Book Review: “Irregular Army” by Matt Kennard (2012)

According to a British journalist, not only did the loosening of military standards intensify the madness of the Iraq War, it may have inadvertently made U.S. society a more violent country in general

One day before the 9/11 attacks, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech titled “Bureaucracy to Battlefield.” The ironically-timed oration served as a symbolic national defense shift, marking the end of the “Powell Doctrine” and the beginning of a long - and controversy wrought - policy of military privatization.

Rewind the tape, and one may recall a 1998 contingency plan suggesting that at least 385,000 troops would be necessary for a “hypothetical” invasion of Iraq. Later on, General Tommy Franks stated that at least 275,000 troops would be required to “stabilize” Iraq, while General Eric Shinseki said the numbers would have to be at least 200,000.

But one look at the 2009 numbers indicate the severity of Rumsfeld’s “privatized forces” doctrine: only 95,900 troops were stationed in Iraq, while 95,461 private contractors were being employed to “stabilize” and “reconstruct” the region. 2002 U.S. Central Command documents prove that the Rumsfeld brass had quite a bit of belief in this little system of theirs; even in Aug. 2002, they believed that only 5,000 U.S. troops would remain in Iraq by 2006, pending an invasion would just, you know, kinda’ happen. By June 2005, however, actual U.S. military men were becoming minority in Baghdad, with private contractors from Blackwater and DynCorp, alongside NATO-backed troops, already beginning to take “control” of the region. Hell, just two year after the Iraq invasion began, an estimated 45 percent of the ground troops in the United States’ own armies in Iraq were National Guard call-ups.

I don’t know if you young Turks may remember it, but the Iraq War - despite what you may have heard in various Toby Keith ballads - wasn’t a very popular affair in the U.S. As national support for war efforts eroded, the military found itself struggling to even fill its depleted-by-design official ranks by the mid-2000s, which ultimately led to military forces greatly lowering their own standards for recruits.

In “Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror” (a catchy subtitle, I know), Matt Kennard is quick to equate the U.S. military’s vast reduction in recruiting standards with the “barbarization” of the Roman armies of yore. Pressed to find anyone willing to risk their lives to defend Baghdad from insurgents, the U.S. military began accepting scores of individuals that, just a decade prior, would’ve been automatically disqualified from service by the time they submit their first application. As a result, Kennard postulates that as much as a quarter of the U.S. military stationed in Iraq were individuals coactively involving in extremist groups, drugs and weapons trafficking or gang activity.

Many white nationalists, Kennard writes, joined the military simply to get weapons training to prepare for potential domestic terror activities back home, citing a number of neo-Nazi groups that believe that a cataclysmic “rahowa” is on the horizon. Using “moral waivers” to get past tricky things like “histories of felonies,” a number of known gang-affiliated young men ended up getting accepted by the military and serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, scores were found to be trafficking both heroin and military grade weaponry back to the city streets of America, with some combat veterans becoming hired guns for the Mexican drug trade once they returned stateside.

Not surprisingly, Kennard states the influx of less-than-reputable individuals in the U.S. military has resulted in quite a few war crimes, citing incidents such as the 2006 gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. troops. He also brings up the story of Andrea Neutzling, an army specialist raped by her own “brothers in arms” in 2005. The statistics he provide are pretty damn telling; while 40 percent of sexual assault cases in the U.S. result in prosecutions, the number dips to just eight percent in the military. One in three women in the U.S. armed forces, he said, experience sexual assault at some point during their military careers. In all, women in the military are more likely to be raped by another soldier than killed by enemy fire during the tour of duties.

Kennard pinpoints an unusual culprit when analyzing just why so many horrific incidents were perpetrated by members of the U.S. armed forces during the Iraq War. According to official stats, about 43 percent of active personnel at the height of the Iraqi occupation reported episodes of binge drinking while on duty. Drunken air strikes and incidents involving plastered soldiers gunning down zoo animals quickly followed. The military brass were also fond of handing out gargantuan levels of Dexedrine to soldiers, and non-consensual  drug testing involving Chantix and other experimental pharmaceuticals were regular occurrences. In 2007 alone, the Department of Defense spent nearly $3 billion in pharmaceutical contracts, doling out about 50,000 narcotics prescriptions during the year. As part of the “Psychological Kevlar Act,” troops were given highly potent drugs like propranolol and even ecstasy; by 2008, approximately 40 percent of U.S. soldiers reported serious mental health issues, with the nation’s V.A. hospitals treating about 350,000 veterans annually in substance abuse programs.

Needless to say, mental health care for troops during and shortly after the end of U.S. occupation has been tragically inadequate. Kennard writes that there are about 500 mental health specialists entrusted to serve more than one million troops, noting a 2005 veteran’s health care funding shortfall of about $1 billion. Price hikes for prescription co-pays ended up forcing out about 192,000 veterans from obtaining healthcare, Kennard writes, with veterans representing nearly 12 percent of all uninsured individuals in the United States. Among others, failed Presidential candidate John McCain proposed privatizing veteran’s health care altogether to offset expenditures, while military medics were actually pressured to NOT report post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms when diagnosing and treating troops. A 2008 Rand report, regardless, found that about 300,000 military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq had either PTSD or severe depression.

Things weren’t much better on the home front, Kennard states. During the Great Recession, approximately 15 percent of U.S. veterans found themselves unemployed, with 76,000 vets reported homeless in 2009. In 2011, Republicans attempted to completely eliminate HUD-VASH, a program designed to help veterans find housing. At the same time, private firms like Caterpillar were being granted $6 billion dollar contracts to build power plants in Iraq, Kennard writes.

Just how bad were military standards reduced during the Iraqi occupation? So much so that even physical and mental fitness standards were lowered. In 2006, nearly three-tenths of recruits were obese - not overweight - and recruits scoring in the tenth and 30th lowest percentiles on the AFQT were allowed to enlist. Military recruiters even drew up amazingly convoluted enlistment contracts that placed would-be troops in accelerated high school diploma programs; the catch being, as soon as they received a degree, they would have to sign a compulsory eight-year contract with the National Guard.

Troop deficits, Kennard writes, may have inadvertently proven to be boons to the “mainstreaming” of Hispanics and homosexuals in the U.S. military. In May 2010, almost 20,000 non-U.S. citizens were on active duty, with about 52,000 individuals becoming legalized citizens via military duty from 2001 until 2009. Even so, Kennard notes that many recruiters targeted Hispanics, tempting them to enlist via the promise of naturalization. Some recruiters, he writes, even wound up in Tijuana (as in, Tijuana, Mexico) looking for Hispanic young adults to sign up. Kennard goes on to state that the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” may in fact be the only “social positive” to emerge from both U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade.

A couple of other interesting tidbits from the book:

- According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, the total economic impact of the Iraq occupation was about $3 trillion. In early Feb. 2013, combined intra-government debts stood at approximately $4.9 trillion; had the U.S. never invaded Iraq, the combined National Debt today may have been reduced by almost 20 percent.

- The parallels between the U.S. backing of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and the British backing of King Faisil in the 1920s are downright astonishing.

- A now-defunct think tank in D.C., The Project for the New American Century, was highly influential in goading the Bush Administration to take action against Hussein’s regime. Just days after 9/11, representatives from the group we’re already sending letters to George W. drumming up support for a “regime change” in the region.

