The Nintendo Switch Sucks And I Hope It Bankrupts The Company

Why the Big N's latest hardware is destined to be a colossal failure ... and why this time, the company may never recover from the financial disaster.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Considering my far from secretive love of all things Sega, it would be rather easy to write off all my musings as the rantings and ravings of a biased fanboy whenever I criticize (well, more like condemn) Nintendo. 

But the fact of the matter? When it comes to just how badly the Big N is fucking up nowadays, you can't say I didn't warn you (raise your hand if you predicted the abysmal hardware failure of the Wii U back in 2012!)

The thing is, Nintendo fans are the Bernie Sanders supporters of the video game world (I used to use the Ron Paul analogy, but despite the divergent political comparison points, the simile still works.) For starters, since all they ever do is circle jerk each other, they never, ever leave their little fanboy enclave, so they totally overstate just how many like-minded dildos and dweebs there are in the world like them. Secondly, they're still acting like Mario and Zelda are totally untouchable platinum pillars of interactive entertainment, when in reality those series have been stuck in tailspin mode for at least a decade. They're literally the only people out there that still vaunt and value archaic franchises like Metroid and Mario Kart and have actually convinced themselves that everybody outside the Nintendo cum bubble is secretly envious and revere their legacy games when in reality, don't nobody anywhere give a shit about Animal Crossing or Star Fox no more.  The only people who think Nintendo is still relevant in this, the post iPhone and iPad era, are the clueless, delusional Nintendo nuthuggers who have tricked their brains into accepting underwhelming crap like Splatoon and Super Mario Maker as alleged "AAA titles." For fuck's sake, Nintendo didn't even reap the bulk of the profits from the one successful thing they've done since the Wii came out ... clearly, this is a digital empire in decline if there ever was one. (And for those of you who want to give me a lecture about the "success" of the 3DS, just remember - the original PSP still has it beat by a good 15 million sales.)

So, Nintendo - as a company, a brand name, and a developer of video games - is pretty much the multimedia equivalent of everybody's favorite senile, 70-something communist from New Hampshire. Nothing either of them propose would work, they don't know a goddamn thing about how mainstream Americans think and both are depressingly stuck in the past, hopelessly clinging onto their gilded age accomplishments like the triumphs of 1994 mean anything to anybody except their most rabid of autistic cult members. 

Or, to put it another way - Nintendo, much like the prospects of a Bernie Sanders presidency, is doomed. 

Yeah, everybody keeps telling me the same old tired shit about Nintendo having so much money in cash reserves so they'll never go out of business (although that allegedly astronomical amount - $4.6 billion as of early last year - doesn't sound nearly as safe and secure when you realize all it took was one economic downturn to make a $640 billion dollar company like Lehman Brothers vanish overnight) but let's cut the bullshit, why don't we? The Big N expected to sell 100 million Wii-U units, but they could barely move 13 million. Just six months into 2016, they were reportig operating losses of nearly $400 million. And the same year, Nintendo saw its stocks plunge to their lowest levels since 1990.

This is a company in deep, deep dookie. And after their most embarrassing commercial fuck-up since the Virtual Boy, how did they respond? By literally sinking all their money into the VERY SAME disaster of a consumer product that put them in the hole to begin with. 

Mark my words, kids: the Nintendo Switch is going to be an even bigger commercial dud than the Wii U. The entire gimmick is fucking stupid, the third party support - again - isn't going to be there (why play watered down versions of Call of Duty and Madden when you can play the REAL versions of those games on a REAL console in your living room?) and the first party games are all going to be major, major disappointments. Nowhere is the substandard prospects of this ill, ill-conceived boondoggle of a video game machine apparent than its launch line-up: you know, the one with a grand total of six retail games. 

Hoo-boy, what do we have here? Another Zelda game sure to disappoint (although all of the hardcore Nin-tards will convince themselves it's better than Ocarina of Time, only to come out 10 years later and refer to it as a piece of over-hyped shit like Twilight Princess), a fucking Bomberman game that has the exact same gameplay as you'd find on a TurboGrafx-16 game released 25 years ago, a glorified re-do of a homebrew game (whose overrated inspiration sucked out loud), a fucking Skylanders game, some stupid dancing title and a glorified tech demo. But hey, what about all of these back-up launch titles, like a barely spruced up re-release of Mario Kart, a Puyo Puyo variation on Tetris, a crappy first person cartoon boxing game that won't work and all those lite-RPGs you could probably run on a PS Vita with no problem? Holy shit, we'll be playing those games for decades to come, no doubt. 

And don't give me none of that crap about how this time - for real, ya'll - Electronic Arts and Bioware and Square-Enix and Atlus are going to finally come through and deliver AAA titles for the platform. Nintendo has fucked over every company that's made anything halfway worth a damn on their systems since the Gamecube, and they sure as shit aren't going to start bringing da' muthafuckin' ruckus for a piece of hardware whose big selling point is you take the sides off of it and use it as a really clunky tablet.

Seriously, am I the only person who sees the glorious structural design problem there? This thing is engineered so clumsily, it's pretty much a lock to be the Edsel of video game systems. People, by nature, are fumbling sorts. Just how many people out there do you think are going to break apart their machine to play it on the go, only to misplace their essential controller pieces and make the whole goddamn kit and caboodle totally worthless? Forget people swinging their Wii-motes into their TV sets ... that little design oversight is going to make Nintendo a laughingstock for years and years.

The stunning visuals in Super Mario meets Katamari Damacy truly are some of the best to ever appear on the Gamecube!

The Switch is one of those things like "New Coke," that in hindsight, can't be seen as anything other than a gargantuan mistake - the kind where you can't help but wonder how in the world the people responsible for the blunder couldn't have realized what they were doing was an all-time commercial fuck-up from the outset. It's hard to believe a company with so many veteran, video game businessmen agreed to double down on Nintendo's greatest marketing snafu in 20 years (or why Nintendo loyalists think the thing would've been a success at all), but therein lies some pivotal business wisdom we can all benefit from. 

Since we're talking about a video game company fucking up, I suppose it's only fitting that I use another video game analogy to dissect the great big error Nintendo has committed in the wake of the DS. You kids ever play Treasure's Advance Guardian Heroes on the GBA? Well, you should, not only because it is a kick-ass beat-em-up, but because it has this thing called "devil mode" in it. Now, what in the world is "devil mode," you may be wondering? Well, it's this feature in the game where - rather than start the game all over again - you can literally sell your soul to Satan and become invincible for about five minutes. Naturally, this sounds like a pretty awesome deal - you come across a really hard-ass boss you can't beat, he keeps killing your ass so you more or less turn on the no-kill Game Genie cheat and fuck him up something wicked. The catch - and you knew there was a catch somewhere - is that once your five minutes of "devil mode" invincibility are up, your character just keels over, Lucifer claims your soul for all eternity and it's game over.

Well, in regards to Nintendo, the Wii was their corporate "devil mode," so to speak. By catering - if not flat out pandering - to the casual non-gaming sphere, they certainly opened the floodgate for cheaper, shoddier games to proliferate en masse. Now, had the softcore, women and children-oriented offerings on the Wii and DS not been as successful, perhaps the first wave of iPhone games - shit like Fruit Ninja and Words With Friends and especially Angry Birds - wouldn't have been as popular or lucrative. By focusing on mass appeal shitware games, Nintendo inadvertently drove the dagger through their own hearts, since it was only a matter of time before some other hardware merchant was to come around and do casual gaming even better. 

