Time and Punishment: Drawing Challenge out of the Past in LA MULANA

As an awkward ten-year-old with a lot of free time, I loved nothing more than my brand-new copy of Super Mario 3. The endless parade of new worlds to explore and strange secrets to unlock captured my imagination in a way that did not let me go, even when I was away from the TV. Stuck in the classroom, I couldn’t continue the adventure, so I started drawing my own. I filled every notebook margin with diagrams for new Mario levels, sketching in enemies and secrets and traps and at some point probably laser guns and a Mega Man crossover. My imagination was working at full steam, so nothing was off-limits.

But at some point I began to think about the levels more literally, as if I was actually Bowser, laying out my fortress to make it impossible for any Italian plumbers to make it through alive. Why not just put up a wall that Mario can’t pass? Well, you can’t do that; the player has to be able to win the game. You can’t just have a mile-long lava pit. But you could dot it with tiny platforms to form a tricky, barely-passable bridge. And add a spiked ceiling. With enemies that fly around and dive-bomb you. At what point does the level become not just challenging, but frustrating? When does play turn into punishment?

My creations might have fit in alongside some tough-as-nails NES platformers released around then, but as time went on, that kind of gaming experience melted away. Games got prettier and more expensive to make, thus having to become more accessible and just downright easier. Years after the first Zelda game had players scouring worlds with barely a clue to go on, Link suddenly found himself getting literally yelled at by a helper fairy until he followed her advice. Mario, who used to hunt for invisible passages and extra lives squirreled away in the basements of pyramids, would now reach the third level of his new game only to be told by a grinning bunny that he should press the A button to jump.

It can be hard to find a truly challenging video game these days. I don’t mean hard; any game can have a hard mode. I mean a game that constantly expects the best out of you, from your brain as much as your reflexes. But one recent game does this in the form of an obsessive love letter to those early years of gaming. Like the scribbles from a 1988 school notebook brought to monstrous, glorious life, this game constantly blurs the lines between imagination, challenge, and punishment. This game is called La Mulana.

La Mulana is an indie game released in 2005 that looks like it could have come out before Mario 3. I suspect the designer(s) had a childhood a lot like mine, only with more of a fetish for Metroid and Maze of Galious, sketching out increasingly complex tapestries of longform adventuring, adding in vital details over the years as they played probably Contra and definitely Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, refining and synthesizing and laser-focusing an 8-bit experience into a diamond-hard lattice structure bigger and smarter than any game of that era could hope to achieve. It’s a glorious experience for anyone wishing to revisit the nostalgia of the era without retreading the exact same ground. And if 8-bit is too far back for you, there’s even a 16-bit remake from 2012 (which is the one I played. From what I understand, the gameplay aspects are mostly the same).

Surely I won’t need to tell you which is which

You play an archaeologist investigating a network of underground ruins, both to search for your missing father, and to learn more about a mysterious legendary figure named “Mother” whose role in the story is several-fold. (A Freudian analysis of this story could fill a ten-thousand-word essay on its own; suffice to say that the game’s mythology is deep, fascinating, and extremely creepy.) That’s the stated goal, but your realistic goal is basically: solve all the puzzles, find all the items, kill all the monsters. Video games 101. Who needs the instruction book? Just turn on the game, run to the right and start whipping!

And there it is: you’ve already made your first mistake.

La Mulana will not hold your hand, and you will frequently ignore its subtle advice at your peril. (Which is as good a time as any to say: SPOILERS from here on out, be warned.) You may easily miss the advice that you’ll need two special items to make any progress at all. First is a hand scanner, which you will use to decode ruins, search for clues amongst corpses, and at later points in the game, actually unlock secrets. Second is a series of, essentially, paperweights: things that look like little logs that you will put on pedestals to open doors and solve puzzles, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style. Now that you’ve realized you need these things, you leave the ruins, head back into town, talk to some NPCs, purchase the scanner software and a bunch of weights and head back down into the ruins again. A few screens in, you’ll come across your first honest-to-god pedestal; you’ll go up to it and pleasurably hit the down arrow to drop a weight, expecting to solve your first puzzle.

And there it is: you’ve already made your second mistake.

The pedestal disappears upon activation, and the ceiling collapses and crushes you. Game over; you get to start again.

YOU FUCKED UP, SON

La Mulana trades in frequent, unexpected punishment. Sometimes it’s done hilariously, like in the case above. Sometimes it’s done frustratingly, like at the end of certain boss battles where only one very specific action will prevent automatic death. But it is usually at least logical. You could have known not to press that booby-trapped pedestal, if you had just walked a little farther beyond it first, and gotten a clue from scanning a nearby corpse. This is game that rewards thoughtful action as much as it rewards reflexes. And that’s even more impressive considering how streamlined your character’s abilities are: you’ll solve most puzzles by using either those pedestals, your scanner or your whip. Even the most helpful “bonus” you get in the game – the Holy Grail, which allows you to warp from almost any location to a save point – elegantly becomes a strategic play mechanic in itself, necessary to whisk you out of deep pits or crushing traps when no other escape exists.

