Casual Cogitations

28 Days Later is not really a zombie movie in the traditional sense. One could honestly argue that it's not a living dead movie at all, since the disease, which renders mankind rabid, doesn't reduce its victims to blank faced slaughter machines with a thirst for blood and hunger for flesh. Society is not threatened by reanimated corpses, but by individuals infected with an illness that leaves them insanely angry and homicidal. The hordes here don't attack for food; they attack for fun. It's as if the lightning-fast infection burrows down deep into the archeological DNA we all carry and re-activates the hunter-gatherer gene in mega-spades. And the fact that one little drop of infected tissue, from salvia or a bleeding cut, can transform you in a matter of seconds significantly ups the anxiety ante.

28 Days Later establishes a new foothold in the whole end-of-the-world sci-fi fright flick extravaganza. It is a movie about a plague gone wild, an apocalyptic fable in the vein o The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, or 12 Monkeys. It does so without hardcore gore effects or shots of epic scope holocaust. At its core, this masterful but somewhat maddening movie shows us the more human side of annihilation, allowing its epic tale of the planet's possible end play out in small individual moments of quick, volatile rage. All hope may not be lost, but it seems to be available in ever decreasing supplies.

Director Boyle and writer Alex Garland use two different devices to keep the suspense level high in 28 Days Later, something that future cinematic shockers would do well to take notice of. First, they make it very clear, almost from the very beginning, that death and destruction can come at any time, from anywhere. There is no such thing as sanctuary (as a church filled with the infected freaks exemplifies), and just when you've come to trust a situation or person, horror can come crashing through a window or spray across the wall in a torrent of turmoil. Secondly, they make their "zombies" unconventional by turning up their rage and riot factors, removing the slow ambulatory security that comes in, say, Tom Savini's remake of the classic Night Of The Living Dead. There the main character of Barbara merely saunters by the reanimated threat, as if taking a casual, if cautious walk. But the beast brood here is fast and furious. This has a profound effect on the narrative drive of the film. It places the audience on its guard and makes every scene one of potential dread and disaster. They then follow up on the premise and payoff handsomely with each new threat or assault. From running corpses engulfed in flames to the hacking to death of a newly infected friend, 28 Days Later makes its savage world sing with a shattering sense of the unexpected.

In a modern global community filled with AIDS, SARS, and Ebola, 28 Days Later functions as an admonitory reminder that technology alone can only take us so far. As important as they are, computers and mapping the human genome cannot save us from simple biological outbreaks or chemical warfare. The universe is comprised of billions of germs and untold undiscovered viruses, and yet we waltz around the planet, de-foresting habitats and exploring unreachable regions, all in the name of science and advancement. 28 Days Later tells us that somewhere along the line we're going to mess with something that knows how to fight back hard, and when faced with this threat, the only viable means of resistance will not be those wonderful futuristic conveniences, but the tools of our evolutionary ancestry: the knife, the club, the projectile. Part of the reason for the film's unrelenting sense of terror is the idea that we are left utterly defenseless, that in a country without ready access to weapons (you can hear Americans in the audience wondering why these Limeys aren't loaded for bear against the hyperactive hissy fitters), your wits and your wallop are far more important. Even at the end, we learn that the more flash and gun powdered the protection, the more impotent the safeguard becomes. Technology may ultimately be responsible for what happens in 28 Days Later, but it's funny that it doesn't hang around to try and sort the problem out.

At its heart, therefore, 28 Days Later is the story of man's will to survive, about what it takes to face the fear of extinction and fight like hell to keep it from happening. The bleak tone and even darker message of humans turning on themselves magnifies the hopelessness and turns a terrifying film into something much more uncomfortable. And if we sit back for a moment and argue that all monster movies are a reflection of their times and creators, 28 Days Later has a great deal to say about us. Sure, there is an endearing desire to continue on, to find a way to overcome and compete against the riot of raging victims. But toward the end of the movie, a character states that this new world—where person kills person for irrational, uncontrollably instinctual reasons—doesn't appear to be so different from what society was like pre-infection. Perhaps 28 Days Later is the ultimate crime nightmare, a metaphorical depiction of a world where the felonious element is unstoppable and unflappable, impossible to control or understand. Or maybe it wants to comment on man's reluctance to resolve his inner demons peacefully, always wanting to work out his psychological traumas on the battlefield or street gang turf. There is definitely a desire on the part of Boyle and Garland to make a solid point about the fall of organized society, but the anarchy in the UK result seems fuzzy in its final determination.

This goes to a very real aspect of 28 Days Later. This is far from a perfect film. Indeed, it wears its flaws proudly and provocatively. As with most movies of this genre, the cautionary example about man himself being more deadly that the undead denizens of destruction around him gets a tired repeat here. Like the biker gang who infiltrates the Mall of Solitude in Dawn Of The Dead, the minute our survivors meet up with the military unit north of Manchester, you know we are about to see the terror turn inward. Too bad that the rationale for the soldier's redolent behavior is specious at best. When we hear what is about to happen to our heroes, especially the women, we wonder why the movie decided to take this turn, when better ones seem prevalent. Also, most fans of fierce, ferocious exercises in horror like their blood ladled on in huge buckets, not overcranked and strobe-lit artistic arterial sprays. There is good gore in 28 Days Later, but no great big globs of goo. In some instances, we don't mind not seeing everything; the technique provides more terror than an autopsy style glimpse of internal organs or dismembered body parts could ever inject. But to have a machete-wielding wild woman and a baseball bat-brandishing hero and to never once get a good look at their handiwork seems like a colossal gyp. This movie has tone and atmosphere aplenty (the opening sequences in a deserted London are memorable) but occasionally falls down where fans want it (and the body parts) to fly.

Despite its flaws, Boyle and Garland supply enough invention and insight to render 28 Days Later a real step forward in the zombie apocalypse genre. Many will still balk at calling this a living dead movie, and they are right. It's a living evil film. To make the movie as human as they do and yet never shy away from the ferocious nature of the beast waiting around every corner, to depict people as the ultimate threat to each other may be clichéd, but never before has the formula been so vicious. Their use of digital video adds a very vérité, realistic quality to the movie, even when the sequences are carefully storyboarded and choreographed. The minor image imperfections that a video element provides, everything from blurring to grain to pixelation, makes the experiment in cinema seem like a news broadcast from Judgment Day, a terrible transmission from a possible future shock. Unlike most films, the filmmakers here—obvious fans of the forefathers who destroyed the world before them—know how to keep an audience on the edge of their seat. Had they magnified the carnage and taken more chances with the narrative (perhaps avoiding the maniac military men all together), 28 Days Later would be a new modern classic, a film to move into the pantheon of the proud, like Dawn Of The Dead or The Exorcist , but this unusual take on the zombie genre tempers too many of its outer trappings to be faultless.

Because.

I do not watch Gladiator because of the romance between Maximus and that girl whose name I forgot. I watch Gladiator because Maximus kicks ass, and that is enough for me.

I do not like Gears of War because of the complex relationships formed between characters. I like Gears of War because it kicks ass. I will happily discuss all of the nuances of this ass-kickery, but if you get no further than the introduction paragraph, know this: Gears of War is a video game that I like and if you disagree you are wrong.

Are those real?

Since I know that I am not the only person to look at 'screenshots' with absolute skepticism, we should probably start with graphics. And a far-fetched analogy. There is this one store I occasionally go to where the first question everybody inevitably asks me is "are you shopping for your girlfriend?" To which I inevitably respond, "no, I just like the feel of lace. Do you mind if I try these on?" In a similar, yet completely different way other people - people in different stores - ask, "does it really look that good?" The answer is simply yes. Gears of War looks awesome. It looks so good that I often do not even notice the graphics. Let me elaborate.

