I’m not sure if this blog has “readers” so much as it has “people who stumble here from Google by pure chance”, but for what it’s worth: You might have noticed that the updates from me have been trickling slower lately, and given that I’ve been the only remotely consistent presence on this blog since it started, my lack of interest has basically ground this zombie to a halt. And this time, there’s a good chance it won’t reanimate.

Likes to Ramble began back in 2009 on a whim by Ryan. He thought it would be cute if he registered this domain name and then gave people personalized blogs using subdomains (using ryan.likestoramble.com for his blog, etc). But since I was apparently the only person he knew at the time who could be bothered writing, my blog was the only one that really updated. After a few months, when it became clear that no one could be bothered turning “likestoramble” into some kind of LiveJournal-esque blogosphere social network, I asked Ryan if it might not be better to recycle the domain name into one super-blog and allow that to have multiple writers. That’s how this site started, and why it has such a bizarre name.

Really, this was all an excuse to make use of a domain Ryan bought for no reason. And as much as I’d like to be part of a Thoughtful Smart Person Mega-Blog, I never wanted to craft that blog all by myself purely to satisfy some obligation that fell into my lap. This isn’t even my website — it’s Ryan’s, and he hasn’t written in over two years, is no longer on speaking terms with any of the writers here, and has apparently quit the internet entirely. So now seems like a good time for me to officially jump ship.

Yes, this means I’m never going to post anything here about being transgender. I thought about preceding this post with another melodramatic coming-out piece, but I have to be honest: that old piece about being a gay man was so over-the-top because I was trying to convince myself as much as anyone else. I don’t really think I’m at a point in my life where I can genuinely write something smart about my experience with gender. One day I probably will, but that day isn’t today and it’s never going to happen on Likes to Ramble. I’ve been nagged since day one to write something about feminism, too, and that’s not happening for pretty much the same reason.

I had a great time with this place, really. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and posting stuff here was the first time I ever got comments on my writing that weren’t completely vapid. But now that I have an account on Everything2 and a personal website that I could easily add a blog to, this place is starting to look vestigial.

Thanks for the memories, everyone. It’s time for me to drum solo.

Currently, San Andreas is the most ambitious title in the Grand Theft Auto series. While the games that have come after it have brought a finer level of polish to individual elements, San Andreas is still usually regarded as the game that tried to do the most at the same time. Whether it’s better than the latest game in the series, GTA IV, is hotly contested amongst fans; understandably so, as San Andreas, in its rush to be bigger and better than ever before, does contain an anomalous number of flaws. But did the developers truly bite off more than they could chew, or does the final product make up for the evident mistakes?

Story

Five years ago, Carl Johnson moved to Liberty City to run away from the murder of his brother Brian. Born to a life of crime, however, he does not recognize an opportunity to do anything different with his life, as shown clearly in a half-hour DVD short called The Introduction which was included with copies of the game’s soundtrack. Instead of starting a new life, he continues living the way he always did, running away from his home and his problems. As the game begins, he receives a phone call telling him that his mom has also been killed, and reluctantly returns to his home in Los Santos to attend the funeral and take the abuse he knows is coming from his remaining family members.

This is where the gameplay starts, in the glorious wonder years of… the early 90s. 1992, to be specific. Carl decides to stick around in San Andreas to help rebuild his old home and make amends for running away, and the story from there takes a lot of twists and goes off in directions you would never expect from the relatively humble origins. That’s both good and bad: while the story at the beginning and end of the game is inspired by and tries to address the types of issues brought up by gangster films such as Boyz n the Hood, which could have been a great idea, these messages are not done justice by the game’s mediocre writing. When the increasingly ridiculous plot points start to pop up, it’s actually a breath of fresh air; the best parts of the story are when the game stops pretending to have a point and just goes insane. Even though this is less satisfying than actually having a good story, I’m glad that the bad stuff didn’t have to drag the entire game down.

The story as it progresses makes no real sense: the first quarter of the game simply takes gangsta rap at face value and wallows in it with no subtext whatsoever; the second quarter — which is incidentally the only time that grand theft auto has actually been integral to a Grand Theft Auto plot, since you run a chop shop — is completely uninteresting and almost seems like an entirely different game just started with nothing but scattered references to the first quarter; the third quarter is so crazy that you forget what the story was even about, and the tiny attempts to remind you only serve to undermine everything that’s supposed to be “serious” even more so; the last quarter makes a slight attempt to actually tie all the mess together, and does make some admirable stabs at it, but eventually it also boils down to blindly glorifying crime with no real point.