One pretty genius trap is an unblinking eye, usually sitting in a wall somewhere, impossible to hurt and often easy to overlook until it’s too late. They are sentries of the ruins, and will zap you with lightning if you strike anything in the room that’s considered “sacred”. The lightning hurts you more than just about anything else in the game, regardless of your character’s level, armor or HP. But it will only hurt you if you do the wrong thing. This is a neat trick: these traps might as well be the game designers themselves watching and operant-conditioning you to take the puzzles seriously instead of just running around whipping everything you see. Of course, the “sacred items” change from room to room, and some of the most harrowing puzzles in the game come from trying to figure out what to hit and what to avoid.

La Mulana has a virtuoso, terrifying knowledge of the friction and flow of a screen. You will figure out the quickest way from point A to point B, only to discover that the monsters know that path too and have already thrown fireballs, arrows, bones, spears, swords, lightning, magic hexes and bits of themselves right into that path at just the right second to mess up your speed run. (Particularly brutal rooms have also predicted your paths of avoidance and have put spike traps there, too.) Every room is packed with resistance, even if some forms of it don’t present themselves right away.

(Side note: my roommate tells me that watching someone play La Mulana is hilarious. I assume it’s like watching Duck Amuck, because I often felt about as powerless as Daffy Duck struggling against the whims of a sarcastic (but more bloodthirsty) animator.)

Hope you like this screen, because you’ll be seeing it a lot.

There’s a really brilliant puzzle a little less than halfway through the game. Three blocks sit in a room, along with a target plate. You know, through lots of experience by this point, that you must push one of the blocks onto the target plate in order to solve the puzzle. But the plate is just out of reach of any of the blocks. Try as you might, you cannot get any of the blocks up to it. You wonder if you need an item you don’t yet have. You wonder if you need to use an item you already have in a totally different way. Nothing works. Finally, in frustration or happenstance, you stand on the plate yourself for a second. Your weight causes the plate to break and it disappears. You realize the plate was never the key to this puzzle in the first place. And as soon as you realize that, and look around for what else you can do with the blocks in this room, the true puzzle answer becomes as obvious as a carp on toast. The puzzle works because it’s such a specific inversion of the strategies you’ve learned up to this point, and it teaches you to keep your brain limber and take nothing for granted. When you solve it, you feel like the smartest guy in town.

There’s a really frustrating puzzle a little more than halfway through the game. The area itself is more than a little annoying, with a lot of warping between areas where backtracking does not always take you where you expect; but the warping has consistent rules and you will figure out how to navigate the areas pretty quickly. You’ll come to a room which seems to lead no further. You scan everything, jump everywhere, hit whatever you can. Go ask your fairy friend for help. Get nothing. And finally, with no other options, you swallow your pride, jump online and look up the game’s walkthrough. (Actually, you probably have the walkthrough bookmarked by this point. More on that later.) Turns out you need to stand at a certain spot and press the down arrow. You warp through the floor into an area and continue on. It’s not even a hidden ladder, or an area specially marked with anything that would indicate action needs to be taken there. None of the many clue tablets sprinkled throughout the ruins mention this (that I can remember). And pressing down as a warp method is never used as a vital play mechanic for the rest of the game. The puzzle doesn’t work because its solution has no clue or precedent. When you solve it, you feel like you’ve finally guessed the random number your annoying friend was thinking of. (Turns out it was 4,178.)

This game has been translated from its Japanese original, so it’s possible that some of the difficulty comes from poorly translated clues, though I doubt it. The English text throughout is generally well-phrased and often morbidly hilarious; if a clue sounds particularly obtuse, it does so in a way that feels accurate to the syntax of a centuries-old stone tablet instead of a cheap Babelfish translation. Actually, the clues do a great job of suggesting solutions without spelling them out; there’s an especially fantastic one that reads “sleep inside the woman”, with a rough diagram of the room it pertains to. The clue is absolutely vital to figuring out a solution that ends up being hilarious, obscure and brilliant all at the same time. Elsewhere, broken runes will frustrate you with incomplete clues, while feeling completely appropriate in their thousand-year-old setting.

(Another side note: the music is fantastic and addictive, perfectly splitting the difference between the energy and momentum of the best Mega Man themes and the atmosphere and foreboding of old Castlevania scores. And there’s even a tune that samples Punjabi MC.)