Though I love to watch Star Wars IV: A New Hope, I am constantly noticing the total lack of realism. The ships look like models, and the explosions look absurd. I'm not saying it's a bad movie. They did the best they could, but the lack of realism distracts from the intended experience.

Now we look at Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Say what you will about the script/plot/whiny Skywalker. Yes, they should have called him Whaa-nakin. But the special effects in that movie are so well done that they are often totally undetectable.

This brings us back to Gears. There are no blocky characters or blurry textures. All of the environments are highly detailed and elaborate. If I am looking at the scenery, it is not because I see mis-aligned textures or a crack in the geometry; it is because I am genuinely curious about the area I am exploring. The point: the graphics are so good that you hardly even notice them. And because the in-game graphics are so good, there is no reason to cut away to play a movie clip. All clips are rendered using the game engine, and none require load times as they smoothly connect the different portions of play.

More than just dashing good looks

The gameplay is familiar enough to be easy, but different enough to be fun. The analog sticks work the same as they have for every FPS and games like Kameo: Elements of Power. Epic Games was even kind enough to include the "Legacy" controller setup, in case you have not played a shooter since Goldeneye on the '64. The cover mechanism is extremely refined, which is good, since it comprises the majority of the gameplay. After about an hour of play, it is easy to thrust from one barrier to another in an effort to flank your opponents. Character movements and animations are fluid. The camera emphasizes the movements by shaking and tilting like in the Blair Witch Project - albeit in a good way. If you can imagine it once all those memories of induced vomiting subside.

The weapon set is also familiar but unique. The standard, trite arms are present: the machine gun, the shotgun, the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher, and the absolutely worthless pistol that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns. You know, the basics. There are also a few novelties, like the over-publicized chainsaw attack and the grenade which players can use as a melee weapon, thus bitch-slapping a time bomb onto someone's face. Both are nice, but neither is as gratifying as the Hammer of Dawn. The Hammer of Dawn is not a gun, but a targeting device. The real weapon is a satellite orbiting the planet. When the Hammer trigger is pulled, the small, hand-held device will point out a target to the satellite. And then (now pay attention) the skies will part and a pillar of fire will fall from the heavens and destroy thine enemies with a satisfying splatter of blood and body-bits.

Shh. Don't say a word. Just enjoy the mental picture for a moment. Fire pillar and body-bits.

Yeah. That's nice.

The story is certainly a story, and nobody will say that it is not a story. Certainly. The problem is that I completed the game and I have no idea what the story was about. Maybe something about monsters that lived below earth? I know that the main character is named Marcus, and that he wears a bandanna. I really was not paying attention to why I was fighting, I was all too excited about exploring the next area. One argument might be that a game this good does not need a good story; others would say that it is my fault for not paying attention, while still others will contest that your parents don't really love you. I don't know who is right, but I think that it is fair to point out that I never understood what the hell Halo was about either. I do know that the gameplay, the levels, and the encounters are enough to make me want to go back and play Gears again, and again, and again, but not again. Four repeats would be excessive.

But I actually have friends

First: no you don't. Second: the multiplayer is awesome.

With a single player component this good, a multiplayer component is almost unnecessary. Epic could have easily slipped in a half-baked CTF piece of Quake 4 sucks. Instead, they flawlessly integrated a co-op campaign mode and a brutally addicting team deathmatch. The co-op mode is drop in-drop out, which means that at any point while playing single player, you can invite a friend to join and take over one of your AI teammates. Then they can simply leave and the AI will resume control of the character. It is most easily described in a haiku:

I saw you playing
I joined; we played together
I stopped, you did not

The deathmatch is great. The maps are balanced and offer a variety of tactics and strategies. The gameplay forces you to work as a team, which I believe offers an all around better experience than a game where a lone gunman can win the game. No, you will find no Steven Seagals here. It is all Tom Hanks (Saving Private Ryan, with a few Gumps).

The only problem, and indeed my only real issue with the game as a whole, is the matchmaking system. Halo 2 has a phenomenal matchmaking system, and there is no reason that every other company should not have one at least as good. There is no shame in building upon a phenomenal system that everybody already loves. Let us do a comparison:

In Halo 2 I can log in, join a party of three friends, and the four of us will be randomly assigned four opponents on a random map. We play the game to completion, and then the process repeats. The key is the instant action.

In Gears of War I can host a game, invite my friends to join, and wait. I played for an hour and a half, and we only (finally) played 4-on-4 for the last 15 minutes. There is a word for this type of situation, and that word is "vexatious". Look it up.

Marcus Christ

In spite of these truly grievous inadequacies Gears of War remains the best new game I have played all year. The graphics are incredible (even in standard definition), and to call the gameplay addicting would be an understatement. This game is so great it may actually be crucified, so play it soon. If you have an Xbox 360 just go and buy it. Go.

Game Master, a local multi-gaming mag that I've long regard with the utmost esteem since its release, has departed. It has for a long time now. Due to some publishing and financial reasons, Game Master was taken out of the business, thus began my sinkhole. Who is to accompany me on those long defecating breaks on the comfort room? Those long dragging lines? Those solitary morning breakfasts?

Enter G.A.M.E.

G.A.M.E is the new Game Master, it seems. Aside from G.A.M.E being more online-oriented, they're basically two peas in a pod. Oh and instead of getting long two-page reviews plastered with screen shots and caustic one liners, you get two-paragraph irksome reviews. I have nothing against laconic reviews, so long its handled efficiently.

Anyway, here's my take:

• White space - the layout looks too simplistic for me (that’s just me, guys). A gaming magazine has to have more spunk and manly guffaw. It has to provide “shock and awe”.
• More screenshots - don’t just use the hi-res and boring jpegs provided for in the press kits. Players want more screenshots of ACTUAL IN-GAME FOOTAGE. Trust me, that’s what PC Gamer and other mags do.
• Sidebars - include little bits of game trivia or information in the sidebars such as difficulty settings, HD or widescreen options or cool NPCs and other knick-knacks. It makes for a better review.
• Official logos - use the official logos of the games or the brand/company in the reviews. The marketing managers will be more happy that you did. And it builds upon the game’s brand equity.
• Have a website - I know they’re already planning for this. Can’t wait to see how it will look like. I do hope that it’s a blog and contains some stuff not found in the mag. A mag and its site have to work in tandem to promote each other. Synergy is the key word here.

"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

With its unconventional, non-linear narrative, Slaughterhouse-Five-Kurt Vonnegut’s post-modern experiment in mercurial meta-fiction and darkly humorous comment on the absurdity of war—still manages to provoke, entertain, and disturb, even after nearly 40 years.

It is anti-war, but that's not all it is. The category is too simplistic, like calling Les Misérables a crime story. Slaughterhouse-Five is actually a treatise on death — both a pragmatic acceptance of its inevitability, as summed up by the repeated, fatalistic signature phrase "So it goes," and a bold defiance of its power over us.

To the latter end, Vonnegut offers the quintessential everyman, Billy Pilgrim, whose very name evokes the journey each of us makes from one end of our lives to the other. Billy's unique gift is that he has become "unstuck in time." The subtle and clever narrative trick here is that Vonnegut never exactly makes it clear if this is really happening to Billy, or if it's a symptom of madness, of finding final refuge from the horrors of the world inside one's own head, like the hapless hero of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. (We learn that Billy first becomes unstuck following an accident in which he injures his head.) It's ultimately irrelevant. To Billy, it's happening. He can step through a door in one decade and emerge in another. He has become a sort of human message in a bottle, drifting along the currents of time without finding any particular shore to rest upon.