- Jared Loughner, the individual that put a bullet in Gabrielle Giffords’ skull, was rejected by the U.S. military in 2008. Among the individuals considered fit for army duty, however? Kevin Harpham (a white nationalist that tried to blow up a Martin Luther King Day parade in 2011) and Nidal Malik Hasan, the individual responsible for 2009’s Fort Hood massacre. Kennard alleges that the military knew about Hasan’s extremist roots (including his correspondence with an imam with terror ties), but since the FBI declared him “not a threat” in an investigation, he was allotted entry in the military.

- Only two countries refused to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a global treaty that outlawed the use of child soldiers. One was Somalia. Take a wild guess who the other one was.

- How much does it cost to train just ONE U.S. troop? Kennard alleges that it costs anywhere from $90,000 to $150,000. By comparison, the same funding could give full-ride, four-year, all expenses paid college scholarships to 3 to 5 individuals.As it turns out, Kennard's estimates are actually extremely conservative: this CNN article states the cost of maintaining just ONE soldier in Afghanistan ranges from $850,000 to $1.4 MILLION.

- Could military homophobia be the catalyst for the rise of WikiLeaks? According to Kennard, Bradley Manning - the dude that illegally released a million trillion military files - did so because he was sick of being bullied by other troops for being gay. And because at some point in the future, you will probably need to know this: his instant messaging handle was the hilarious-in-context “bradass87.”

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What the Popularity of “Fifty Shades of Grey” REALLY Says About U.S. Culture

Why the “Sugar Kink” Phenomenon Indicates an Existential Sourness in American Society

Because I just HAVE to know everything that’s going on in American popular culture, I recently decided to read the astoundingly popular romance-erotica-novel “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Well, “read” is kind of an ill-fitting term, because I more or less skimmed its contents instead, and seeing as how the Google Books preview stops at about the fifth chapter, I was only exposed to about a quarter of the tome, but I think that’s more than enough to anchor a clumsily-worded, overlong diatribe around it.

The gist of the story here - a trilogy which began life as an unauthorized, X-rated “Twilight” fan-fiction, if you weren’t aware - involves a young woman, whose sexual history is limited to the aberrant hand hold and peck on the cheek. It’s strongly insinuated in the first book that the main character has never even tongue kissed a boy before, which probably explains why she acted so abnormally horrified when her stereotypically impassioned, reluctantly platonic Hispanic friend tried to snog her. Not that there could be other reasons, of course. So, she runs into this really weird dude, but since he’s handsome and rich, the fact that he’s probably “American Psycho” doesn’t bother her. At one point, the dude shows up at her place of occupation - a hardware store - and starts buying all sorts of cords, and ropes and miscellaneous items. Eventually, she visits him at his sex dungeon, and she gives him her V-card, and I don’t know what happens after that, but apparently it involves lots of kinky, rugged, reckless pre-AIDS crisis style doin’ it, assisted, primarily, by Black and Decker hardware. I can only imagine how sales at Home Depot have improved since this series hit the mainstream.

Now, the question as to why this stuff is popular is, on the surface, a little difficult to answer. Let’s start off with the obvious things first. From the get-go, I think we can all agree that the series isn’t exactly what you would call “good writing,” in any way, shape, form or incarnation. If there’s a singular reason as to why folks are flocking to this dreck, it’s probably not because of it’s literary excellence.

The sexual angle is pretty hard to dispute, but that brings up a sub-question, of sorts; of all things, why this particular novel? Surely, there are scores of romantic-erotica novels out there, which are both more articulate and better sources for smut. I mean, have you people ever actually read what Anais Nin wrote about? Reading a snippet of “Little Birds” is probably the only time I’ve ever gotten a boner doing philosophy class homework.

The reality here, I think, is something of an inversion of the male/female porn dichotomy. For years, male-centric smut was anchored around aesthetics and intensity, whereas traditionally marketed erotica for females has been all about a facsimile of intimacy and romance. In other words? All the dudes are about the instant gratification and release of sexual experiences, whereas the gals are about finding a particular emotional quality to accompany the physical dynamism of sexual fantasy.

What makes “Fifty Shades” so interesting, however, is that it’s very much a flip-flop of the tried and true spank-fodder dynamic. The primary audience for “Fifty Shades” is clearly a female audience, but the tomes themselves are utterly devoid of anything resembling traditional romantic elements. Instead, the books are loaded with dark sexual overtones, replete with some strong misogynistic qualities and even some strongly hinted-at date-rape fantasies. There’s not a whole lot of warmth and tenderness to be found in the books…unless getting strangled by a dude wearing a tuxedo and a Mardi Gras mask is what you consider “sweet” and “amorous.”

With that in mind, maybe it’s a little more understandable why the series is such a hit with bored, sexually frustrated middle-aged women. Instead of giving them visions of an ideal lover, the book allows the reader to transport herself back to her salad days, and instead of losing it to some dude that worked at Foot Locker, the “Fifty Shades” fantasy allows women to vicariously “re-write” their own sexual histories to getting deflowered by a sex-addicted Batman. The first reason for the series’ success is because so many middle aged ladies - divorced and on the verge of menopause, most likely - are such utter failures in the romantic arena of their own lives.

The strong sadomasochistic qualities of the series is particularly interesting, especially when you look at the overall “softening” trends for male-tinged erotica. The spectator-as-voyeur craze seems to have given way to a bizarre, new-wave form of electronic titillation that, instead, simulates an oddly intimate experience between the video subject and he-who-spanks-it-while-watching-it. Very rarely does graphic sex come into the equation, with "JOI” videos simply involving a female talking dirty to the viewer (without being even remotely naked, for the most part), and the even more bizarre “ASMR” videos simply involving women speaking - at low pitches - to the viewer about casual affairs. That’s right; men have so lost touch with their own sense of outside-the-Internet humanity that they’ve turned banal chit-chat into the hottest emerging porno trend going. For every action, of course, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and for female-centric erotica, the inversion has been a drift away from emotionally-tinged fantasy and a quick U-turn into some particularly aggressive territory.

With “Fifty Shades,” what we’re seeing as a conscientious decoupling of “emotion” from sexual experience. The “love scenes” in the first novel are gloriously devoid of anything that resembles ardor or passion; instead, the main character of the novel completely deindividuates herself via the myriad acts of really tough love her disturbingly one-dimensional “aggressor” hoists upon her. Even the basest of standardized pornography has some human element to it, plastic it may be; with “Fifty Shades,” however, we’re seeing a concentrated effort to do away with the emotional experience of lovemaking altogether.

Now, I’m no Puritan, folks, but this kind of popularized “sex-for-the-sake-of-self-obliteration” fantasy really gives me the heebie-jeebies. As Mormon-ish as the “Twilight” romance was, it at least carried with it something that tried to mimic the experience of human love, but with this “Fifty Shades” stuff? Love is literally the only four-letter word that’s verboten.

The shelf-life for the franchise seems surprisingly evergreen. Despite being sold at big-box marts in plastic shrink wrap (designed to keep the kids from learning about all the things you can do with a socket wrench to void its warranty, no doubt), the title remains a perpetual best-seller, and an omnipresent book section stalwart that might just supplant “Mario Kart DS” as the longest running shelved product in Wal-Mart history. Eventually, a movie will get made, but scores of horny fan girls - before you get too excited, just remember that most of the hardcore “Fifty Shade” enthusiasts are probably grandmothers - will be aghast at the lukewarm R-rated simulation of all that NC-17 raunch and rancor they loved in the source material. Eventually, the fad will die out, but as Stephenie Meyer has no doubt shown us, those tasteless fads can have some shockingly able-bodied legs.

