemoth of the MCU and a touchier movie-going audience (when was the last time we had a hit comedy in theaters?) killed off the mid-budget flick. The Hangover seemed like something real. Its surprises were genuinely surprising, and an audience calloused to casual misogyny (all the women in this film are either strippers or shrews) and despicable characters (It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia aired in 2005) ran to theaters in droves to see The Hangover. I recall thinking it was funny as hell back in 2009. While a lot of the comedies from that era have problems, the filmography of Judd Apatow holds up much better because most of his movies have a heart, whereas The Hangover has nothing but a pair of shrugging shoulders that seem to exclaim "boys will be boys." The incredibly vile sequel proved my point (Helms' Stu gets a facial tattoo and has unconsensual sex with a Thai lady-boy and it's played for laughs) and I'm not sure anyone saw the third flick. Over a decade later, The Hangover is forgotten; Cooper is a movie star, and Galifianakis' and Helms' careers have petered out. If you're planning on rewatching it, don't; put in Superbad or The Forty Year-Old Virgin. If you've never seen it, watch something else.

New Music: Girlfriend

 

New is a bit of a misnomer; this song dates back to 2009 or so, when I first got my telecaster. I was going through my catalog, looking for songs to redo, and I stumbled upon this oldie. A whiny tongue-in-cheek ode to deadbeat boyfriends, it's just a simple singer-songwriter arrangement of acoustic guitar and vocals. I really need to change the strings on that acoustic. It's been two years, but I'm not a fan of bright-sounding acoustic guitars.

New Music: Living In The Past

 

Wrote this last weekend about a friend. I tried out a few chords I don't usually used, such as a B7b5, an Am6, and an E7#9, so I guess this means I'm a real songwriter, hah.

Writer's Block: Apophenia Sequel

 

Started writing a sequel to my soon to be self-published novel Apophenia. It's going pretty well, and it's fun to return to these characters and imagine what would've happened to them in the last ten years. Here's the first chapter below.

Mickey’s got the headlamp on again; he’s shining it around on the ground, searching rhythmically, his hands carefully tending the bare dirt like a chimpanzee scooping up termites. I’ve never known enough about methamphetamine to determine what he’s doing exactly, but my theories run the gamut from hallucinating to actually collecting tiny drug crystals that he likely accidentally scattered on the ground. He searches and searches and then rummages in his car, moving junk about, and when daytime arrives, the pile will have grown tremendously while the entrance to his dwelling will have become even harder to see. It’s a shack with a rotating cast of characters. I’ve called the city about it and they claim the building has been taken away from its druggy owners and put into the hands of a property management firm, but so far, Mickey and his ilk still haunt the place, moving around like dead men walking. The car is an ancient Corolla, Christmas tree green, with broken springs and enough bumper stickers to let you know that its owner is part of Fuck-You America, and damned proud of it. Come and take-it AR-15 sticker, check. 2020 Steal sticker, double check. It sputters like an emphysematic smoker when it runs, and Mickey’s always tinkering with it, changing tires and pulling plugs. He’s probably rebuilt the entire engine on a drug-fueled binge twice. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when on meth.

Mickey himself is of an indeterminable age, though I guess that he’s likely younger than myself. When he’s working, I can usually see his underpants, and they are a soiled black shade that tells me he’s been wearing them for months, if not years. Camo is his favorite color. From a distance, I can’t tell if he has his teeth.

I’m out in the dark with my dogs, Sheamus and Lilith, as they fumble around like fellow degenerates, their failing senses hindering their quest to find somewhere acceptable to evacuate their bowels. Lilith is a fourteen year-old pitbull with a face that sags on the left side due to muscular atrophy. Sheamus is a shaggy black son of a bitch with long plummage growing out of the back of his legs like Chewbacca. They are living remnants of another age, another life. When they go, a piece of myself will follow, and I’ll never get it back.