People like to claim that the story is meant to be satire, and certainly many of the individual jokes are satirical in nature, but the game as a whole really has nothing at all to say about Los Angeles in the 1990s. In fact, the sheer force with which the writers missed the point almost crosses the boundary of being sort of offensive. According to this game, gangsters are so badass and so capable of utterly destroying all competition, that it seems like the infamous police brutality and racism simply didn’t exist, because black people really were evil and deserved everything they got. That’s not what they were trying to say, but the real message is done so poorly at the expense of making the gameplay fun, it really draws attention to just how much this story didn’t fit the gameplay at all. The main characters are a thousand times worse than the bad guy could ever be.

Yes, making the game fun is more important; I’m not saying they should have toned down the gameplay to make it fit the story, I’m saying they should have made a story that actually fit in the first place. In Vice City, the overwrought machismo of 1980s crime movies (mostly Scarface) fit the GTA style like a glove. Vice City didn’t pretend that its main characters were sympathetic. San Andreas has the worst story of any GTA game — although it’s technically more interesting than the bland paint-by-numbers story of GTA III and the practically-nonexistent stories of the first few games, the contrast between what the storytellers try to do in cutscenes and what the game actually lets you do is greater than it ever has been in other games.

It’s more disappointing than actually annoying, thankfully. A boring, meandering story with a couple of memorable parts and plenty of genuinely funny jokes, but no point to it at all and a lot of bad implications. A definite step down from Vice City, but nothing to absolutely ruin the game in my opinion.

Presentation

For the most part, the presentation of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is really good. The graphics, though they were dated even by 2004 standards, are still very impressive when you take into account the vast amount of stuff that’s in the game. Despite the low-quality models and textures, the game still does have some good touches: the draw distance seems to go on for an eternity, and the PC version even has sorta-realistic shadows and reflective surfaces. These help to distract you from what would otherwise have been very ugly graphics.

The GTA series is infamous for having a lot of pop-up — times when objects materialize out of thin air while you’re looking at them because the game engine can’t keep up with all the junk on-screen — but it’s never a problem that seriously destroys the game. The one time when it does get annoying (on the PlayStation 2 version primarily) is when flying aircraft at high speeds: many times, you’ll end up dying after you crash into a gigantic California-style tree that was invisible until after you hit into it. That would be an unforgivable flaw for most games to have, but for a game that pushes the limits of the PS2 so far, it’s actually pretty understandable. Just don’t fly low to the ground or you’ll be swearing a lot.

The controls are as good as they could be. It’s inevitable that some things are easier with a mouse and keyboard, like firing a gun, and other stuff is easier with a classic controller setup, like flying the aircraft. Everything is doable with both layouts, however, and it is actually possible to swap between a controller and a keyboard while playing the PC version, if you have both input methods plugged in while starting the game. Trying to fly with just the keyboard takes a lot of practice to get used to, but I personally prefer to just stick to one control method. (Thankfully, if you use a laptop with a nub or nicely-positioned touchpad, it’s almost like having a third hand; you can adjust the camera with your thumb while using the rest of your fingers to steer.)

It’s well-known that the game’s soundtrack doesn’t live up to its predecessor. How could it, really, when that game was set in the glamourous 80s? However, I understand people’s complaints: even for a game that follows a gangster in the 90s, it still has way more rap than necessary. Something like half the soundtrack is rap, and it seems like Rockstar North doesn’t know how to licence more than two songs to use off the radio, because every single dance or club scene in the game uses the same damn music. I’m not sure what kind of sense that makes, when the radio has tons of music; is it really more expensive to licence the songs for use in the diegetic sound as well? That seems unlikely.

Map design

To date, the map of San Andreas is the largest world to have ever graced a GTA game (although the developers of Grand Theft Auto V have said that the new game’s map is going to be just slightly bigger). The state of San Andreas, while obviously not the size of an actual state, is still massive and amazingly well-designed. One of the key complaints everyone made about Vice City was that the map was full of filler areas, where the designers lazily wasted big amounts of space for no reason just so they could advertise it as being bigger than the GTA III map. San Andreas, in contrast, has probably the best map of any video game I’ve ever played. Obviously there are newer games nowadays that have bigger maps, but bigger doesn’t automatically mean better.

San Andreas is split into six rough areas: the three cities, Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas; and the three counties, Red County, Flint County, and Bone County. Not every single inch of these areas is designed well, but definitely most of it is. The one thing Rockstar has always been good at (even in Vice City, despite the laziness), is designing cities that, although unrealistic, fit the quick gameplay perfectly and ooze culture even when the story doesn’t pull its weight. San Andreas is full of personality, from the breathtaking Mount Chiliad, to the foggy streets of Fierro, to the dirty slums of Santos, it really does feel like a miniaturized version of the real places it’s based on. At the same time, the map is simple enough to navigate that it never gets frustrating despite the size; the designers never commit the sin of doing something solely because it’s “realistic” — dead-end streets and alleyways that lead to nowhere are nearly nonexistent in San Andreas, and stuff like the desert feels a lot bigger and more intimidating than it really is. This is a good thing.