Once time is no longer an issue for Billy, neither is death. He has seen his death, just as he's seen his childhood, many times, and no longer fears it. He has also become an object of interest and study to comical aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who observe him in a glassed-in zoo on their distant world. The Tralfamadorians, who look like little toilet plungers, also exist in all times at once, and thus have no need to fear death. For them, any being that is dead in one time period is perfectly all right in another. Our fates are out of our control, so why waste valuable mental energy on fear and angst?

As far as its anti-war stance goes, Slaughterhouse-Five can't be thought of in the same terms as more overt anti-war classics like All Quiet on the Western Front. We never see Billy Pilgrim in any sort of major battle set-piece. Indeed, most of his war experience that we witness involves his stint as a POW in Dresden, right before the bombardment. We don't see the heroics of countless Hollywood wartime propaganda movies. We see desperate men trying to live 24 hours at a time, and becoming hard and mean in the process. (Not for nothing is Billy's fellow soldier and bête noire named Weary.)

The book's title is the Dresden location where Allied prisoners are temporarily housed — another institution whose trade, even before the war, was death. Billy is the ultimate detached observer, bearing more resemblance to, say, the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (a film that seems to carry a small degree of influence from this novel) than to any traditional portrayal of the soldier boy. Billy is both involved in and removed from human experience, and the "So it goes" mantra that follows each notice of death's handiwork isn't so much glibness as resignation and sorrow over a situation no one can control when it comes for you. It's bad enough we have to die in the first place. How stupid and pointless of human beings to speed the process along through the all-too-efficient machine of warfare. The ultimate pointlessness is encapsulated by the execution of an American sergeant, following all the horror and mass destruction of Dresden, for stealing a teapot from the ruins.

As he was wont to do, Vonnegut gets meta and slips himself into the book, first in an opening chapter that is direct autobiography, then as his alter-ego, the marginally talented and perpetually out-of-print SF hack novelist Kilgore Trout. To Vonnegut, a novel wasn't so much a vehicle for make-believe as a way to look at life as reflected in an assortment of funhouse mirrors. Billy meets the acerbic Trout in his temporal wanderings, and through him Vonnegut makes the observation that provides the book with its subtitle: all wars are children's crusades, as all wars are fought by soldiers barely out of their teens, some of whom have never left home before they were called upon by their countries to kill and die. So it goes.

That this book resonated with Vietnam-era readers is a no-brainer. That it continues to resonate speaks to a universal quality that so many novels attempt but few attain. Just over forty years on, America is embroiled in a war that many critics are saying is as wrong-headed, if not moreso, than Vietnam, Billy Pilgrim's strange odyssey speaks to us anew. Would that we could get unstuck in time, just for a moment, to speak to those we've lost, soldiers and civilians and now even Vonnegut himself, and ask, "How did we ever come to this?" Who knows — they might just shrug and say, "So it goes." For now, we have this book, Vonnegut's timeless literary requiem for a world we all want but cannot seem to make for ourselves, where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

What makes Vonnegut’s work so provocative and intellectual is his ability to weave theme and imagery together. Only when it’s viewed as a whole can one see a pattern, pushing through the fog of war and words. Like a jigsaw puzzle or a dream analysis, Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim create a picture that, ironically, does say something intelligent about war.

I'm not sure if science fiction had ever seen anything like this before 1979. This is science fiction made to laugh at itself while honoring its rich tradition, but it is much more than that. Adams' peculiarly dead-on humor also draws deeply from the well of sociology, philosophy, and of course science. Whenever Adams encountered a sacred cow of any sort, he milked it dry before moving on. Beneath the surface of utter hilarity, Adams actually used his sarcasm and wit to make some rather poignant statements about this silly thing called life and the manner in which we are going about living it.

This is one reason the book is so well-suited for multiple readings-a high level of enjoyment is guaranteed each time around, and there are always new insights to be gained from Adams' underlying, oftentimes subtle, ideas and approach.

Adams' unique and peculiar sense of humor, rife with gonzo aliens, exploding galaxies, and the infamous Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, might not have found an audience at all had it not had the good fortune to burst upon the world during the hight of Star Wars mania. George Lucas's box-office demolishing opus had not only brought space opera into the mainstream of pop-culture consciousness, but for SF fans, it had brought some much needed light-heartedness into a genre that had been spending the past couple of decades taking itself very seriously indeed in an effort to rid itself of the stigma of juvenile pulp fiction and be regarded as mature literature.

Where Lucas, through the lamentations of the all-too-human droid C3P0 (of whom Marvin seems a loving parody) and the Mos Eisley cantina scene, had told SF fans it's perfectly okay to chuckle at this stuff now and again, Adams snatched the reins and propelled us into out-and-out farce. In fact it can be said that Douglas Adams probably made the first successful stab at comedy writing in SF in the last half of the 20th century. Sure, other writers had tried their hand at it, but no one really successfully made people guffaw until Adams came along with his inspired melding of Lucas and Monty Python.

Given that, it still must be said that there's no point in trying to pretend this is any attempt at high literature, just as it's senseless to make an argument that the Three Stooges created timeless cinema. Hell, just kick up your heels and have a good laugh.

Much of the humor here is impossible to describe; this novel must be read to be appreciated. It seems like every single line holds a joke of some kind within it. The characters are also terrific: the unfortunate Arthur Dent, who basically has no idea what is going on; Ford Prefect, Arthur's remarkable friend from Betelgeuse; Zaphod Beeblebrox, with his two heads, three arms, and cavalier attitude; Trillian the lovely Earth girl who basically flies the Heart of Gold; Slartibartfast the planet builder and fjord-make extraordinaire; and my favorite character of all, Marvin the eternally depressed robot. Life-"loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it" is the Paranoid Android's philosophy.

One brilliant thing that Adams does is to step away from the action every so often to present interesting facts about the universe as recorded in the Hitchhiker's Guide; here we learn about Vogon poetry, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, Trans Galactic Gargle Blasters, and other fascinating tidbits about life in the crazy universe Adams created. He even gives the reader the ultimate answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything in these pages.

This novel is just an amazingly hilarious read that will leave you yearning for more; to our great fortune, Adams indeed left us more in the form of four subsequent books in the Hitchhiker's "trilogy." If you don't like science fiction, it doesn't matter; read this book just for the laughs. The most amazing thing about Adams' humor is the fact that everyone seems to "get" it. Adams broke all the rules in writing a novel quite unlike any that had come before it, and he succeeded in spades. This may well be the funniest novel ever written.

Game developers must always tread a fine line between their artistic vision and the reality of what makes a good game as opposed to a desktop science experiment. Sure, the idea of an ultra-detailed space sim (for example) where you can literally control every aspect of the game might sound great in theory (just like Communism or car jousting); in practice, unfortunately, you might wind up with Battlecruiser 3000AD: A Derek Smart Pile of Steaming Monkey Feces, or whatever that bug-ridden mess was actually called. Games must remain games, but in the last 5-7 years there has been a growing dichotomy between how developers and marketing departments define what that really means. While developers realize that there are certain consumer accessibility requirements that games must meet, they also generally assume that their games can nonetheless exhibit a certain degree of complexity. Marketing departments, on the other hand, come from a long history of treating consumers of video games like 10-year old children, despite the fact that the demographics of this particular market have long moved into much more mature age groups.