I glance back at Mickey and he’s examining something in his hands with such scrutiny that I figure he must’ve finally found what he was looking for all of those sleepless nights. To search and search and keep on searching. I admire the focus, I guess, even if it’s misplaced. Life seems to be more or less an aimless collection of bits interrupted by long sections of ennui. You remember the bits, however, and reconstruct a narrative that supports whatever conclusion you’re trying to reach. I don’t know if Mickey does this shit or not. I doubt it. His existence is likely more akin to an animal’s. A reactive life, a life lived in a perpetual haze as the physical circuitry that powers cognition becomes more and more damaged by daily meth use.

Sheamus finally notices Mickey and lets out a deep bellowing cry, the call of his people, an ancient garbage dog howl. Mickey doesn’t stir; he never does. Whatever powers of concentration his addiction grants him must be enormous. I give the old dog a tug of the leash but he digs in his heels and keeps barking. Lilith meanders around, oblivious, her glassy eyes and clogged ears neither seeing nor hearing any evil. Why it is my duty and not Arnold’s to take out these senior citizens I don’t know. Marriage seems to assign chores asymmetrically, and I’ve received the brunt of the labor. I figure whoever gets off their ass and actually does the task gets stuck with it, and such is my making that I’d rather get something done than sit around and wait for Arnold to notice. Perhaps Mickey’s relationship works in a similar manner. His baby-momma seldom joins him in his nocturnal tinkering, preferring to emerge from their hovel in the mid-afternoon. Like her partner, it’s difficult to determine her exact age, but from the near distance that I usually observe her, she seems to be poorly bearing the physical strain of frequent drug use. Her feet twist abnormally when she walks, as though she had a corrective surgery for club feet late in life. Or maybe her ankles were just broken and they never healed right, I dunno. I waste a lot of time speculating uselessly.

I drag the dogs back into our one-hundred and fifty year-old house, take their leashes off, and trot over to the couch, where I collapse in a tired heap. Arnold is on his computer wearing headphones, editing his latest video, back hunched, eyes squinting in concentration. He’s a bodybuilding influencer, a hawker of snake oil, a grifter-entertainer extraordinaire. When I first met him, he lived in a hovel and ate raw meat that he caught and killed. Now he does shit on camera for the interwebs. He makes a decent living, though the hours involved and the creativity demanded by the one video a week format have put a strain on our relationship.

“Why don’t you go to bed, babe?” he says, not peering away from his monitor

I don’t want to go to bed. I’m as tired as a human can be, but I don’t want to sacrifice my night for eight hours of sleep.

“Mickey’s out there, tinkering again,” I say.

“Why do you call him ‘Mickey’? His name is meth-head. You’re humanizing him, babe.”

Well of course I am. I have an inexhaustible supply of empathy that seethes out from my body in waves that oscillate.

“What’s your video about?” I ask.

“It’s a Arnold Picks Up Random Heavy Stuff video. Saw an old plow at an apple orchard and asked the guy if I could film myself moving it. Cantankerous old bastard let me for a fifty.”

I watch the video and see my husband giving his comedic monologue to the camera while rubbing tacky all over his forearms.

“Lemme tell you something, folks: if you want to beat the man, you gotta out eat the man!” A cartoon hotdog flashes across the screen and careens into Arnold’s mouth. “Mass begets strength. If you’re not prepared to stuff your face like the average American at Ponderosa’s, then you’ll never develop the sheer power to do random acts of stupidity like the one I’m about to perform.”

My husband gets in front of the plow and picks it up by pinching the blade in between the inside of his elbow joints. His face gets redder and redder as he drags it across the ground, heading, it seems, for a big oak tree. Suddenly a hillbilly stereotype rushes for Arnold and starts berating him, though my husband doesn’t even give him a glance, he’s so focused on moving the several hundred pounds of rusted farm equipment. When he gets it to the tree, he’s drenched by the spittle that the Goon has sprayed on him. That’s what I’ve named him: the Goon, for he is a cartoon-character come to life, a real snaggle-toothed gooferton, a mulleted moron. When Arnold gets to the tree, he drops the plow, lets out a triumphant roar, and then socks the Goon right in the mouth. He goes down like a his jaw is made of the thinnest glass.