If there’s one complaint I do have for the map, it’s just that the design is generally so good that the slightly-less-good parts stick out worse than they would normally. San Fierro, for example, is an especially bland city compared to the other two; the real life San Fransisco has a lot more to it than the GTA version lets on, and it’s a bit disappointingly straightforward to navigate; it feels too easy, with almost everything locked onto a strict grid layout. I also think there’s a lot more that could have been done with the desert, which the story kind of glosses over. It’s my favourite part of the map, but there’s not a lot to actually do there compared to the rest.

These are all minor gripes, though, and overall the map of San Andreas is absolutely incredible. Definitely one of the best things about the game.

Gameplay

It’s a Grand Theft Auto title, of course the gameplay is good! All the clunkiness of the previous GTA III era games is gone in this one, especially on the PC version, which actually feels like a genuine PC game instead of a half-assed port of a PlayStation game (most notably, you can actually move the camera while driving now). A lot of the byzantine limitations of the engine are gone: waist-high fences are no longer treated like insurmountable obstacles (you can actually jump now, instead of that awkward useless hop that the games had before), and the water isn’t an instant death trap.

For whatever reason, even though the game does have a fluid system for doing drive-bys (similar to the one in GTA IV), the developers hid it behind a cheat code and the standard game is limited to the same poor controls that GTA III had. I have no idea at all why they did that, but the situation is improved a lot by the fact that your passengers do have good drive-by controls and can actually hang out the window to shoot at targets. The best use of this feature is when playing online^* with friends, since the AI’s accuracy is typically very low.

Unlike previous games in the series which had notoriously poor difficulty curves, San Andreas makes a serious attempt at keeping the game balanced and challenging without going too far towards frustration. However, it seems like Rockstar still hasn’t figured out that arbitrary changes of genre are a bad thing, especially in the first quarter of the game, which is stuffed with irritating mandatory missions that require you to do things like play a Dance Dance Revolution-esque minigame. I’ve played the game so much at this point that I can breeze through these missions, and it’s definitely not bad to have stuff like the dancing minigame in the game, but the core gameplay should not change in such a drastic fashion as to frustrate players who bought the game expecting action adventure. Especially when these minigames are much harder than the games they’re based on: the game is very picky about what constitutes a winning score. It violates a fundamental principle of video game design and makes the game significantly less fun.

Another problem is the game’s somewhat out-of-place RPG elements. I don’t necessarily hate these features, which involve slowly leveling up your character’s skills and attributes, but sometimes they can be very annoying, especially with the vehicle skills. Chasing people down on a motorcycle with intentionally bad controls is not very fun, especially when you replay the game and the mission is still hard despite all the practice you got by playing the first time. Some of these elements, like the firearm skills, work pretty well — nothing at the beginning of the game really demands that your skills be higher than they naturally would be — but they still reek of fake gameplay growth. I shouldn’t have to grind my motorcycle experience points just to get through the very beginning of the game, when the game isn’t even supposed to be an RPG. It helps the immersion sometimes, but most of the time it’s just a hindrance.

Overall, though, the gameplay is still very good. The first quarter of the story can be a bit frustrating, but once the designers get that pointless need to show off everything out of their systems, the game settles into a much more GTA-like routine. The majority of your time is spent stealing cars, chasing people, shooting people, and exploring the magnificent map, which is exactly the kind of thing that GTA should be. The game also features the welcome addition of a “trip skip” button that allows you to skip over long travelling times in missions if you have to retry them, which was a great idea considering how big the map is.

* The game doesn’t have online features by default, but a fan-made mod for the PC version adds rudimentary support for it. It’s far from being perfect but it’s a fun mod to play with nonetheless.

Conclusion

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is still my favourite game in the GTA series. Since this game, Rockstar North has brought the franchise into a different direction from what I would have liked; the cartoony action and satire that characterized the series initially is slowly being leeched out, and although the expansion packs have been adding some of the craziness back in (with stuff like exploding shotgun shells in The Ballad of Gay Tony), it still doesn’t change the fact that every game is now trying harder and harder to be enormous, and spreading the polish too thinly.