If I had to take a complete stab in the dark at what the “Fifty Shade” sensation says about contemporary U.S. culture, I would have to summarize it as an indicator of our changing emotional values. The franchise represents a marked movement away from the romanticized leanings of most mainstream literary sensations (you won’t be seeing anybody getting smacked around with a bullwhip in a Nicholas Sparks’ novel, that’s for sure), and seems to be heralding a new era of “anti-romantic” erotica, in which things like “passion” and “spiritual connectedness” have been replaced by focalized (sometimes, explicitly violent) sexual intensity and the complete disintegration of interpersonal identities. If the traditional Western romance is generally about  the journey of two people merging into a singular self, than “Fifty Shades” and its progeny are anchored around the complete opposite; sexuality as an individual experience, sans contextual merits of any kind.

The characters in “Fifty Shades” - and seemingly, a majority of the series’ fan base - find no wholeness or happiness in their sexual forays. Instead of seeking and fantasizing about intimacy or togetherness, they seem to be embracing a nihilistic way of life in which value-less experientialism and loss of self-identity becomes the most desirable thing in the world.

In other words? I think this “Fifty Shades” fad means we’ve finally become a culture preferring sensational pain over sensationalized pleasures.

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A Review of Little Debbie’s Valentine’s Day Snack Cakes

Because nothing says “burning desire” quite like individually wrapped brownies and marshmallow bars…

I think it was around the week after Christmas that I started seeing Little Debbie Valentine-themed snack cakes on store shelves. You know, some people would say that’s saturating the market a little early, but I guess it makes sense. I mean, there’s really not the much you can commercialize between New Year’s and February 14, and if somebody manufactured brownies shaped like Martin Luther King, Jr., there would probably be some public backlash of sorts.

Now, just strolling down the dessert aisle at your local grocer, you would be under the impression that Little Debbie - which, if you can believe it, is actually manufactured by a bunch of hardcore Seventh Day Adventists - has released roughly five gillion snack cakes to commemorate Valentine’s Day 2013. The truth, however, is that the company has only released four real snack cakes this year, but they chose to do so with multiple variations - i.e., white cakes, black cakes, red cakes, etc. And if that wasn’t shady enough for you, they even decided to release the same products in mildly differently shaped boxes, to give consumers the illusion of more options than there really are. Hey, it’s a glutted market out there; sometimes, you’ve just got to use Viet Cong tactics every now and then to get your Cosmic Brownies and Zebra Cakes noticed.

Since I’ve already reviewed two years worth of Halloween candies - not to mention a blowout on seasonal treats last Christmas - I figured a thorough review of these newfangled snacks was a decent way to kill an afternoon. And also, it gives me a convenient excuse to drop twenty bucks on chocolate, which is something, Lord willing, I will always have the wits and wherewithal to accomplish every other month or so.

To begin our walking tour of Little Debbie‘s latest seasonal goods, we’ve got “Be My Valentine Cakes,” which come in both black and white hues. The colors there are merely cosmetic, however, because both items taste pretty much identical.

As you can see, the cakes are your standard, heart-shaped treats. There’s a nice zig-zag of additional chocolate on the cakes, which I think is a really nice touch. In a way, it’s kinda’ like the cover of the “Black Album” - you know, with black writing on a black background - but there’s way more crème-filling here than in any Metallica album you’ll ever listen to. Yes, even “Death Magnetic.”

I thought the cakes were just kind of…OK. Truthfully, I’ve never been a huge fan of crème-filled snacks, and these things tasted way to spongy on the inside for my liking. The exterior shelling, however, was pretty yummy, and you can probably chow down on one if your wife leaves one in your lunch bag. It ain’t the best around, but it’s, as the kids say, “a-ight.”

Not content with giving us just “Be My Valentine” snack cakes, this year Little Debbie also gives us “Be My Valentine” iced brownies, which I think is a tremendous way to inflate one’s product lifespan and literal shelf space presence.

The hearts here, however, are a little less impressive looking than with the cakes. While the snack cakes had a nice, rotund quality to them, the brownie hearts look a lot less effortless. The design is a little bit too angular for my tastes, with the edges of the treats looking really sharp instead of cherubic. It’s a plus for Christmas tree facsimiles, but kinda’ negative for internal organ-shaped brownies.

While the design may be a little underwhelming, I liked just about everything else about the brownies, though. For one, you have to dig those little sprinkle hearts, which are certainly a nice touch - even though they ensure that all sorts of romantic crumbs will end up all over the carpet. And the things, of course, taste pretty delicious. Hey, a brownie is still a brownie, no matter which holiday we’re exploiting here.

The “Be My Valentine” marshmallow treats are really the odd-duck out of the bunch, primarily because they are the only seasonal offering that isn’t covered in chocolate ooze. Similarly, while the rest of the Valentine’s stuff is all red and quasi-romantic looking, the box for this one is primarily purple and pink - you know, the colors that seem to imply friendship and socialization instead of profound amour and secretly wanting to do it.

Additionally, I think it goes with saying that these marshmallow treats have the absolute coolest wrappers of the quadrilogy of foodstuffs. Of course, these are the only individually wrapped snacks that have ANY sort of writing on them whatsoever, but still.

These treats may not have been my favorite of the bunch, but they were certainly the most remarkable of the seasonal foodstuffs. At some point, you’ve probably had a marshmallow bar before. Hell, maybe you even decided to make your own out of General Mills Monster Cereals once. But as long as I have lived on this blue ball we call Earth, I have never tasted a marshmallow treat THIS thick before. Seriously folks, as soon as you bite into one of these things, your teeth sink half way to the planet’s core, with the bar itself ending up somewhere deep inside your top row gum line. It’s not so much a candy bar as it is a seasonal snack that you could also fashion into a set of crispy dentures.

The final seasonal item on tap is an offering that, on paper, sounds the classiest. What lady (of the non-diabetic sort) doesn’t love her some cherry cordials? Well, how about some chocolate doused, mass-marketed snack cake sandwiches with real (artificial) cherry flavoring? OK, that’s probably not as delectable sounding as the first thing, but still.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the appearance of these things. They come individually wrapped, and the look like your basic marshmallow sandwich delicacy. At first glance, you might even think this thing is an under-nourished Moon Pie or something.

As far as the taste goes, I wasn’t a huge fan of this one. For one, the artificial fruit taste seems really superfluous, and it doesn’t gel very well with the other two textures - all that damn chocolate and the sugary pastry dough - at all. It’s not horrible, per se, but biting into one of these things is sort of like licking a strawberry-scented air freshener that was dipped in Nutella. Like I said, it’s not an entirely detestable concept, but not really something you would enjoy too much, either.

And that, in something that resembles a nutshell, is your Little Debbie seasonal selections, for this, the year of our Lord 2013. Alike all of those heavy hitters of the candy bar industry, they tend to trot out new “limited-time” only items every major pagan holiday, so it’s pretty much a guarantee that L.D. will be releasing an entirely new cavalcade of foodstuffs in time for Easter. While nothing they released for Valentine’s Day  this year was worth going out of your way to experience, it’s not as if their offerings were truly atrocious and completely inedible, though. All in all, I probably wouldn’t recommend dropping these on your number one girl’s lap on the 14th, but hey…you got to snack on something while scouring the Web for the cheapest flower delivery rates, don’t you?