If you have anything resembling a regular job, family or social commitments, or anything less than a saintly level of patience, you will not finish La Mulana without help. On several occasions. At first, it bothered me having to consult a walkthrough. Shouldn’t the alert player be able to figure out everything on their own, without solutions feeling too arbitrary? Sure, although some of the truly classic video game secrets – the Konami Code, the Super Mario Bros minus world, hell, even the first warp zone – gave no indication of their presence until a friend told you how to do it. Although these are bonuses, and intrinsically different from a puzzle solution necessary just to reach the game’s next screen. I think there’s a significant difference. But I also think it’s less of a deal today than it used to be. You need the internet to get La Mulana in the first place, so is it really so weird that you  need it to help finish the thing? And your ego can rest easy in that no amount of secret-spoiling will help you through the boss battles, which are legitimate trials of dexterity and patience without any magic bullets in sight.

This fucking guy. You don’t even know.

This is a game for players who want a real challenge. But La Mulana is not a game that can be outsmarted. If there is any gamer out there who can finish it without getting one single piece of help, they are probably of the kind of neurotic, hygienically-unsound variety who will drink nothing but Diet Coke for five years to win a dollar bet. You don’t want to be that person or know anything about them. It’s frustrating that many puzzle solutions seem arbitrary – particularly in the final hours, where the progression of Mantra locations deteriorates from logical to nonsensical, and the solution of the very final, post-end-boss challenge seems like one last kick to the teeth. The punishment can at times outweigh the challenge. But at least the developers seem to realize the nature of the monster they’ve created, and give zero fucks about it: in their own summary of the game, they suggest you “Play through the entire game till your fingers bleed, give up and throw it out the window, or get help from strategy guides. The choice is yours.”

In other words, La Mulana is a platforming passion project that you have to accept on its own terms. Your ration of fun-to-frustration may vary; mine was something like 65-35. But I never felt bored or belittled; instead, I was constantly mulling over clues I’d discovered, thinking up ways to stop getting my ass kicked by that miniboss, and more than anything, looking forward to discovering that next screen. That sense of exploration, the ecstasy of getting just a little bit further and seeing just a little bit more, pervades every corner of the game so completely that, in its massive shadow, all else is forgiven. It’s immersive and inspiring in such a nostalgic way that if my workstation had margins, you can be sure I’d be filling them with new La Mulana levels, secrets and traps, my imagination gloriously full-steam, nothing off-limits.

—

La Mulana is available for free in its original 8-bit PC version; for the 16-bit remake, several different versions exist including PC ($15) and WiiWare ($10). I’d recommend the Steam version, which the developers note is the most recent and “complete” port of the game, including a bonus level and features not in the WiiWare port.

2010 Tunes: a Campesinos for All Seasons

Of all the bands I’ve come to truly love over the last few years, Los Campesinos! has been one of the most problematic to recommend to friends. Their 2008 debut album, Hold on Now, Youngster… hit a very specific wavelength of shout-along post-twee anthemic indie rock so confidently and completely that – well – it became difficult to recommend the album to anyone who wasn’t looking for exactly that sound. And is it the kind of thing you’d even know you were looking for until you heard it, anyway? At times overcaffeinated and bouncing off the walls, at others deceptively maudlin and veering close to over-smart, it was nevertheless a record that always gave 110%, a breakneck ride through the weird wonderful world of seven barely-adults from Cardiff that, OK, you kind of have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. And don’t get me wrong: I am there, often, and when I am the music is fucking great. I’ve just found that this isn’t the same for everyone.

But, good news: my friends won’t be able to use that excuse much longer.

The band’s “proper” sophomore album, Romance is Boring, has just been released and I’m honestly surprised how spectacularly these guys have managed to balance their sound. The album as a whole sounds a little more centrist, but it’s barely at the expense of losing anything that makes their sound so unique. If anything, they’re just growing up and branching out, but staying true to themselves all the while.

It’s there even in the first few notes of the album, a slight variation on what I call the LC Riff. If you know the band well, you have heard the LC Riff. It’s a fairly simple but memorable melody – usually played on violin but sometimes synths or otherwise – that appears in many variations across the band’s work. It only shows up at the end of Hold on Now, but pops in and out of a good chunk of odds-n-sods collection We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, often late in the song – check out 3:00 into “Ways to Make it Though the Wall” – always slightly different but an unmistakable callback, a motif, a wink to the fans, whatever. It’s here in full force from second one on Romance, immediately welcoming you to familiar territory. But 30 seconds in it takes a turn into new territory, measuring its time and building up to the big release, with Gareth Campesinos! welcoming you to the album with a phrase you never thought you’d hear him say: “Let’s talk about you for a minute”.

Already in this first minute, they’ve spelled out their mission statement. And, OK, Gareth does spend only a literal minute in second-person before returning to his hilariously pessimistic autobiographical sketches, but hey, baby steps. The song soon submerges into feedback, glides around in it for a minute, seems to meander. And you start to wonder if maybe these guys are losing their way already. But then it roars back to life, so goddamned triumphant that it brings along a whole horn section (pay attention to these horns; they’ll be back), one more killer verse from Gareth, and then, yes, a short spoken-word outro, because this is still Los Campesinos, right – and it’s done. As far as opening tracks go, it’s not a barn-burner in the vein of “Death to Los Campesinos!”, but it does set the tone for the rest of the album pretty perfectly.