It then becomes a tug of war between the developers (or more precisely, game designers), who want the game to be as rich and detailed as reasonably possible (exception to this rule: EA), and the publishers, who just want a game that's 'good enough for the kids' to be released at some point during this millennium...assumedly so that they can cackle evilly while rubbing their glistening, naked bodies with 100 dollar bills and the blood of the innocent, or whatever it is that game publishers actually do.

The root of this problem, of course, is that there is a rather large amount of moolah to be made in the games biz these days. And while the marketing people have obviously seen the statistics indicating that the average console gamer is now in their 20s and 30s, they are clearly refusing to actually respond to this shift. This leads me to believe that they therefore simply assume that most console gamers are blithering idiots as compared to their PC-playing brethren (definitely NOT an exception to this rule: EA). Among other things, this means that the battle for 'user friendliness' is slowly turning console gaming into a form of entertainment slightly less challenging (and certainly less interesting) than scratching yourself with rusty pruning shears (try it some time). Ok, please don't actually try it some time, or at the very least film it and put it on YouTube so we can all enjoy it.

One of the most obvious recent examples of this "Gaming for Dummies" philosophy is Assassin's Creed. Now please don't get me wrong, I quite liked the game: the gorgeous visuals, sublime setting, and almost meditative gameplay ensured that it was an impressive experience. What a shame, then, that it also single-handedly led to the creation of the phrase "Press X to Win." There is just no challenge to this game at all, no punishment for failure, and certainly no need to do anything in a fight but block and tap X to counter and instantly kill your opponent ad infinitum, until you've eventually finished the game or worn that little blue button down to the point that you need a new controller.

Devil May Cry 4 is another example of oversimplification damaging the challenge in games (and thus fun and replayability). Once upon a time fighting games and beat'em ups used to require an 82 button combo just to walk forward a step; DMC4, on the other hand, could be considered exceedingly complex only in a parallel universe where you have a great deal of difficulty remembering to press Y or feed yourself. Examples of the stunningly difficult to master, advanced combat manoeuvres that DMC4 forces you to learn include Tap Y - Y - Y; or maybe Tap Y and then hold Y; and of course, the dreaded Tap Y five times in a row.

I' m all for not having to master ridiculously long combos in games, but seriously, Capcom, one freaking button? As though that wasn't going to get old super fast! Combine it with the fact that all the cool fights happen in cutscenes, and it's a wonder that they didn't just release this as an anime and cut out the middleman completely.

Then, of course, there's Army of Two: a game which so fails to live up to its potential that it's actually kind of heartbreaking. This was meant to be a complex, enjoyable co-op experience with legitimate tactics, genuine teamwork-based moves, and a slick, modern storyline chock full of bad-assery and more machismo than a Village People song. The sad part is that a fair bit of this stuff was in the game initially, but was then stripped out due to the fact that half the features didn't work properly, and the other half might have required a modicum of intelligence on the part of the player. What we got instead was a game so hacked up and crippled by a desire to be more palatable to Joe Dumb Consolegamer that it is now just a buggy, repetitive mess that is half unplayable and half too boring to bother playing anyway.


I guess I just love the irony (if crying, wailing, and much gnashing of teeth can be classified as 'love') of the idea that while modern games are supposed to be all about freedom - bigger worlds, more expansive ideas, and emergent gameplay - the people in charge of the cash get scared and think that gamers can't handle this freedom with their fragile, pea-sized brains and thus won't spend money on it unless there's a tutorial window every 30 seconds, or an incredibly irritating "guide" character like Burnout Paradise's DJ Atomica - may he die a horribly slow and infinitely painful death.

The really absurd thing is the fact that numerous titles in recent times have been highly successful, despite requiring the player to occasionally exercise their brain matter and think for themselves. Titles like Oblivion, for example, or the Orange Box, do not feel the need to mollycoddle the player and thus actually manage to encourage creativity and immersion. How popular do you think the GTA series would be if every aspect of the game not directly related to the storyline was removed due to being too difficult?

When that ridiculous thought has finished percolating, take a look over at the PC gaming shelf in your local GameStop and consider why it is that genres like 4X games, turn-based strategy, RTS, or hardcore RPGs are still considered "inappropriate" for consoles? Sure, once upon a time digital control methods and lackluster system specs might have made these styles of game a no-no, but why couldn't Neverwinter Nights 2 or the phenomenal Sins of a Solar Empire be ported over these days? If it's a matter of controls, it's already been shown that RTS can be pretty decent on console (see Tiberium Wars), plus there is always the option of hooking a keyboard into a USB slot (which all the next-gen consoles should be taking advantage of anyway) and enjoying all those sexy beige function keys.

I don't think anyone really looks back on the dark old days of keyboard overlays and 600 page manuals with much in the way of teary-eyed nostalgia, but the sheer contempt exhibited toward console gamers through today's stupidly simple design is more than a little insulting. If a game like Army of Two is sold specifically to adults (as an MA rating and more swearing than a Tarantino flick would seem to indicate), shouldn't it be assumed that the adults playing it are in possession of enough adult intelligence to comprehend the finer points of play?

It's a scary thought, but maybe we'll eventually get to the stage where "Press X to Win" will be more than just a facetious little comment made by a particularly witty forum goer. Imagine, if you will, the public relations department's wet dream of the perfect game: every jump will land, every race will be won, every damsel will be rescued (and/or ravished, depending on whether you're playing as Conan or Mario), and every enemy will fall before your unintentionally hilarious, but undeniably phallic blade. Best of all it will all be so incredibly intuitive and user friendly that you won't actually have to even touch the controller. Oh wait, looks like we just invented cinema!

In all seriousness, though, the only way this alarming trend toward assumed console gamer idiocy can be stopped is by making a stand for our rights as people who somehow manage to both play games and not be morons. We are the generation of the information age - not only can we operate the microwave and program the VCR, we can also perform financial analysis, create complex websites, and program the very presentation software that marketing folk use to try to prove that the video game consumer of the internet generation is still the mental equivalent of the snotty 10 year old that was the primary consumer of games in the 80s and 90s. And yes, we also play games.

So if you are sick to death of annoying tutorials; if you've had enough of awesome gameplay features being cut right before release due to 'complexity' issues; if you are ready to murder the next PR drone that talks about "accessibility" or "user-friendliness" as a substitute for good old fashioned fun, then do something about it! Jump onto a forum, send off an angry email, and most of all, refuse to buy condescending, oversimplified games if that is what it takes to let them know that we resent being treated like the children that are no longer the primary audience of consoles (and have not been for a damn long time). If the software giants are rocked by enough consumer pressure to get rid of this ridiculous "Gaming for Dummies" design ethos, then maybe, just maybe, they will realize that their target audience deserves to be treated like the adults they know we are.

I can probably can make a serious case that the first season of Code Geass is a genuinely good anime, but I could only make the same argument for Code Geass R2 on days that I feel completely and utterly retarded. Sure, the first season does have a bad tendency of hitting viewers on the kneecaps with convenient plot devices, but R2 takes the extra mile to run them over with a train. Much like the first season, Code Geass R2 is a boatload of fun and excitement, but as the series progresses, it gets bogged down by some of the most asinine storylines I’ve ever seen.

Perhaps the first season has left the Sunrise staff short on good ideas, but I honestly don’t think these folks took a step back to actually see what they were writing. While the story has spurts of absolute brilliance, the vast majority of episodes play out like fanfics, which can only be praised for originality and their ability to draw rabid fan reactions. The overall story is really a jumbled mess in serious need of an editor with a chainsaw.

So what exactly is the problem?

