Empty Bookshelf Reviews

The best way to make a video game accessible to lots of people is this: make the first few levels pretty simple, and then have them get exponentially harder. Sure, you say, most video games follow this pattern. Mario, Tetris. Sonic the Hedgehog… Ducktales is pretty easy throughout, but that’s mostly because the levels are built more as challenging mazes, and you can choose the order in which you want to play them. Don't get me started on Legacy of the Wizard... I've already written 2000 words about that.

I can’t think of a better example of this than the little-known game, BigNose the caveman, which came as a gold-colored cartridge. The main focus of the game was to walk from left to right on the screen and beat up dinosaurs. I really can’t remember if there was a story or not, mostly because I never got very far. I mean, the first two levels are exceptionally easy, to lure you in. They were actually pretty similar to the Mario model, with bad guys coming at you that you had to hit as you walked on the horizon line and jumped over random cliffs. That was something I always wondered about in the Mario world. How can there be so many cliffs on a piece of developed land that don’t have bridges built over them? The Princess’ father must not have been doing a good job in the public works sector. As far as BigNose, well, they barely had the technology to build a wheel, so I’m going to assume that bridges are way out of their league. ( And for all you cavemen out there, I’m not trying to insult you… the last thing I need are commercials disparaging our fine little rarely-updated enterprise)



Strangely enough, though, most of the dinosaurs BigNose encounters are pygmy dinos, with stegosauruseses and triceratopseses no bigger than the eponymous caveman himself. Sure there are giant dinos that appear at the end of major levels, as bosses, but most of them, from as far as I got, were usually seen as just two legs or something. They were way too big. Someone obviously didn’t consult the AMNH before designing this stuff.
If you think about it even more, you realize that there’s no reason for a stegosaur to attack a caveman anyway, unless he was intruding on its nest. Maybe it’s different with mini-stegosaurs though.

The simple attack was using your club to hit the bad guy, and if you picked up some stones you could use them like the fireflower power in Mario, only lamer, cause the stones don’t bounce, and if you miss, they kinda just magically fell through the ground. The hard part is getting the timing right. If you swing too soon, you miss, and too late, you’re hit by the dinosaur, which is why stones are the best option, especially since there are some dinos that need to be hit twice. Jumping over them is always an option, but you can’t jump very high, so sometimes you’ll miss. There are also potions you can buy at some stores that you can use to regain life or kill everything in the frame, making it easy to beat a boss.

Really though, the biggest challenge to this game was actually getting it to work. Maybe it was my system, or just the cheapness of the people who made the cartridge, but it never worked right. I had to do the blowing on the game, then blowing in the Nintendo thing that every kid my age was quite accomplished at. You’d think we’d all be harmonica players. At some point, even that began to not work, and the game would only work if I used the game genie as a buffer.

The music was actually really catchy, even though I can’t remember any of it now.

Overall, the first few levels are moderately enjoyable. The next few are too frustrating. And there’s no continue or save option, so once you lose, you start all over again. I’d say the same thing about Mario, except there’s plenty of opportunity for extra lives and level-skipping in that game. That, and you had some sort of goal to achieve in Mario. If you really want to play a game about cavemen, I’d settle for a Turbo Graphx-16, or an emulator for its games, and Bonk’s Adventure.



One and a half stars for making me feel like I was good at video games, and then tearing that dream away from me. Relatively good music, but a premise that was pretty much just a terrible rip-off of Bonk's Adventure.

The academy awards nominations came out this morning. And for some reason I decided that I don’t really care this year. It’s weird because I don’t know why. In fact, I wrote most of this review on Sunday, before they were even announced. I’ve become jaded to the whole celebrity scene this year, and I’ve stopped seeing this show as an affirmation that the movies that I enjoyed over the past year are good, and more as a means of keeping up the guise of celebrity importance. (review of the near future: celebrity feuds)

Maybe it was seeing people argue about which movies deserved which awards the way I used to, and thinking, “Wow, do these guys see how completely stupid they look, rooting for something that they think they have partial ownership in, just because they kinda liked it? Did I look that stupid, phony, and in over my head when I was complaining about how undervalued “The Man who Wasn’t There� was, or how that ridiculous “THEY MAKE THE RAIN AND SAY IT’S RAINING!!!� rant from Cold Mountain won good ole squinty-eyed Renee Zellweger her academy award? Well, chances are I did for the last one, because I totally used to do an impression of that was intentionally unintentionally hi-larious, and which has since failed the test of time, seeing as how nobody even remembers the movie a mere two years later. This also goes to show the unimportance of these awards, because I highly doubt that all the people that argue about these sort of things could even tell me without looking it up, who hosted the 2001 awards (held in 2002), let alone who won best actor and actress. Whoopi Goldberg hosted by the by, and I don’t even think I could tell you what movie won best picture ( Chicago maybe?) let alone the acting awards. The only reason I remember Whoopi is because my friends and I were watching in a TV lounge filled with people who actually thought she was funny. We couldn’t take it and ended up leaving in a huff. That’s beside the point.

All this is not to say that I’m not going to look and see who’s nominated or who wins. I’ll probably even watch the show. But at this moment, writing this review, do I think it’s worth having an Oscar "party" or doing an awards pool (in which I have participated numerous times)? Not really. Do I find that a little disheartening? Of course I do. Three years ago at this time, I was in the center of celebrity culture. I was in the bleachers for the Screen Actor’s Guild red carpet. I stood by the limo security checkpoint at the Golden Globes to get a glimpse of anybody relatively famous. I can’t say for sure if I would do it again. Maybe just to say I did it. Then again, I never really got “star-struck� to begin with. Most of the pictures I took of people were either for bragging rights, or because I knew friends might want them. But still, even the following year I went in on an Oscar pool.

What’s my point in all this? I’m not quite sure. All I know is that at this specific minute of this specific day, I’m thinking to myself “Don’t we have enough other things to be interested in or worry about than awards for millionaires (I know that the tech award winners are mostly non-millionaires, and the people who make the shorts and documentaries are probably even less well-off) we’ve never met and mostly think they’re better than us anyway?� I suppose you could argue the same of sports, but to me the difference is that football and baseball are designed to be competitions, and film isn’t, or at least shouldn’t. Why should it matter to us if a movie we like wins an award? Shouldn’t liking it be enough? Maybe it’s the validation that comes with being behind something that is regarded by professionals to be the best. Maybe it’s the ability to say to our friends “I totally knew Marcia Gay Harden was gonna win for Pollack, even though I’ve never even heard of the movie because it sounds boring and was only playing in 8 cities�, thereby coming off as knowledgeable, even though you just got lucky or read a newspaper article. Maybe it’s just that feeling that you know a lot about a subject, even if you really don’t, but just know a little bit more than your friends. Besides, ten years from now, "Saving Private Ryan" will be remembered even though it lost to the completely forgettable "Shakespeare in Love", which was lauded by the pretentious set.