The next two tracks are the album’s lead singles, and while I’m not sure I would have chosen the same ones (probably because most of my favorite parts of the album hinge on the word “fuck”), they’re more than worthy as catchy gateway drugs for new listeners. The title track in particular has a great dirty southern rock feel to it, another new direction for them. There are actually a lot of neat new flourishes all over the album, no doubt thanks to musical mastermind Tom Campesinos!. There’s the aforementioned horns, the stringy guitar scraps winding under “We’ve Got Your Back”, the blown-out punk fuzz of “Plan A”. Weirdest and most interesting is “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know” (title aside), a detuned inversion of that LC Riff getting ground around in a thick hyperspeed mash. It’s thrilling stuff. Dunno how they’ll replicate it on stage, but still, thrilling.

It’s great to see how everyone’s stepped up their game here, from Harriet’s violins to Ollie’s drums. Aleks’s presence isn’t as widespread as it used to be – which makes sense given that she’s on her way out of the band – but her contributions are more varied and vital than ever, maybe because of their infrequency. At once sarcastic ice queen on “I Warned You, Do Not Make an Enemy of Me”, judgmental conscience on “A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State” and needling huckster on “Plan A”, she’s become far more than an easy vocal counterpoint, and her presence will be missed.

(Side note: is anyone else really wary of the new lineup? Not that it has anything to do with my hopeless crush on Aleks (well, maybe a bit) or new acquisition Kim Campesinos! personally, but the fact that Gareth’s new vocal counterpart will be his sister places the band dynamic in a fundamentally different light. Like any band with mixed genders and intensely personal lyrics – The Smashing Pumpkins, The xx, hell, Fleetwood Mac – a lot of the fans’ morbid fun comes from speculating on the romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, between the band members, and how those inform our listening experiences. The listener who thinks they must have hooked up has a different experience from the one who thinks he must have a huge crush on her and the one who thinks she must think he has a crush on her and so on. But when you’re talking about two siblings, all this speculation falls away – unless you have a really twisted view of them, which I don’t. Still hoping for the best with Kim, but there’s no denying that the Los Campesinos! of 2011 will be a very different beast.)

But this is also an intensely personal album for Gareth. The word is that most of his lyrical illustrations are only barely fictional, and I don’t think he’s even changed the names of old flames (I can’t believe that the Charlotte to whom he writes letters on “Heat Rash” isn’t the same Charlotte he thanked in the liner notes of We Are Beautiful), yet he doesn’t shy away from details whether hilarious or depressing. Only on “Who Fell Asleep In” does it become a little too much, a slow confessional dirge that’s missing most of the trademark Campesinos humor and vitality. And it’s not a matter of just being slow; by contrast, late-album track “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future” is hardly fast, but carries such epic weight and emotion (and plenty of Gareth’s trademark oddball character sketches) that it easily becomes one of the band’s best tracks.

In fact, Romance is Boring has one of the best late-album sequences I’ve heard in a good long while. From the off-kilter “I Warned You” to “Heat Rash”, a steel-eyed regret that swells into a towering anthem with the return of those fucking horns, through “The Sea is a Good Place” to proper album climax “This is a Flag. There is No Wind”, a vitriolic shout-along that doubles back to familiar territory without once forgetting all the new ground they’ve tread. Here, after the shouts and the choruses and crescendos, the LC Riff comes rolling back in, ready to send the album out on the same note that ended Hold on Now, Youngster. But then it magnifies and bottoms out, and the band comes roaring back in – “Our friends have put the two of us on suicide watch!” – and our expectations are gloriously upended once again. This shit is exhilarating.

It’s a perfect end to the album, though it is followed by one more track: the fittingly-named “Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State”, which is just Gareth, his glockenspiel and a gloom of guitar feedback. It’s a hugely abrupt comedown from the previous song, but in context it feels important, a lament of personal failure aimed at… maybe one of the girls named on the album, maybe the departing Aleks, maybe all, maybe none (see? It’s fun to theorize). It’s such a downer that I usually want to skip the track – though that just starts the album over again. And I am always fine with that.

So, yes, it gives me great pleasure to say that this is my favorite album of theirs, and so far my favorite album of 2010 – which, in a year already filled with new releases by Spoon, Hot Chip, Gorillaz and Massive Attack, is really saying something. It’s exciting to hear and watch one of your favorite bands really maturing and improving, especially when they produce the kind of sound that speaks to a wider audience – without selling themselves or their fans short. It’s a rare triumph of a (technically) sophomore album, and hopefully just one more step in a long and successful career.