In a nutshell, R2 gets struck halfway through with a bad case of Sudden Shambolic Misdirection; this downturn in quality happens so inexplicably that I’m convinced the original production team got sacked and replaced with animation students on crack. Even in the beginning, R2 displays a couple of minor irritants which aren’t present in S1, such as incessant perverse shots of Kallen and an unnecessary influx of new and powerful characters. At first, these are easy to dismiss as temporary blips (after all, just watching Lelouch in action is exciting enough). Eventually, though, things begin to catch up with Code Geass – characters start doing things that don’t make sense and most of the shocking “twists” actually turn out to make no difference to the story later on.

Above all, what really hurts the series is the eventual sidelining of strategic interplay in favor of mecha battles so excessive that the show might as well rename itself Code Geass: I Wanna Be Gurren-Lagann So Bad.

Having said that, Code Geass has always been a franchise obsessed with results – it will sacrifice almost anything to deliver an almighty twist at the end of each episode. The same can be said of R2’s story as a whole; plotting and characterization (and yes, even the rules of chess) are crudely manipulated to make sure the series can deliver its ace in the hole. In those final few moments, the pointless twists and meaningless progression become vague memories lost in a single moment.

Indeed, for some this will be the only vindication necessary, or the miracle cure so to speak. However, I retain a healthy dose of skepticism for one very simple reason: while the final episode tries really hard to provide some delightfully poetic moments, simply knocking out a few great scenes can’t ever compensate for ten episodes of ill-conceived nonsense.

The writers of this show also need a remedial course on basic story writing because they have a bad tendency of following the “because I say so” form of storytelling. Instead of drawing from already established plot conventions, the writers clumsily tie the story into convoluted knots - which shoots logic in the foot - and shores everything up by making up a stupid explanation on the spot. In other words, if Lelouch were to somehow summon a magical, pink dragon that farts rainbows, it will be explained by a convoluted story about the history of Geass followed by blanks stares and a “because I say so.”

Nobody can claim that the cast of Code Geass has ever been superbly realized; in R2, however, they become downright incomprehensible. The best example of this is Lelouch himself. His goal at the beginning is clearly to protect Nunnally, but later, he starts to bounce from one contrived motivation to the other, confusing not just his companions, but also any discerning viewer. If Lelouch wasn’t so single-mindedly compelling, his final development would be a textbook example of how not to characterize a protagonist.

As for Cornelia, Kallen, Xinque and the rest of this colorful bunch, feel free to pick your favorites – it really doesn’t matter, because chances are they won’t end up doing much anyway. Too many times what appear to be brilliant new additions to the cast only end up hanging around like deadweight and even veteran cast members turn out to have no meaningful roles whatsoever. With each one falling prey to the story’s fickle whim, the ultimate effect is that too few of them remain interesting to watch in their own right.

Code Geass S1 is from beginning to end one of the most enjoyable anime of all time; conversely, Code Geass R2 is predominantly a big fat anti-climax. Conveniently, it delivers a hefty emotional punch at the last minute, ensuring in the process that it will be remembered with great fondness rather than bitter disappointment. In that sense the final episode could be read as a masterful move, although I think it’s more like dexterous trickery.

When all is said and done, any emotional connection made with R2 is only possible because of S1’s outstanding groundwork; for example, Lelouch remains sympathetic for miracles he used to perform as opposed to any of his actions here. As a standalone series, R2 is shamefully lacking; as part of a set of two, however, its worth lies in delivering the only thing S1 was missing – a finish.

Ultimately, how much you will enjoy Code Geass R2 is dependent on your opinion of the first season. If you think that the first season is mediocre or worse, skip this incarnation. If you think that season one is pleasure to watch, then expect the second season to be reduced to a guilty one.

Memento has one of those stories that everybody has seen before. Stop me if you've heard this one. A guy's wife/girlfriend/fiancée gets murdered and the guy then goes on a kickboxing/shooting rampage looking for revenge. The joy of Memento, however, is the unique approach that Christopher Nolan takes with the story. By having the plot unfold backwards in time this creates a story in and of itself, a regular whodunnit where the rug is yanked out from under the audience at least twice.

I realize that a negative review of Napoleon Dynamite is going to put me in line for plenty of hate mail, but I see no point in pretending: the only thing that made this film successful was the studio hype machine. Without Fox and a huge MTV marketing campaign, Napoleon Dynamite wouldn't even have registered on the Richter scale of teen popularity. This has been discussed by a lot of critics, of course, but normally as a bit of an afterthought. As a non-fan of the film, though, I think it's impossible to overemphasize this point. This is the perfect example of studio-driven predestined popularity—groups of teenagers so willing to follow marketing that they actually find this film funny.

Napoleon Dynamite the movie seems determined to do, in the words of its hero (played by Jon Heder) “Whatever I feel like I wanna do. Gosh!” This doesn’t include having a coherent plot, explaining the llamas in the yard, or indeed possibly making any sense at all. The only recognisable plotline is the attempt by Napoleon’s friend Pedro to win the class presidency, which spawned the nationwide trend for “Vote For Pedro” t-shirts. It’s the same principle as “Save Ferris” gear: you either get it or you don’t.

The film’s humor is extremely deadpan, and at times relies on the cast’s ability to deliver a ludicrous line with a completely listless attitude: “I realized it was my hair that was making my head hot” being a pretty fair example. The film’s title seems to operate on the same principle: there is nothing dynamic or Napoleonic whatsoever about Jon Heder’s character. He’s not even short.

To be fair, there are a few good moments. There's something strangely charming about the developing friendship between Napoleon and Deb, and I enjoyed some of the gags with Kip and uncle Rico. More importantly, I appreciate the cinematography on display here, almost reminiscent of Wes Anderson. The main difference is that Anderson fills every still frame with small details, while many of the shots in Napoleon Dynamite are almost painfully empty.

To an extent, I understand why so many people like this film. We all knew some people like Napoleon in high school, and we probably never talked to them. This film offers us a voyeuristic peek into what their lives might be like, with no hint of irony or explanation. The weirdness of that setup alone seems to be enough for some people. I don't want to deny you any fun, I just don't understand the appeal myself.

Napoleon Dynamite tends to produce polarised responses. Its fans declare that nothing funnier has been made in the last ten years, whilst detractors point to the fact that not even the most rabid admirer can explain what the joke is. There’s no denying the film’s popularity, though, and it looks set to take its place as a “modern film classic”, which more or less means that people will argue over whether it is or isn’t a classic for a good few years into the future.

It's a quirky little film that polarizes audiences, and I'm on the wrong end of that polarized response.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
-Jefferson

When it was written, 1984 stood as a warning against the dangerous probabilities of communism. And now today, after communism has crumbled with the Berlin Wall; 1984 has come back to tell us a tale of mass media, data mining, and their harrowing consequences.

It's 1984 in London, a city in the new überstate of Oceania, which contains what was once England, Western Europe and North America. Our hero, Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth altering documents that contradict current government statements and opinions. Winston begins to remember the past that he has worked so hard to destroy, and turns against The Party. Even Winston's quiet, practically undetectable form of anarchism is dangerous in a world filled with thought police and the omnipresent two-way telescreen. He fears his inevitable capture and punishment, but feels no compulsion to change his ways.

Winston's dismal observations about human nature are accompanied by the hope that good will triumph over evil; a hope that Orwell does not appear to share. The people of Oceania are in the process of stripping down the English language to its bones. Creating Newspeak, which Orwell uses only for examples and ideas which exist only in the novel. The integration of Newspeak into the conversation of the book. One of the new words created is doublethink, the act of believing that two conflicting realities exist. Such as when Winston sees a photograph of a non-person, but must reason that that person does not, nor ever has, existed.