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JIMBO GOES TO THE MOVIES: “The Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn Part 2”

It’s the end of an era…and after watching this steaming turd of a movie, it’s a farewell much appreciated

I ended up seeing the last installment in the “Twilight” pentilogy almost two and a half months after it was released in the U.S. My screening (which I caught, only because I was twenty minutes to late to get tickets for “Lincoln”) was on a Saturday afternoon, and despite the fact that film had been out for so long - in this day and age, a three month run is equivalent to a movie getting shown for eight months straight in 1988 dollars - the theater was fairly packed, the darkened room filled to the brim with tweens, their parents, and for reasons that I actually don’t want to know, more than a few middle-aged, childless couples.

It’s pretty much a national policy that everyone makes fun of the series, calling into question the franchise’s horrible acting, atrocious visuals, hackneyed plot and downright cruddy action sequences. That said, for something that’s (seemingly) universally loathed, it sure is quite the money-maker; Laugh (or cry) all you want about the series’ quality, the stone cold fiscal reality here is that the series is extraordinarily lucrative; the final film in the series has already grossed more than $800 million across the globe, making it - as of late January 2013 - the 34th highest earning movie of all-time. In case you were wondering, that makes the last “Twilight” movie more successful than “Star Wars,” “E.T.,” or “Spider-Man 2.” As a collective series, “Twilight” has also generated almost $3.4 billion dollars - a higher sum than the combined franchise profits of such heavy hitters as “Toy Story,” “Indiana Jones,” “Star Trek” or “Transformers.”

You can go back and forth about why the movie is so profitable - some people say it’s because the same hardcore group of filmgoers keep seeing it over and over again, while others claim that it’s successful just because people want to ironically partake of its awfulness - but the points are sort of moot. It’s pretty much unavoidable now; the “Twilight” phenomenon, for better or worse, has become a hallmark of our pop culture, the sort of  iconic Americana on par with “Superman” and “I Love Lucy.” It’s stupid and crappy, but it’s emblematic of America’s special stupidity and crappiness. 400 years from now, anthropologists will probably have an entire field dedicated to the film’s import on American culture, with excavators unearthing long-forgotten trash heaps of Twi-tard memorabilia with utter jubilation.

Say what you will, but the impact of the “Twilight” series is impossible to downplay. With its Victorian-by-way-of-Mormonism tinges, the franchise has single-handedly resurrected the Gothic romance - and in a lot of ways, both directly and indirectly - the “romantic” genre altogether. Well, that is if you want to call stuff like “Fifty Shades of Grey” - derived from an X-rated “Twilight” fan-fiction site, by the way - “romantic.” There’s stuff coming out now that, had “Twilight” not proven successful, would have had zero chances of being green lit, let alone getting big studio backing and national releases. A decade ago, there’s no way in hell something like “Warm Bodies,” or “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters,” or even “Beautiful Creatures” would have gotten a go-ahead, and in a post-“Twilight” filmscape, we’re pretty much guaranteed at least one semi-“Twilight”-inspired national release per week.

For the franchises’ grand finale, you would think the producers of the film would have, you know, tried, but the end result is a film that is arguably several times WORSE than anything the series has churned out so far. As a guy that was particularly floored by how bad the last flick in the franchise was, I was literally aghast at how bad this movie was; not only is it significantly crappier than its already awful precursor, the film is even lamer than most of the watered-down knock-offs it’s inspired. Walking out of the theater, I declared the film to be even suckier than “Red Riding Hood” - a movie about Gary Oldman lugging a wooden rabbit through the woods while wearing silver finger nail polish, with Amanda Seyfried dropping lines like “there must be a god, because you’re the devil” for ninety minutes straight.

After thinking about it for some time, I’m pretty much convinced that the director of the last two films - Bill Condon - actually made the movies intentionally atrocious out of spite. I recall thinking the first film in the series was bad, but it was an innocuous, rudimentary kind of bad - i.e., the work of an inexperienced filmmaker that just didn’t know how to make a better movie. With these last two entries, however, it’s quite apparent to me that Condon - a guy with a suspiciously decent looking resume, outside of the “Twilight” films - probably went out of his way to make the flicks as hokey, bland and sarcastically unctuous as he could, just to piss of the world for the fact that the series even exists in the first place. Far beyond a self-parody, “Breaking Dawn 2” feels more like the world’s most understated, satirical critique of the series’ stylistic failings. This film isn’t just awful - it seems to me to be subversively awful, as if the director made the movie so shitty on purpose as some sort of political slight against the source material’s hetero-centric, pro-“family values” leanings.

The series just goes into all-out, cuckoo-bananas mode for its final chapter, with Edward and Bella - now an immortal bloodsucker herself - shacking up with their suspiciously Latter Day Saints-resembling extended family to take care of their half-human, half-vampire child, which just so happens to have an accelerated aging disorder. And with that little plot point in mind, perhaps we can screen this alongside failed Robin Williams vehicle/Francis Ford Coppola tax write-off  “Jack” and the Eric Stoltz-y sequel-to-a-remake “The Fly II” as part of a made-up, rapid-aging -syndrome triple feature of sheer suck.

Hey, did I mention that the Mormon stuff in this movie is incredibly heavy-handed? Castigated by the rest of society, the Cullens decide to pick up their stakes (get it? It’s because they’re VAMPIRES!) and haul out into the middle of nowhere, where their newfound peace and tranquility is shattered by the arrival of a bunch of “Italian” (read: Catholic) illuminati types that want to cut up Bella and Ed’s daughter because they think she’s evil incarnate. Yeah, I’m describing the plot of “Breaking Dawn Part 2,” but that same summary could just as easily be used to synopsize the latest episode of “Sister Wives.”

Everything that sucked about the last four movies is here in full force, multiplied a couple of times over thanks to a mildly increased budget. That said, the special effects in the film remain inconceivably underwhelming, with some green screened sequences - especially the opening scenes of the film, with Ed and Bella “running” through the Pacific Northwest woodlands - look about as amateurish as a made-for-SyFy movie.

The dénouement is particularly unimpressive, with the Cullen clan assembling a ragtag group of Mormon…I mean, vampire…mercenaries to go into battle with those Roman nosed evildoers. By the way, Camp Cullen now includes a couple of borderline-racist super-heroes, including an Arabic dude that can “manipulate” the elements and two Afro-Brazilian tribeswomen with mind control capabilities. Outside of “Street Fighter II,” I don’t think there’s a larger accumulation of super-powered stereotypes anywhere to be found in popular culture.

The climactic scene - an illusory “battle” sequence - is just about the crappiest climax you could imagine. It’s not just unsatisfying, it’s literally a non-event, with the two warring tribes just standing out there in the snow, looking all aggressively at each other until they decide to let each other live and let live. Cue a completely unneeded montage/retrospective scene that recaps the entire franchise, and thankfully, this one is done for good.

The day the very last first-run screening of “Breaking Dawn: Part 2” is shown in America, it ought to become our next federal holiday. Alike the day smallpox was eradicated, we should all celebrate, knowing that our cinemas and theaters will never again have to bask at Ed Cullen and Bella Swan’s forced, plastic and emotionless facsimile of what human feelings look like. Never again we will have to watch Kristen Stewart strain her way through performances with the vivacity of Keanu Reeves doing his best impersonation of an ice cube. Away with the semi-bigoted depictions of Native Americans (complete with the heroes of the film calling their scents “repugnant”), and that atrocious-looking werewolf CGI, and those long tracking shots of Dakota Fanning, just standing there, wearing blue and red eye shadow and not saying anything.