This pretentiousness is something that the Oscars and other awards do spur on, and I guess this is where my whole complaint starts. Soon enough, the debates will rage over which arthouse movie that nobody was able to see was more overrated, which one deserves more attention etc. And all these people will be arguing over the fact that we love a movie that we haven’t even seen, just because of the talent attached to it. And that “you’re� (the royal “you�) stupid and less important because you’ve never even heard of it. And that’s just wrong. I really don’t want to do that again. (Update: I was flipping through the morning shows today to see if anyone was talking about the noms, just to prove my case, and the new FOX morning show had on their two Oscar Experts... two women who looked to be a mere few years older than I am. Of course there were raving about how great Helen Mirren was in "The Queen"... and to make matters worse, the audience erupted in applause. Now, you have to be sure that in this situation, maybe 25 percent of the audience at most has seen this movie, and the rest are either being egged on by the stage manager/audience warm-up guy, or just don't want to seem like they don't know anything about anything. Strangely enough, I'm looking at the box-office tallies for this weekend, and "The Queen" is actually playing in more theaters than "Children of Men", "Alpha Dog", and "The Good Shepherd".)

And maybe I'm upset that somehow I've grown to see something that I used to see as the Holy Grail of Film-making achievement now as a way to sell movies that otherwise wouldn't have an audience. I mean, would anyone have gone to see "The Last King of Scotland" otherwise? It's all part of the self-promoting hype machine, and I don't know if I'm still down with that. Maybe in a case like this, yes, but that silly red carpet image stuff always seems to undermine the gravitas of the "talent-based" awards.

As for the specific nominations themselves, they seem generally fine across the board, as far as the movies that I've gone to see, and those are really all that I can discuss.






The 2006-07 Academy Awards Nominations get two stars for being a way to generally promote smaller, higher-quality movies. As far as awards competition goes, I'm not really a fan of how devisive it makes people, including myself, about movies we like, versus ones we aren't planning on seeing, but dislike just for the sake of it . As far as this year's specific award nominees go, I've got no major complaints, other than the lack of "Children of Men", but I can live without it, knowing how the voting process, and awards campaigning go. Oh... and the fact that THREE freakin songs from Dreamgirls are nominated.... now that's something genuine to dislike... but still, does it really matter?

This guy is everywhere! I mean it. I mean it. Not just the ubiquitous ads for the movie, either. He may very well be the first person I've seen promoting one thing on Letterman, Leno, Conan, and The Daily Show, and a half-hour appearance in Opie and Anthony, in less than two weeks. And not only has the actor, Sacha Baron Cohen, been on all of them, he's been on all of the as Borat, and done so in multiple segments on at least two of them. On Leno, he made a bed with Martha Stewart, and on Conan, he chased Conan around the stage with a pair of scissors, followed by one of the most bizarre musical performances I've seen on his show. In all four appearances the interview topics were different and fresh. Here's a compendium of all of the media appearances. The guy even had a "float" in the NY Halloween parade, which is basically just a costume showcase and giant party. The "float" consisted of about 20 Borat impersonators. Completely ludicrous. I'm sure he's got a myspace thing going as well. I have never seen an ad campaign for a film that was so in your face. The thing is, the movie was so inexpensive that it made up its cost in the first week. They can throw all kinds of money into the advertising, and it'll still come out on top. And it's an hilarious movie to boot. Congrats on getting everyone in the country's attention.



There isn't a person in the country who doesn't know about this movie. I'm nearly certain. Five stars.

So here we are at the first of what may be a few reviews of our first milestone, 100 reviews. Not only is this the first review of this milestone, but of what could be very many milestones. We here at the Bookshelf like the word "milestone", and don't believe in Thesauruses. So here we go, our first hundred in a nutshell.

The first actual review happened way back in October of 2005... remember that time before the Steelers won the superbowl, before "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" movie, before Dick Cheny accidentally shot his friend while hunting, and before Bristol, United Kingdom celebrated the 200th birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (actually April 9) by relighting the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

Dan's first review was aimed at complaining about post-game hype surrounding an extremely long baseball game. Of course our readers probably care about boring Astros-Braves baseball games as much as they seemed to care about my terrible review of the dictionary. Even though that picture was good, it was nowhere near the five star quality of this image. I too tried my hand at reviewing food, but it was an utter failure. On the plus side, my review of the letter to the editor is one of my favorites, and my first review actually got eight comments, including this link. The few following that grilled chese review focused mostly on music, my opinion of "Good Night, and Good Luck", a particular episode of Trading Spouses, and Dan's opinion of My opinion of "Good Night, and Good Luck". Dan also said that the Colbert report wouldn't last, which seems to have been proven false.

October seemed to be us finding our footing.





November saw Dan's Cleveland Trifecta, a diatribe against horses, a road that he liked, an episode of "Coach", and his complaints about how much he aches, now that he's an old man. I started the month strong with the Beth review, but struggled through the rest of it, with lame reviews like Thursday, a type of tooth"paste" that doesn't work for me, and an insightful, yet completely unnecessary complaint about my nosebleeds. My FAO Schwarz review kinda made up for them, but the highlight of the month involved Dan and I sparring about how Christmas is coming earlier every year, and something about me being a time-traveling sheep.

November didn't see much improvement over October, but the Christmas stuff was entertaining.




December got a bit better, even with a few less reviews. I busted out the old NES games, for a few reviews that I swear are not trying to copy off of XE, another personal favorite, Christmas Cards, Adam's first review, Dan throwing the hate down on Pitchfork media, and a suprising amount of people commenting on Roger Ebert's take on video games. The biggest advance in December was the pop-ins, that added added some clarity to our parentheses-obsessed-writing.

December was a highly engaging and entertaining month, even with only nine reviews.




2006 rolled around, and January saw Dan get political, review half of a book, not like warm winters a lot. I only contributed three of ten reviews that month, but all three of them were relatively alright, mostly because "Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego", and "The Simpsons" after season 9 is so easy to complain about.

