Singular-Minded

Mayhaps I am a sensitive soul but watching movies is usually a terrifically emotional experience for me. Recently I've twice-sat in on two films which I could say I've experienced more than I really watched. The first would be Fury, a war movie starring Brad Pitt and company as the crewman for an American tank in the twilight months of the Second World War. Fury isn't an especially great movie - the overall message seems... sophomoric when considering the subject matter and it ladles out heavy servings of cheese on several occasions. It isn't as well put together as, say, Saving Private Ryan which does a better job of creating both an experience and conveying a story. 

But boy-howdy is Fury ever one of those see-it-in-theaters type movies. It's hard for me to easily recommend - if you want to feel like you're huddled huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with soggy, exhausted infantrymen whose coats are heavy with damp, reek, and mud while 7.62 rounds bang off the front of the clattering, snarling Sherman tank providing you with a mobile shield as you inch your way across open ground to a hasty German defensive position, then by all means watch it. If you want to feel claustrophobic, deafened, and terrified as four American Shermans dance a slow and high-stakes ballet with a single German Panzer - feel the air suck out of your lungs as 88mm anti-tank rounds howl like banshees overhead and peel paint off the side of your turret while your gunner frantically attempts to traverse and engage and everyone is screaming because people are dying and everyone is going to fucking die if you can't get around it and get ahead of its gun and then be racked with relief and grief when it's over and all that's left is the burning of engine oil and the terrible empty silence that was moments ago filled with chaos - well, this is the movie to see.  

Why you would might want to experience that is a pretty good question, I guess. But I remember watching Lone Survivor and listening to the squeal and thunder of Chinook rotors and feel the machine heartbeat in my chest and boots as a four-man team stepped panting into the mountains under the burden of heavy rucksacks. I watch Fury and I remember laughing nervously through a screen of cigarette smoke in the back of a LAV-3 while dust tumbled down in screens from the air-sentry hatch, ears humming with the monotony of radio chatter. I remember banging my fingers off the C-SAM and hearing the muffled thump-thump-thump clang-clang-clang of our gunner laying down a Z-pattern burst and watching the kinetic backlash kick dirt up on the screen and howling with the frenzy of it. It's cathartic. 

The second movie is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. I've seen it twice and both times I've had the wind knocked out of me. Both times I've walked out of the theater with friends or my brothers and said it's the best movie I've ever seen - subjective, biased, a heat-of-the-moment sort of thing, maybe, but I can't help but feel disconnected from the cynical critical observations I've perused through online. I guess in the end, it's an emotional issue that can't readily be rationalized - I guess I'm a very empathetic being. 

Spoilers ahead, folks.

I think the main reason Star Trek: Into Darkness left such a bad taste in my mouth was that it was ideologically bankrupt and Star Trek, if anything, is an entirely ideological concept. When Gene Roddenberry wrote

"Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

I doubt very much he intended it to be representative of a brainless game of laser-tag. Superficially Captain Kirk traveled to "strange new worlds" made of styrofoam and had sex with green women but subcutaneously the series was a kind of fictional vanguard for the pursuit of knowledge and for human exploration. Superficially, Interstellar (especially with all the awesome power of IMAX™) lets us wonder at the silent majesty of space yawning terribly around the fragile Endurance; we breathlessly watch it tumble insignificantly past Saturn's rings, fold through space into a wormhole and feel the physical stresses run through the ship's frame and instruments, gaze upon the blinding event horizon of a massive black hole, feel its tidal power move waves the size of mountains across the surface of a planet caught haplessly in its orbit, and break frozen clouds into a glittering riot across the upper atmospheres of some alien, semi-gaseous world galaxies away. 

The hard physics of this are irrelevant in face of the theme - if I can hand-on-heart talk about the conveyance of realism in Donkey Kong Country, then I can attest that Christopher Nolan achieves similar conveyance through Interstellar's depiction of space-travel. Now that the movie is also an emotional roller-coaster - to hook an audience on the layman's terms - and viscerally dramatizes temporal relativity and the traumatic effects on a small American family adds profundity to the overall experience. MacConnaughey watches helplessly as his children grow old and suffer emotionally through distant radio transmissions, stuck in dilated time, The concept of a loved one ultimately beyond your reach and that love exists beyond purely physical dimensions gnawed at my heart - but how couldn't it? We are all human and suffer the same. 