As horrible as the franchise’s ending may be, it at least a guarantees us that we won’t be inundated by such insincere, artificially-flavored and blatantly-misogynistic Puritan-sex-fantasies - targeted at junior high schoolers, no less - for quite awhile.

…well, at least until “The Host” comes out, anyway.

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JIMBO GOES TO THE MOVIES: “Zero Dark Thirty” Review

Alternate Title: “How Half-Drowning Detainees and a Lamborghini Helped Kill Osama Bin Laden”

I went into “Zero Dark Thirty” with some pretty lofty expectations, and as she did with “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow pretty much kicked every form of cinematic ass imaginable with her latest release. The film is only slightly controversial, with members of the CIA and Congress claiming that the flick is a wheelbarrow of lies and exaggerations, while conservative pundits (read: the ramblings of madmen) accuse the film of being pro-Obama agitprop of the highest caliber. Granted, the film is probably more malarkey than historical fact, but I think you can say the exact same thing about every other supposed “historical drama”, too. Consider the new Lincoln biopic, for one: dude, everybody knows vampires didn’t even make it to the U.S. until The Spanish-American War!

As for the film itself, it’s pretty much the greatest movie James Cameron has never made. Don’t let the Oscar-bait hubbub convince you this is Merchant-Ivory fare, because at heart, the film is much, MUCH more in line with “Terminator 2” than “The King’s Speech.” In fact, the film, in at least some ways, is almost a parallel for “Aliens,” with a kick-ass yet fairly stoic female lead being enmeshed into a circle of technologically-adept grunts, fighting a mysterious, underground enemy while simultaneously weaving herself in and out of bureaucratic collusion. Of course, one of the movies has the dude from “Mad About You” being eaten by eight foot tall lizard people, but beyond the aesthetics, we’re pretty much dealing with the exact same plot here.

The film begins with some actual telephone calls recorded from inside the WTC on 9/11, so literally a MINUTE into the film, you’re already sweating and feeling uncomfortable and kinda’ sick at your stomach. After that, we’re whisked away to some black site out in the middle of god know’s where, and watch a couple of CIA operatives waterboard this one dude that may or may not know who Osama Bin Laden’s courier is. From there, we’re introduced to the main character of the film, which just so happens to be Celia Foote from “The Help.” A lot of people are saying that she put on a tour de force performance in the film - and yeah, she probably did - but the only thing I could really pay attention to was just how pouty her lips were. We’re talking Angelina Jolie levels, really, and if you pay real close attention, you can actually observe how most of her upper lip is actually the same color as her flesh as opposed to your normal lip hue. It’s a little hard to describe in words, but as soon as you see it, you’ll know what I’m talking about - and for the rest of the movie, it’s just going to distract the hell out of you. I promise.

So, the CIA spends a good four years stuffing dudes into four foot-by-four foot boxes and forcing hairy dudes to drink orange stuff through a funnel, and then, 7-7 happens, and everybody gets all morose and hopeless again, but Celia just ain’t giving up and continues to relentlessly pursue this one dude that’s allegedly bin Laden’s delivery boy, because she reckons that if they peg him, finding the al-Qaeda big cheese really wouldn’t be that hard to locate.

And, we get more terrorist attacks. There’s a particularly unnerving scene in a hotel that gets rocked, and there is an INSANELY intense scene dramatizing the 2009 Camp Chapman attack that might just go down in history as one of the most nerve-shredding moments in film history. With her BFF done-in by a suicide bomb, Celia decides that it is time to REALLY clamp down on her lead, and eventually comes to find out that the dude that they thought was bin Laden’s delivery boy was in fact the brother of bin Laden’s ACTUAL messenger, and that for the last nine years, the CIA has been in hot pursuit of a dude that’s been dead for almost an entire decade.

Now we get to the part of the movie that I would LOVE to see some heavy duty historical research on: according to the film - which, itself, seems to be based on several different accounts of the Kill-Bin-Laden campaign - the CIA was able to locate OBL’s delivery boy by procuring the telephone number of the delivery boy’s mother in Pakistan. It’s not really an unusual premise, but it’s more or less how the film said the deal went down that has me shaking my head in simultaneous awe and bewilderment: the CIA, allegedly, picked up the tab for some rich Kuwaiti dude’s Lamborghini, and THAT was the key turning point that lead to the assassination of the world’s most wanted fugitive.

From there, it becomes the procedural movie to end all procedural movies, as Jessica Chastain and her un-lip-colored lips keep pushing the CIA to pursue this lead, eventually to the point where they not only find the supposed OBL delivery-boy, but even find an Abottobad compound with a mysterious tenant that may or may not be old Blowy-Up-Stuff hisself.

How this thing hasn't been turned into a commemorative Lego set, I'll never understand...

We get some more “down with the bureaucracy” subplot, and eventually, Barack Obama gives the green light for the raid, and everybody flies out to Area 51 to get a look at some experimental helicopters and then…it is ON.

Folks, the last 45 minutes of this movie absolutely SEALED it for me (and uh, no pun intended, of course.)You think you’ve seen some awesome action scenes in movies before? Forget it, because the actual raid sequence in “Zero Dark Thirty” puts just about everything you’ve seen at the Multiplex over the last 25 years to shame. Yeah, yeah, we all know how it ends, but with that in mind, it just seems to make the sequence all that more harrowing and intense. Granted, some of the helicopter CGI looks a little crappy, but beyond that? It’s a dénouement that, in my opinion, outdoes everything in Nolan’s Bat-Trilogy COMBINED times twenty.

The finale is also pretty fantastic, ending on one of the most morally ambiguous notes you could imagine. In a way, I guess you could say that the final sequence - involving a young woman, wondering what she will do now that the main target of the “War on Terror” has been eliminated - is kind of a metaphor for the U.S. as a geopolitical titan. We’ve spent so much money and wreaked so much havoc to “avenge” the 3,000 killed on 9/11 that now that the “revenge” mission is complete, what sort of ideological and moral value do we have anymore? Alike the main character in the film, all we can do is cry, reflect, and wonder what the hell’s next. (Take your pick, folks: Iran, Syria, Russia, China…they’re all wonderful choices!)

I guess there are two ways of looking at the film, and depending on which lens you go with, you’ll net two totally divergent outcomes. First off, if you’re just catching the flick for its popcorn value, than you will assuredly get your money’s worth. Not only is it an outstanding, intellectual action-flick, it’s also one of the most riveting movies to come out in 2012. Very rarely do you get mainstream flicks that are both fantastic works of cinema - with outstanding acting, direction and a literate plot - AND tremendous movie going experiences - you know, with loud exploding sounds and hyper-tense “OH SHIT” moments and the like - and with “Zero Dark Thirty,” you’re getting the best of both worlds.

Now, as a 100 percent reliable, historical drama, though…well, I wouldn’t exactly suggest taking this shit as the gospel. While several of the characters in the film are pretty obvious stand-ins, a majority of the characters appear to be composite figures, and actually ID-ing who several of the more prominent characters - including the central figure of the film - are as actual people seems to be next to impossible. You get some fact, but for the most part, the flick is all dramatization, with artistic licenses doled out to seemingly everybody involved in its production.