2009: The Year Freak Broke

It’s weird to me that my main motivation for finishing this list was to want to move on and start talking about the music of 2010. The new year is looking great already! Not that 2009 wasn’t also excellent. There was a lot of great stuff, most notably from established artists who found serious success in evolving their sound (they make up half of this list). Some exciting newcomers in here too, though; I’m excited to see where all of these guys go from here, whether we hear from them next in 2010 or 2020. At any rate, here they are: my Top 10 Albums of 2009.

10. Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Something about Bear in Heaven feels weirdly out of time. There’s something very familiar about this sound – maybe even retro – it remains hard to categorize. “Shoegaze without the gazing” might get you almost halfway. It’s a swirl of sound and texture – at times hazy and at others energizing – that still manages to pack in more poppy hooks that most actual “pop” albums this year. Weirdly against the grain of a year that itself felt against the grain, Beast Rest Forth Mouth didn’t need any tricks or gimmicks to stand out on its own merits.

9. Atlas Sound – Logos
Bradford Cox’s “solo” work can be pretty fucking contradictory, but that’s absolutely its intention. Just look at the album cover: that’s Cox himself up there, but with his face blurred out and a big hole where his heart should be. It’s a fitting illustration of an outfit that is primarily Cox’s, but easily shifts and grows to fit the ideas and abilities of his guest performers. It’s unfortunate that the tracks without guests comparatively suffer a little, but Logos still has “Walkabout”, the great Panda Bear song that could have been, and “Quick Canal”, the best Stereolab song never written. And that’s high praise indeed.

8. Mew – No More Stories Are Told Today I’m Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I’m Tired Let’s Wash Away
Mew’s angular nü-prog sound is, in some ways, as obtuse and uncool as the frustrating title of their new album. But there’s something to be said for letting go occasionally; OK, not just letting go, but really pushing everything to 11, as they do time and again on “Repeaterbeater”, “Hawaii” and “Vaccine”. Though not as immediate as some of their earlier albums, No More Stories finds them pushing in new directions; check out the fractured breakbeats on “Introducing Palace Players” and the unexpectedly uplifting piano riffs on “Sometimes Life isn’t Easy”. The album begins, fittingly enough, with a timeshifting haze of a track that makes as much sense played backwards as forwards. Its title? “New Terrain”, of course.

7. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
The entire industry of musical criticism fell all over themselves this year in praise of Animal Collective’s eighth album, and while I don’t think it’s the end-all of Indie Rock in 2009, it’s impossible not to recognize the genius and musicianship that created some of the year’s strangest hits. From the woozy gallop of “Summertime Clothes” to the near-goofy exuberance of “Brothersport” and, oh yeah, the completely inescapable “My Girls”, there’s no question that without Animal Collective, 2009 would have been a far more somber and less interesting year.

6. Dan Deacon – Bromst
Bromst found tireless party boy Deacon growing up and growing out, giving out without giving up. Using his classical training to create a dense album as thoughtful and adventurous as it is boisterous and party-ready. Nowhere was this evolution more apparent than at his live shows, where a 13-piece backing band did justice to every diverse melody and instrument used on the album, while Deacon himself still bopped over his turntables in the thick of the crowd, never once forgetting that even a thinking man’s party is still a fucking party.

5. Yacht – See Mystery Lights
On his own, Jonah Bechtolt provided a fun and optimistic – if somewhat gimmicky – counterpoint to a lot of the dour, over-thinking indie dance scenesters of the last few years. But the addition of Claire Evans with See Mystery Lights evolved the band from what could have become a novelty act into a full-blown musical force. They’ve gone from appropriating DFA to becoming one of its tentpoles; and if, with LCD Soundsystem increasingly silent and The Rapture unraveling, the movement’s old guard is beginning to fade, at least it’s in the hands of these two promising youngsters.

4. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
For my money, “1901” is the song that ate the world this year; you’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfectly-formed 3 minutes of pop-rock anywhere else in 2009 or even the last several years. Lucky for us, Phoenix didn’t stop there, rounding out the rest of the album with so many other high-energy jams that you might confuse these elder statesmen of indie for the scrappy new kids on the block.

3. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Worst initial reaction I heard to “Stillness is the Move”: “Who the fuck is this, Mariah Carey?” It was as easy to hate on the Dirty Projectors as it was to love them in 2009, which I guess just comes along with sudden explosions in popularity. True, their howling, staccato tendencies aren’t for everyone, but those with an open mind will quickly discover that this twisted variant of pop has an intensity and addictiveness all its own. You’ll find it in “Stillness” and “Cannibal Resource” among others, but it’s Bitte Orca’s arguable centerpiece – the two-pronged rafter-shaking primal scream from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian 3 minutes into “Useful Chamber” – that blows out the doors and really shows the heights that can be reached when you start looking in new directions.