I’m still a big fan of Take Two Interactive (the parent company of Rockstar) and their always-admirable attempts to push the limits of gaming technology. But at the end of the day, they need to remember what their individual series are. GTA has always spread itself a bit thin and covered a lot more gameplay variety than it really needed to, and that was a big part of its charm, but now it’s time for them to focus on what matters. The new games feel more and more like bad crime movies with some kind of bloated, bizarre life simulation thrown in for no reason, along with a billion minigames. The “satire” gets increasingly nonsensical in every game, which goes hand-in-hand with the series ever-increasing vulgarity. Yes, it’s a crime game, but the older games didn’t have to be this blunt about it; they had a balance of being juvenile and still a little bit subversive, whereas the games now seem more mean-spirited with every release.

I know they’re just trying to keep the series fresh, and it’s hard to come up with new ideas (certainly it is, when you recycle everything as often as they do). But what the GTA series needs is polish, and writing that doesn’t make me ashamed to be a fan of it. They have other games to stretch their legs with, they don’t have to stick everything into GTA anymore just to make money. If they focused on doing smaller games with more polish to the parts that are actually important, they wouldn’t have so many heavily-flawed gems.

The bad writing also ruins the developers’ other, more serious games such as L.A. Noire. At the very least, if they don’t want to be well-written, make the games into a cartoon again. Stop pretending to have meaning that isn’t there. Grand Theft Auto would be significantly better if it actually tried to have something to say about crime, and it rarely does. For a series that puts so much effort into the voice acting and setting, you would think that they would actually bother to hire good writers. They don’t, and it’s making the new games harder and harder to enjoy as anything other than guilty pleasures. It doesn’t have to be such a mindless series when they’ve clearly proven in the past that they can do satire.

But in the end, is San Andreas a good game? Yes. In fact, it’s an incredible game, definitely one of the crowning achievements of gaming. In my opinion, it marked the beginning of a steep decline in quality for Rockstar, but it’s still a great video game in its own right, and I highly recommend that you play it if you haven’t already.

Biographical films usually fit into one of two categories: the first contains movies like Kinsey and Nixon, where the primary purpose of the movie is to examine the main character and impart information to the audience. Events can still be changed slightly by the filmmakers to make them more fitting to the medium, and of course the movie can still have a message and conclusion as long as it fits reality, but the overall film is, at its core, a biography. The second category contains movies like Ed Wood and Boys Don’t Cry, where the main character is used more as an icon than an actual human; in this case the reason that the main character is developed is just to increase the empathy felt by the audience, not because the actual character is in itself important. Of course, in either case the film is character-driven and imparts information about its subject, but the latter type is less analytical of the actual person and more about what they represent.

Zuckerberg is in his late 20s, and obviously making an analysis of his life as it is now would make little sense, so The Social Network tries to fit into the second category. However, while the movie does a great job conveying its messages, they aren’t actually the messages that it should have had. In fact, Sorkin has stated that he doesn’t actually use Facebook at all and barely does anything with modern social technology other than email his relatives, which couldn’t be more obvious while watching the movie. Zuckerberg is solely used as an icon of someone who thinks that getting power will cause him to be socially accepted, even though that’s purely conjecture, and the most cursory of glances at the man’s history would reveal a number of definitely accurate angles that the filmmakers could have taken instead.

The screenplay may be technically proficient, but it can’t make up for the fact that the writer doesn’t understand the subject matter. For a movie supposedly about a social network, it has nothing at all to say about social networks, or even the impact of technology in general. Nor does it have much to say about programming or sociology, which were Zuckerberg’s majors in Harvard and the fields that define the portion of his life that the movie is about. Instead, it relies on lazily using Zuckerberg as the Hollywood edition of a nerd — a well-written portrayal, yes, but not a unique one or one that has any relevancy to the subject matter. Even if it does want to be entirely about Zuckerberg’s personal life, it never actually has a real portrayal of Zuckerberg in it at all, just the stereotyped strawman version. Whether it’s true or not, the impression left is that the filmmakers had a personal vendetta against the subject — and that makes the entire thing seem reprehensible.

Minor alteration of the true story is fine, and it would have been okay for the writer to ignore the fact that the real Zuckerberg is currently married to the same girl he was dating before he created Facebook, if he was going to use that plotline to illustrate the character’s isolation and the consequences of his misguided ambition. Except that a lot of the real Zuckerberg’s friends — and even people who the film portrays as enemies — have stated that the “misguided ambition” doesn’t actually exist anyway. That’s a double whammy of dishonest screenwriting, and it isn’t the only example in the film. The entire thing is built upon (and littered with) factual errors.

In my opinion, biography is the one genre of film in which the filmmakers absolutely have to have integrity with the facts; and in this case, as Sorkin admits, they had as much integrity as a paper bag in a hurricane. If they wanted to simply make a good movie, they shouldn’t have made a good movie that pretended to be a true story. Especially if they’re going to pretend the movie is about someone who’s still alive and at the height of his career: that’s called being an asshole.