I guess you don’t really need me to tell you this, but the film is freaking fantastic and you probably need to see it. As far as I am concerned, it’s definitely one of the best films of 2012, a flick easily on par with stuff I utterly adored like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai” and “Samsara.” I probably enjoyed “The Hurt Locker” a little bit more, but the scope of this film is a whole lot wider and as such, makes the film all that more impressive to take in. Considering the gargantuan amount of terrain the film covers - really, ten plus years, over the course of three different presidential reigns - the film could have easily collapsed under its own ambitions, but to Bigelow’s credit, the film remains captivating from start to finish - no small feat for a film that flirts with a running time of almost three hours.

How good is “Zero Dark Thirty?” Well, I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you this: if we ever get a movie about the “War on Terror” that’s better than this one, we ought to drop to our knees and thank the movie gods for giving it to us…

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The Rocktagon Recap of UFC on Fox: Johnson vs. Dodson!

Featuring exploding eyeballs, lethal liver kicks and two jockeys engaged in mortal combat! 

I’m not really telling you kids anything you don’t know, but there sure are a lot of UFC cards going on these days. In fact, I almost forgot there was a UFC show going on a few hours before the thing kicked off, so there’s an outside shot that instead of reading this, you’d probably be reading about my latest trip to Alabama, and me getting the opportunity to see the world’s largest fireworks store and hold a bottle of “Dr. Wham” in my hand for like five seconds.

But, uh, it looks like we’ve got one of them there UFC on Fox cards, and since they are free events, I figured why the heck not and drove down to the local Chicago pizza place to catch the C-level mayhem on display. And ironically, this card is emanating from the land of Deep Dish, itself. Actually, that’s not even remotely ironic, but what the hell ever.

All right, fellas and gals, how about we jab our forks in the Alfredo-pesto-shrimp pie and get this recap a-going? Break out the extra sauce and rap music performed by teenage heroin-dealers, ‘cause it’s time for UFC on Fox: Johnson vs. Dodson!

Our hosts are probably Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg. I really don’t know, because the managers couldn’t find the channel clicker until almost 8:20 PM, EST.

Featherweight Bout

Ricardo Lamas vs. Eric Koch 

At one point, Koch was scheduled for a title shot against Jose Aldo. That was a long, long time ago. In his first fight in about a year and half, Koch squares off against Ricardo Lamas, a Chicago native on a three fight winning streak in the Octagon. And, uh, no relation to Lorenzo, I think.

Lamas comes out looking for a head shot, and taking his cues from the Virtua Fighter 4 fighting engine, Koch responds with some low kicks. Lamas looks for a takedown, and lands some elbows in the process. Lamas can’t land a spinning back fist, but he manages to get Koch in a clinch before the round expires. With a few seconds left on the clock, he lands a takedown.

Koch with the low leg kick strategy to begin round two. Lamas takes a fall, and Koch swarms him (which I hear is also what happens if you fall down in a shower prison.) Lamas manages to get on top, and he starts raining some nasty elbows on his opponent. The first shot to the skull basically causes Koch’s eyeball to explode, as blood squirts halfway across the cage. The ref jumps in, and the hometown boy celebrates a stoppage victory.

Lightweight Bout

Anthony Pettis vs. Donald Cerrone

An interesting turn of events here, with the former WEC mainstays duking it out for a chance to go toe-to-toe with Benson Henderson…a guy both dudes have battled back in their World Extreme CageFighting days.

Right out the gate, Pettis tries for a cartwheel kick. Pettis throwing pretty much everything at Cerrone, including a couple of knees. At one point, he even does sort of a miniature version of the famed “Super Kick” when he springboards a knee off the cage and whacks Cerrone. Pettis rears back and drops Henderson with a nasty liver kick, swarms him with a few punches on the ground, and this one is all over.

Light Heavyweight Bout 

Quinton Jackson vs. Glover Teixeira 

It’s supposedly Jackson’s last fight in the UFC, while Teixeira is one of the hottest prospects in the division. Glover nails a takedown right off the bat, and the two swing wildly once things get vertical. No offense, but both of these guys look, well, a little flabby to be championship material. Some more exchanges, with Glover getting the best shots. Jackson’s attempt at a takedown fails miserably. Glover drops Rampage with a left. The Brazilian rattles of some good shots, but it’s not enough to completely take out the former UFC Lightweight champion.

Glover with a takedown to begin the second. Jackson trying to find a rhythm. Glover cuts him open with an uppercut. Jackson still looking for a takedown, and he’s still getting nowhere. Jackson taunts Glover a little, and Glover responds by peppering Quinton with shots until the round expires. 20-18 for Glover.

And another takedown from Glover as the third opens. Jackson fires back, but nothing substantial. Glover with a head kick, and another takedown. Glover throwing a grab bag of knees, uppercuts and low kicks now. Jackson looks extremely tired. Glover with yet another takedown, and he’s in the full mount. Glover just hammer fists “B.A. Baracus, 2010” as time expires.

A 30-27, across the board unanimous decision victory for Teixeira. Probably not the stellar performance he needs to earn title considerations anytime soon, but more than enough to make him a top ten light heavyweight fighter.

UFC Flyweight Championship Bout

Demetrious Johnson (Champion) vs. John Dodson (Challenger)

“Wow, those guys are really small,” says every single person at the pizza place when these two walk out. Dodson gets bonus points for wearing a Pop Rocks tee-shirt to the cage. Johnson with a high kick, and Dodson stuffs him. The two trade, and Johnson scores a takedown, feeding his diminutive foe a couple of knees as the round concludes.

Johnson with another takedown in round two. And another. Some high speed exchanging going on, and Dodson drops the champ with a left. Johnson looking for another takedown, but nothing. Dodson drops him again, and keeps battering the champion with lefts. Johnson tries desperately for a takedown, but Dodson simply ripostes with some knees, and we have ourselves a dead even fight heading into the third.

These two dudes, who combined weigh about 200 pounds, are fighting at hyper speed now. LOL moment of the night comes when Johnson knees Dodson right in his sack. Dodson misses a flying knee, and Johnson replies with a billion knees and right hands. Johnson with another takedown. A second takedown blocked, and Dodson rattles off a few good shots as the third ends. I’d give the slight edge to Dodson here.

Johnson with a quasi-illegal knee on the ground that isn’t called. Time out to give Dodson a vision test. Dodson comes out swinging, but Johnson is landing the better blows. Johnson just tearing up Dodson with those knee shots. Dodson bleeds pretty badly, as Johnson totally decimates him in the last minute of the round. The final round will ultimately determine the winner of the bout.

Johnson with a takedown, but he can’t do anything on the canvas. Both men back up, and Johnson looking for another attempt to grapple. Now Dodson with a takedown, but Johnson easily responds with a surplus of knee shots. Johnson has Dodson in the Thai clinch, and it’s knee-city. Johnson pretty much knees Dodson to death as the fight concludes. It’s a unanimous decision victory for Johnson, as the judges score the fight 48-47, 48-47 and 49-46 for the defending Flyweight Champion.