The funny thing is, what killed Nintendo's post-Wii success wasn't the expected rivals Sony or Microsoft, but Apple and Google. The rise of iPhone and iPad gaming naturally meant a boon for developers of low-power, minimal gameplay products, and since the adoption rate of smart phones and tablets is way higher than any proprietary gaming system, of course all of the shovelware casual game merchants would abandon the Wii/3DS platform for the far more lucrative iOS and Droid markets. The casual gaming market Nintendo abandoned the hardcore for with the Wii, Wii-U and 3DS - women and kids and old fucks - have since moved on to the new portables of gaming, which, in addition to delivering them precisely the kind of low-intensity, low-challenge games they enjoy, also offer them a litany of other social and business applications that "dedicated" video game platforms just can't supply. And oh yeah - it fits in their pants pocket and they can take it with them literally everywhere they go.

Even Ray Charles can see why the Switch is such a horribly stupid idea, and he's dead. You see, Nintendo thinks people play iPhone and iPad games because they are mobile and usually incorporate some sort of delayed WiFi multiplayer element - hence, this horrible, horrible console unveiling video that shows millennials breaking out the controllers for NBA 2K pick-up games at basketball courts and carrying their machines over to rooftop keggers to play Mario Kart. No, you pedophile-supporting, literal hooker hiring 'tards, people enjoy smart phone games because they're on the machines they spend eight-to-nine-hours a day looking at already. They don't absorb themselves into the games for hours on end like dedicated Madden or Elder Scrolls or Forza players, they just need quick and easy hits of instant virtual gratification to ward of the daily rigors of modern ennui. You can play a game for ten minutes, hop off, check Facebook, and go back to cooking dinner or taking a shit or watching Grey's Anatomy or whatever else you do with your life. Whereas commercial console gaming is all about software commitment, the new-wave mobile games succeed by extolling themselves as nothing more than glorified, low-quality time killers. So, in short, the sort of deep, nuanced, intricate gameplay Nintendo used to be known for back in the NES and SNES days is quite literally incompatible with the iPad-era definition of portable gaming.

Yeah, you won't be seeing this happening in public. Ever.

And on the issue of multiplayer gaming, I've never in my life seen a bunch of smart phone wielding neer-do-wells gathered in a physical space to enjoy any kind of competitive  smart phone/tablet game. Pokemon GO is an outlier, but again, that's already proven itself to be a short-term (dare I say it, devil-mode-esque?) fad that Nintendo barely profited from. The likelihood of Nintendo replicating that success with the Switch is practically zero, since the whole Pokemon GO craze hinged on the fact that the hardware adoption rate to play the game was already high ... if not culturally ubiquitous. Unless Nintendo plans on going cross-platform - which means partnering with Apple and Google, something they almost assuredly would never do under their current leadership structure - there is no way in hell the company can do anything even remotely comparable to Pokemon GO. 

That, and no one has really explained how the Switch improves upon the atrocious Wii-U dedicated console/portable hybrid concept. Indeed, if anything, the Switch represents an even worse variation on the concept, which has no successful analogue in any kind of electronics industry anywhere. Factor in the exorbitant $300 day one price tag ... plus the dearth of quality, exclusive games throughout the hardware's first year on the market ... and you have all the makings of an all-time legendary product failure staring directly at you.

There might be some good games released on the Switch. That one Mario game that has him running around in Grand Theft Auto and appropriating Hispanic Day of the Dead culture at least looks fairly fun, and I've been yearning for Syberia III for almost as long as I've been yearning for Shenmue III (except, you know, with not as much enthusiasm.) And first person Super Street Fighter II is the kind of idea so incredibly stupid, you can't help but appreciate the absurdity of its existence. But the rest of the setlist, to put it mildly, flat out swallows. Minecraft variations and re-releases of years-old Disgaea games and generation-behind ports of Skyrim and Dragon Quest and shitty lite-strategy games like Has-Been Heroes and watered down minimal upgrades of Fire Emblem and BlazBlue? For every halfway decent-looking game like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 you're going to get three dozen turds like Cube Life and Farming Simulator and Stardew Valley. The ratio of great to shit games is likely to be even higher than the ratio of the Wii, and somehow, the third-party support - where are you, E.A. and Rockstar? - is even more scant than on the Wii-U. 

Whether or not the Switch will be a marketing failure isn't even a question anymore. The real question is just how big of a product dud this stupid fucking thing is going to be, and if I were a betting man, I'd venture to guess this thing won't even crack 10 million lifetime unit sales. Hell, it may not even eclipse the lifetime sales of the Dreamcast, which may indeed be the most fitting fate imaginable for the Big N. 

At least Sega went down with a dedication to hardcore, innovative and quality games, while Nintendo's hardware waterloo will forever be associated with a crappily-designed, under-powered retread of a console glutted with god-awful ports, shovelware and disappointing first party releases. 

Sega failed, but at least they failed with their heads hung high. With the disaster-in-waiting known as the Switch, however, Nintendo is destined to for a commercial manufacturing demise not unlike the one experienced by their former arch-rival ... only they're planning on going out with their eyeballs swollen shut and their tongues splayed out over the floor.

From the undisputed kings of video gaming to a cash-hemorrhaging, woefully out of touch market-blinded laughingstock. One day, the history books will reflect on the launch of the Switch as the beginning of the terminal cancer that eventually upended the Nintendo empire.

Alas, I wouldn't shed too many tears, Nintards. After all, theirs is a gruesome demise they wholeheartedly brought upon themselves.

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JIMBO GOES TO THE MOVIES: "Boyhood" (2014) Review

Some are calling it a modern masterpiece, but is the much celebrated indie darling anywhere near as good as the critics would have you believe?

The Reverend Al Sharpton -- who, depending on your political leanings, is either an unjustly maligned civil rights icon or a race-baiting sack of dog shit -- recently made headlines when he called for a boycott of the Academy Awards because the momentum on the post-Eric Garner cops-killing-black-kids brouhaha is dying down “Selma” didn’t get enough nominations.

At the heart of Sharpton’s argument is the overbearing, unrelenting whiteness of this year’s Best Picture nominees. Yeah, “Selma” did indeed pick up a nod (and will probably win, because Hollywood kowtows to even the slightest suggestion that its executives might be a bit on the racist side), but the remaining nominees are so flabbergasting devoid of melanin their reels would probably catch fire if exposed to sunlight.

A movie about a white sniper, directed by an old white dude who talks to invisible Obamas on live television. A movie about white jazz drummers, starring J. Jonah Jameson. A Stephen Hawking biopic, a deconstructionist comic book movie starring Michael “Vanilla Mayonnaise” Keaton, and a goddamn Wes Anderson movie … on any given year, any of the above would be the frontrunner for most Caucasoid cinematic offering of the year, but hoo boy, did we get ourselves a movie in 2014 that brings unparalleled levels of whiteness to American multiplexes.

“Boyhood” isn’t just the whitest Best Picture nominee of 2015, it’s arguably the whitest movie in film history -- it makes “Triumph of the Will” feel like a multicultural jubilee, and “Birth of a Nation” feel like a Melvin Van Peebles production. It’s a film so utterly enrapt in its own whiteness that if you poke the DVD hard enough, Radiohead starts playing.

Of course, none of this is to say that “Boyhood” ports about anything even remotely resembling prejudicial sentiments against non-whites. Rather, this is a film that doesn’t even acknowledge brown people exist, serving as something of a the film equivalent of Brendan Fraser’s character in “Blast From the Past” -- an absolute vacuum of whiteness, the living, breathing definition of Caucasoid insulation.

There’s no denying that “Boyhood” is an ambitious movie. Director Richard Linklater -- he of “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” fame, not to mention the mastermind behind that supremely overrated “Sunset” trilogy -- spent the better part of 12 years filming it, with the cast aging a decade throughout the production. It’s a novel cinematic hook, to be sure, but unfortunately, it appears Mr. Linklater forgot that part about, you know, crafting an actual movie around the gimmick.

The first warning sign are the opening credits, which are synched up to “Yellow” by Coldplay … arguably the most saccharine, wishy-washy, artificially nostalgic song ever recorded. From there, we jump to what is probably 2002, and meet our main character Mason when he’s about six years old. He spends most of his time watching the Majn Buu episode of “Dragon Ball Z” and vandalizing tunnels with spray paint while the Hives play in the background.