The inspiration for Winston's work may have come from Russia. Where Stalin's right-hand man, Trotzky was erased from all tangible records after his dissention from the party. And the fear of telescreens harks back to the days when Stasi bugs were hooked to every bedpost, phone line and light bulb in Eastern Europe.

His reference to Hitler Youth, the Junior Spies, which trains children to keep an eye out for thought criminals- even if they are their parents; provides evidence for Orwell's continuing presence in pop culture. "Where men can't walk, or freely talk, And sons turn their fathers in." is a line from U2's 1993 song titled "The Wanderer".

Orwell assumes that we will pick up on these political allusions. But the average grade 11 student will probably only have a vague understanding of these due to lack of knowledge. It is even less likely that they will pick up on the universality of these happenings, like the fact that people still "disappear" without a trace every day in Latin America.

Overall, however, the book could not have been better written. Orwell has created characters and events that are scarily realistic. Winston's narration brings the reader inside his head, and sympathetic with the cause of the would-be-rebels. There are no clear answers in the book, and it's often the reader who has to decide what to believe. But despite a slightly unresolved plot, the book serves its purpose. Orwell wrote this book to raise questions; and the sort of questions he raised have no easy answer. This aspect can make the novel somewhat of a disappointment for someone in search of a light read. But anyone prepared to not just read, but think about a novel, will get a lot out of 1984.

Scout and her older brother are children growing up in the backyards and fields of small-town Alabama in the 1930s. When the book opens, Scout is about to go to school for the first time. Their father, Atticus Finch, is a esteemed lawyer and Congressional repesentative for the region. Their mother died when Scout was two, and Atticus has raised them with the help of a black nurse (who also serves as cook). Atticus is about to take on, at the request of the court, a case of a black man accused of raping a white woman, a case that will stress the town and the Finch family and uncover both the prejudice and the dignity of the people of Maycomb.

Despite being Harper Lee's first novel, it's widely considered among the greatest and is frequently assigned in school. I missed many of the classics in high school including this one and have been going back to see what I missed, so it's my first exposure to the book. It's pervasive enough, though, that I had picked up a mental connection between the name Atticus and great lawyers without knowing where that was from.

My expectation going in was that this would be a coming of age story of sorts about the culture of the South. It is that to a degree. The first section of the book settles into that pattern, telling of childish exploits, summers of freedom, town legends, loved and hated relatives, and confrontations with the class structure of Maycomb in school. Even this section, however, is one of those stories where a brief outline of the plot makes the book seem less appealing than it is. Lee has both a fine eye for characterization and pacing and a deft touch with dialect. Coming of age stories, particularly of childish pranks and dares, usually leave me cold, but the characters are so vivid and deep and the relationship between Scout and her father so touching that I didn't mind the plot. The story is written somewhat in the dialect of the region, but Lee uses this just enough to give the account flavor and not so much that I had difficulty following it. I had to guess at terms in a few places, but the reading experience is smooth.

This first section is not the heart of the book; it's only background and character and cultural introduction. Soon, Atticus is drawn into the trial, the children start taking insults because their father is defending a black man, and the tension rises markedly. The lines of class and race that have been in the story from the beginning become more pronounced, and Atticus's quiet insistence on the basic worth of human beings becomes more relevant and poignant. The climax, about two-thirds through the book, of the trial is one of the most engrossing and emotionally affecting pieces of literature I've ever read.

This is not a triumphant book, nor is it an angry one. It's a story about seeing people as people and trying to understand them, about taking small changes where they can be had, about being decent and behaving honorably. It deals with difficult attitudes that don't change easily or overnight. Deeper than that, it's a book about accepting the good in people and trying to help them deal with the evil. Lee presents a memorable picture of a father trying both to raise idealistic children and children who can live in the world that is, who is trying to do the right thing even when the right outcome isn't possible. Despite all the reason for pessimism, it's a book that helps one appreciate people and provides reason for hope.

The end of the book ties back to one of the subplots of the beginning and follows the return of the town to something approaching normalcy. It's a bit of a letdown after the emotional drama of the trial; there is continuing dramatic tension, but it's more personal, closer to home, and doesn't feel as significant. Stay with it, though, as Lee is going somewhere with the conclusion. In the last few pages, she ties together the desire for action, the outsider perspective, the flaws and fallout of any human action, and the inherent dignity of humanity in scenes that, if quieter and less grand than the courtroom, have nearly as much depth.

Reading a lot of science fiction has left me sensitive to techniques of alienation in literature. Lee uses them effectively here, at least for a reader separated by culture and time from her setting. Scout is deep within the culture of the book and simply takes it for granted, but she's a child, and Lee uses explanations from adults as explanations to the reader. To Kill a Mockingbird dares the reader to react, both to Scout and with her, as the politics of the town are slowly revealed. If anything, I think the book is more effective fifty years later when no one speaks of blacks even the way that Atticus does (but with racism still present, just unspoken). The modern reader has an ingrained and immediate dislike of the racists that Lee plays off of and against, both using it to increase our sympathy for Atticus and to make the reader go back and reconsider impressions of people who seemed vile on first glance. This book left me with a strong sense of the slow moral arc of the universe described by Martin Luther King, Jr. — an appreciation for small gains, the slow pace at which people are able to change, and the dignity of trying.

Classics have a bad reputation partly they're so often assigned reading (not the best circumstance under which to meet a book), and stories of the small-town South never sounded that appealing to me. If you've been avoiding this book out of fear that it was literary without being entertaining, don't. The plot may not sound that appealing, but the characterization is exceptional and the dramatic payoff is one of the best I've read. Regardless of any deeper moral point, this is simply good storytelling and deserves to be as famous as it is.

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life"

- Albert Camus

For Camus, life has no rational meaning or order. We have trouble dealing with this notion and continually struggle to find rational structure and meaning in our lives. This struggle to find meaning where none exists is what Camus calls, the absurd. So strong is our desire for meaning that we dismiss out of hand the idea that there is none to be found.

What sets Camus apart from many existentialists and modern philosophers in general is his acceptance of contradiction. Yes, Camus wrote, life is absurd and death renders life meaningless--for the individual. But mankind and its societies are larger than any one individual person.

Camus wrote The Stranger as an enticement to his readers, to think about their own mortality and the meaning of their existence. The hero, or anti-hero, of The Stranger is Meursault. His life and attitudes possess no rational order. His actions are strange to us, there seems to be no reason behind them. We are given no reason why he chooses to marry Marie or gun down an Arab. For this, he is a stranger amongst us. And when confronted with the absurdity of the stranger's life society reacts by imposing meaning on the stranger.

It's worth noting here that The Stranger is sometimes translated as The Outsider but this is inaccurate. Camus does not want us to think of Meursault as ‘the stranger who lives ‘outside' of his society' but of a man who is ‘the stranger within his society'. Had Meursault been some kind of outsider, a foreigner, then quite probably his acts would have been accepted as irrational evil. But Meursault was not an outsider; he was a member of his society – a society that wants meaning behind action.

In the second half of The Stranger, Camus depicts society's attempt to manufacture meaning behind Meursault's actions. The trial is absurd in that the judge, prosecutors, lawyers and jury try to find meaning where none is to be found. Everyone, except Meursault, has there own ‘reason' why Meursault shot the Arab but none of them are, or can be, correct. In life there are never shortages of opinion as to why this or that thing occurred. How close to any of them get to the meaning behind action?