2. Passion Pit – Manners
The common description of this album has been “like MGMT but the other half of the album is good too”. And… OK, it’s not entirely inaccurate. The latest Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere, Passion Pit offered up a serious collection of jams this year, and while this kind of music can have a short shelf life (see: The Go! Team; MGMT, again), Passion Pit has actually been able to overcome this with daring, thoughtful composition and, seriously, that back-end of the album doesn’t hurt (Why “Let Your Love Grow Tall” hasn’t been made a single, I will never understand). There will of course be a new Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere in 2010, but the question isn’t “who will it be”; the question is “can they outdo Manners?”

1. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
How much of our listening experiences do we owe to ourselves? Listening isn’t just a passive activity: every time we press Play, we’re also bringing our thoughts and desires and wants and preconceptions to the table. And everything we feel or know or think we know colors what we hear, which is why the same source material can give two people radically different listening experiences. So how much of my enjoyment of Veckatimest comes from my knowledge of the sheer amount of attention-to-detail work that Grizzly Bear put into their new album? How fair is it that our shared appreciation for Albums Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts helped them secure a spot on this list above other albums I’ve listened to – and maybe even enjoyed – more this year? I couldn’t tell you. But any kind of intellectual second-guessing does a disservice to the masterpiece that Veckatimest is, from the opening thunder of “Southern Point” through the ethereal “Two Weeks”, the rollicking swell of “About Face” and the hard-won triumph of “While You Wait for the Others” all the way through to the measured, delicate end of “Foreground”. Sure, the listener will always bring their own opinions, but they’d be hard-pressed to argue with an album of this exceptional caliber.

Honorable Mentions

Cymbals Eat Guitars – Why There are Mountains
Franz Ferdinand – Tonight
Japandroids – Post-Nothing
Metric – Fantasies
Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms

Not So Fast.

I really liked The Hurt Locker, but I’m not sure how I can explain the damn thing to you. The film has been called a lot of things: Epic War Journal, Suspenseful Thriller, Action Extravaganza, Insular Character Study; the list goes on. It’s a little bit of each of these, but not really all of any of it, which makes the thing so hard to categorize — but is also more than a little responsible for its success.

“War Movie” is probably the most obvious and misleading of its descriptors. Sure, almost all of it takes place during a war, and most of what we learn about the characters comes to light because of (and is heavily informed toward) a life of neverending battle on Whatever Constitutes The Front Lines These Days. But it’s not at all your typical Hollywood peacenik “My God, War is Hell” diatribe, which might have made for some quality post-Vietnam stories but can’t seem to find an audience with this century’s ever-jaded audiences.

A lot of critics have been calling this the first great film about the Iraq War, and I think that’s exactly because the film isn’t trying to be. At least, not exactly.

The Hurt Locker does something very simple: it seeks nothing more than to tell a story in the best way it can. Nothing gets in the way: not ideology, not inflated egos, not mass-market paranoia.

Wait, in Hollywood? (This is probably why it started as an arthouse film, only growing to wide release thanks to overwhelmingly positive word of mouth. Look, I don’t need to tell anyone that arthouse fare is generally better-written and more insightful than the average megaplex feature. I guess the reason this film throws these differences into such sharp relief is that, on first glance, it looks like it belongs at the megaplex, what with the explosions and expansive sets and even Guy Pearce. We all have such strong expectations of how a film like this typically behaves, and Locker so deftly subverts them within its first ten minutes that you can’t help but sit up and wonder, now more than ever, why more films can’t not just look but also feel so real.)

Locker explores a small number of characters in a wartime situation that happens to be Iraq. The rationale for the war is never explored; the soldiers’ place in an infamously contentious situation never outright questioned. There are no grandstanding judgments or righteous crusades, no Ultimate Antagonists without or within. Even the protagonist, who suffers from a kind of cowboy-action-hero syndrome, is shown as neither Perfect American Hero nor out-of-touch goofball. The film explores these characters and how they live with a situation that exists beyond their control or understanding. And it’s that deceptively simple framework that produces results far more interesting and surprising than anything you’re going to see in those other war movies that decided they were going to be “important” from day one.

It speaks to a larger idea of what’s supposed to be important versus what is important; the divide between intent and execution. If you’re creating something, there should never be such a divide – unless you’re creating some experimental wankery about artist vs. audience and all that, and if so, best of luck to you – but how do you ensure that intent is execution? It’s the same deceptively simple answer as before: make sure your intent is to tell your story the best you possibly can.

That may be unfairly reductive, especially when many have to deal with the whims of financiers, editors, deadlines, feeding one’s family, etc. But I see it more as an umbrella term with a lot of possible manifestations, like Keep Revising, Do Your Research, Let the Story Tell Itself. Don’t Discount Someone’s Feedback Because They Don’t Understand Your Big Ideas. Do Not Expect to Win an Oscar. And however many other rules you can think of.