His mama, played by Patricia Arquette, gets sick of her boyfriend, so she decides to take him and his slightly older sister Samantha (played by Richard Linklater’s own daughter) to Houston so they can live with their grandmother while she takes psychology classes. Cue lots of Sheryl Crow songs while Mason plays “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” on his Game Boy Advance.

Olivia and Mason’s dad, played by Ethan Hawke, takes them bowling at one of those pastel-hued pseudo-futuristic alleys, and he gives them sage life advice about how real life doesn’t have “bumpers” preventing gutter balls. He smokes indoors, talks about the Iraq War, and his why his children should vote for John Kerry. He and Patricia have an argument, as Mason watches helplessly from his bedroom window.

From there, Patricia starts boinking one of her professors, this dude who seems really amicable upfront, which obviously means he’s a sonofabitch of almost Dwight Yokam caliber. So, Patricia and the prof get married, and Mason and Samantha move in with him and his two kids, and they play “Halo 2” a lot, and their new daddy tries to show them how to play golf and then we learn he likes to chug Sprite and vodka, and before long, he’s slapping their mama around and throwing glasses at them and drunk driving them to liquor stores to cash checks for him. Needless to say, that don’t last too long until Patricia grabs the kids, files for divorce and moves in with one of her friends, where Mason plays a lot of Wii Sports boxing.

Ethan Hawke shows up to take the kids out to a Houston Astros game so they can see Roger Clemens play, and they all dress up like Muggles for the midnight release of one of the “Harry Potter” books.

So, Mason and his biological daddy go camping and they talk about the potentiality for more “Star Wars” movies and pee out fires, and then the kids go door to door putting up “Obama/Biden ‘08” signs in the neighborhood and Ethan tells them to go yank down some McCain posters.

So, Patricia gets a job teaching pop psychiatry in Austin, and Mason starts drinking beer and punching wooden blocks and throwing saw blades at stuff. Patricia, whose boobs pretty much quadruple in girth over the course of the film, winds up marrying one of her students, an Iraq War vet, and she tells this one day laborer he’s pretty good at English and should probably go to college or something. Mason, meanwhile, starts smoking weed and making out with generic blonde girls, but his mom, surprisingly, really don’t seem to care all that much.

Ethan gives the kids a stern talking to about condoms, which is pretty appropriate, because he’s gotten remarried and has a new baby of his own. Mason gets mad at him because he sold the GTO he thought he was going to inherit, but their daddy’s new wife’s parents gives him a bible and a rifle, so that … kinda’ makes up for it, maybe? Oh, and there’s a part where they talk about the Beatles solo work for, like, ten straight minutes.

Mason’s photography teacher tells him he’s talented but lazy, so he makes him go film a football game and he just spends the entire third quarter taking pictures of a practice net. He visits his sister, now at the University of Texas, and plays pool while Gotye plays in the background. They make fun of people who talk to themselves at Denny’s and freak out Sam’s roommates, who walks in on them all naked and stuff.

So, Mason wins some pointless photography awards and his mama leaves her third husband because he has PTSD and stuff and he has an argument with her about moving away to college, and there’s a big party and his daddy has a really gross looking mustache now and then, he meets his dorm buddy, and a girl gives him psychotropic mushrooms literally one minute after arriving on campus and then they go to a canyon and yell at the sky and talk about living in the moment. And then … the credits roll.

My Score:

Two Tofu Dogs out of Four

Now folks, I am not an opponent of artsy-fartsy cinema. One of my all-time favorite directors is Bela Tarr, a dude whose filmography includes a menagerie of eight-hour long minimalist black and white movies about evil whales and people boiling potatoes. I can most certainly do avant-garde, but this “Boyhood” simply isn’t great art, by any stretch of the imagination.

If you strip away the “it took 12 years to make” hook, there’s hardly anything noteworthy about the picture at all. Thematically, it’s no different than something like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” and god knows that kind of shit ain’t worthy of an Oscar.

The acting is good, and there are portions of the film that are entertaining, but it’s oh-so overlong and, ultimately, pointless. The main character has the personality of a wet marshmallow, and the rest of the cast is so whiny and one-dimensional that you kind of want this thing to turn into “Elephant” halfway through it -- without question, this has to be the most critically acclaimed Lifetime original ever made.

This movie, no doubt, will appeal to a lot of folks -- most likely, the staggering number of high-brass child predators in the film industry and all the neo-urbanite post-hipster scum who think liking what pseudo-intellectuals like gives them some sort of relational perceptiveness or credibility.

At the end of the day, though, the big problem with “Boyhood” is that, for an event film, it’s oh-so uneventful. This isn’t just a boring movie, it’s something far worse: a white-hot boring movie, a film so steeped in upper-class Caucasian ennui that it makes “American Beauty” look like “Do the Right Thing.”

It’s clear that Linklater takes a lot of pride in his movie, and I don’t want to be that asshole that rips apart a dude’s literal life’s work, but at the end of the day, this is a GLORIOUSLY overrated motion picture. Oddly enough, the character development just isn’t there, the story itself is frustratingly devoid of anything engrossing, and there are segments that just dawdle on forever, giving you the glimmer of something significant, but ultimately, hardly anything we see in the movie leads to any kind of meaningful denouement. Like every other fucking movie made over the last forty years, it’s just another celebration of youthful suburban alienation, suggesting that the cure-all for affluenza is lowering one self into a state of inauthentic paucity. At the end of the day, “Boyhood” has nothing more profound to say than “do drugs and don’t give a shit about anything” -- an astoundingly immature narrative for a film being hailed as a master work of the matured cinematic form.

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Six Horrible Bands That Shouldn’t Have Survived the ‘90s

…and another half dozen who should’ve ruled the freaking world.

The 1990s were a great time for music, it being the era that gave us Cynic, Nada Surf, Wu-Tang, Anal Cunt, Merzbow, good Johnny Cash and of course, the Wesley Willis Fiasco. While most bands from the era have long since dissolved or turned into calcified husks of what they once were, quite a few bands from the era have remained quite popular ever since.

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at a dozen bands who, after becoming popular in the ‘90s, have had extended careers into the aughties and beyond. To be different though, we’ll largely be looking at six bands that have proven extraordinarily popular beyond the Sega Genesis era, who in my humblest of opinions, never deserved their success to begin with. Serving as palette cleaners, we’ll then bring up a band that SHOULD have had the post-Clinton success that the overrated artist did.

Odds are, this one will probably irk some fan boys, but that’s not exactly territory we here at the Internet Is In America is even remotely afraid to get into. Get ready, folks, it’s time to chow down on some supremely overrated sacred cow…

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER ONE:

Tool

Tool, and their fans, are people who overstate their own intelligence. They think tunes like “Prison Sex” and “Schism” are profound and intellectual and probing, but no -- they’re actually pretty fucking stupid, pointless and meandering to the point of being indecipherable.

Tool is pretty much Pink Floyd for people who might shoot up a school building some day. You HAVE to be high to listen to their music, because anyone with even the remotest sense of pitch and tune would hear three seconds of “Stink Fist” and probably mistake it for air conditioning static. The H.R. Giger claymation videos and lenticular album covers of Vitruvian Man and dudes blowing themselves pretty much tell you all you need to know about the band as an act -- they’re boring, they have nothing to say, and they have to be inauthentically “shocking” and grandiose to even be worth mentioning. At least Marilyn Manson and his followers know how stupid his shtick is -- Tool is a band glibly unaware just how painfully mundane they truly are.

Tool is the worst kind of band, the kind of band who thinks their music is better than what it really is. Ultimately, they’re just a shitty industrial band -- probably worse than Ministry or Prong -- who think they can overcome their drabness by filling their music with creepy stalker poetry and Bill Hicks references. You know why Tool songs often drone on for more than ten minutes? Because it gives you ample time to get up and find something better to do with your life, that’s why.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

DEATH

Far and away the best death metal band of all-time, and pretty much the act responsible for turning the genre from a goofy thrash offshoot into arguably the most intellectual and technically demanding genre out there. Truly intelligent people listen to “Human” and “Symbolic” -- mush heads keep waiting for Maynard James Keenan to write another song about egg recipes.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER TWO:

Nine Inch Nails

And speaking of shitty industrial acts, hey ya’ll its Trent Reznor and pals!

Really, NIN shouldn’t have had a career after “Pretty Hate Machine.” “Head Like a Hole” should’ve made them a one-hit-wonder, and they should’ve faded away into obscurity by the time the mid 1990s arrived. But somehow, they managed to become goth-rock-Prozac heroes with “The Downward Spiral,” the techno-metal-emo magnum opus that’s probably been the soundtrack to more teen suicides than any other album in history.

Magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone praised NIN for being “emotional” and “innovative,” which is codeword for “playing like shit, but since its arty, we want to sound enlightened too, so we like it.” With a rock world tired of “woe-is-me” mopey  flannel shirt shit-grunge, Reznor had the business sense to cook up some “woe-is-me” mopey black fingernail polish electro-shit-emo to fill the lucrative void created by Kurt Cobain’s doped up corpse. Like a turd that won’t flush, they float up to the top of the commode every four or five years, with another boring-ass album that sounds just like the last one, but rest assured, the NPR crowd will eat it up, anyway. They say all you need to make it in show-business is talent, hard work and a hell of a marketing campaign. Thanks to NIN, we know now you only need one of those to thrive in the recording industry.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

MONSTER MAGNET

Quite possibly the best pure rock and roll band on the planet, and a group that’s been releasing consistently great dope smoke rock since the early 1990s. With a lead singer who looks just like the dude from “American Movie,” Monster Magnet is the kind of old school rock act that knows how to rip it up and get groovy at the same time. Whereas NIN is overproduced, computerized drabness, Monster Magnet is raw, mechanical sexualized fury -- in short, everything that makes actual rock and roll fucking awesome.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER THREE:

AFI

AFI was -- and still is -- the Backstreet Boys of goth music. 98 percent of their fan base are prepubescent teen girls (who may be in their late 30s by now), who dream of being seduced by some 120 pound weakling with a lip ring while “Invader Zim” romantically plays in the background. AFI is a pseudo-band who makes pseudo-music, and they’ve undoubtedly made a lot of money courting the Hot Topics crowd like Jerry Lewis serenading kids to the gas chamber.

AFI was NEVER a real punk band. Even their ‘90s stuff was more “Green Day” than “Suicide Machines,” and their post “Girl’s Not Grey” stuff might as well be considered Top 40 pop. Their dark-romantic-Victorian-kinda-emo-straight-edge hook is one of the most noticeably formulaic in all of music -- their songs seem structured to sell iTunes downloads to fat punk chicks who would recoil in disgust at G.G. Allin’s mere visage.

There’s not much of a difference between AFI and the All-American Rejects or Fallout Boy, except maybe the clothing is darker. It’s major record label, niche target youth-baiting claptrap all the same, made worse because AFI and their fans actually think they’re a real band. Show me someone who enjoys AFI’s music, and I’ll show you someone with about as much depth as a drained kiddy pool.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

GWAR

Yes, GWAR, the group of Virginia art school students who dressed up like outer space bacon monsters and did stage shows filled with fake amputation and gallons of synthetic blood. To the untrained eye, it was all goofy showmanship, until you actually paid heed to the band’s lyrics, which were among the most subversively intelligent political satire of the last two decades. AFI are a bunch of rich pretty boys in eyeliner, whereas GWAR were a bunch of ugly motherfuckers who knew what TRUE art looked, sounded and sometimes smelled like. They were true audiovisual entertainment, not the commodified, Super Target discount bin-ready corp-pop that AFI has been for at least the last ten years.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER FOUR:

Tori Amos

I don’t know which I detest more: Tori Amos, or Tori Amos fans. Let’s pick apart both, why don’t we?

Despite all of the accolades she receives,  Tori Amos is really nothing more than the female equivalent of Ben Folds. Except Ben Folds has dexterity, and he has the good sense to not make super-long paens to rape and domestic abuse staples of his catalog. EVERY goddamn Tori Amos song sounds the same -- breathless, absurdly forced egocentrically emotional pornography. “Look at me, I’m a woman, men are bad, I’ve been through bad stuff, women are good.” That’s pretty much the lyrical range to the entire Amos discography. PJ Harvey more or less had the same gimmick, but at least she has a decent voice -- Amos usually sounds like a raspy-throated Disney on Ice singer who stopped giving a shit a long time ago.

And goddamn, are Tori fans the most annoying throng of wannabe intellectual artistes this side of the Animal Collective fan club. They’re all so emotionally distraught over the most menial wrongs that have occurred to them. The aggregate Amos fan isn’t some chronically abused outsider, but some suburban mall rat whose worst day ever was the time she got the wrong coffee at Starbucks and what’s-his-name from geometry class never accepted her friend request. Liz Phair beats the shit out of Tori Amos any day of the week -- I’d rather listen to a scratched disc version of “Exile on Guyville” than ANYTHING this overrated ginger has crapped out.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead?

MATTHEW SWEET

Matthew Sweet is the single most underrated artist of the 1990s, and under complete obscurity, he’s released nearly thirty years worth of the best guitar-driven power pop in the history of recorded music. If you want overblown, self-righteous sentimentalism, Amos is your girl; when you’re ready for no-frills, old-school emotional rock and roll, Matthew Sweet is waiting for you.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER FIVE:

Radiohead

In a just world, Radiohead would have gone the way of Wax, Greta and Quicksand. “Creep” would have been a popular contemporary hit, their follow-up albums would have sold like crap and with enough luck, Thom Yorke would’ve died of a heroin overdose sometime in 1998. Alas, the winds of fate have blown the other direction, and as a global society, we’ve all had to suffer.

There’s no way around it: Radiohead is the pussiest band in history. They make Morrissey sound like Slayer and The Cure sound like Deicide in their prime. You MIGHT be able to give their guitarist credit, but that still leaves three-fourths a shitty band to deal with. And then, there’s the discography as a whole.

“OK Computer” is the most overrated album of the 1990s, and its not even close. From “Kid A” to “In Rainbows,” they’re discography hasn’t gotten any better, with their subdued, low-key high production value-low-fi sound becoming the aural template for countless Euro and US suck-core acts such as The Killers and Coldplay. More than any band of the last 30 years, Radiohead has been the most responsible for popularizing wuss-rock, the effeminate, absurdly morose wannabe art house genre that more or less represents rock and roll music as a whole today. For that alone, Radiohead deserves the world’s collective scorn. And they probably deserve even more than that for simply being Radiohead.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead?

LOCAL H

Most folks only know Local H for their minor 1996 hit “Bound for the Floor,” and that’s a real shame. Unbeknownst to 99 percent of humanity, the Chicago post-grunge act has gone on to release outstanding album after outstanding album ever since, producing super-smart alternative rock that puts all of those egghead college rock groups to shame. Radiohead is music people listen to because they think it makes them look hip and intellectual; Local H is the kind of music people listen to because hot damn, does it ever rock.

OVERRATED BAND NUMBER SIX:

Neutral Milk Hotel

Without hyperbole, “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” is the single worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life, and I once heard the death scream of a kitten before. I’m not trying to sound acerbically humorous when I state that I have no earthly idea how anyone could find this type of “music” pleasurable. It’s so pretentious, and inauthentic and insincere -- authentically shitty music, I can handle, but disingenuous shit like this? It’s the absolute worst of the worst.

Neutral Milk Hotel isn’t a band. I’m convinced of it. It’s actually some kind of far-reaching, longitudinal MK Ultra experiment on mimetic desirability or something. The masterminds at DARPA used algorithms to create the absolute shittiest kind of music possible, and via media engineering, have convinced all of the pop music barons that it’s actually great, and since kids today are a bunch of mush heads who can’t think for themselves, they too, have convinced themselves that NMH is, and I definitely quote here, “good music.”

Between Jeff Mangum’s make-believe hillbilly yelp, the band’s inability to find a rhythm of any sort and the group’s sickeningly avant-garde for the sake of being avant-garde shtick (hey, let’s make an alt-country concept album about Anne Frank!), Neutral Milk Hotel is -- without question -- the single worst alt rock act to achieve critical or financial success in the 1990s. They may not have recorded any music since 1999, but they made enough shit from 1992 onward to forever leave their undeniable streak mark on the industry. I can be flexible on most things, but if you’re into Neutral Milk Hotel, I automatically hate you. It’s something much worse than having bad taste -- it’s a sign you, as an individual, have absolutely zero ability to think beyond what shitrags such as Pitchfork tell you to. To summarize: fuck Neutral Milk Hotel, and everyone on planet Earth who likes them.

Who Should Have Been Popular Instead? 

VIC CHESNUTT

If you want REAL alt country, it doesn’t get any better than Vic Chesnutt, the Athens, Ga. singer-songwriter who is probably best known for being the guy in the wheelchair in “Sling Blade.” With soulful, haunting songs about faith, disease and depression, Chesnutt was an artist who really made music that connected with you. As insincere as Neutral Milk Hotel is, Vic Chesnutt is every bit the real deal; as much as you owe it to yourself to avoid Jeff Mangum, you definitely owe it to yourself to give Chesnutt a thorough listening.

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Let’s Face It: Kurt Cobain Sucked.

Two decades after the Nirvana front man’s self-administered demise, we reflect upon the grunge icon’s hallowed legacy. And as it turns out, he probably doesn’t deserve any of the reverence. 

It’s an illogical statement, I know, but I’ll say it anyway: I’ve more or less always been a pretty big fan of Nirvana, but at the same time, I’ve always detested Kurt Cobain.

Yes, as a ‘90s child, I’ve always fostered a certain affinity towards the “Nirvana sound,” if you will, but I never really bought into Kurt’s retroactive deification, either. From a musical standpoint, Kurt was clearly the least talented of his bandmates, and his faux-philosophical, anti-Guns N Roses, new-new-wave, ultra-liberal shtick more or less opened the floodgates for a million, billion wusses like Trent Reznor and that crybaby from Radiohead to make miserable, woe-is-me alternative the default setting for mainstream rock to this day.

Here, on the 20th anniversary of Cobain’s suicide -- or, depending on how much of a crackpot you are, the date Courtney Love either killed her husband or hired somebody (but not that dude from The Mentors, of course) to do it for her -- I believe it’s a most opportune time to reflect on just how overrated Kurt Cobain was, on every conceivable level.

First and foremost; Kurt Cobain was a shitty guitar player, a fact that doesn’t keep him from routinely being ranked on top 100 all time greatest guitarist lists, you know, just ‘cause. With a voice that sounded like dual recordings of Edward Furlong’s screaming outtakes from “Terminator 2" and Pepe Le Pew doing a drunken karaoke ballad, Kurt’s “signature” singing style was similarly a less-than-impressive display. It may not have been as imitated as the “Vedder Voice,” but seeing as how easily fourth-rate alt rock acts like Seether and Puddle of Mudd were able to faithfully recreate that soulful Cobain howl, I think it’s safe to say we weren’t dealing with an all-time crooning legend, either.

As for Cobain’s music, I think the entire Nirvana discography is horrendously overrated. Cobain himself absolutely hated “Nevermind” and “In Utero,” considering the first to be an overproduced turd and the second a reluctant compromise between him and the record company. All in all, the band was responsible for perhaps only one and half truly decent albums -- the beautifully unpolished “Bleach” from 1989 (a grimy, under-produced classic that stands out as the band’s one truly uncompromised release) and the glorified B-side collection, “Incesticide” -- and before you give that one too much credit, just recall that half that album more or less consists of cover tunes, which is also a criticism you can lob at the band’s much revered “Unplugged” set, too.

For a composer that’s frequently hailed as the voice of a generation, Kurt’s lyrics were suspiciously cryptic, disjointed and largely apolitical. Whereas Bob Dylan at least referenced social issues in his “decades-defining” songs, Cobain’s lyrics were really just a grab-bag of fragmented poetry pieces, seemingly tossed together at random. In fact, he actually said that’s how he wrote his songs, on numerous occasions. For an alleged voice of an entire decade, old Kurt’s music had astoundingly little to say about anything at all.

As far as the much-acclaimed “Nirvana sound,” by now, we all know it was mostly just a restructuring of classic rock tunes -- “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is basically just “Louie, Louie” and “More than A Feeling,” only played faster and shittier, while even early Nirvana tracks “Spank-Thru” convey a certain Credence Clearwater Revival-esque vibrato. Cobain’s adulation/imitation of the Pixies is well-documented, so there’s really no need to drudge up how much of the Nirvana discography is derived from “Surfer Rosa” and “Doolittle.” However, I’ve always thought the Nirvana’s “iconic” sound was actually more of a rip-off of Steve Albini’s post-punk outfit Big Black -- just take out the synth and amp up the distortion, and you’ve more or less got “Nirvana” before there was a “Nirvana.”

And of course, how could I talk about Kurt Cobain’s revolutionary “creativity” without talking about the second-most iconic track off  “Nevermind?” A song, by the way, that is a direct rip-off of the Killing Joke song “Eighties,” which itself is a rip-off of The Damned’s “Life Goes On.”

Compared to the glut of Seattle-area bands, I still find it weird that Nirvana, out of the deluge of groups, is the one that gets the most credit for kicking off “The Grunge Revolution.” Yeah, “Nevermind” is said to have been the turning point, but a lot of people tend to forget that both Soundgarden and Alice in Chains’ big mainstream breakthroughs were released long before Nirvana’s 1991 opus. And any number of bands -- from The Melvins to Green River to Mother Love Bone -- could rightly lay claim to pioneering the “grunge movement,” years before Nirvana was even a fully-formed idea in Kurt Cobain’s noggin. The theory I’ve developed over the years was that the Grunge Takeover had always been something of a ploy by David Geffen and his kindred to supplant the dried-out hair rock movement, and Nirvana was just the right act at the right time to get all of the engineered publicity to turn the tide; with enough mass marketing and enough sound mixing, really ANY of the Seattle area bands could have had a “Nevermind” sized breakthrough. Clearly, Cobain’s ascension as pop icon had a whole hell of a lot more to do with luck than it did talent...and most certainly, ambition.

And what about Kurt Cobain, the individual human being? Well, for starters, he was bold-faced hypocrite, the kind of soul that liked to champion himself as a defender of women’s rights when he himself admitted to once molesting a developmentally disabled girl in his youth. His notebooks were filled with hateful diatribes against “jocks,” decrying their meat-eating dispositions, when Kurt was responsible for intentionally killing cat when he was a kid. He routinely mocked the macho excesses of the hair metal movement, even though he was pumping lethal drugs into his veins habitually and publicly priding himself on his own sexual conquests, too. And the ultimate tragicomic punch line to the Cobain life story? After literally making a fortune regurgitating the same-old, same-old “my parents are sell-outs and the break-up of our family royally screwed me up” drivel, he then proceeded to become a sell-out himself who voluntarily decided to break up his own family by blowing his brains out.