The Verdict? Eh, it was a pretty disappointing show, in my opinion. You can give the flyweight dudes all the technical props in the world, but the reality is that it’s kinda’ hard to get casual fans interested in watching dudes that are 5-foot-nothing wail on each other, with minimal threat of knockout, for half an hour. As talented as they may be, dudes like Johnson or Dodson will never get to headline a PPV, and they’ll never be a top draw for the business. The slow, flabby co-main event, I believe was a much more entertaining fight, with some historical antecedents in place that the main-fight just didn’t have. The hyper-violent finishes for the first two bouts were kinda’ cool, but they both ended so abruptly that you didn’t have time to soak in the true awesomeness of what you encountered. At the end of the day, this show will probably be remembered for how it set up some potentially awesome fights (Pettis vs. the Henderson/Melendez winner, Lamas vs. the Aldo/Edgar winner, Glover vs. somebody in the light heavyweight division that’s actually worth a shit, etc.) but as far as what you got out of this evening’s slate of fights?

All I’m going to say is, I reckon I got what I paid for.

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Daikatana: One of the Best Game Boy Color Games Ever?

Or, “How in the hell did a notoriously awful P.C. shooter get turned into one of the greatest 8-bit action-adventure games of all-time?” 

The long, tragic back story behind “Daikatana” is one of video gaming’s greatest cautionary tales. For those of you unfamiliar with the grade-A train wreck that was Ion Storm’s 2000 first person shooter, here’s the abridged yarn: back in 1997, John Romero, a dude that had become rich as hell off all of that “Doom II” money, decided to build the FPS game to end all FPS games, an insanely ambitious, content-loaded title using an already obsolete engine, with an understaffed crew, in a comically brief amount of time. Originally scheduled for a Christmas 1997 release, the entire game had to be scrapped and rebuilt, once the Ion Storm team realized that everything they had been working on for the last year was utter shit. Spring 1999 rolls around, and the only thing the developers have to show off is a crappy deathmatch demo. By the way, the company promised the game would be on store shelves just a few months before that. In an absolute snafu of biblical proportions, the developers then decided to show off the software at E3 later that year, running at a molasses-slow 12 frames per second. The demonstration was so embarrassingly awful that it led to the founders of Ion Storm getting shit canned and Eidos buying up the company, to make sure the guys calling the shots there wouldn’t set fire to the ashes of what was left of the game. To make matters worse, once the game finally was released - almost three years late - it was promoted via a downright disastrous marketing campaign, in which oblique ads that didn’t even state the NAME of the game were released, stating that “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch.” The reception of the gaming masses, unsurprisingly, wasn’t all that positive.

Alas, I would like to turn your attention towards an entirely different “Daikatana” - and not that shitty Nintendo 64 port, either. Believe it or not, there was a Game Boy Color version of the ill-fated PC game released - albeit, only in PAL countries - and the truly shocking thing here is that not only is it NOT a bad little handheld game, it’s actually one of the most awesome GBC games to never make it stateside. So, how did a notoriously underwhelming, ego-fueled FPS disaster turn into a super-awesome Game Boy Color offering? Well, primarily, by changing the entire genre and format of the source material.

Released the same year as the PC iteration, “Daikatana” on the GBC was published by Kemco, the guys that are probably known best for the “Top Gear” series - and a whole slew of crappy GameCube games, like “Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure” and “Batman: Dark Tomorrow.” After spending the better part of a month playing through it, I’ve pretty much determined that it’s one of the best 8-bit action-adventure games I’ve ever played - a game that’s probably even on par with such GBC titans as “Metal Gear Solid” and the two Capcom “Zelda” games. It’s a lofty claim, and one that sounds bat-kaka insane on the surface, but trust me; once you play through this one, you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree with my assertions.

Granted, it’s a pretty hard game to track down, but as a bonus, since the Game Boy Color is region-free, if you do so happen to encounter a copy, your North American GBC should have no problems converting all of that Euro-only fun into 8-bit ecstasy. And yeah, you can ROM this one, but the purist I am, I STRONGLY suggest you try to play this one the way the gaming gods originally intended.

So, why is this hyper-obscure title worth going out of your way to experience? Well, I’ve come up with four distinct, concise reasons as to why the Game Boy Color version of "Daikatana" is something every retro gaming fan worth his “Sonic the Hedgehog” cartridges should play, at least once…

Reason Number One:

It’s Pretty Much Everything You Love About Old School, 8-Bit Gaming Crammed into One Cartridge

A subtle allusion to the discography of Otis Redding?

The GBC iteration of “Daikatana” immediately, and obviously, reminds me of two 8-bit classics: “The Legend of Zelda” and “Metal Gear.” In fact, the game is pretty much a perfect synthesis of the two titles, creating one of the most finely tuned, exploration-based action-adventure games in the history of handhelds. That said, the game also amps up the experience by including some “StarTropics”-like platforming, “Crystalis”-like roaming and even an emphasis on story and character development, which easily puts it on par, as far as narratives go, with the absolute best Square and Enix were squeezing out on the NES. Similarly, you’ll find the occasional touch of “Metroid” and “Blaster Master” in there, too, in turn, making this essentially what happens when you take every single action-adventure title found on the Nintendo Entertainment System and puree them into a single experience. For serious old-schoolers, this is a game you simply HAVE to experience, and for all of you young Turks that weren’t born until after the PlayStation came out, this is a fantastic introduction to the gloriousness of 8-bit adventuring.

Reason Number Two

The Atmosphere is Just Awesome

Fun fact: the game actually began life as a VERY loose adaptation of "Onibaba." 

“Daikatana” shows us just how much life 8-bit gaming had in it, even as recently as the year 2000. The visuals are crisp and detailed, and the music is just downright tremendous. A lot of times, we tend to discount just how much influence sound design has on a game’s overall feel, and the audio-philes at Kemco went out of their way to bring the aural awesome in this title. From the ambient, droning hum that picks up while you’re navigating dungeons to that awesome, Optimus Prime-meets-Knight Rider chime that tunes up when you solve a puzzle, there’s just so much to love about the game - and that’s not even taking into account the game’s exquisite chip-tune score, which sounds sort of like an 8-bit mash-up of Danny Elfman’s “Batman” soundtrack as performed by The Prodigy. I don’t want to say that the aesthetics of the game are minimalist, but the game is also refreshing devoid of clutter. Everything in the game is detailed, but none of the sprites are too elaborate; it’s just a smooth looking game, sans any gimmicks that would slow down the game play. In other words? It’s NES-era gaming, the way it ought to be.

Reason Number Three

The Dungeons!

What the? An adventure game, with dungeons that aren't populated with red stalactites and killer bats?

The dungeons in “Daikatana” are among the best I’ve ever visited in an 8-bit world, and that’s including heavy hitters like the first “Zelda” and the afore-mentioned (and stupidly underappreciated) “Crystalis” and “StarTropics.” For one thing, there’s actually a pretty fair amount of variation among the dungeons, so you’re not just trekking through purple and blue caves over and over again. Throughout the game, you’ll explore futuristic barracks, a feudal Japanese dojo, a HUGE monastery and an ocean-side cavern (well, I guess you have to have at least ONE spelunking level in an 8-bit game). Not only are the dungeons surprisingly large, the challenges therein are pretty damn intense, with some of the most brain-bending puzzles and thumb-numbing boss fights you’ll encounter in a GBC title. A lot of times, level design can make or break a title, and in the case of “Daikatana,” we’re dealing with some of the best laid-out dungeons in the annals of portable gaming.

Reason Number Four:

The Story is Surprisingly Enjoyable and Nuanced 

Racial profiling, Game Boy-style. (Note the gigantic prescription pills and naked dude just casually chatting it up with you.)