And this extends to other walks of life too. If all you can think about at the office is getting that promotion, you’re not going to be able to put in the work necessary to earn it. If you’re killing yourself always trying to look flawless for the opposite sex, you won’t be able to loosen up and actually engage with anyone. (This last one, I am still working on.)

So the moral of the story is… well, I guess you could boil it down to one of many familiar idioms, in one way or another. Look Before You Leap. Don’t Count Your Eggs Before They’re Hatched. It’s All in the Follow-Through. You get the idea. But just spouting the idiom kind of takes away from all the work you put in to get to that point, and the understanding you reach from having achieved that knowledge on your own. Which, I guess, is an inverted way of saying what I already said. Maybe this wasn’t so hard to explain after all.

Who Judges the Watchmen? Or Really, Who Doesn’t?

Alright! We doing this! Come on, Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time! Bring your Hollywood Blockbuster brother! I ain’t care! It’s on!

So, yeah, I saw Watchmen. I’d read the book several times – and reread it again in the days leading up to the film’s release, which, in hindsight, may not have been the best idea. But it’s clear that those who have read the book will have a pretty different viewing experience from those who are coming in with fresh eyes.

If you’ve never read the comic, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, I honestly have no idea if you’ll enjoy the film. And I’m not sure that reading my review will be of much help to you. But I’ll try a quickie. The film looks amazing. Production design is awesome, special effects generally great, good fight sequences that aren’t too overdone. Patrick Wilson is particularly great as the nebbish Nite Owl, and Jackie Earle Haley’s intense few scenes out from under Rorschach’s mask are really satisfying. Most of the rest of the acting is good, though there are some weak links, and a few line readings fall flat. The retro soundtrack is pretty killer. And the plot moves so fast you can’t help but get swept up in its velocity; whether you can follow the intricate plotting or not, you’ll never be bored. At best, you’ll come out of the theater wanting to read the comic (and if so, good! Go out and buy a copy, you won’t regret it). At worst, you’ll be entertained for two and a half hours, and will have forgotten about most of it after a week or so.

But if you have read the comic before, or want to know how it translated – we’ve got a lot to talk about! And I am going to talk about a lot, including the ending, so here’s your Spoiler Warning! Come back later if you need to.

More than a few people have called Watchmen “unfilmable”, and while I don’t agree with that in a literal sense (in a perfect world, it would make a great miniseries or even a series of films), it makes sense from a practical standpoint. The Hollywood system being what it is, mass consumer culture and short attention spans being what they are, a fan of the comic couldn’t reasonably expect anything more than an imperfectly enjoyable 3-hours-or-less adaptation. And that’s pretty much what the film is.

A lot had to be taken out, obviously, but most of what’s there is slavishly faithful to the comics, for better or for worse. While most of the memorable images from the book have been recreated verbatim, so has a lot of dialog that sounds like it came from, well, a comic book from 1985. Some of the lines have not aged well. Many of the heroes’ costumes look pretty awful, but that was true in the comic, too (poor Doctor Manhattan went through four “outfits” in the series, and the least offensive, ironically enough, was his birthday suit), and I think that actually works to the benefit of the story, adding “lack of fashion sense” to the litany of flaws these characters have.

The story itself moves at a breakneck pace. It has to: there just isn’t enough time to get through everything the filmmakers want to tell, even after pruning almost half the plot of the book. And although there are a few times where the speed prevents a few character moments from really transcending, by and large I think the writers did a great job distilling everything into as compact a package as possible (especially the new ending, which I’ll get to in a moment). Yes, everyone has a favorite scene or character or theme that was cut, but that’s the nature of the beast. And the filmmakers are at least able to throw in references to the omissions where they could: the excellent and complex production design is full of fanboy nods, from the Gunga Diner blimp to the post-disaster Millennium billboards. Though Bernie the newspaper vendor and Bernie the young reader don’t get a story, we do see two extras obviously meant to be them during the climactic scene of disaster, so it’s not difficult to imagine that their story has been going on, perhaps in the theater next door. Even Laurie’s childhood snowglobe is there, if just for half a second. Snyder and co. earn a lot of goodwill from me just by making the extra effort to at least imply the presence of details that couldn’t be thoroughly examined.

But the film’s emulation is so exacting that the few moments of actual innovation feel out of place. Though most of the heroes in the story (actually called “The Watchmen” several times in the film, though not once in the novel, interestingly enough) are portrayed as sad-sack, out of shape or out of touch, each of them gets one or two shiny new Bad-Ass Fight Scenes, which may annoy the purists but were probably added to appease everyone else. And certain characters, once normal humans, can now punch through concrete and survive multiple-story jumps – also presumably for spectacle. It does kind of go against Moore’s painstaking effort to show these characters as humanly as possible, masks on or off. But if any of this increased bad-assery benefits anyone, it’s the Silk Spectre, who wasn’t given much to do physically in the comic beyond beating up a thug and leading folks across a bridge. I don’t think Moore treated the women in Watchmen very favorably; they’re forever only reacting to the men in their lives, too clearly defined by their need for affection or companionship to be able to do very much. Poor Janey Slater especially reads like a Fainting Nellie out of some old genre sci-fi, so it was good to see her get a moment of proactive payback (whether real or manipulated) in the film.