January's topics fell off a little.




February, while being the shortest month, was also a monster for us, as far as number goes. A whopping twenty-one reviews. To be fair, 17 of them came in our envelope-pushing live superbowl reviews, the biggest stunt pulled in the history of reviewing anything and everything on a five star scale. The only other reviews of any substance were my Gauntlet Review of the Beatles albums, and Dan's digging up of our one-issue underground high-school newspaper.

Despite the big stunt, and two good reviews, February was kinda lacking.




March just plain sucked. Four reviews total. One by me. Three mega-reviews by Dan.





April was slightly better, with another of my top five of my reviews, Legacy of the Wizard. The other four I would give an average of 3 stars to, but since there were only four during the month, that's going to cancel out the Legacy of the Wizard bonus and take it down a half star.





For my money, May was our best month yet. Dan's contribution was the lengthy three-part TV landscape review. I threw out quality stuff with my Songs for Silverman, and Degree Navigator reviews. The shorter American Dreamz and Davinci Code video game reviews were serviceable, but my immense LOST season 2 review tops everything.





June fell off a bit. Four reviews total. Split two and two. Mine were based on a ridiculous news story, and anger at other people for coincidentally coming up with the same ideas as me. Dan tried to put everything into perspective by seeing how well the entire history of human ingenuity and artistry stacked up in the interstellar community, and complained a little about how the national geography of roadways isn't designed to suit his needs.





July was filled with the (I gotta admit my ignorance as to the relevance of this phrase... and wikipedia does nothing to help) Navel Gazing set. I was had for a few minutes by a Jimmy Kimmel hoax, and I thought the critics were a little too harsh on Shayamalan. Despite the mediocre numbers for the month, I'd give it a 3.5




This gives us a per-month average of 3 stars, which isn't too shabby.

In my first ever review, I reviewed the concept of this website. I claimed that we wouldn't be able to keep it fresh, that we'd run out of ideas, and that we wouldn't be able to stay somewhat funny at least. I believe my exact quote was "It has the potential to provide hours of entertainment for readers, and shape their lives for years to come. However, the downside is that it could get old real soon, and provide us with nothing but an excuse not to get real jobs."

Well, I think we've significantly proven wrong every single point that I just brought up. We have 29 categories, 19 subcategories, and even two sub-sub categories. We're still writing about reasonably different things, and while we may have slacked on the funny in recent months, we still bring the 'A' game on occasion. As far as my quote goes, I'd be willing to bet that we've provided maybe a few hours of entertainment for a handful of people, which probably did nothing to shape their lives for even the near fututre. On the upside, it hasn't gotten old, and we have gotten real-ish jobs.

For all of these reasons, I'm willing to up our star rating by half a star, over the average rating of 3. I've also realized that my method of calculating the rating might not be the best, so I'm gonna throw in another half star for a final rating of 4 stars out of five.



And for those of you playing along at home, yes, this technically is the 100th review and so therefore should be included. This review receives 3 stars for not having much to offer in the way of witty musings, and for having a faulty overall rating method, but for packing so many subjects and links into one review.

If you keep tabs on the movie world, you're probably aware that right now, two sort of big deal stories are going on between critics and directors. The first one involves Joel Siegel making a big to-do and walking out on a screening of Clerks 2, and then being called out by Kevin Smith on the Opie and Anthony radio show. Interestingly enough, Smith's going to be filling in for Roger Ebert on the "Ebert and Roeper" show this weekend. The second one is a little more high-profile, mostly because the movie's director is a little more mainstream.

M. Night Shayamalan's new movie "Lady in the Water" was released into the wild this past Friday, and was met with mostly bad reviews. Strike that; terrible reviews. Strike even that: Reviews that not only claimed that the movie was bad, but "a charmless, unscary, fatuous and largely incoherent fairy tale", or "idiotic, contrived, amateurish or sub-mental... [and] pretentious, paralyzing twaddle" among other things. The movie pretty much received pans across the board, with rottentomatoes counting only 28 "positive" reviews out of 130 total, with nearly all of the major papers/writers, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and in probably the best-written of all of them, Roger Ebert's MAMMOTH Mega-Review, completely tearing the movie apart.

Movies get bad reviews all the time though. Just look at the 15 percent that Little Man got on Rottentomatoes, or the 20 percent that You, Me and Dupree got. The difference in these reviews though is that they're written about the movies themselves. They're not out there angrily insulting the Wayanses, or whoever was behind the latest Owen Wilson vehicle.

With such terribly scorching reviews claiming that Shayamalan has basically declared himself a god, and that this movie is the "biggest ego-trip" ever devoted to celluloid, I was terribly worried about going to see it. But you know what? I enjoyed it. I didn't take any of it seriously, because I knew that much of it would involve highly elaborate mythology that was quite silly. I didn't care though. The movie looked good, was well-acted, and paced well for what was written, which by proxy means that it was directed well. Was it written well? That's a matter of opinion, and usually that opinion is no. I'd say it's serviceable while watching it, but the more you think about it, the worse it gets. Ignoring the overelaborate mythology for a second, there's the way most all of the characters are said to have a specific purpose, and I guess that's true to an extent, if you count being a red-herring, or standing around watching something as purposes. There are a lot of characters and they are diverse, and so in order to get their personas across in such a short time, he uses some stereotypes, which I don't mind, but seems to be another cause for the death sentence he's being handed. To me, the worst part of the writing was the obnoxiously expositional way that the "mythology" was told to the main character and how easily he and the rest of the people in the apartment complex believe it. Yes there are flaws, but while you're watching it, it's for the most part an enjoyable film. I'd give it two and a half stars, out of five.

It seems though that the only person who really shares my sentiment is the guy from the Boston Globe. Everyone else seems to be caught up in this M. Night-hating party that's all the trend. It's one thing to criticise the movie, but they're taking aim straight at him for being a complete egomaniac who won't listen to other people's ideas and who presents himself as a savior. What's their basis for these accusations?

Well, first of all, there's this book that some guy wrote about why Touchstone Pictures (read:Disney) didn't want to make this movie unless changes were made. Supposedly he refused to make the changes and they walked away, leading him to go to Warner, where they let him have free reign. Secondly, he likes to cast himself in his movies. That's not a secret. People who thought he was full of it for casting himself in the role he had in Signs will probably be even angrier at this role. It's not the size of the role that seems to be bothering critics though; it's the importance of it. He's cast himself as the person whom the Lady has come to see, whom she's come to inspire to write a great piece of literature that will cause a great change in the world. Critics have seen this as the ultimate sign of messianic aspirations.

What angers them the most though is the idea that he had the guts to throw in a character who's a movie critic. He's cold and unfeeling, snooty, likes to talk about annoying movie conventions, and (this isn't much of a spoiler because it's been talked about and the character isn't important anyway) he dies.

My take on the whole thing is "Why should I care about this book?". This goes for both the people who put it out, and the reviewers who care to bring it up in every review. They see the book as being a publicity stunt for the movie, and not the possibility that the book people might want to put it out when the movie comes out as a publicity stunt FOR THE BOOK. Even if it was the case, I don't see why these movie critics chose to review him instead of his film. When "War of the Worlds" came out, critics didn't say anything about Tom Cruise's shennanigans. In fact, they all liked the movie, even though the story was terrible and had more plotholes than both Lady in the Water and The Village combined.

As far as casting himself goes, I don't mind. I find his acting competely fine for the roles he's cast himself in. He's usually cast himself in inconsequential parts, and in his most emotional role in Signs, he was perfectly serious and brooding. His delivery seemed natural and all. In this movie, I understand the reasons why they'd think that he was full of himself for putting himself in the role that he was in. But he was perfectly capable in the part. When he wrote it, he knew that he was going to be playing a fictional version of himself, or maybe how he seems himself. But criticizing him for doing this is like complaining about Eminem in 8 Mile, or Woody Allen in that movie with "Humphrey Bogart". Acting-wise they could do a lot worse, and any no-name actor would've been just as good.

As far as the last issue, I actually agree with the critics. The character is useless in serving the story, except to provide some "wink wink"-type moments meant to criticize both the lack of originality in movies, and the pretensiousness of movie critics. At the same time however, the criticisms that the character has of movies seem to all appear in the film. Examples include characters talking aloud to themselves (ironically, this is done by the critic himself, when confronted with an angry creature), "seemingly unimportant" characters actually being "important", and the climax taking place in a rain storm. He's simultaneously written himself into a corner AND been brilliant about it. It's as if halfway through it he realized that plot elements were too convenient, and so he needed a way to say "I know that that these things are too cliche". While I understand the character's "purpose" in the story, it would've been better off had he decided to either fix the story issues, or get take the character out entirely. The critic is basically the lazy way out.

I guess my thought about the whole thing is that with such bad reviews, I figured I'd be squirming at how terrible it was, or want to walk out on it, or rip my ticket up out of anger. I didn't, and I think that for critics to go this ballistic is unnecessary, especially attacking the director, and not the movie itself.

For the amount of complaining that everyone does about how there is nothing new and unique that ever gets a big release, or all the gratingly bad horror movies, or Wayans Brothers projects that keep coming out, M. Night is ALWAYS putting out something different and unique. People should at least give him credit for attempting something like this, even if there were majorly unresolved story issues.



The critics' response to Lady in The Water gets one and a half stars for having a few legitimate issues with the movie to complain about, but instead opting to attack the director for off-screen dealings and the role he's cast himself in, nevermind about whether he was a capable actor in the role. I think that critics should spend more of their time vocally ripping apart terrible movies instead of mediocre ones.

Once again, the generous sponsorship of the Fruit Stand/DVD store made this review possible. Be sure to stop by and enjoy a 50% discount if you're not American!

I’ve said I don’t enjoy writing movie reviews, so I’ll try to skirt around specifically “reviewing� the movie in that exact term, but it’ll be tough considering the movie is intertwined with its message.

Usually when someone goes out of his or her way to create something “deep,� “thought-provoking,� “challenging� or the like, the final product doesn’t end up being any of those things, if only because if it draws too much attention that goal (“deepness�) instead of the movie itself. It’s incestuous, but I’ll link here to my review of Inside Man with my brief commentary on its very out-of-continuity “thought-provoking� scene of the seemingly vicious bank robber being disgusted by a Grand Theft Auto-look-alike. A History of Violence practically begs for over-analysis starting with its vague but simultaneously pointed title. The director, David Cronenberg, is very much on the record talking about the philosophical issues raised by his movie.

Most “deep� movies become grossly over-analyzed, with the arguers forgetting what the movie was about and what happened in it (or what the movie wasn’t about and what didn’t happen it—Donnie Darko fans, I’m looking in your direction). Throw in some psycho-babble (“Munich was about how Israel became self-actualized in the 1970’s and 80’s�), and you’re good to go. Without putting it terms of whether it was a good movie or not, Munich certainly had enough going on it to not need this over-analysis. (Okay, to be fair, some people have complained that not much of anything happened in the movie, other than Eric Bana sweating like a maniac when he was getting his pump on.) Oddly enough, “A History of Violence� needs this discussion; not a whole lot happens in the movie; it could basically be considered an immediate and direct sequel to Goodfellas. (I liked A History of Violence enough that I won’t ruin the “how� and “why� that lingers throughout the story for our readership, but if you’ve seen Goodfellas, you’ll understand what I mean about it being the next step in the Goodfellas story.)

Sure, plenty happens in A History of Violence, but the characters spend so little time onscreen reflecting on it; the extent is really “how long have you lied to me? And did I marry your past or just an identity you arbitrarily created?� The viewers are in the same position as the characters after the open-ended conclusion of the movie. Like the characters, the viewers are asking themselves, “What’s in me? What am I capable of if something needed to be done?� “Would I be able to leave behind my ‘history of violence’?� �How far removed is sex from violence?� And most importantly, “what would I do to leave that history behind me?� The movie doesn’t provide an answer beyond implying that people will do ‘what it takes,’ and leaving violence in the past doesn’t mean that it won’t find you. Oddly, any discussion of the movie uses the term “violence� as if it is something more than just a concept, as if it’s a physical thing, like a jacket, a car, or a computer. Is this violence as presented in the movie worth considering a physical object? No one talks about happiness in such terms. In fact, the only other concept that gets this treatment is love. It would be convenient to say that there’s some “duality� between the two, one being a requirement to survive and one being involved in the process of making more of oneself, but that would be the unnecessary analysis I talked about above. But, this is entitled “Navel Gazing,� so I’ll stand by my statement, intellectual preposterosity or not.

That’s why the movie works in spite of it being a rather thin story. It hits all the right notes to leave the audience asking questions “with� the movie, not “at� the movie. It’s a dangerous angle from which to make a movie, but it was pulled off with great success. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t at least thought about the issues it raises after seeing it, whether or not the train of thought evolved/devolved (I vote for devolved) into a Plato-esque debate about the increasingly less-and-less abstract concept of “violence� as presented by the movie.

I guess the singular moment from the movie that led to me writing at some length about this was actually not in the movie itself, but in the DVD’s special features which showed snippets of interviews with David Cronenberg at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005. Almost in passing, he said something along the lines of: Humans are the only animals on the planet that could conceptualize a world without violence. (Of course, for the smart-alecks out there, I know that animals can’t really conceptualize anything, it’s more about what an ideal world would be for other animals versus what would seemingly be the ideal world for humans.) There’s something to be said for that; we’ve been doing the human thing for a while, and there has been and always will be plenty of violence to go around. Is our ideal world really one without violence?



Navel Gazing Part 1: A History of Violence receives four stars because as a philosophical treatise, it was a rather superficial and derivative train of thought stemming not from an original idea, but a movie which had an explicit goal of “getting people to think about how violence works.� Of course, the movie gets all the credit in the world for succeeding in “getting people to think� when that goal is usually a superficial ploy to attract pretentious white people (meaning NPR listeners—for future reference, NPR did pimp this movie like crazy).

So recently I read this article. I understand that you all might be in a hurry, but you might want to at least peruse the article, because the entire review is sort of based on it.

Or.... I'll summarize. It seems that some forensic scientist in Japan, for whatever reason, was commissioned to determine what the person who was the model for the Mona Lisa would've sounded like.

Probably having spent at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this, apparently for no other reason than to say "We did it! BOOYA JIM!" even though nobody really ever questioned their ability, this seems like the most collossal waste of time since I sat through "Big Bully".

Maybe it was all a publicity stunt for the DaVinci Code, considering the article doesn't actually say who approached the Japanese, or maybe it just was a pull for the scientists to win another "Ig Nobel" Prize, awarded for research that "makes people laugh, then think". Just the idea of an award like that sort of makes me a little upset. I bet by looking at the list of past winners, you'd be able to see some of the biggest misuses of resources possible. I mean, just look at what these Japanese people won the award for doing a previous time:"for promoting harmony between species by inventing the Bow-Lingual, a dog-to-human interpretation device".

I really don't know what's worse, that somebody actually spent money on a scientific process to create something that can never be proven or disproven, or that the people in charge actually thought that the public would care enough for it to not be a waste of time. Granted, I don't know much about modern Japanese culture, and I'm not a renaissance art enthusiast, and those are probably the people that it would be aimed at the most (hence the reason why nobody here in the U.S. has made a huge deal over this "breakthrough"), so I could just be missing the boat. I suppose there is the whole "science for the sake of science" thing, like trying to determine if there ever was life on Mars, but there are some things that are more weighty than others.

To me though, something like this has little to no easily accessible evidence to prove that it's actually correct. Sure, these scienticians can make all sorts of claims about how big her vocal chords were and what her voice-related anatomy was like, but there are so many "X-Factors" at work here, like "what if she was deaf?", or "what if she smoked?" (although that's probably highly unlikely, but some sort of outside force on her voice could be possible), "what if she was from some other area not in Italy and was visiting, and didn't even speak Italian?" Or, here's one to make you think, "what if she wasn't a real person at all?" Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I don't see the point in hypothesizing about a topic that is so insignificant to our everyday lives and can't be shown to be fact anyway. That's like saying that if Bagwell or Biggio hadn't hit that game-winning ninth inning homerun against the Phillies last year that Philadelphia would've made the playoffs, and gone to the World Series, or if Roethlisberger hadn't made that tackle at the end of the Indy-Pittsburgh game last year that Manning would be wearing a Superbowl ring right now. These events are in the past, and, at least with the first one, highly unlikely. In addition, it's all speculation and therefore useless to those of us but the dreamers. When zombies roam the earth and Mona Lisa wakes up from her grave, maybe then we'll get a better insight into how she speaks, but even then, she'll probably only moan, "ZOMMMMBIIEEEE", probably in her mystery Italian dialect, and we'll still be as clueless as we are now.

But really, who am I to argue with the people who mastered the canine language?



I'll give them one whole star for the amount of work that they put in, but I view it as a wasted effort, because there'll never be any way to prove that they're right, and nobody will ever care.

Site note: We'll be having our first night of live reviewing on Sunday, February 5 during the Superbowl. That's right; we'll be reviewing all aspects of the game while it's still in progress: we'll review plays, people, commercials, the foods we're eating, you name it. Be part of our reviewing milestone starting at 6pm EST on Sunday Feb. 5.

MINI-REVIEW!




I had this sandwich the other day, and I suppose while I can't really claim to have expected there to be any more to it, it was very underwhelming. Having not lived under a rock for the past however many years, I realize that ads for food usually exaggerate (or "overrexaggerate" as friend of The Bookshelf Josh Calloway would say) the overwhelming deliciousness that said foods provide, and that Quiznos is a big purveyor of such underhanded tactics.

First of all, and yet a side note, Quiznos likes to pretend that their prices are cheap when they're anything but. When you hear them speak of just 2.99, you automatically jump to the mindset that Subway instilled in us about subs being 6-inch or footlong, however that's not the case. It's more along the lines of 4, 8, and 14 inches, or something like that, and so the 2.99 price is for the small. I'm willing to forgive the higher pricing as the sandwiches are mostly considerably more "gourmet" than subway, but the fact that they advertise them as cheap without saying the actual size, essentially preying on this mindset, really grills my flatbread.

Back on topic. So the sandwich looks all big and stacked full of slow cooked roast beef and melted swiss cheese, when in reality, all it is is a regular roast beef sandwich (the beef hasn't been specially cooked or anything), with swiss cheese, served with a cup of roast beef juice, known better by some french term that i'm not going to stoop to saying. The sandwich was hot, but I'm not giving them the special credit for that because they toast all of their subs. Basically this was a plain roast beef sandwich, made to look all important, and the price that the people paid for it probably wasn't worth the letdown.

Not saying that the sandwich wasn't good (it was quite tasty), but I probably would've been better off with the Chicken Carbonara sandwich, the classic italian (minus the olives), or the more expensive black angus sandwich, but hey, I wasn't paying for it, so nothing to lose.



This sandwich gets three stars, due to the fact that while it was good, it was small, and didn't even have the filler (lettuce, tomato, etc.) to make it more substantial a meal. Add to it that the roast beef was actually cold in spots, due to the hasty toasting of the sandwich, and the fact that the commercial makes it look substantially more overwhelming than it turned out to be, the sandwich leaves a good amount to be desired.

Footnote: While I understand that I am again using the argument that a product did not live up to my prior expectations as a gauge by which to judge said product, this case is different from before in the sense that the company itself was inducing false presumptions, and not other noted reviewers.

Quick site note: This is the first review of either many or zero more that will use "tips." When hovering over some links, text will pop-up near your cursor. We're not yet sure whether it's annoying or if it enhances the writing. I especially find myself drowning in a sea of parenthesis, and these "tips" solve that problem in a way that writing on paper never could. Feedback please.

Lately the non-review sections Roger Ebert’s website have been filled with discussion on the merits of video games versus movies, and "the internet" has been abuzz with him being an out-of-touch old man. His weekly answer-man column has addressed the issue multiple times, namely his lack of interest in video games, in general. I can’t find the absolute starting point for the whole debate, but I think it has to do with a reader objecting to Ebert’s awarding of one star to the movie adaptation of DOOM (he uses a four star system for those of you wondering how to reconcile his reviews with ours.). The reader basically took offense at his generous one star review because one section of the other-wise unremarkable adaptation paid super-close homage to the game. Ebert sufficiently served the reader by explaining that video game websites review movies on their own terms, and he will continue to review movies on his. What started the “controversy� was his final comment in his reponse:

“As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games."

This lead to (what I can only assume to be) countless angry letters of video game fans defending their XBoxen and poorly translated, endlessly sequeled, Japanese-sourced games (i.e. the Metal Gear and "Final" Fantasy series, etc.). True, that’s my bias showing through, but in the response to the letter that Ebert decided to run, he explained:

“I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art.�

That’s the one that really got the internet in a tizzy.


The problem with video game fans (in general) is that they are relentlessly but selectively enthusiastic about their “art� of choice. There’s no point for me to write an e-mail to the movie “Answer Man� being that it will be lost in the mountains of “You’ve never played Halo, Resident Evil, Final Fantasies 1 through 12, etc. so you suck� type letters (not that I’d assume it’d automatically be printed of course. I’m sure that every e-mail is read, but I think Jim Emerson (The site’s editor/blogger) probably handles most of the filtering). So, being that I have my own internet soapbox that ends in .com, here I go.

Without backing any of it up with fact or definitive history, I can guarantee that every medium of art has had to deal with detractors. Movies weren't widely accepted as having any worthwhile value at their inception, especially considering that mankind had gotten used to the previous status quo from the past two-thousand+ years of seeing live actors performing on stage. On top of that, even movements within each art form have faced critics (again, with the lack of facts or evidence). People still argue about the merits of Jackson Pollack imagine hundreds of years ago, when Baroque music was developing and becoming (again) the status quo, and *gasp* didn't base all of its harmony on the 4th. Sure, the now "normal" root-3rd-5th harmony sounds right, but back then a lot of people didn't like it one bit due to the "profane" nature of the major-3rd harmony (in terms backing that up, I'll hold a music professor I had responsible for defending that bit of trivia). In philosophical terms, the video game "medium" is about 25 years old and in only its second major movement. Consider the first to be the 2D era, started with the first Atari system and ended with Super Nintendo and Genesis. The second is the 3D era, started with the Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64, and Sega Saturn. The third (sub)wave of the 3D era began in late November of 2005 when Microsoft began shipping the XBox 360. As mentioned earlier, gamers are notoriously selective in their passions, and some choose to be passionate about the hardware aspect of video gaming, so in response to those people:

1. I know I'm glossing over lots of other systems.


2. I know that Genesis came out before Super Nintendo.


3. Atari probably wasn't the first system, but realistically it started the whole console "thing."


4. I know that 2D games have come out for the "3D" systems -- especially Sega Dreamcast, but 2D vs. 3D is too significant of a divide to ignore.

Structured music went through quite a bit of development before anything gained an historical foothold; specifically, J.S. Bach and Handel are still being widely performed today while almost the whole of still-existing Renaissance and Medieval music is relegated to prominence in academic environments only. Sure, movies "came of age" much more quickly than music (or even painting), with films from about thirty years after the proliferation of the medium still widely considered classics. Interestingly enough, film also experienced several technical and artistic waves. (The "maturation of computer-generated effects" probably being the academic-sounding, retrospective categorization of today's "wave.")

Video games have not yet experienced a true second artistic wave (the 2D/3D divide is of a technical nature). The gameplay advances of Grand Theft Auto 3 (namely, go wherever you want, do whatever you want, follow a story or play randomly) have inspired countless similar titles the same way that DOOM began a wave of 1st person shooters in 1993. They offered different experiences, but neither was the quantum leap experienced by movie-goers attending the first "talkies" in the 1920's. Newer hardware generations have enabled new features (namely graphical, some incredible advances in AI) in first-person shooters (and eventually bigger, prettier worlds in GTA-style games).

Anyone who says that once Roger Ebert would play Halo or any other mass-market game, Ebert would develop a huge appreciation and change his mind is simply wrong. Halo’s story serves merely to give the player a reason to shoot things. Similarly, Grand Theft Autos’ stories (any game in the series, even way back into its 2D, overhead days) simply provide a reason to take part in the shenanigans for which the games have become (in)famous. Limiting the lens to newer games, even the story of Metroid Prime is just a tool the developers used to make the shooting more compelling, not the other way around. It’s not that there aren’t story-driven titles among newer games, it’s just that in popular games it’s supplemental. I know there are ambitiously enthusiastic fans of the story in the Halo games, but ask yourself if you’d play the game any differently if there were no story, just the mission goals list, then shooting things until the next numbered list appears, rinse, repeat. So, no, I’m not claiming that “new� (more accurately, “popular�) games are bad, just that they serve as poor evidence in one’s claim that video games are narratively engaging.

So, as a bit of a disclaimer, I’d consider my interest in current video games to be passive. I’m interested enough to read game reviews or watch someone play for about 10 minutes or so, but I don’t participate. I own no consoles and the video card in my computer is from 2001. I’ve watched people play FarCry, Half-Life 2, DOOM III, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, both Halos and on and on. (Those games are almost all shooters, but a complete list would be excessive, and these are some of the most popular and loudly defended of the last couple of years). I hold no grudge towards new games, but my personal “golden age� of video gaming passed sometime in the late 90’s. Most recently, the games I’ve spent any considerable amount of time playing have been the Genesis version of John Madden NFL ’98 and the arcade version of Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, both running on a friend’s modded Xbox. As the understatement of the year, neither of these games is exactly what we’d consider story-heavy, but in terms of bringing things full circle, provide a very social experience with a group of people, exactly what is marketed as the number one feature of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, not its currently man-beast-esque hardware capabilities.

Directly addressing Roger Ebert, we'll now present the definitive example of the "video game as art" discussion:

"I did indeed consider videogames inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Videogames by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

At risk of this becoming a "my favorite game is more obscure than your favorite game" reverse sales-measuring contest, let's first throw out every RPG. Ebert's comment about "authorial control" initially sounds too heavy-handed to be anything other than hyperbole, but it should be painfully accurate to RPG players. A decently modeled RPG lets the player assume the "role" of a character (or group of characters); the user can choose for his game play experience to be as dull as desired. His or her experience will be different than another player's. Sure, that sounds ideal, even enough to potentially consider that to be the ideal example of the one thing that would skew video games toward "art" status. But think of Choose Your Own Adventure books; they offer a choice in the reader making his or her own story. The first reaction to that is, "But they're kids books, they're not supposed to be good." It goes without saying that there are plenty of widely appealing kids' books, and if there were adult-oriented Choose Your Own Adventure books, would anyone read them? Would they be considered "literature?" Nope; and for good reason. It's just a gimmick.

There are two story-heavy genres in video gaming. Role-Playing Games and Adventure games. (This is where I'm looking to avoid the obscurity-related reverse penis size contest.) RPG's having already been justifiably thrown out, that leaves Adventure games. Most anyone with a passing interest in video games has played an adventure game, but their popular peak was both dramatically short and intensely focused on one title (which really wasn't that great of a game, all things retrospectively considered ). MYST (aside from being considered the "killer app" for PC CD-ROM drives) was hugely successful, and was undeniably an adventure game. There was a set story, and very little room for non-linearity; provided you could figure out the "oh yeah, I guess that makes sense" puzzles, you were undoubtedly under the control of some "authorial" figure as you played. Though the graphics contributed to the overall mood, it was really the story and "art direction" that truly established the player's sense of loneliness on the island throughout its history. The story created the puzzles (the single element of "gameplay"), not the other way around. Though this isn't a review of MYST, it needs to be noted that it actually offered a rather passive gameplay experience; the puzzles were simplistic, the story, dull, but the mind-bendingly amazing (for 1995) graphics sold everyone. Unfortunately, it became the benchmark for the Adventure game genre, causing most everyone to think them dull and pretty-yet-vapid after most people were left thinking "Gee, I don't get it" after either finishing the game (or more likely) giving up after getting one's fill of pretty pre-rendered pictures.

With the genre's prime and popular example painting such an ugly picture for average users as time went on, the "mass market" PC gamers moved back towards more interactive games (such as Quake, more-or-less the beginning of the PC's true 3D boom). During this time, adventure games were still being made, and George Lucas of all people was responsible for some of the best. Okay, George Lucas' company actually made them, but trivia's trivia. Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Full Throttle were some of the best received adventure games of their time and are widely considered the classics of the era. Just like every every other genre eventually shifted to 3D, adventure games followed suit.

LucasArts' first of two 3D adventure game offered one of the most interactively cinematical experiences in games, ever, no matter the genre. Limiting the focus of the "video games as art" discussion to whether or not video games present the "authorial control" apparently required by art, Grim Fandango offered the "authorial control" of a movie, while engrossing the player in ways that movies and books simply can't. Loosely inspired by some sort of Central American mythology of multiple underworlds, and souls wanting to end up in the final, 9th underworld, you play as Manny Calavera, a sort of travel agent in limbo between life and death. Manny "sells" travel packages for different routes to the underworld; the better the prospective travellers lived their lives, the quicker their trip to the 9th underworld. The "cleanest" souls get to ride on the "Number 9" train which speeds them right to heaven,while those that face the travel agent (Manny) with more regrets are stuck with the less desirable methods, notably the long, dark walk through the underworld. All that is the setting, the actual story involves a conspiracy that Manny begins to uncover as he realizes that he keeps getting the "lesser" souls, and due to his unmentioned sins of his human life, he'll be stuck in limbo forever. Along the way, he meets a special lady, gathers a sidekick, meets a mortician performing an autopsy (one of the harmlessly creepy characters in any movie, game, book, etc.) and ends up having to shoot someone to save his life. (In case you're wondering, to kill a dead person, you apparently shoot them with a bullet that sprouts flowers, similarly to the earth "taking over" a body buried in the ground.) Without spending forever talking about this game, I'll simply say it's a more cinematic experience than many movies: the story is the game, the voice actors are top quality, the art direction (which somehow combines Latin American influences with Art-Deco) compares with any Hollywood production, and it offers an ending more emotional than most movies.

Which brings up the final thought: How many people have played Grim Fandango? How many have even heard of Grim Fandango? Not many. In fact, it's usually considered the ultimate symbol of the adventure genre's waning popularity. It came out in 1998, one year after Sierra had abandoned the King's Quest franchise. Critical reviews were immensely favorable, but sales were not. Escape from Monkey Island, which was ultimately the final LucasArts adventure entered and exited with a whimper as sequels to two of their most popular adventure franchises were cancelled for 'current marketplace realities' and 'creative issues,' reverse respectively. In any medium there's a distinct divide between the commercial/popular and the artistic. There is sometimes cross-over between the two, and it seems that most fans of the "artistic" baselessly resent fans of the popular merely because it is the "popular." Music has thrived with that divide, and the "indie" boom of the mid-90's brought that awareness to the world of movies. Even today, Rolling Stone and Spin's editors campaign for the "latest, greatest, obscurest" new music while movie critics practically bet their credibility in defense of those same three superlative adjectives on some not yet known about "indie movie." Thankfully, we don't live in France where critics have been known to defend bad movies just to prove a point. Importantly, there is no true "indie" vs. otherwise divide in video gaming. There are no critics willing to champion some unheard of game for the sake of getting more people to experience it. People's expectations for video games are drastically different than for other media, and even with the internet, there is no true "indie" movement that produces and distributes unheard of games the way that the major movie studios have arms dedicated to picking up obscure movies. There's simply no My Big Fat Greek Wedding in the world of video games. The infrastructure isn't set up to "get the word" out, and I'll go out on a limb and say that in a society greatly affected by advertising and shiny things, video gamers are especially vulnerable to this advertising.

Looks like we covered a lot more than just "Roger Ebert and Video Games" in this one, so here we go, emptybookshelf's first three-headed review! Let's hear it for innovation.



Roger Ebert's take on Video Games receives two-and-half stars due to the fact that as well as he defends himself, he can't help but come off as just another old person afraid of what the kids are up to. "Oh my God! How could a bunch of moving pictures ever be better than having the actual, live actors in front of the audience?! That'll never work!!" Unfortunately for the video gaming industry, he has a decidedly correct take on the "games as art" issue. Judging just the popular games, he's hit the nail on the head; they are diversions where interactivity is thought to remove the need for story. Aside from the fact that he's said he has not played games, if he were to ever pick up a controller/mouse/keyboard/bongo, he wouldn't be playing anything remotely cinematical. At the risk of going on yet another tangent, just the fact that you can use bongos to play a video game says something about them compared to movies.



Though I claimed this wasn't a review of Grim Fandango, I can't help but consider this an ideal time to "star" it. It receives five stars for being the most engrossing of all adventure games, and dare I say, any game. That isn't to say that it's the best game ever, just the most cinematical, and in a non-girly way, potentially the most beautiful.



Internet Fanboys receive one star due to the fact that their existence and pedanticism make it so a review of such a contentious topic needs to go on so many sidetracks. There's something to be said for being enthusiastic about something, but there's also something to be said for having some perspective. Not-so-oddly enough, Roger Ebert himself, probably one of the wittiest people on the planet, summed up the whole "fanboy" thing quite well in his review of Hackers:

You should never send an expert to a movie about his specialty. Boxers hate boxing movies. Space buffs said 'Apollo 13' showed the wrong side of the moon. The British believe Mel Gibson's scholarship was faulty in 'Braveheart' merely because some of the key characters hadn't been born at the time of the story. 'Hackers' is, I have no doubt, deeply dubious in the computer science department. While it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie."

Hmm, is it possible to somehow not take the side of a sick kid and not be considered an awful person? Let's find out. So, I was doing some stuff for work the other day (well, a lot of days), and I was outside of Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest. And lo-and-behold, there's this bus stop advertisement of a very young, pants-less kid and his dog with a message imploring anyone reading it that 'you' should help because "Perhaps YOU [their emphasis] have the knowledge to save our son." I'd assume that this is one sick kid, a poster child/patient for some obscure but deadly disease/syndrome/condition, etc. and there must be some sort of national ad campaign to get the attention of doctors because I sure don't have any knowledge about how to fix the kid other than to possibly point him in the direction of a GAP Kids so he could get some pants. Maybe his condition is skin-related, and clothing irritates his skin, but I doubt families of kids with severe skin issues own dogs. I guess the "ad" campaign (quotes because I doubt that they're trying to sell anything) worked, and I checked out the website, Cure4Cole.com.



Turns out that, yes, Cole is indeed a sick kid, and that dog is there to bark when Cole involuntarily stops breathing. Yikes. Now, lesser men might end a review there, giving 5 stars to anything related to Mr. Cole just because of "the little guy's courage." So at risk of further becoming a bad person, here's a quick rundown of the "situation." Well, I guess that shouldn't be in quotes, but oh well. What I thought was perhaps a national campaign is actually a goodwill gesture from Lamar Advertising Company which placed a full-size billboard in Milwaukee (outside a children's hospital), two billboards in Ohio, and four in the Lehigh Valley. To be honest, I'm now interested in finding the other four in the Lehigh Valley (and I know that I've seen a second one, but I can't remember where), but that's more my completist nature showing through than anything else -- don't worry, hoping that someone finds a cure is a higher priority to me than seeing all the signs in the general area. So, anyway, the website covers the story of how an undiagnosed, but very sick kid from Winnipeg caught the attention of an advertising company, includes a photo gallery and even video examples of the choking behavior that he exhibits when he stops breathing (the sound of the choking is what the dog has been trained to recognize as the cue to start barking to get everyone's attention). I've not clicked on the videos as I can't help but think that if I did, I probably wouldn't post this review.

So, I guess to effectively review this "ad" campaign, I need to forget that there's a sick kid behind it. Superficially, I recognize the fact that having a poster child for a condition is one method of increasing awareness. For example, Doug Flutie has a public-awareness autism campaign named after his son. It's not a shameless move on anyone's part, and it's better to see sports stars and celebrities promoting medical awareness instead of knee-jerk political opinions. But, the only issue with Cole's campaign is that he seems to be the only one. Of course it's not his fault (or his mother's) that his condition is so rare that it is more accurately called "personal," but a cynic would see the website and notice its lack of "help Cole so you can help other sick children"-type messages and be put off by the whole idea. Of course, it says in bold letters that they're not asking for money, but cynics would say that anyone who specifically says they don't want your money actually do. Am I that particular cynic? No, not really, but I guess it stands against my character to assume that someone out there might think that. Of course, I'm also the type of person that would think of wishing Dr. House to be real so that he can diagnose Cole, accuse his mom of drug use in her past [because that's what House does in almost every episode], and hilariously harass his boss in one drama-filled hour. Again, superficially, while the website is perfectly functional, there are some spelling errors. True, they're typos, but some of the copy has a "xanga-esque" feel to it, and and professionalism = legitimacy. Of course videos of the choking sound a sick kid makes as he stops breathing are also equal to legitimacy. So in the name of that, if anyone is coming here to call me soulless for all of this, consider this my formal offering to copy check the entire website for the entirety of its existence.



The Cure4Cole "ad" campaign receives three-and-a-half stars due to the fact that it shows that companies do care and so on, and looking through the guestbook has lots of people wishing well, many after having seen the billboards. It's not the fault of Cole (or his mom) that his condition is so rare that messages about "helping others, too" would be almost inapplicable, but it's very odd to see an awareness campaign focused on just one kid. Again, that isn't to be held against them, but symbolically, it would count for something. Of course, I/we/anyone-with-a-heart hopes that they figure out the problem and that he gets better. But, is it too much to ask that he be at least more fully clothed in the picture used in the campaign. There are lots of pictures in the gallery of him wearing more than underpants/diapers(?). So, yeah, three-and-a-half stars. That's right, I'm going to Hell.