“Why did you hit him?” I ask.

“It was planned,” explains Arnold. “Just a little surrealism for the viewers. I had to slip him a twenty. He was all for it.”

It all seems wrong; the whole performance, the dehumanization of an imbecile. I give Arnold the look that I often give him when I’m trying to summon the remnants of his soul.

“Come on, babe, it’s just a stupid video. I’m gonna put a cartoon “pow!” behind the punch. I didn’t really knock him out. You don’t think I know how to pull my punches?”

“No, I don’t think you do. I’ve seen you and Dave wail on each other.”

Dave is Arnold’s twin brother, a more quiet, sensitive soul. I’ve often wondered if I married the wrong twin.

“Hey, you wanna go to the orchard sometime? It’s only like ten minutes away. Beautiful place. Apples galore. Old rustic farm equipment. You can really appreciate the subtle degradation of small-town America’s farms. The trees, you know, they got nice branches. You like branches, right, Leona?”

Arnold’s being a little manipulative. He knows that I like worn-out places, areas where the cracks are showing. Dilapidation, in other words. I appreciate the honesty, the lack of shine. All things must pass, and all things decay. Sometimes, in moments of clarity, I wonder what the hell is wrong with me, and then I remember my upbringing, and I’m like “oh, yeah, that’s why.”

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll check it out.”

I purposefully omit “we.” Arnold is incredibly busy, not just with his stuff, but with the kids. He’s the more natural parent out of the two of us, which is a fact that I still can’t get used to, despite it’s obviousness. The man was wild when I met him, a part-time drug dealer, full-time maniac. Time seems to wring strange qualities out of people.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” I say suddenly.

Arnold gives me an appraising glance, shrugs his shoulders, and turns his attention back to the computer screen.

I put on my shoes, throw a jacket on, and step back outside. Mickey’s disappeared inside his hovel, and the night’s sky has a dark clarity to it that ebbs into my bones. I walk, through the empty streets of our small town, heading by the gas station with its bright lights, trotting past the covered silos of the weigh station, onward to the parking lot that lies before the seven-mile path that winds along the levy. The paved asphalt winds through a narrow path of trees, with wet lands to my right and train tracks to my left. The highway isn’t far, but at this time of night, there aren’t many cars. We’re passing through the tail end of winter, so even though the temperature is warming, insect life hasn’t returned, so my walk is a silent one beneath the emergent moon. I’m alone with my thoughts, and I try to master them rather than let them master me. It’s bizarre how lonely you can be as a married adult with two children. There is an existential gulf between people that can never be closed. Arnold and I can’t share the same head, and he can’t feel as I feel, and at the end of the day I’m stuck, a prisoner in my own skull. I process this thought with a dispassionate coldness. Walking (and fasting) put me in a meditative state, and I nestled deeper into the protective embrace of the Void.

I walk over an arching wooden bridge, an inlet flowing beneath me, the river to my right suddenly, sparkling with the light of the moon. There’s a clapping noise, growing louder, feet falling powerfully on the wood, so I move to the side, closer to the rail to let this approaching passerby go. Just a man, running in the dark, the details of his visage obscured by a hood. As he passes, time seems to slow for just an instant as I stare into the darkness where his face should be, and then he’s off, jogging into the dark of the woods. I have no knife, no mace, just my general orneriness and my ability to slink into the shadows like a specter.

The bridge takes me to an area where the trees have nearly grown across the trail, making a tunnel-like canopy. Were I to be assaulted, this would be a good place, although the underpass up ahead is probably the best. Even at this distance, it almost looks like there are shapes lingering about, but I resolve to walk a little further, still desiring to get some mileage out of the night and my legs. Something catches my eye, glimmering in the moonlight. There, on a bench, a little metal cash box. All around the bench are the half-eaten remains of hedge apples, as though a sasquatch sat there and had its meal. I stand and look at the box for a minute, transfixed. Gingerly, I stretch out a hand and feel the cool coldness of its metal exterior. Without thinking, I pick it up, tuck it under my arm, and book it back the way I came. It isn’t until I’m home that I stop and sit down on my side-porch and open the box. Inside is a large amount of money, stacks of one-hundred dollar bills three inches thick. There is no one outside, not even Mickey, but I immediately shut the box and go inside.

I go up to the attic to count the money. The attic has a triangular ceiling that is very low, and it’s full of stuff, boxes of holiday decorations inherited from my mother, plastic totes containing college notebooks that I haven’t unpacked in over a decade. It’s a cluttered place, but I like to hide here, especially in the northwest corner, where my ancient computer sits, waiting for my fingers to type on its worn keyboard. I sit down on the green carpet and open the box and meticulously count the stacks. It’s one-hundred thousand dollars worth of cash. I think for a moment and try to contemplate why someone would leave a metal box full of a fortune in the park, unattended. Did I just rob a senile grandmother? Was someone being held for ransom, and I fucked it all up?

“Drug deal,” I say, suddenly.

I think of my neighbor stumbling through the park, his headlamp cutting through the night like the wandering vision of an old dog. There’s no way this chest was meant for Mickey, who seems to own nothing of value, and who would likely not have a clue what to do with that amount of cash. But what am I going to do with all that money? The questions hangs in the air like a rancid funk as I wander downstairs and go to bed.

Deadspace (Remake) Review

 

Deadspace is easy to distill down to its influences. Take the gameplay from Resident Evil, the atmosphere from Aliens, the spacestation from System Shock, and add some enemy design elements stolen from John Carpenter's The Thing, and you have everything that makes Deadspace tick. Despite not being original, Deadspace does its haunted-house in space thing very well, so well, in fact, that there's not a whole lot to complain about in this new remake. The original came out in 2008; since then, there have been a whole lot of graphical advances, and Deadspace puts them to work. The lighting is top-notch, with excellent use of shadows and flickering ambient illumination that periodically brightens the deep darkness. This is the darkest game I've played since Doom 3, and that's a good thing. I played it on a VA monitor with a pair of good headphones, and it was definitely an immersive experience. Deadspace is creepy rather than terrifying; I didn't have to stop playing because of nerves, mainly because I'm not a pussy (hah) and also because the third person perspective mitigates the tension somewhat, unlike, say Alien: Isolation, another game that I was frequently reminded of while blasting through Deadspace's fourteen hour runtime. Having never played the original, this was a new experience, and I enjoyed it immensely. Poor starship engineer Isaac discovers that the Ishimura is overrun with grotesquely mutated monsters wearing their insides on their outsides, and as his comrades are slowly picked off, he must scrounge together enough improvised weaponry and ammo to survive. The arsenal is limited to six weapons, but they are all memorable. The plasma cutter is a hard-hitting pistol you'll use to surgically remove the necromorph's limbs (necromorph=xenomorph from Aliens) which is the only way to put most enemies down permanently. My two favorites were the contact beam, a powerful laser cannon, and the ripper, an industrial saw that hovers a rotating blade in front of you, perfect for sawing up nasty beasties. This is a gory game, with blood and entrails scattered everywhere, and Isaac can recover more ammo or health drops by curb stomping the disfigured remains of his opponents, rendering their corpses into glistening giblets.

The story is serviceable, with Isaac's objectives frequently being changed as the shit hits the fan, and a memorable doublecross occurring during the last couple hours. There are audio and text logs to discover, but I've tired of that mechanic since System Shock 2, so I usually just skimmed through the latter. My only real complaint is that Deadspace stutters a lot. The game compiles shaders before launch, so I don't know why it stutters so much, but it happens frequently, usually whenever you're entering a new room. So despite the game running around 100 frames per second at 1440p on my rtx 3080 powered-computer, it never quite feels smooth. If you're intolerant of hitchy gameplay, then maybe stay away from this one, (or any new computer release). Seems like a lot of games are being released in shoddy condition lately on pc. Hopefully that changes.

Screens and a gameplay video below:

Apophenia Chapter Twelve

 

Chad’s car is a 2003 PT Cruiser, navy blue, full of homework papers, stinking clothes, and miscellaneous detritus. He immediately turns on his stereo just as I’m settling into the vehicle, and the Queens of the Stone Age song No One Knows kicks on extra crunchy, the blown subwoofer on my side of the vehicle providing extra distortion. We take off, Chad pressing his foot on the gas pedal like a septuagenarian, creeping toward stop signs, pausing for two seconds at red lights, the light night flow of the city’s traffic passing us by like blood cells. We’re on our way to the heart, the fleshy, vital heart that beats and pulsates through these sad sack lives, pushing us onward, head over heels, trying to get us to move, to breathe, to live, to fuck. Chad lights a joint while he’s driving, and I only laugh and wonder how slowly he’ll continue, now under the influence. He offers me a tote, and I smile and say what the hell and take it. I’ve been living in a repressive environment, one of fatness, omnipresent pasta, mulleted men, and discarded ambition, and I’ve traded that life for one of muscles, drugs, guns, and youthful degeneracy. Does Chad fit into this? I think, looking at his effeminate complexion, smooth and oval-faced. I don’t know right now, and it’s fine, I conclude, to not know. We pull up to Cans and park in the lot, and it’s more packed than I would’ve imagined. I see the Conans standing before the entrance, engaged in a heated discussion with the bouncer, both of them wearing sleeveless shirts and cargo pants with combat boots. "Are those your friends?" asks Chad. I only shake my head and pull him forward.

"What the hell you mean Predator’s a shitty movie?" says Arnold, talking up to the bouncer, an African American fellow well over six feet tall.

"It’s not my favorite, alright? I’m more of a Terminator fan," says the bouncer.

"Terminator? Did you hear that, Dave? James fucking Cameron? That goddamn movie has time travel in it, and don’t get me started on how retarded time travel is. Why wouldn’t Skynet keep sending terminators back in time? Why would they quit just because Linda Hamilton stopped them once or twice? Is there a limit on that shit? Furthermore, is time linear, Maurice? Is it a straight line? I just can’t believe that. I believe in the grandfather paradox," says Arnold, emphatically gesticulating, moving his arms around in circles. "Back to the Future, Terminator, they can suck it."

"Predator’s got Carl Weathers in it," points out Dave.

"Why should I care about Carl Weathers? Just because he’s black?" asks Maurice.

"That’s probably why Dave said that, but forget him. Predator is the perfect action movie. The first part is your basic military flick. You got Schwarzenegger dealing knives and one-liners, cars blowing up, a solid team of bad-ass dudes. But then the tables turn, so to speak. The Predator starts hunting them, and they don’t know how to deal with it. There’s that scene where they blow apart the jungle with their machine guns, these big, muscled dudes, they’re helpless and left swinging their dicks around impotently, to no fucking avail. Is there that kind of phallic imagery in Terminator, Maurice? Can you really tell me a movie with fucking time travel in it is a better film? The machines will destroy us? Hell, that’s the most cliché sci-fi theme ever."

"Do you guys want in or not?" asks Maurice.

"You don’t have to let them in if they’re behaving badly," I say. "This is Chad, a classmate of mine."

"What’s up," says Chad, putting his hand forth. Neither of the brothers moves to shake his hand.

"We don’t shake hands," explains Dave.

"What’s wrong with you all?" says Maurice, shaking Chad’s hand before it is withdrawn. "You shake another man’s hand unless he’s done something bad to you."

"Man is a funny word. It has a varying definition in some circles," replies Arnold.

"If I let you two assholes in, you better drink a lot and tip the strippers," says Maurice. "Five dollar cover charge."

"What the hell we gotta pay a cover charge for if we’re gonna drink and tip the strippers?" asks Arnold. Maurice is about to reply with a barrage of obscenities, but I cut in and hand him a twenty dollar bill. The boys and I enter, going down the entryway, into the bar where we grab a table next to the stage. The crowd is good, much better than I expected considering Leslie’s constant complaints. I look at Arnold, who’s apparently still pissed about Maurice’s preference for Terminator over Predator, and ask him if he’ll go buy everybody drinks.

"Purple Rain over there needs to give me some money," he says. "I’m not spotting him anything." Chad fishes in his pocket and gives Arnold a five dollar bill, and he goes to fetch the alcohol.

"Do you guys get into fights and disagreements everywhere you go?" I ask Dave.

"He does, and I usually have to back him up," replies Dave. "We don’t play nice with others."

"I’m told that success in life often depends on how to win friends and influence enemies, or some crap like that," I say. "Social decorum and basic manners don’t apply, I guess, to barbarians such as yourselves?"

"I don’t know that we’re looking to get the same things out of life as most people," says Dave. "We don’t particularly care about living in poverty, as long as we have enough money for food, drugs, and other basic amenities. The comforts of modern life are overrated. I don’t have a television, a cellular phone, a garbage disposal. Our refrigerator is twenty years old; our furniture consists of pieces we’ve scavenged or stolen. Arnold and I desire strength over all things, not just of the body, but also of the mind. The whole Nietzschean concept, the will to power, the triumph of the individual over the harshness of the world—that’s the ideal we’re striving for. I don’t want to live in a McMansion with a four-car garage and a bunch of kids. I’d rather live out in the urban wasteland burning effigies in my backyard, stripped to the waist, drunk and belligerent. I’m selfish. I’m dedicated."

"You’re an artist," says Chad, interrupting.

"I think of myself that way. I don’t know if Arnold does. But he is, too. He’s probably a greater artist than me."

"These goddamn beers were five dollars a piece," says Arnold, slamming down our drinks. "Now I remember why I don’t go out anymore."

"We never went out in the first place," says Dave.

"That ‘cause we’re banned from half the bars in this town," replies Arnold. "We did go out, initially. Otherwise, we would’ve never been banned."

"Those are some nice melons," says Chad, as a stripper walks past our table.

"Hooters," says Dave.

"Bazoombas," replies Arnold.

"Ah, the conventional male obsession with tits. It feels good, you know, to hear you guys fetishize something normal, as opposed to, say, cannibalism or anthropomorphic ponies," I say.

"Hey, don’t think we don’t like to get freaky in the bedroom," says Arnold.

"Please don’t say we, Arnold," says Dave.

"Dave, you’re a weird motherfucker, at least as weird as me, so don’t be all leave-me-outta-this-shit, because I have stories, and you know I’ll tell them," replies Arnold.

"At least I’m not into pegging," says Dave.

"You know, we have some nice strap-ons for sale at Les Adultes, available in all sizes and colors," I tell Arnold.

"Dave likes it when they pee in his mouth," says Arnold.

"Welp, I’ve had about enough of this discussion," says Chad. "Can we just look at the boobies and leave all this weird stuff where it belongs?"

"You a Mormon?" asks Arnold.

"No, why?" replies Chad.

"He does it missionary only, like Bram Stoker intended," says Dave.

"Excuse me, what? Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. Are you thinking of Brigham Young?" I say.

"Whatever the little leprechaun’s name was," says Arnold.

"A leprechaun didn’t found Mormonism," says Chad.

"The fuck it didn’t. A little racist leprechaun that’s polygamous? Wears a green buckled hat like a pilgrim? Dances with a box of Lucky Charms?" says Arnold.

"Now you’re just fucking with us," I tell him.

"That ain’t me," says Arnold, as the first stripper comes on stage. She’s blonde, curvaceous, conventional, a decent pole dancer. The boys watch and salivate; I can see the horniness radiating off of their eyeballs, dripping onto the table, ugly, desperate, obscene. They grip the table; they fixate their vision, peering holes through this large-breasted female, boring into her soul, eager to see something that no one else can, through the shallow skin, the shiny exterior. They want, they want, they want—they have no conception of balance, of shared sexual pleasure, they only know the needs of themselves, the raw, angry desire—Arnold grits his teeth, he gnashes and bites his lip—and the blonde dances, writhing her hips, moving her breasts like ammunition. Some toss dollar bills up at her, not many, but a few. The Conans have come prepared, and they spew cash all over the stage, the sum total likely not exceeding forty dollars. I watch her collect, smoothly bending down, not taking her eyes off of the audience, giving us her face, her radiant, sun-tanned visage. Jasmine could be up there, dancing, strutting, having money rain down on her priceless flesh. I don’t know if I could stomach the cynicism that flows through my veins. It is, nonetheless, an amusing fantasy.

Candy is next, as I knew she would be. She comes out like a firecracker, all sparks and flickering lights, her eyes wide, her smile large enough to devour our glances, our ambitions, our hungry needs. She struts and stalks upon the stage, prowling, almost crouched down, like a beast of prey, until she finds the pole and latches on, her moves unbelievably graceful, tight, practiced, effortless. I am absorbed, soaking in every movement like it is the last I will see, appreciating the skill and mastery on display. What is art but gestures of an artist? The body she has, most of it granted to her by God, is bent and cupped by preternatural gyrations, ranges of motion I do not think I have, nor will I ever. Graceful, limber, supple—I can’t think of enough words to describe her, nor do I tear my eyes from the figure that moves, motivated by the stage, the music, the cries and praises of the audience, all of us hunched over and offering up our life savings just for a glimpse of affection, of acceptance and exclusivity. Desire is selfish; it can be no other way, and I imagine how the boys must feel, looking at me in my black dress, my legs long and lean and more beautiful than any limbs of theirs. What do they have that I cannot offer? What can they give her that I cannot?

The Esteemed Critic Reviews The Menu

 

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Or hot, in this movie.

Every artist yearns to be understood, or at least, appreciated, yet every artist with ambition has to pander to the rich in order to climb the ladder of status. Yet at the top, it is never worth it, because no one at that level cares about art, they only concern themselves with fame, power, and money. Thus, the artist's soul is damaged, for his or her art is no longer even art but just another cog in the capitalist machine that powers our world. The desire for recognition makes prostitutes out of all of us, The Menu suggests, although it conveys this message in a much more humorous manner than my staid prose. Anna Taylor Joy plays an escort named Margot who is hired to accompany foodie Tyler (played for many laughs by Nicholas Hoult) to an exclusive island restaurant called Hawthorne, operated by famous chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). This dinner is more than it initially seems, and each of its clientele are there for a purpose, that is, besides Margot, who is a last minute substitution. There's an aging actor (John Liguizamo) who's there to try to push a reality TV show; a threesome of finance bros interested in name dropping and status; a food critic (Janet Mcteer) who has sunk many a career; and an aging couple of richies who can't even name a dish they had, despite dining at Hawthorne ten times. Fiennes is great as an insane celebrity chef, with his facial expressions reminding me of his villainous role as Lord Voldemort. I can't say too much more about The Menu without giving too much away. Let it suffice it to say that it's incredibly funny, and definitely worth seeing, especially if you've ever had a service industry job. A much better comedy thriller than Glass Onion.