I’m not necessarily saying that Zuckerberg is a really nice person — with all the non-disclosure agreements and out-of-court settlements, it’s impossible to really tell at this point in time — but that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly acceptable to make an entire movie just to sling mud at him. The film completely ignores any impact Zuckerberg had on the world itself, as if none of that mattered and the real story is just some kid being a jerk. Maybe that makes for a compelling story, but it has almost nothing to do with the social network the movie is named after. Are they just focusing on the creator’s personal relationships to make him look unequivocally bad, even though the majority of it is at best conjecture anyway, so they can avoid actually making a point about the current issue the movie should have been about?

If it stuck to reality without inventing all sorts of nonsense seemingly for the sole purpose of insulting Mark Zuckerberg, it could have had some short-term relevancy on top of its timeless messages about ambition and friendship. It wouldn’t have been incredible, but it still would’ve been good. Instead, it’s a movie that pretends to be about something current while actually just using the current things as a platform for mudslinging. It never has anything insightful to say about its current issues, it just uses timeless messages and didacticism so it can be praised by stodgy film critics. And that’s lame, mean-spirited filmmaking at its worst.

If you can ignore the fact that it’s supposed to be a biopic and just take it for what it is, you’ll probably enjoy The Social Network. It’s a good movie. It’s just a terrible biography, and a lot less insightful than it’s cracked up to be.

We should not allow this blasphemy to continue uncontrolled. His argument is grounded on the premise that the only people who would ever talk about gay love are people to whom gay love is very tempting — so tempting that, with societal restrictions removed, Caiden Cowger and supple blond Dan Soucy, would give in to it. But such an argument in itself is self-defeating, is it not? In order to think about such a thing in the first place, Soucy himself would have to admit the truth.

Dan Soucy: you are gay.

Here’s the thing: sodomy is not remotely interesting to a heterosexual Christian. The only way your argument makes internal sense is if the person making it is, himself, a sinner. Unless you’re seriously suggesting that a God-serving heterosexual male would be interested in the affairs of a homosexual? What possible motivation would he have to care about equality and issues of basic human dignity, if he’s already guaranteed his own paradise by doing nothing?

Does this mean you will forever lust after poor Caiden and suffer eternity in Hell? Yes. But you should torture yourself first, just in case God decides to forgive you. Your decisions are still yours to make: marry a wife, have several children, and take them to church every Sunday without ever seeing a naked man. You may be miserable for the rest of your life, but serving God isn’t about being happy; it’s about constant subservience to a greater power and the overwhelming knowledge that you will never be good enough.

That is, after all, why we teach our convictions to children. Sure, there is a chance that our children will be straight, white men without our intervention, but often we are not so lucky. Many unfortunate Christians have gotten blessings from God that were touched by Satan, or even worse, were female or disabled. But with a little love and horrific bedtime stories about Hell, we can ensure that our children are scared into being just like us, so everything can stay the same. Forever.

I’ve always been a bit of a joker. For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been the guy with a funny one-liner. Did it get me into trouble? You bet your ass it did — but it made me feel better, less insecure. In high school, I had great friends who would put up with my bullshit. We would always blow off classes to be involved in anything was going on, and instead of studying, we would spend entire nights together, just wandering around, doing whatever.

Despite being a pretty bad student, I graduated from high school two years ago. Since then, I’ve felt lost, going from job to menial job, trying to survive. Sometimes I think maybe if I had tried to get better grades, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I really thought I could make it on my own, but I ended up back in my parents’ house.

My parents. Fuck I can’t stand them. All they do is drink and fight. Worst of all, it’s usually about me. I’m tired of hearing how they could be happy, someplace far from here, if I had never existed. I feel trapped, like I’ll die if I never get out of this place. My friends got busy with classes and stuff, so I don’t see them as much as I used to. They still see each other all the time, which hurts. I’ve never felt isolation like this before.

But it was okay. I was getting by with the help of a friend. Okay, a really good friend. Okay, a girl. She was my life. For the first time, I felt like I really belonged. She could make me feel joy or pain with a glance. She seemed kind of dense when I first met her, but after I got to know her, I realized that she’s one of the most sensitive people I’ve ever known. As a person, I changed completely when she was there: I was no longer the feeble loser I was; I was a strong, confident, man, capable of anything.

She was my whole life, and I blew it. I did some stupid shit, and it hurt her, and that hurt me. We were going to grow old together, and I fucked it all up. Since then, I’ve been spending every waking moment trying to get her back. We still hung out with the same group of friends, so I’d been seeing her all the time, but the looks I got from her — when she did look at me — were nothing but cold.

Then she passed away.

I never changed her mind. We were never more than the most distant friends. And now she’s gone forever.

This brings me to today. How can a person move on from something like that? Will this hole inside me never go away? When I think of all the good times we had, and that we should’ve had (if not for me) it just makes me think there might be nothing left for me in this world. I can’t sleep; I can’t eat. I just can’t believe she’s really gone, that I’ll never see her again.

That’s all for now — Buffy needs me to help fight off some vampires.

I’m not going to pick on him, like The Young Turks did, nor am I going to make fun of his grammar, like TMZ. Obviously, he doesn’t need any more death threats or harassment. What he needs at this stage of his life is to realize the truth about himself.

Caiden Cowger, you are gay.

Think about it: one of the central arguments in the video is that because Obama says being gay is acceptable, people are deciding to do it. That argument is grounded on the premise that gay love is very tempting — so tempting that, with societal restrictions removed, all the country’s youth would give in to it.

Here’s the thing, though: gay love is not remotely tempting to a straight person. The only way your argument makes internal sense is if the person making it is, themself, very gay. You see homosexuality as a threat because your same-sex temptations are legitimately putting you at risk of defying the printed word of the bible.

Does this mean you will turn to a life of sin and suffer eternity in hell? No, it doesn’t. Your decisions are still yours to make: you could marry a wife, have several children, and take them to church every Sunday without ever seeing a naked man. That is, after all, the life that conservatives advocate for gays. Unfortunately, this does mean you’ll never be happy and you will die full of angst and self-loathing.

And that’s the real danger of religion. Because Caiden’s parents told him stories of a magical Justice Fairy, his life is doomed to misery — unless he comes to the realization that his god isn’t real, which itself is quite a terrifying experience.

This is the kind of damage that you can do to your children by teaching them your convictions. Sure, there is a chance that your child will be a straight, white male, with a hatred for shellfish, in which case he might be very well-adjusted with his Catholic lifestyle. More often than not, however, you will seriously twist your child’s perception of reality and make their teenage years unnecessarily harrowing.

The story concerns Max (voiced by Jason Marsden, singing voice by Aaron Lohr) and his relationship with his father, the classic Disney icon Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer). Max is in high school and wants what most teenage guys want: to fit in, have friends, and get the girl. In the first act, he highjacks a school assembly to ask out the girl of his dreams, Roxanne, but in doing so ends up getting in trouble with the principal. When Goofy hears that his son is causing trouble, he takes parenting advice from his neighbour Pete and tries to get his son “under his thumb” (i.e., earn his son’s respect) with a little bonding time on the open road.

If someone told you that there was a Goof Troop movie, would you expect much more than a made-for-TV cash-in? Surprisingly, this movie is more than that. Yeah, it’s a goofy cartoon (get it?) with tons of slapstick, but it never forgets to include the undercurrent of drama required to maintain your attention for the running time. When the film needs to be quiet and mature, it can be — and there are quite a few touching, insightful little moments thrown in — but A Goofy Movie never forgets that it’s essentially a big-screen Saturday morning cartoon. Personally, I think that’s what makes it so good. I don’t want Goofy’s movie to try to be The Lion King. As a family road trip movie, it works.

The film is also a musical, and though the songs aren’t the greatest tunes you’ll ever hear, they’re not too bad either. They work within the context of the film, and one or two of them do stand out as being memorably good — most notably the first song, “After Today”. The song that marks the beginning of the road trip, “On the Open Road”, isn’t that spectacular on its own but is accompanied by countless visual gags that elevate it. There’s isn’t much to complain about, but nothing to write home about either.

The animation, as I said, is a bit bad by Disney standards. Watch the backgrounds and you’ll see extras conspicuously frozen in place, elements that are clearly painted onto separate cells (having mismatched colours as a result), and there’s even a few sequences that appear to have been artificially slowed down in post-production, causing the frame rate to drop erratically. It’s nothing worse than you’d see in a TV show, however, and the movie makes up for it with some very clever use of colour; I especially like the red light that illuminates the map every time someone looks at it dramatically. It isn’t subtle, but that’s what makes it fit this style of animation so well. For a feature film, a bit more effort could have been put in, but it’s passable.

A Goofy Movie isn’t a grand epic tale that digs deep into important issues — it’s a fun little tale about a boy and his dad. Goofy is definitely my favourite Disney character, and the script does an incredibly good job of keeping him ridiculous while still making me feel some genuine emotion about him. Like in Goof Troop, Goofy is a single dad, but now that Max is a bit older, he finds himself struggling to maintain his relationship with his son. Max is embarrassed by his dad in that way teenagers frequently are… and when your dad is Goofy, it’s a pretty believable embarrassment. I can empathize with Max’s desire to gain some independence from his parent, but I can just as easily sympathize with Goofy. The relationship is done very well. Some people might have wanted something with a bigger scope, but I think this modest story does the movie a favour: the emphasis is on what made the TV show good, while still expanding it to fit a movie format. Maybe a “Goof Troop Saves the World” movie could have worked, but that formula has been done to death. This works fine.

Is it a masterpiece? Probably not, but A Goofy Movie is still one of my personal favourites, bias taken into account. I grew up with those old Goofy cartoons, and I can see a lot of myself in Max and his relationship with his father. Sometimes, it is hard for a little boy to tell his dad, “I love you.” If you don’t understand that, you probably won’t understand what makes me like this movie so much. And if you don’t like Goofy… well, don’t expect him to suddenly endear himself to you.

If you’re a fan of Goof Troop, or if a father-son road trip movie with Goofy sounds like something you would enjoy regardless, check this one out. Maybe it’s not really the best Disney movie, but it’s far from the worst.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as James Brennan, a shy, introspective nerd who plans on going to grad school after the summer. But after the unexpected job loss of his father, Brennan finds himself taking up a summer job at the local amusement park, Adventureland. Here he meets the mandatory assortment of kooky characters: the snarky slacker Joel (Martin Starr), the hot chick Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), local macho man Mike (Ryan Reynolds), and the love interest, Em. Kristen Stewart plays the lead female role of Em in her typical lip-biting style, but it does work in this instance, proving that she really doesn’t deserve the hate she gets from being in Twilight. She can act when her character actually has a personality.

Where Superbad tried to be a straight comedy with only small dramatic elements to keep it afloat, Adventureland tries to do the opposite. In this, the film is fairly successful.

The characters are, for the most part, well-written and well-developed throughout the narrative; even the archetypal hot chick has a little more depth than you would expect, dating the main character for a brief time and letting some details spill about her background and outlook. The movie has something in common with Lost and Delirious, in that the characters act so consistently stupid and make such obvious mistakes that you want to slap them — but their actions fit their age and situation, and you can’t help but relate to them. If you were ever a teenager, you’ll recognize the people in Adventureland. Even the two-dimensional, undeveloped guy who punches everyone in the nuts is a realistic character, really: I know several people I met in high school who still act like that and never seem to have any depth no matter how long I’ve known them.

Drama is where the movie really shines. Where it starts to falter a bit is the comedy. The structure of the film pools a fair mix of drama and comedy into the first act and partially into the second, but it’s always in the form of a dramedy rather than a comedy — meaning that the scenes are mainly dramatic and have light humour to punctuate them, rather than being primarily funny. The problem is that the movie doesn’t really do this consistently, and ends up becoming a straight drama by the halfway point. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but when the movie starts out like that it starts to wear on your nerves a bit and makes you think, “What happened to the jokes?”

I’m not saying Brennan should wear a clown suit, but the tension is just a tad too much in later scenes of the movie, to a point where it almost starts to seem melodramatic. These are teenagers, yeah, they blow everything out of proportion and act like every little betrayal is a bullet to the head — but they’re teenagers, they’re supposed to be sarcastic and blow off a bit of steam while doing so. For a movie with so many stoners in it, there’s a distinct lack of funny stoned people and an overabundance of philosophical prats. It’s not too bad, but it kills a bit of the movie’s rewatchability — once you know what happens, you can’t muster up that edge-of-your-seat I-want-to-know-what-happens-next feeling, and it becomes a lot less entertaining.

Adventureland is a good film. Hell, it’s a great film that deserves way more recognition than it gets. Is it perfect? Not really; it does go a bit far with the drama at times. But it’s so much closer to being perfect than most movies like it, you have to see it at least once. It’s no Dazed and Confused, but how many movies are?

Splitting the source material into two films means that the final confrontation against Voldemort and the Death Eaters is allowed to span roughly five hours instead of the usual two and half, and this means that the story can linger and pace itself a little bit better. For a series as massive and epic as Harry Potter, a suitably huge conclusion would be needed to cap it off — and for the most part, the director David Yates succeeded once again. Part 1 is a leisurely first act that draws you back into the characters and setting quite effectively, with plenty of action creeping into the second act just to keep the viewers on their toes, then Part 2 is for the most part just a super-extended third act. And while my gut instinct for a situation like that would be to criticize Part 2 for stretching out what’s traditionally supposed to be punchy and to-the-point… I can’t deny that the enormous climax of Deathly Hallows just works.