An interesting motif in The Stranger is that of watching or observation. Camus is writing a book about our endless search for meaning. We are all looking for a purpose in our lives. The characters of The Stranger all watch each other and the world around them. Meursault watches the world go by from his balcony. He later passively watches his own trial. The world around him is a fascination to Meursault. He keenly observes the sun, the heat, the physical geography of his surrounding. The eyes of the other are also depicted by Camus. Antagonism behind the eyes of the Arabs, as they watch Meursault and his friends. The eyes of the jury and witnesses at his trial. Finally the idea of the watching crowd, representing the eyes of society.

The Stranger is not so much a story but a statement by Albert Camus. Meursault, the main character attends his mother's funeral and does not apply the emotions one would associate with a funeral; he does not cry and when offered a cup of white coffee he drinks it and enjoys drinking it, these mannerisms are not those suspected of a grieving man but he does not act like this in deliberance, it is just his manner. However because he does not, in the author's words 'play the game' people in society judge him as a strange and heartless man which at the end of the book costs an honest man his life.

Needless to say, this is not an uplifting book, but it is an engaging, thought-provoking one. While Camus cannot be called a true existentialist in his own philosophical outlook, his fiction does epitomize many existentialist ideas. Marsault is a protagonist like no other in literature--you cannot like him, he is obviously guilty of killing a man in cold blood, and he is of a cold-hearted nature, yet you do understand some of his thinking, find yourself more and more interested in his dark outlook on life, and have to admit that much of what he believes makes sense.

When I was growing up, 70's show was the seminal sitcom that hit me. Though there was some brief overlap, Simpsons peaked almost perfectly to become Alpha Sitcom when 70's show started getting old. And then, after Simpsons reign, Friends became the last sitcom. Of course some sitcoms have come close to reaching Friends' rarified height but none have permeated so deeply into the my consciousness. And considering the sorry state of contemporary sitcoms, none may ever reach that levels again.

The premise of Friends is both well known and simple: six urban twixters—three men, three women—share the travails of early adulthood. Though the show occasionally presents absurd storylines, for the most part it sticks to exploring the more prosaic aspects of a quarter-crisis: frustrations with the searches for a suitable career and mate.

The three female lead characters are: the anal Monica Geller; the spoiled Rachel Green; and the spacey Phoebe Buffay.

The three male lead characters are: Monica's uptight brother, Ross Geller; the sarcastic Chandler Bing; and the goofy Joey Tribbiani.

One of the most popular television series of all time, Friends debuted on NBC in 1994 and ran to 2004. It also can be found in syndication just about everywhere. "Everyone can relate to the characters, whether it be to yourself or amongst your own friends". Friends found its niche throwing a group of attractive young people together in a couple of apartments in New York and providing them with endearing qualities and snappy dialogue. Everyone has a favorite "Friend" be it Ross, Rachael, Joey, Phoebe, Monica or Chandler.

The show thrived by engaging viewer first in the on/off relationship between the nerdy Ross and the worldly Rachael and later, the surprise pairing of the OCD Monica and wise acre Chandler. Womanizing dumbell Joey and airhead Phoebe served up a lot of comic fodder and provided the cohesive that held them together. Everyone almost uniformly love Friends, with the lone exception simply tired of seeing the reruns everywhere.

For as overexposed as the series has become in syndication, when you sit back and actually watch some of these episodes all the way through, one has to marvel at the comedic timing and ensemble these six actors have created. Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc share a comedic bond that rivals Hope and Crosby or Martin and Lewis. Jennifer Aniston has grown into an actress of impressive emotional range, especially for a sitcom. Courteney Cox has established a character that is almost unconsciously funny. Lisa Kudrow deftly delivers some of the shows best one-liners—"If we were in prison, you two would be my bitches!" David Schwimmer showcases more problems and anxieties than any three characters combined.

Sure, Friends is far from innovative, and its astronomical success prompted network executives to green light an abundance of sitcoms featuring young, hip urbanites. But its unthreatening humor and conventional drama somehow managed to captivate a nation, and only cynics and contrarians could deny the series' well-deserved acclaim.

Tell me again why we as a society spend so much time watching other people's lives instead of living our own? Social commentary aside, the writing, directing, and acting on this series is par excellence. It may have lost some steam in later seasons, but this show is the best sitcom in television history.

Go on, admit it: You like Friends.

"A human doesn't have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both."

So muses the narrator of Markus Zusak's powerful and moving new novel, The Book Thief. As you might guess, this is no ordinary narrator. The contemplative first person guiding you through this book is Death, an at-once fitting and ironic vanguard for a tale that both celebrates the power of words and agonizes over the consequences of their use.

Set against the tragedy-stained canvas of World War II, Death tells the story of young Liesel Meminger (the eponymous book thief) growing up in Nazi Germany under the watchful eye of a staunch foster mother and kindly foster father who teaches her to read. She attends meetings of the BDM, a youth group aimed at indoctrinating young girls into Hitler's ideology. She plays soccer with the boys on her street, holding her own in any disputes that arise. And all the while, the dreams of her dead brother haunt and goad her into a fascination with reading and words that inevitably leads to her life of crime.

It is a meeting with Max Vandenburg, a 24-year-old Jewish man being hidden in Liesel's basement by her compassionate foster parents, that alters the course of Liesel's life. Max, too, is haunted by nightmares of a family he lost in the harrowing aftermath of Kristallnacht. Together, Max and Liesel discover a shared love of words that leads to a decisive understanding about the role words play in both bravery and cowardice. Each, in their own way, sets out to use this knowledge to shape the world around them.

While other writers have employed Death as a narrator, Zusak makes his own indelible mark on the technique in the dimensions he gives to the character. Death is simultaneously dispassionate about his work and the impact it can have while striving to understand humanity's resilience. Death boasts an omniscience of what will happen in life but also a naivety about what can happen in the human heart.

Sometimes a fictional interpretation of history is exactly what we need in order to be able to come to a real understanding of what it meant to live through historic events, particularly horrific ones. Markus Zusak provides us with a masterful interpretation of the Nazi period of German history from the perspective of ordinary people suffering through it and striving to keep their lives together and their souls alive and kicking within the horrific and ever-tightening boundaries constructed by the Nazi regime.

He gives us a gut-wrenchingly palpable empathy for people facing harrowing decisions on a daily basis. His marvelous characters bring to life the dilemmas of those who believe they should help the Jews as well as the equally nightmarish predicament of Jews who through receiving help put others in danger. We see much of this through the perspective of the main character Liesel, who is only a young girl. Her innocence and the gradual realizations she comes to about the events swirling around her in a maelstrom of horror evoke a remarkable empathy in the reader.

In the ultimate expression of his dichotomous theme, Zusak creates a touching love letter to books and writing, framed in arguably the most horrific period in human history. But his greatest triumph is delivering a reminder that no writer enters this world quietly. Writers are born of eruptions and detonations, and the truly exceptional ones, like Zusak, continue to channel these explosive energies to craft a truly remarkable book that will be admired for generations.

If you want to understand how the little people cope with such tragic historic events without allowing their souls to be crushed, read this book. Ultimately it is a portrait of the resilience and hope of the human spirit.

How long has it been since I read Ender's Game? Just barely a few months ago but for the life of me, I still cant shake off the impression the book left me. Well how can I ever? This book is held accountable for pulling me out of this cut-and-dried universe and throwing me into the dazzling, highly intelligent and challenging world of science-fiction.

Written by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game is a novel of extraordinary power that is among the very best the genre has ever produced. Lauded with both the Hugo and Nebula awards, it tells the story of genius child Andrew "Ender" Wiggin who is reared to be the military savior of humanity. At the tender age of six, he is whisked off to battle school where warfighters tutor him in the lonely job of commanding Earth's fleet against the alien "buggers" who twice attacked earth.