The biggest change comes at the end of the story, and by and large I think it actually works really well. Ozymandias’s manufactured threat now comes in the form of framing Dr. Manhattan, and though I miss the squid, it’s kind of astonishing how easily this new ending fits into the story, with far less exposition needed than having to detail secret islands and missing artists and psychic bombs. Going into the film knowing that the ending would be different – but not how – I actually grew really excited during the final scenes in Antarctica. Because – unlike most superhero films where the final battle is always won by the just and moral hero – in the world of shades of gray that is Watchmen, I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen. It was almost like reading the book again for the first time. And being able to produce that feeling, even for a veteran reader like myself, has got to be one of the film’s greatest triumphs.

There were only two changes that really bothered me, and the first is admittedly not a huge deal and more of a fanboy rant, so bear with me. The original Watchmen graphic novel is absolutely stuffed with visual symbolism – reflections, mirroring, image transposition, and, especially when Rorshach is involved, symmetry. Everything in the man’s life is symmetrical, from his mask to the locations he visits to the page layout of issue five. The effort Moore and Gibbons took to impress this upon the reader borders on obsession. So I was fascinated to note, upon rereading the book, the panel following Rorschach’s death in Antartica. Essentially exploded by Doctor Manhattan, all that remains is a spatter of blood on the snow. But where you might expect further, morbid symmetry, the remains are instead wild and random. There is no symmetry in Rorschach’s death, and purposefully so. But in producing the film, Snyder or Hayter or someone must have noticed the omission but missed the significance of it, because the film proudly displays a giant Rorschach blood blot in the snow; a perfectly symmetrical image that the camera lingers on so long that it kind of becomes the morbid punchline of the character’s existence. Zach astutely noted that morbid punchlines are exactly what Watchmen is all about, and that’s true, but I still feel it did the character a disservice that was actively avoided in the source material.

The other negative is far more significant, though it actually begins at almost the same time. In the film, Nite Owl witnesses Roshach’s death, and his reaction is the typical melodramatic “Nooooo!” which results in another failed fistfight with Ozymadias. “You haven’t saved humanity”, Nite Owl says, “You’ve twisted it! Perverted it!” And then he and Silk Spectre exit the building, looking down their noses in Moral Judgment at Ozymandias. Oz’s last scene in the film is a lingering shot standing alone and sad in his ruined home, ostensibly contemplating what’s been lost. As Dan and Laurie begin a happy life together, if not a new one (they appear to continue their costumed adventuring, which is a huge misread of the book’s intent), the film seems to be saying that they were in the clear moral right, that the ends did not really justify the means. Though it’s fine for some of the characters to voice such an opinion, the book itself never takes sides. Rorshach, the only one whose life was black and white, is gone, and the others continue to live in varying shades of gray. It’s one of the great and most unique moments of the entire story (especially for a mainstream comic book), and not a difficult one to understand. So it feels strange and false for the film to actually go to the same dark point the book did, only to make a moral apology for it after the fact. By the end of Watchmen the comic, there are no heroes left; our protagonists are either dead or complicit in the deaths of millions. But Watchmen the movie tries to have it both ways, making the tenuous argument that Dan and Laurie will keep Adrian’s secret but, dammit, that won’t keep them from always trying to do the right thing. It seems like the very definition of the dreaded Producer Note, so Snyder and the writers might not be to blame for this. We may never really know. But it’s there, and for me the 11^th hour sermonizing comes very close to undoing everything the story hoped to accomplish.

Was that change (or any of the others made) truly severe enough to justify Moore demanding his credit be removed from the film? I don’t think so. Yes, Moore’s films generally don’t translate well to the screen, whether in spite of best intentions (V for Vendetta) or due to simple Hollywood apathy (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or, God, LXG), so I can understand his vulnerability. But Watchmen the film is hardly hackery or mockery. Time and an impartial eye will tell if it can survive on its own merits, but it’s impossible to argue that the film hasn’t been beneficial to the source material in terms of sales. Thanks to excitement for the film, Watchmen the collected graphic novel sold over a million copies in 2008. That’s an incredible achievement for any comic today, never mind one that’s over 20 years old. Whatever you may think of the film, it’s brought many new readers to an industry starving for numbers; hopefully many will stick around, curious to read other books from the same creators or of a similar mold. Realistically, what more could you ask for?