That’s not to say that the two films are masterpieces. Being made in 2011 amongst the craze of pointless CGI and superhero movies, it seems like the post-production visual effects team decided to be lazy and just reuse some PlayStation 3 graphics instead of doing actual work. For $250 000 000, don’t tell me they couldn’t have made the effects look better than that. Half of the movie feels like a video game cutscene, Attack of the Clones style. But then, I’m really biased against CGI in general. I’ve always held up the other Potter films as my example of CGI done well (you either use it sparingly or have enough dough to make it look flawless), but Deathly Hallows hangs a big asterisk over my example, and that just annoys me.

There’s also a serious problem with the subplot distribution. For whatever reason, either the screenwriter or the director decided to put all that negative stuff about Dumbledore that was in the book into Part 1 — but then didn’t actually follow up on it satisfactorily in Part 2. Unlike in the book, Deathly Hallows doesn’t redeem Dumbledore, and his winking smile to Harry when we do get to see him one last time just sort of makes him look like a prick. What was that about? The majority of the story was done quite well in Deathly Hallows, and it’s not like they didn’t have enough running time to expound on everything they wanted. The humanization of Dumbledore is pretty important to the series’s themes, but if they wanted to cut it so badly, they could have at least cut all of it.

Overall, though, the two parts of Deathly Hallows are pretty good. Not incredible, but none of the Potter series was really incredible anyway. They’re just fun.

See also: my review of Half-Blood Prince, my review of the first five Harry Potter movies.

If you’ve read other reviews from me, you might have noticed that I have a thing for heavily flawed movies that manage to still be good. This is one of those movies.

The film follows a quiet, introspective girl named Mary, played by Mischa Barton. In the beginning of the movie, Mary tells us that her mother has passed away, and her emotionally-distant father has decided to enroll her in an all-girls boarding school. Arriving there, she soon meets her roommates, Tori (Jessica Paré) and Paulie (Piper Perabo). In shocking juxtaposition to the main character, Paulie is outspoken and open about everything, never flinching when the truth needs to come out — except, of course, when it comes to Tori, whose parents can’t be allowed to know the true nature of their relationship.

The first time I watched this movie, I thought it was pretty damn good, but it gets worse on every subsequent viewing. The reason, I think, is that it’s extremely lopsided — movies are a combination of plot, characters, visuals, music, pacing, and theme (the last three forming the broader category of atmosphere), but Lost and Delirious doesn’t do many of these aspects well. The plot scores an absolute zero, hitting nearly every single cliché in the queer and feminist books and being as boring as humanly possible. The visuals are fairly bland, with only one scene being memorably well-composed and many, many scenes which comprise a series of heavy-handed visual metaphors. The music is… well, there’s a reason critics have called it melodramatic. Even the theme, though it’s not done terribly, is kind of… generic. Are you surprised that a movie about lesbians and a shy girl is about feminism? Surprised that a movie set in an all-girls boarding school has something to say about patriarchy?

No, I understand fully why critics hate this movie. It’s very, very flawed, doing many key aspects of filmmaking utterly and completely wrong. But it does one important thing right: characters. The characters are amazing.

Regardless of what you might personally think of them (trust me, you’ll probably want to slap them a few times during the film), one thing you can’t deny is that they are completely honest. Yes, the overwrought musical sequences are melodramatic… but the movie is about teenagers going through what is, to them, the end of the whole damn world. The lengths Paulie goes to to win the heart of her girlfriend are absolutely insane, but I can name three people in my life who would actually do that.

Does that mean the movie can be forgiven for all it does wrong? No, not at all. A great movie takes a personal, emotional scenario, blows it up, and turns it into an experience that accurately conveys the complexity and meaning of the situation to the audience, including and especially outsiders who wouldn’t have understood the situation otherwise. But Lost and Delirious just isn’t a great movie — it’s a cult movie, or maybe you’d call it an insider movie. A movie made by a lesbian, for lesbians; by a woman, for women; and it makes no attempt to include the outside world in its equation. You’re in, or you’re out.

So no, Lost and Delirious isn’t good — but it isn’t necessarily just the clichéd mess that people claim it is. If you can relate to the characters, relate to the melodrama, relate to the age and place where a trite visual metaphor seemed supremely poetic — then you can get swept up in the movie and walk away feeling like someone just stabbed you in the heart. But if you can’t relate to it, you’ll be throwing popcorn at the screen. That’s just how it is with this one.

For the record, I’ve never read the source material myself so I can’t comment on why and how the movie could have been improved in that manner. However, I read that the newest edition of the book has a foreword by the author praising the movie, despite its differences. Take that as you will.