The novel follows Ender as he navigates the puzzling, cruel and unfair world created by the Battle School teachers and the other children to complete his military training and assume the responsibility he has been shaped for, by learning to out-bully his enemies, outsmart his teachers, and think like the aliens he is being raised to kill.

Ender's Game takes a familiar theme from war fiction — war as seen through the eyes of a child, and reframes it by making the child the war's central figure. It is a tale defined by a sense of both tragic inevitability and cold irony. It is not merely about the loss of innocence, as so many stories are with children at their center. It is about innocence systematically deceived and purposefully destroyed in the fanatical pursuit of a misguided higher ideal.

Ender’s Game is science fiction with a tough, enjoyable core of psychology and ethical dilemmas. The most intriguing aspect of this novel is not the clichéd concept - brilliant child is selected by authority figures and grows up to save the world - but the startling tweaks in that concept and the details through which Orson Scott Card presents Ender’s isolation, his inner turmoil, and the extremes to which a young boy is forced in the name of what is “good.”

A hardcore sci-fi war and gravity-free mock training battles will appeal to some readers, and the psychological dilemmas and mental puzzles will appeal to others. However, it is Ender’s personal journey, and that of his siblings back on Earth and his cohort of other Battle School students, that will fascinate readers whether or not they are fans of science fiction.

Ender's Game works from its first page to its last. For one thing, it's the character study of a young boy whose childhood is being denied him by those who are in fact putting on a show of catering to it. The battle games are just that, games, but the consequences are real in terms of how they effect real lives. Ender's flawless leadership record — his gift for unconventional thinking means he never once loses, even when the odds are absurdly stacked against him and his platoon — earns him enemies among lesser, jealous commanders, and an actual attempt on his life is made. When Ender successfully defends himself against one (using the same skills at thinking on his feet that have made him victorious in the Battle Room), the blinders come off. This world of children's games is in fact one that deals in the grim realities of life and death.

But are the blinders off all the way? The I.F. is clear about their agenda: fight the buggers. What they aren't clear about are their methods. The more Ender advances, the more it becomes clear the Battle School's games have no rules at all, or none that can't be changed completely. Ender's Game examines the ethics of power and the role sheer manipulation can play in forming the cultural and political landscape people live in. Both in the Battle School, and in an interesting subplot where Ender's siblings Peter and Valentine (both of whom are as much prodigies as he is in their own way) compose for their own amusement pseudonymous political essays on the web that end up having more influence worldwide than they could've dreamed of, Card explores how easily and unwittingly people can find themselves played. And even when you are aware of it, how difficult it can be to do anything about it. And this all comes to a head in the book's sucker-punch of a climax.

Ender's Game is no didactic anti-war tract. It wouldn't be, really, as Card is a proud conservative. If the book has any message to deliver about war, it does so through the time-honored tradition of fine storytelling, and it's this: It's no game.

"I learned so much about some stuff that I ended up not knowing anything at all about it”.

This quote (from the end of King Dork) serves as a metaphor for the book itself; an amusing albeit convoluted tale of teen America. The novel, although widely hailed as a success, often gets bogged down in the protagonist’s neurotic manner. It is largely, however, an accessible and enjoyable piece of writing; showing American teen life through the eyes of the underdog. Portman, in an impressive debut, creates a refreshing and cynical glimpse of the American High School system; a funny yet important novel that ultimately will make you laugh.

Tom Henderson is not having a good time. His high school is a dump, failing to teach him anything but scathing contempt for his peers and the mispronunciation of what is referred to as ‘extended vocabulary’; bullies great and small take pleasure in persecuting him; his mother is insane, his sister strange, his stepfather Little Big Tom (for reasons of differentiation) is a harmony-addict hippie. He can’t seem to manage to land himself a girlfriend, his only friend Sam Hellerman became his ally solely because they are related for alphabetical reasons and spend a lot of time standing in line next to each other. Above all, nobody quite gets young Tom’s view of the world. I repeat, Tom Henderson is not having a good time, at all.

It seems curious that a guy who’s been playing in pop-punk bands for almost 30 years has suddenly become a well-regarded author of “young adult” literature. But it’s not so surprising when you consider that Portman’s songs generally deal in themes befitting the high school set: girls, break-ups, ironic sarcasm, girls, rock bands, girls, dates, nerd humor, and of course girls. All perfectly suited to the heightened emotional spazzfest of adolescence. But where most mid-40s pop-punkers singing about teenage experiences come off as brain-dead, Portman writes and sings about them with wit, insight, and the kind of vocabulary you’d expect from a UC Berkeley graduate. He’s no dummy, he just happens to have spent most of his life writing power-chord rock songs about not being able to get a girlfriend.

And that’s exactly where King Dork comes in. The book takes Portman’s skills at examining the angst and trials of “young adulthood” through irony and wit, but expands the tableau from 3-minute songs to a 350-page novel. And it works incredibly well. I found myself reading it quickly but being thoroughly entertained; I was intrigued by the main character’s inner dialogue and also laughed out loud at a lot of the humor. Though the book is intended for “young adults” it’s an entertaining read at any age, and since we’re all clutching our Harry Potter volumes right now anyway we’re obviously in the mood for well-written fiction that might seem a bit beneath our true ages (though I admit I haven’t read any HP books).

Actually, an important aspect of the book is the way Tom (and obviously Portman) feels about The Catcher in the Rye, that book we were all forced to read a dozen times because it changed our teachers’ lives. I think this is best summed up in a quote:

It’s kind of like a cult. They live for making you read it. When you do read it you can feel them all standing behind you in a semicircle wearing black robes with hoods, holding candles. They’re chanting “Holden, Holden, Holden…” And they’re looking over your shoulder with these expectant smiles, wishing they were the ones discovering the earth-shattering joys of The Catcher in the Rye for the very first time.

Tom refers to this secret society as the Catcher Cult, and the though King Dork obviously has roots in Catcher’s portrayal of teen angst, it harbors a distinct grudge against the book. I mean, just look at the cover: a deliberate defacement of the old maroon paperback from the bargain bin. But Catcher isn’t the only standard from the sophomore summer reading list that gets the Portman analysis, and some of them are actually looked on quite favorably.

My favorite aspects of King Dork come from Portman’s method of describing the day-to-day dynamics of high school. Now, this is stuff we’ve not only experienced but seen satirized in hundreds of teen comedies over the years. But King Dork puts a fresh spin on it via Portman’s distinct brand of sarcasm. Remember, he’s been writing humorously ironic songs about adolescent frustrations for going on 30 years. I laughed out loud at his description of the “Make out-Fake out” deception used by teen girls to mess with the guys’ heads, and when Tom learns new vocabulary words such as callipygous and ramone (from the French ramoner, to scrub out a chimney…combine with Tom’s rock & roll background and you have a perfect new neologism for intercourse). The book’s action culminates in a performance by Tom and Sam’s band at the battle of the bands, which of course has been renamed the Festival of Lights by the school’s P.C.-police due to the negative connotations of the word battle and the fact that bands is unfairly exclusive to some students.

Needless to say, King Dork gets my major thumbs up. I don’t have the opportunity to read for pleasure very often, so I’m very glad this book came across my path when it did. Portman is currently working on a second novel, and he’s said that he might eventually write a King Dork sequel. Though it’s tacky to quote a review from the book’s dust jacket, I feel this one pretty much sums up how I felt after reading it: