Farewell Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert gave Tomb Raider a good review.  “Here is a movie so monumentally silly,” he writes, “yet so wondrous to look at, that only a churl could find fault.”  I suppose that makes me a churl.  Reviews like that one, especially over the last decade or so, helped earn Ebert a reputation as something of a “soft” critic, one who refused to hate popcorn movies just because they were popcorn movies. 

Sadly I was in college when the Tomb Raider review came out, suffering from the same pretension imbalance that affects all too many twenty year olds, and I might have jumped on board the anti-Ebert bandwagon for a little while.  But only a little while.  The thing about Ebert’s reviews, about his writing in general, was that it was honest.  When he hated a movie, he let you know why, and when he loved it, you couldn’t help but feel the excitement.  Make no mistake, Ebert was a master of snark, and his negative reviews make for fantastic reading.  But in an age when effusive praise is considered less intellectually sound than brutal criticism, Ebert had the courage to love the movies he loved. 

No matter what he thought of a movie, he was always fun to read.  Like most I was introduced to Ebert through At the Movies.  I remember being thrilled at the idea of a show where people just talked about movies, then so disappointed when it turned out they hated all the best movies:  Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II:  The Secret of the Ooze, The Addams Family.  Then to cap it off, they liked a bunch of boring adult movies that nobody I know had seen. 

But I kept watching, when I could.  Since the show was syndicated, it tended to jump around in the schedule a lot (as it sadly continued to do until the final version ended two years ago), so it was always something of a treat when I could find it.  As I got older and started to see more of the movies they were talking about, I valued their opinions more and more.  The show helped me learn that film criticism wasn’t about being negative; it was the practice of thinking critically about movies as art.  Re-watching Ebert’s commentary on Dark City today, I was struck by just how much the guy thought about movies.  The man could probably have written an essay about each and every frame. 

At the dawn of the internet age I discovered Ebert’s reviews online, and made it a habit to check them out almost every time I saw a movie.  He was the one and only critic I almost always read.  In high school I would often manipulate assignments so I got to use his movie reviews as a source.  Even when we disagreed, like on Tomb Raider, it was always fun to read his writing, and great to know that someone out there was giving Tomb Raider the same chance, the same opportunity to provoke thought, that he gave to Oscar winners.  He helped me conquer my snobbery towards popcorn movies at a time when I was way too full of myself, helped me get back in touch with the kid who’d hated him for giving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II:  The Secret of the Ooze a bad review.   

More recently, after he lost his voice to cancer, he began blogging about a whole host of topics and encouraging lively feedback in the comments section.  He wasn’t just a movie reviewer, I realized, he was a writer, in the best sense of the word.  Freed from the newspaper word counts he had lived with since the 60s, he wrote a lot, to be sure, but it was almost always snappy, funny, and worth reading.  Even when he made arguments I find ridiculous, like the whole “video games can never be art” kerfuffle, he made the argument interesting.  I especially enjoyed his essays on God and his cultural Catholicism.   Given my own background the latter hit me on a personal level, but Ebert wrote so much about so much that he probably hit just about everyone on a personal level at least once. 

In his memoir Life Itself he goes into even more detail about his love of a particular hotel in London, a love of Illinois’s popular Steak n’ Shake fast food chain, the love he had for Siskel, for his wife, for the movies.  Even when cancer made it impossible for him to speak, he found ways to keep talking about the movies.  The Onion article on his death just hit the nail on the head.  What a great time he must have had.

Sadly we won’t get to read his reaction to any more movies, but he reviewed so many there will always be a new one to read.  Whenever someone watches a movie made between the late 60s and the end of 2012, they’ll still be able to check what Ebert thought, hear his voice as clearly as ever.  That’s the power of the printed word, and few have had as much fun with the medium as Roger Ebert.  Also, he sang on an episode of The Critic, which I think we can all agree will prove his most powerful legacy.

Whoops!

I was cautiously looking forward to the new SimCity game.  Sure, the always-online requirement was troubling, especially for a game series that’s been single player for 25 years, and most of the previews complained about the small city size, but really, how can you screw up SimCity?  
 

As it turns out, pretty easily.  While I haven’t played the new game, by all accounts the launch was horribly mismanaged, with the “always-online” requirement locking players out and even erasing entire cities.  Though forced online play was an advertised part of the game from the start, it’s an unfortunate situation when you’re paying fifty dollars to effectively lease a game from a company, a company that can refuse to grant you access to the game whenever they feel like shutting down their servers.  This created a huge fuss when Blizzard tried it with Diablo III last year, but at least Diablo III worked (eventually). 

The problem is the multiplayer angle was never right for SimCity.  Multiplayer games are generally about competition, about maxing stats and staying ahead of other players.  SimCity is a game about screwing up.  In the previous games, only an elite few could make a fully functioning metropolis.  For the rest of us, the game was about filling in the map with junk until you gave up and summoned aliens to wipe it out.  The fun of SimCity comes from the joy of unfettered creation mixed with the utter frustration of watching your creation refuse to behave as planned.    

Though for many SimCity 2000 remains the ultimate version of the game, I have the fondest memories of the original game.  My first exposure to the game came not on the PC but the Super Nintendo, and my child brain was utterly fried by the possibilities.  For kids who had grown up playing almost only side scrolling action games, those first generation Super Nintendo games were a breath of fresh air.  Sure you had traditional games like Super Mario World, but there were also outside of the box titles like Actraiser (an action game mixed with an early RTS) and SimCity.  These were the kind of games you could only dream about on the original Nintendo; games where the player actually got to design and create their own world.   

Sadly, I didn’t actually own a Super Nintendo, and spending hours constructing your own city at a friend’s house isn’t exactly the most sociable of activities, so I eventually got the game for the PC.  The original 1989 PC version and the 1991 SNES version are essentially the same game, though the SNES version has a few more bells and whistles, along with a rather clumsy control scheme.  The PC version also had cool alternate graphics options allowing you to build a medieval or wild west city, something I would love to see return.  

Though fairly simple by the standard of later SimCity games, all the gameplay basics were there from the start:  worrying about money, worrying about crime, worrying about pollution, worrying about traffic, worrying about population, and summoning monsters.  Patience, almost incomprehensible patience, was the only way to win.  Or, like me, you could just hit SHIFT+FUND to build up a huge treasury, then build until the map was full, then spend a few minutes wondering why your city was a post-apocalyptic hellscape before starting it all again.

Whereas other games are all about instant gratification, SimCity is a game of small victories and slow progress.  You can spend hours upon hours just trying to balance the budget.  Even with SimCity 4 in 2003 (the most recent game before now) the formula was basically unchanged.  A SimCity fan who fell into a coma in 1990 and woke up in 2003 (thus missing the entire run of Batman:  The Animated Series) would be able to pick up and play the newer games without a hitch.  There was something constant and familiar about SimCity.

I’m not saying that change is bad or that innovations should be avoided, but SimCity was the absolute last series that needed to be online only.  The entire premise is that the player is a mayor of unstoppable god-like powers, free to do whatever she or he wants with the world.  By limiting city size and encouraging cooperative play, it seems like Maxis has removed an essential part of what makes SimCity so much fun.  Hopefully, once all the anger over the completely botched launch fades away, players will be able to find the appeal in the underlying game. 

 
For the rest of us, it sounds like the older games may do a better, more stable job of scratching the SimCity itch.  The original game is probably free at this point, SimCity 2000 can be bought from GoG.com for $6 dollars, and SimCity 4 is on Steam for $20.  Thanks in part to the problems with the new game, they’re selling quite well.  In the next SimCity game, perhaps “SimCity 2013 Release” can be one of the optional disasters.  As long as they keep the aliens.

Dear Mr. Watterson

For a comic strip that was so enormously popular in its time, there has been surprisingly little public discussion of Calvin & Hobbes.  There are no huge web communities, no toys, no video games, no $300 million Hollywood reboots staring Shia LaBeouf.  Of course, this is partly because of creator Bill Watterson's notorious refusal to merchandise his strip, but it also has to do with the medium itself.  Because Calvin & Hobbes is only the comic strips themselves, it was something we all experienced individually.  The world existed only in the headspace of the individual readers; like Calvin, we were free to see the strip's world any way we saw fit.



It's always surprising, then, to find out that this individual, personal part of your childhood was in fact an individual, personal part of everyone's childhood.  Though we were there separately, so many of us were there together.  For the generation of kids growing up in the 80s and 90s, Calvin was the comic.  For many, it was how we learned to read.  I was burning through Calvin & Hobbes books before I could pronounce most of the words.  The strip captured a vision of childhood (and adulthood) that resonated with any kid who had ever been misunderstood, bullied, marginalized, or denied access to Cannibal Stewardess Vixens Unchained by philistine parents.  Calvin & Hobbes, through gorgeous drawings and hilarious dialogue, proved as only the best art can that Hobbes is real, that the world is infinite and inviting, and that reality is optional.

Though Dear Mr. Watterson (at least from the trailer) looks to be little more than a bunch of people talking about how much they love Calvin, it may not need to be any more than that.  A few years ago a book, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, covered similar ground, but the author put too big an emphasis on finding the strip's reclusive creator.  We don't need to search for Calvin & Hobbes, we have it, and getting an interview with Bill Watterson won't unlock any secrets.  The best creations are bigger than their creator, and the best way to appreciate Calvin & Hobbes is not to go looking for the creator, but instead to talk to the people who loved it.  It's amazing how many of us there are.