I am a very tonelessly unreligious man. To me, religion seems like a sort of betrayal - to believe in purely fantastical concepts for the sake of comfort and community baffle me because I guess I am a humanist. I acknowledge fundamental scientific reasoning and that unanswered questions will be answered not by some higher power but by our own ingenuity and achievement. If that is faith, then I willingly choose that faith. MacConnaughey's character plummets into Gargantua and finds himself unstuck in a tesseract of space-time desperately attempting to caress his daughter's face decades into the past and correct his mistakes. The revelation that this five-dimensional room is the construct not of some alien power, but of a future human civilization evolved beyond our contemporary comprehension raises the hair on my arms. Why believe in anything if not us? 

To know that there is a finite amount of matter in all the universe and that it cannot vanish - only change states - and to dream about somehow reaching beyond space and time to even faintly hold my youngest brother in my arms again; or that whatever made up Tommy beyond his physical vessel must exist in one form or another - could somehow try and reach through that barrier - is religion enough for me. 

How could anyone want to believe in anything else? 

Same Country, Different Province

Well it's been a few months now since the suicide of my youngest brother. You would think this heavy subject would be what I want to talk about more than anything - to open a vein and pour red, wet words across a white page. Frankly, it's the last thing I want to talk about. The impact of it makes me feel malformed with grief and it has overall been a confusing and terrible experience. The whole world is a darker, grayer place, with fewer points of light in between. The geography of every day life has shifted - some thing matter more, other things less or not at all. It's hard to trust yourself to be okay all the time anymore - some days you move through life as if nothing has changed and other days you sit down and your heart cracks open with grief and all you can do is try and hold the pieces together until you can breathe again.

We were four brothers, a Four-Temperament Ensemble. We were Ninja Turtles, Pizza Cats, Ghostbusters. Now we're staggered down to three and trying to share what's left and made haggard with the cold mathematics of tragedy.

When I think of Tommy I think of holidays, of Christmas, and of lumbering down to the rec-room and splaying out on the big leather couches with Mike and John and lording over our youngest brother as he diligently set up game-system after game-system. Four brothers, four controller-ports, all plugged in to each other. We hit each other with shells or won more stars or fought over golden guns or collaborated in a scrambling, dysfunctional sort of way (usually over each others backs) to get all the Star Coins in Mario. Now there's an empty slot, a CPU, a bot.

I think regression is the common trope of grief, and so I occasionally find myself doing nothing but watching Game Grumps' Let's Plays or SNES retrospectives or fiddle-fucking around with emulated classics and sometimes wishing my HTC One-M8 was a Gameboy. Occasionally there is some heavy, emotional significance - like orchestrated Squaresoft music- but not always. The first time I played Donkey Kong Country for the SNES was at my dentist's office in Winnipeg. The man was a genius - had installed several then-gen Sega and Nintendo gaming consoles in his office waiting room to mesmerize whiny, bored kids and keep their minds off the hooks and drills and fluoride. Sonic 2, Aladdin, oh boy!

Something struck me about Donkey Kong Country, though - which, despite being stellar platforming games and some of the best Wii titles, is missing from the Returns and Tropical Freeze sequels. For a pixelated 2-D game about monkeys jumping on crocodiles DKC managed, through sheer mechanics and decoration, to convey genuine atmosphere.

Granted, this is owed to David Wise's outstanding soundtrack - but also to aesthetic. Again, despite being a game about anthropomorphic gorillas beating up alligators to steal back floating bananas something about DKC's design aesthetic conveys realism and grit. Something about the weight and jump mechanics while platforming - about your Kong's constant vulnerability to the enemies and level design around them - something about the awesome worlds you explore. That latter bit may be a big piece of it - there is a grain of fantasy, of cartoon, planted in an otherwise realistic world of chasms and pitfalls and pastoral landscapes. Yep, cartoon animals. Gotcha, floating barrels. But there is no... cartoon vegetation... or bizarre and childishly drawn mountains. Pine trees, icy grottos, coral reefs, and oh - Kremlins, beat those guys up. The minimalism does a lot for the aesthetic - like the original Crash Bandicoot for the PSX.