A lot of people like to speculate how Cobain’s music would’ve progressed had he not played the shotgun clarinet that fateful spring morning in King County. Odds are, he probably would’ve progressed down the Metallica path, abandoning the tried-and-true Nirvana sound for something a little more radio-friendly. Legend has it that the never to be “last” Nirvana album was going to be a stripped down, mostly acoustic, “Automatic For the People”-inspired detour, which is exactly the kind of thing you hear before a band starts playing half-hearted, bland-ass music that clearly indicates the outfit’s lack of good ideas anymore. The “In Utero” studio follow-up, as such, would have likely been Nirvana’s “Monster” -- a critical flop that signified the slow, boring downfall of the formerly influential and inspiring.

Of course, that scenario skirts perhaps the most important aspect of who and what Kurt Cobain was, and that was a sad-sack junkie. In reality, any fantasizing about what Cobain would be up to “today” is just pointless, since had Cobain not offed himself when he offed himself, he no doubt would’ve been dead before he turned 40, anyway. Perhaps the allure of Cobain is that he had the good sense to kill himself at a time when it was still fashionable and attractive -- going down at one’s peak is a hallmark of the legends, while disappearing into a decade of drug dependency, only to resurface as a bloated, O.D.’d corpse five years after last releasing an album just makes you Layne Staley.

What is Cobain’s lasting legacy, ultimately? Well, for one thing, he made suicide and flannel shirts fashionable -- at least one of which is still considered en vogue at the moment. And his stardom went a pretty long way in “normalizing” heroin addiction as a common occupational trait among rock stars. Musically, he’s probably the most culpable party responsible for the rock and roll industry’s shift away from good-time, nostalgic party and driving music to music more befitting anti-depressant-fed teens that paint their nails black and cut themselves on the third floor of their suburban mansions. Yes, he was responsible for eliminating the grandiose vapidity of Guns N Roses from the national consciousness, but nobody really brings up the fact that all Nirvana really did was replace it with a more nihilistic form of grandiose vapidity.

At the end of the day, though, I suppose Nirvana had some good songs, and if given the option of listening to a decade of bands that sounded like Silverchair and Oasis or a decade of bands that sounded like Trixter and Firehouse, well, shit, the answer ought to be downright obvious. But all of this retroactive mourning and retroactive reverence -- now stemming from youths who weren’t even born when Cobain made the choice to end his own life -- that he gets?

Well, that’s just stupid, and unfortunately, contagious.

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Breaking Bad SUCKS.

Why the program isn’t just merely overrated, but detrimental to U.S. society as a whole. 

One of the old standbys when it comes to anti-censorship rhetoric in the U.S. is the idea that pop culture -- i.e., entertainment such as television, film, music and video games -- doesn’t have a profound psychological impact on viewers, listeners or players.

Funnily, empirical evidence seems to point otherwise.

Perhaps it was just coincidence that James Holmes elected to shoot up a movie theater screening the loud and violent “Dark Knight Rises,” only to identify himself as “The Joker” -- the homicidal, anarchistic pop culture icon whose visage was as commonplace as Barack Obama’s in 2008 -- when police finally ended his dozen-corpse shooting spree two years ago. Similarly, perhaps it is just “coincidence” that Anders Breivik was a fan of the hyper-popular “Call of Duty” games -- so much so, that he said he used the game as a virtual simulator for his unprecedented rampage in 2011 that left 77 individuals dead…not to mention an additional 300 whom were seriously injured or critically wounded. Perhaps we can also chalk up a would-be mass shooter’s plans to decimate his high school in 2013 as “mere coincidence,” despite the fact that said perpetrator intended on carrying out said rampage while music from the infamous “No Russian” level in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” played on his iPod. Similarly, the number of “copycat” crimes based on Oliver Stone’s super-overrated 1994 pseudo-opus “Natural Born Killers” is so high, it has it’s own tally sheet on Wikipedia.

Of course, media has very little impact on individual psyches and their personal decision-making, which is exactly why navy recruit numbers skyrocketed after “Top Gun” was released. Nor can that be the reason why, in the wake of made-for-cable “reality” dreck like “Storage Wars,” auction attendance numbers across the U.S. have exploded. And of course, lawyers and judges across the country aren’t complaining about something called “The CSI Effect,” in which “Law and Order”-weaned jurors keep demanding non-existent technologies be used to “solve” actual criminal trials.

When “Breaking Bad” -- the unexpected AMC mega-hit, starring of all people, the dad from “Malcolm in the Middle” -- concluded last fall, it wasn’t just a television event, it was indeed a generation-defining moment. That evening, my apartment complex -- itself, a glorified student housing project -- was literally overflowing with cars. The communal Wi-Fi was lagging, because so many people were on Twitter and Facebook and texting each other back and forth about the final episode. Many acquaintances later told me that the “Series Finale” parties they attended were more densely populated than any sports-centric get-together they had ever seen. The grand finale for the program was a mass cultural experience, something more akin to the Super Bowl or even a Presidential election than just some sliver of pop cultural ephemera.

And of course, I didn’t watch a second of it.

When it comes to modern-day pop culture, I admit that I am something of an aberration. Simply put, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, since I have refused to own a television since 2007 and haven’t turned on my car’s radio since 2009. As such, pretty much all of my pop culture intake comes from Facebook chatter and other Internet-borne phenomena, which I usually ignore until it becomes absolutely impossible to scroll three centimeters up, down, left, or right without being bombarded by massiveness of whatever contemporary pop culture thing is going on at the juncture.

In regards to “Breaking Bad,” I avoided it for quite some time, primarily due to spending my free time doing stupid things like being outside, hanging out with my loved ones and writing about four bajillion things simultaneously instead of watching a non-stop, 12 hour block of TV programming in one sitting like God intended us to do as a species. Alas, my curiosity finally got the best of me, and I decided to skim my way through a couple of episodes. And after all of the nonstop media bombardment, with people endlessly celebrating it as the best thing since sliced bread, you know what my reaction was?

“Well, that’s pretty unremarkable.”

Simply put, “Breaking Bad” -- in my eyes -- sucked as a drama, a television program and a work of fiction. As is, television is pretty much the lowest form of “art” there is -- being the only self-censored media format, designed solely for the sake of unabashed commercialism and all -- but even in a world glutted with “Dance Moms” and “Duck Dynasty,” I found “Breaking Bad” to be especially lackluster.

For years, I was told that “Breaking Bad” was a deep, humanistic work of art, with character portrayals of criminals so real, it felt less like your standard TV tomfoolery and more like a Scorsesian drama -- not that films like “Goodfellas” or “Casino” completely romanticize the mob or anything like that, but alas, such is an aside for a different day. This was, allegedly, a gritty, psychologically rich tale about life after the recession, and how far desperate people are willing to carry on in the face of inevitable destruction. The way the pop cultural wehrmacht posited it, you’d think “Breaking Bad” was scripted by the resurrected corpse of Erich Remarque himself.

Alas, such was not the television program that I saw. Instead, what I saw was a downright pandering, fantastical program that once again glorified criminality as a reasonable way of life and a just response to adversity. Told that “Breaking Bad” was the definitive post-Recession pop culture construct, I was actually offended by what I saw: instead of focusing on the real-life degradation of the American family (and with it, an entire generation’s sense of optimism and belief in self), “Breaking Bad” was a borderline fascistic show that, with the lung cancer skeleton key, completely exonerated its characters from any sort of moralistic retribution for their own doings. Very few television programs I have viewed have had such a nihilistic, and socially destructive, mindset: the main character’s just going to die, anyway, so why not break the law and fuck up the lives of countless others as some sort of bizarre, sociopathic riposte to one’s personal setbacks?

I’ve written dozens of stories about real-life human beings aversely impacted by the Great Recession, and not a single one has been analogous to Walter White -- the meth-cooking, unconscionable protagonist who has since become the unofficial icon of an entire generation. Faced with their own financial doomsday -- and among some, their own impending mortalities -- none of the people I interviewed seemed to port about attitudes as vicious and unprincipled as the “hero” of “Breaking Bad.” Instead of seeking an “easy way out” by getting into illicit trade, the people I’ve seen have worked like crazy in menial labor to support those who they love, and of the people starring into the economic abyss, the ones I have talked to have spoken about entering poverty gracefully; that is, instead of going into despair with an anti-social disposition, they’ve tried to pattern their old ways of life around being poor.

The story of real American life, post-recession, has been one of sacrifice: families taking the deep cuts to support themselves. However, the story of “Breaking Bad” is almost the complete inverse: instead of focusing on a family man who sacrifices his own wants for a greater good, he more or less goes on a rampage, engaging in sundry antisocial behaviors, with the needs of his family serving as a convenient “excuse” for his own sociopathic, criminal behavior.

With all of the corpses piled up on the show, defenders of “Breaking Bad” claim the program doesn’t glamorize the drug trade, to which I call bullshit. At the absolute best, “Breaking Bad” is a program that philosophically argues that extreme conditions (such as financial insolvency and terminal illness) provide one with a moralistic carte blanche, that with self-destruction imminent, the moral guidelines people follow under “normal conditions” no longer apply. “If you suffer an injustice,” the show’s mantra seems to be, “it’s OK to perpetrate more injustices to get back to square one.”

You see this kind of shit all the time. How many rappers, many of whom have been convicted of felonies and/or been the victims of homicide, have cited “Scarface” as an influence? The underlying theme of that film, similar to the theme of “Breaking Bad,” is that if you get wronged or marginalized, it’s completely reasonable to do what most people would call “unconscionable actions” in order to “fix” said problems. How many gangster rappers sing the exact same song and dance? They were born poor, in crappy environments with few educational or occupational opportunities; denied those “legitimate” opportunities by “the man,” is it really that “wrong” if they turn towards criminal enterprises as way of “making it” as others do?

The key “life lesson” in oh so many a gangster rap classic is the same virtue that’s promoted in “Breaking Bad” -- do unto others, as others have done unto you. Note that such is not “as you would like others to do,” as the Golden Rule postulates, but “as other have already treated you.” Everything an individual does, then, is not an action, but a reaction -- not individual choice, but reciprocity stemming from an event the individual has no control over. If “wronged,” in any way, shape, or form, the individual has no moral restrictions on doing whatever it is that he or she believes is necessary to right that perceived injustice. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s the law of the jungle --  “and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper,” as Rudyard Kipling once penned, “but the wolf that shall break it must die.”

If there was ever a program that so vigorously defended the literally inhuman construct of survival of the fittest, “Breaking Bad” would personify it. Why not turn towards meth-making, and the murderous drug trade, if it meant “survival?” Who cares if you create a monster that destroys the lives of oh-so-many families and relationships, if it’s done solely for the sake of “survival?” Why not turn on your best friends and align yourself with absolute miscreants, if it’s just for “survival?”

Walter White is pretty much the antithesis of what served as a protagonist half a century ago. Whereas the pacifistic, morally-guided Atticus Finch was once deemed the cultural depiction of heroism, the principle-less White has become this generation’s de facto icon. We’ve no time, nor patience, for self-sacrificing, virtue-driven heroics anymore; it’s much more entertaining to watch conscience-less anti-heroes do as they please, with the auger of “past injustices” serving as a universal “justification” for their doings, of course. Resiliency and moral high grounds, it appear, went out with landline phones and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

“Breaking Bad,” as such, may not glorify methamphetamine use, per se, but it does something that’s actually far worse: it rationalizes the methamphetamine drug trade as a “just cause” in times of personal tribulation. Throughout the episodes of “Breaking Bad” that I scanned, I wondered about the clientele that Walter poisoned, and if their home lives were anything like the home lives of actual methamphetamine-impacted families that I’ve interviewed over the years.

Were there seven kids in one mobile home, with pink insulation falling out of the ceiling? Were there squalling kindergartners abound, whom lacked the cognitive ability to fully grasp what their daddy’s 20-year-prison sentence actually meant? Were there any 28-year-old kids, with more fingers than teeth, literally foaming out of their mouths due to withdrawal? “Breaking Bad,” you say, is drama, sheer entertainment. I’d highly recommend those same individuals, whom find the program so “enthralling,” actually participate in a Functional Family Therapy session, and watch the decades and decades of loving bonds disintegrate before your very eyes, thanks to the demon of meth addiction. That, my friends, is the TRUE face of methamphetamine, not the guns-blazing, made-for-cable bullshit that “Breaking Bad” represents.

Of course, I’m not going to change anybody’s opinion about the program. After all, it’s just
“entertainment,” you’ll tell me, and nothing more than mock dramatics with an engaging storyline. What’s so bad about a show, after all, that completely trivializes one of the nation’s greatest health epidemics, turning the real-life suffering of hundreds of thousands of families into action-movie bravado? What’s so bad, you’ll tell me, about a show that makes a “hero” out of a character who destroys so many lives with the justification in mind that it’s “OK,” because he too has experienced his own difficulties? What’s so bad, you’ll say, about an entire culture embracing a show so decisively nihilistic, and fascistic, and antipathetic to any and all forms of selflessness?

It’s not like “entertainment” has any impact on culture at large, after all…

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Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) Review

Depending on who you ask, it’s either the best movie of 2013 or the most controversial. But is the much talked about French film as good -- or as shocking -- as some critics would have you believe? 

Let me start off by saying there is a lot of eating going on in “Blue is the Warmest Color.” And no, that’s NOT the brusque euphemism you think it is, I’m being hyper-literal here; virtually every scene in the movie revolves around food, or restaurants or people talking about what foods they like or don’t like. Of all the recurring themes director Abdellatif Kechiche throws around in the movie -- and trust me, there are a metric ton of them -- it is this motif of food and food ritualism that becomes the most pronounced and omnipresent throughout the film. For all the hubbub the film has stirred, at the end of the day, “Blue is the Warmest Color” is really more about food porn that it is lesbian erotica -- at times, it feels less like it was helmed by a horndog alpha male than it was an anorexic, Pinterest-obsessed high schooler.

For those of you that have been living in a cave since last year (or, for those of you that think “media” ends on both coasts of the continental U.S.), “Blue is the Warmest Color” is a European production that took home the prestigious Palm d’or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. After its release, it was condemned by those on the right of the aisle for its allegedly graphic sexual content (it was successfully banned from public viewings in Idaho) and then it took a few punches from the left, whom accused Kechiche of promoting the fabled…I mean, tyrannical…patriarchy by supposedly “taking advantage” of the film’s lead actresses during the shoot. The heavy political forces squeezing the movie on both sides pretty much kept it from getting much of an American theatrical distribution, and despite glowing praise from trendy art house folk the world over, it didn’t even manage to land a Best Foreign Language Film nomination for this year’s Oscars. Alas, now that the film is making the Netflix rounds, it’s finally getting a crack at a widespread U.S. audience, and after catching a showing of the film myself, I have to say that it is a really good -- albeit flawed -- motion picture, that’s probably worth at least one viewing for the more cultured filmgoers out there.

The film is centered around the exploits of high school junior Adele (played, reasonably enough, by an actress named Adele Exarchopoulos), who has a schnoz like Anna Kendrick and a set of bee-stung lips that more or less resemble what Angelina Jolie’s kisser would look like if she stuck her face in a hornet’s nest. She also parades about in the film with this perpetual huge-eyed, deer-in-headlights gaze, and spends more screentime with her mouth hanging open than Kristen Stewart does throughout the entire “Twilight” pentalogy. Anyway, all of Adele’s friends are a bunch of brunettes with bangs who wear blue and red nail polish (that’s called “symbolism,” Holmes) who want her to sleep with this short-haired heavy metal singer, so she goes out to dinner with him and talks about “Dangerous Liaisons” for ten full minutes. At around the 20 minute mark of the movie, Adele has a fairly intense fantasy about this random blue-haired girl she saw prancing about town earlier, and I guess this freaks her out, because she has sex with short-haired metal singer guy in the very next scene.

In the next scene, Adele looks disheveled as all hell and asks one of her (gay) boy friends to help her break up with Mr. Heavy Metal Singer, and she does, and then she walks around town chain smoking at midnight and then she cries and rips into her hidden chocolate bar stash underneath her bed. Then she and her fellow students go on a protest march and drink Coronas and get a lecture about Antigone, and then one of Adele’s gal pals tells her she thinks she’s all cute and mysterious and they smooch for a bit and the next day at school, her not-quite-out-of-the-closet amiga tells her that she didn’t really mean it yesterday so she decides to go hang out at a gay bar instead.

So Adele sneaks off into a lesbian dive, but not before a geriatric John Cena lookalike tells her that “love has no gender” and to “take whoever loves you.“ Conveniently enough, the blue-haired girl Adele fantasized about earlier then emerges from the bar’s bathroom. The eel-eyed, denim jacket sporting Emma (played by Lea Seydoux) is a Fine Arts student, who gives Adele some strawberry milk and pretty much knows that she’s under-age, but decides to strike up a conversation with her anyway. The next day, Emma draws a picture of Adele in the park, and they talk about Sartre for a bit, and Adele tells her she likes probable rapist Bob Marley, and they cheek kiss, and the next day at school, Adele gets into a fight with one of her friends who calls her a lesbian.

Next scene, Adele is in class getting a lecture about gravity and water, and then she and Emma sneak off to the museum to stare at statue asses. Adele tells Emma she’s basically bulimic and can’t stand shellfish, and then they start talking about their first lesbian experiences. And at the one hour and 14 minute mark of the motion picture, we get the much talked-about lesbian sex montage bonanza, in which Adele and Emma engage in pretty much every position found in the Kama Sutra, for a full SIX MINUTES. Afterwards, the two go to a gay pride parade and make out on a park bench, and then they go over to Emma’s parents’ place for dinner, and they’re all super-liberal and accepting, but they’ve prepared oysters and Adele’s grossed out and they talk about how much the current job market worries them and then they go upstairs and “scissors” each other, really, really hard.

Then, Adele gets thrown a surprise birthday party, which is so lame that even the black attendees dance like white people. Adele’s parents are a bit less open to the whole “lesbianism” thing, and her mom thanks Emma for helping her daughter out with her “philosophy,” while dad cautiously asks Emma what her “boyfriend” does for a living.

Emma, now devoid of blue hair dye (and eerily resembling Eric Stoltz, circa 1985), does a nude sketch of Adele, who we learn is a kindergartner teacher or something like that. Then, Adele and Emma go to this art crowd party, and Emma flirts with this pregnant chick, and Adele gets jealous and starts talking with this Arabian guy about action movies while all of the other partygoers eat spaghetti and discuss “the philosophy” of orgasms.

There’s a lengthy pillow talk sequence, and Adele’s paranoia about her partner’s infidelity is clearly rising, so she goes out and makes out with this dude, and then she has a nasty argument with Emma, and they decide to break up. Then Adele goes to the beach and just floats in the water for awhile, and she has a post break-up encounter with Emma, and they talk about how much they miss each other’s touch, and they monkey around for awhile, but Emma cuts her off and says she can’t do it, because she doesn’t love Adele anymore. And then the film concludes with Adele going to an art gallery, and talking to a dude and a chick while some guy in the background gives a really, really heavy-handed lecture about the significance of the colors red and blue. And then Adele simply walks out into the great unknown, and this movie is all over, folks.

I suppose the first question most folks would be asking is if the lesbian scenes are really that intense. I guess they’d give your motor a good whirring if you were a Quaker or something, but to be honest, the scenes go on for so long that they pretty much begin to border on self-parody, like that infamous “puppet sex scene” from “Team America: World Police.” That, and the visuals here are pretty hard to take too seriously: I mean, half the time, the scenes just look like Sonic the Hedgehog is going down on Jennifer Love Hewitt, anyway.

Now, as to the allegations that the film is somehow misogynistic or even homophobic -- and yes, there actually are people out there accusing the filmmakers of being precisely that -- I’d have to roll my eyeballs down to somewhere around my shins. If anything, hardcore leftists that hated the movie probably disliked it so because it actually had the audacity to focus on a main character who has no idea what her sexual identity is, let alone be able to make any efforts to politicize it. Instead of being a militant LGBT film about identity politics, it’s much more a film about self-denial and the troubles one goes through differentiating interpersonal intimacy from sensorial chaos. Mayhap the “problem” of the film, from the standpoint of leftist detractors, is that it’s a movie that has the gall to take the sexuality out of homosexuality, and explore sexual non-conformity as a confounding experience instead of a liberating one. “Blue is the Warmest Color” doesn’t paint its multi-sexual protagonists as heroes, and perhaps more infuriating to the more politically-motivated viewers out there, it also doesn’t really paint them as “victims” of mass social prejudice, either.

As for the film’s biggest positive, it’s absolutely LOADED with subtext. Really, the entire film is pretty much an Easter egg hunt for veiled meaning, in particular, the picture’s intriguing “red vs. blue” color dynamic. OK, so “red” imagery could come to denote heterosexuality and “traditionalism,” while “blue” imagery represents both social and sexual non-conformity; but what of Adele’s aversion to oysters, the (in-text) symbol of upper middle class pseudo-intellectualism? As much as the film is about sexuality, it’s probably an even blunter statement about contemporary gender roles and socioeconomic class differences. It’s definitely refreshing to watch a movie that forces viewers to read between the lines and through the character’s own dialogue to get the most out of the narrative; it’s definitely a film that rewards you for paying attention and playing armchair psychoanalyst, that’s for sure.

The biggest negative of the film, of course, is its length. Really, “Blue is the Warmest Color” is about 66 percent really, really good, but by the second hour, it really starts to drag. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the makers of the film for giving the flick the time that it needs to get rolling, but the film as a whole is at least a half hour longer than it really should have been. It’s a fun sprint for 120 minutes, but those final 60 are sure to take a whole hell of a lot of wind out of your sails.

The direction is sure-handed, and the acting is solid throughout, but the cinematography is the true star of the show here. Everything in the film looks crisp and super clear, and it has some of the most beautiful shots you’ll see in any movie from 2013 -- the sound-stage, CGI crap from “Gravity” can take a hike, as far as I am concerned. The script is generally quite good, and until the final third of the film, it never really hits any snags. The script reminded me a lot of “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” which was a similar film about a “forbidden romance.“ Of course, “Ali” is a far superior movie, but that’s not to say “Blue” doesn’t have a certain vitality all its own -- if nothing else, it definitely feels a lot livelier and way more realistic than a good 99 percent of the U.S. rom-coms and rom-dramas that came out last year.

Ultimately, I think the “problem” that kept most U.S. distributors from eyeing “Blue” wasn’t its sexual content, but simply the fact that it was too good and too anti-commercial for American audiences. As a film sans jump cuts or explosions of any kind, it’s just too much of a hard sale for today’s ADD-addled masses, and the three hour run-time was pretty much the fork in the proverbial roast beef sandwich. “Blue” is really, really good (but not necessarily great) world cinema, which is pretty much anathema to the Hollywood mode of production -- more sequels, more toy tie-ins, less dialogue, more ka-boom.

Thankfully, the advent of streaming, on-demand video allows movies like “Blue” to sneak their way through the multimedia backdoor, and hopefully into the living rooms of filmgoers who, in addition to porting about adult bodies, also port about adult sensibilities. After all, home video has always been the saving grace for films given the “NC-17” death sentence -- which, as it stands today, is more or less a safety mechanism that keeps children and men-children alike from having their fragile intellects damaged by that much vilified ailment, individual thought.

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