I'm a firm believer that the medium should dictate the message, ultimately, and in the case of Donkey Kong Country realism is conveyed rather than directly experienced through game design. If Super Mario Bros. is an absolutely enjoyable game to play, then Donkey Kong Country is an absolutely perilous one. The first game (unlike it's successors) lacks some serious balance gameplay-wise. You can cheerfully coast through the first three worlds and hoard lives like nobody's business and then WHAM Gorilla Glacier will stonewall your progress and every level will see you test the tensile flexibility of your SNES controller a little more as you grind your teeth watching Diddy Kong get barrel-blasted right into a Zinger or miss than one last bloody jump. The difficulty is immersive - pattern recognition, obstacle memorization, timing and dexterity. You're paying attention when you play Donkey Kong, fuck the doorbell. 

There is an interesting thematic arrangement in the world-design as the lush jungles and forests and natural environments give way to the toxic, industrialized wastelands of K. Rool's mines and factories:

Which does a lot to magnify the theme of increasing peril and difficulty. If it were up to me, I would have reversed the play-order for Kremco Inc. and Monkey Mines (to end with the factory), but whatever. The Gameboy port followed suit - moving from the jungle to an abandoned urban center. All of this is completely absent of the new Wii games (again, despite their brilliance), which feel like Mario games with alternate game mechanics. They are most definitely missing from the big, fat, galumphing collect-a-thon that was Donkey Kong 64 - with its monkey rapping, coconut bazookas, barren polygonal environments and lumbering Banjo-Kazooie soundtrack (which worked in Banjo but feels out of place after the Country series). 

Me and John finally sat down and two-playered the shit out of Diddy Kong's Quest, the rarely disputed pinnacle of the trilogy. The sequel branches off from the pure Country of the original, featuring pirate ships, bayou boardwalks, haunted forests and castle parapets - but again the mechanics still convey that gritty, realistic edge to the platforming. 

I'll say it, though - Donkey Kong Country 2 is tough as nails. 

You are given a short grace period to familiarize yourself with the mechanics but by the time you reach Kremland the gloves are off, and with still half a game left to play including the insanely difficult Lost World levels. For a second-hand sample, watch the Game Grumps fruitlessly attempt to beat it before rage-quitting in frustration. John and me don't fuck around though. We've sunk dozens of hours into the bloody thing on the Wii Classic Console - we've climbed the rigging on bog-sunk pirate ships, jumped across lava flows, wrestled with giant (motherfucking) wasps and hugged doomed rollercoasters up and down ludicrously unsafe tracks. At the present time we've stalled - having squandered most of our lives in Gloomy Gulch - with one foot in the final world slipping around submerged ice shelves at the base of K. Rool's castle. I play as Diddy, because I'm better and can use his acrobatics, and John plays as Dixie, because he's worst and needs the hair-float handicap (admit it, John). 

You wouldn't expect that to co-op a side-scrolling 2-D platformer short of New Super Mario Bros. would be much fun or immersive, but DKC's switch-over gameplay is far more palatable than the my-turn-your-turn Mario-Luigi concept. It's great. It's hard; it's mind-blowingly, give-me-another-beer-I-need-a-fucking-cigarette-fuck-this-game hard - but it's also a blast to make progress and hoot and holler like idiots when you've accomplished something together. Like I said, we're in a tight spot; with three lives at the entrance to one of the final worlds - we've exhausted all the Swanky Bonus Bonanzas and there is no Kong College in sight to save and we don't have any goddamn banana coins to pay off Funky and score more lives in another world but dammit we're not done yet. We're just going to have to stick this one through until the end.

It's all you can do, really.