OK, so maybe expecting a Tolstoy-esque narrative in a handheld game from 13 years ago is a little dumb, but I have to say I was really surprised by the (relative) quality of the narrative in “Daikatana.” Yeah, it starts off pretty generic - some dude named Kage has unleashed a killer virus, and only you and your time hopping buddies can prevent it from destroying humanity - but the presentation here totally transforms it into something exceptional. For one, I LOVED how the story was so seamlessly woven within the gameplay itself, with several triggered flashbacks - displayed in a black-and-white tone, which was a really nice touch, in my humblest of opinions - actually tying into what you were doing in the level. Furthermore, there actually IS a fair amount of character development among the three avatars you take turns controlling, and each of the three have their own, somewhat fleshed out personalities. Yeah, maybe it is a little blunt to have a main protagonist literally named “Hiro,” but like I’ll ever complain about commanding a virtual ass-kicker named “Superfly.” The time-hopping hook is also pretty cool, as it whisks you away to a whole bunch of diverse gaming landscapes. It’s not too often that you can visit feudal Japan, ancient Greece, a futuristic San Francisco and (for some peculiar reason) Norway in one game, but that’s PRECISELY the kind of globe-hopping that awaits you in “Daikatana.” And without giving away too much, let’s just say there are plenty of great twists and turns as the story unfolds, including several out-of-the-blue boss fights and a twist-ending that TOTALLY blindsided me. And I will leave the spoils of the final boss fight up to you to find out, dear reader…

And also: it has some of the coolest-looking rugs in video game history.

I really can’t think of a reason why you shouldn’t at least make an effort to hunt this one down. Granted, it may not be worth a trip to a PAL country to find, but if you’re ever just hanging out in Wolverhampton, it may be worth your time to scour the Mom and Pop’s, you know, just in case. A game like “Daikatana” is really the kind of title that old school purists like me are absolutely enchanted by: a no-frills, straight-up, hyper-fun game that seemingly NO ONE is aware of. It’s “Zelda” meets “Metal Gear,” with shades of Kurosawa and “Logan’s Run” thrown in there, just because; in short, it’s pretty freaking amazing, and you need to experience such awesomeness with your own two thumbs and eyes, folks.

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Book Review: "Hot, Flat and Crowded" by Thomas Friedman (2008)

According to the New York Times columnist, nothing short of a “Green Revolution” is going to keep America competitive in the Era of Globalization. Do Friedman’s energy concerns have merits, or are his suggestions just a load of fracking nonsense?

Thomas Friedman envisions a brave new world where energy consumption is such a major social priority that parking garages PAY individuals to park their hybrid electro-cars there, so the owners of the complexes can suck excess energy out of their batteries and sell them back to the power companies for an extra couple of pennies a month. And the power companies themselves will run on entirely different models than they do now, offering customers a la carte options that result in charges based on how much total energy per month a home uses, which, in a total affront to Henry Jenkins’ “black box fallacy” theory, is regulated by some super-duper, high-tech “Smart Box” that’s connected to literally EVERY energy sucking product in one’s home. And as far as energy policies go, Friedman sees a future where state and local officials aren’t messing around anymore, with the Department of Transportation charging insanely expensive debits to single-car users on the nation’s highways.

There’s no denying the (seeming) far-fetchedness of Friedman’s post-Green society, what, with it’s personal energy plans and congestion pricing models and net zero energy usage mandates and dual use schools and rolling energy storage units (what we currently call “cars,” in case you were wondering.) But amidst all of the futuristic hubbub, the heart of Friedman’s 2008 manifesto - not so subtly subtitled “Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How It Can Renew America” - is a pretty hard-to-debate argument that unless major, MAJOR changes occur to how America views its energy supplies, we’re in for a whole heap of trouble in both the immediate AND long-term future.

While the United States has been gripped in battle over the last decade with that two headed menace, the recession and global terror, Friedman notes that one of the major geopolitical flashpoints we’ve overlooked is just how were going to keep our energy usage rates consistent when natural reserves are being sucked out of the ground left and right by developing nations like China and India. Conservative estimates put the global population at about 9.2 billion people come 2050, and economic growth - and with it, net energy usage - is expected to skyrocket in the “big four” developing nations (the other two, in case you’re a dummy, are Brazil and Russia.)  As more and more global societies develop more American-like appetites for energy - which in turn, inevitably leads to more deforestation and urbanization - Friedman believes that we’re staring down both an environmental and economic disaster; and since so little emphasis has been placed on renewable energy and energy conservation policies, we have approximately five minutes to fix things up or else...uh-oh.

Problem numero uno, per Friedman, is our dependency on what he calls “fuels from hell,” that being rapidly diminishing natural energy sources like coal, natural gas and most especially oil. U.S. dependency on these fuels are bad, he says, because for one, it gives extraordinary political power to anti-pluralistic Islamic regimes in the Middle East. In fact, he argues that petrodollars, a good $200 billion of which went to Saudi Arabian officials ALONE in 2008, are pretty much responsible for the rise and expansion of extremist Islam, noting that predominantly Islamic countries like Bahrain and Lebanon, which aren’t oil-exporting monoliths, seemed to embrace pro-democratic movements much tighter than their Scrooge McDuck-rich OPEC kin. At one point, Friedman breaks out a bar graph, demonstrating what appears to be an indisputable push-pull effect regarding oil prices and democratic movements. In short? When gasoline prices go down, oil-rich countries become less authoritarian, and when gasoline prices increase, “freedom” gets a whole hell of a lot less “free” just about every major oil exporting country on the planet.

The second issue, of course, is global warming. Friedman says that since the modern industrialization era began, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have leapt from 280 PPM to about 384 PPM (when an increase to 550 PPM, he states, would trigger a 3 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures). Now, seeing as how a temperature shift of about 5 degrees Celsius might just kick off another Ice Age, you can see why this Friedman fellow is just a little concerned about all of that noxious waste in the sky. And believe it or not, that long-held “urban legend” about how cow flatulence supposedly destroys the atmosphere is actually pretty damn true, with EACH of the planet’s three billion cows farting out about 600 liters of methane gas per day. Methane, by the way, is also about TWENTY times denser than CO2, so…yeah, steer queefs apparently ARE that detrimental to our ecology.

And of course, Friedman sees these two issues converging in a perfect storm of geopolitical and environmental upheaval, with conflicts destined to break out over resources and new mega cities sucking up so much energy that constant blackouts - which, clearly, would result in higher crimes, loss of food and a whole slew of other really bad things - would be going on all across the “developing world.”

Friedman’s response to this daunting future is two-fold. First off, we need some renewable energy out there, damn it, and the only way to ensure that renewable energy becomes sustainable is to get some hot and heavy regulations and legislation on the books. It’s at this point that Friedman starts throwing out some REALLY wild ideas, like establishing a fixed floor price for oil so that investors will have an incentive to pump moolah into renewable energy programs. More than anything, though, he says we need some “revolutionary bureaucrats” to get into the game and goad entrepreneurs and upstarts to invest in renewable energy, via feebates, legislative mandates and government loans out the yin-yang. Surprisingly, the guy he turns to for inspiration here is none other than George W. Bush, specifically citing his 1999 Texas Renewable Portfolio Mandate as just the kind of forward-thinking’ our national energy planners ought to have in mind when it comes time to decide whether they want to put up a wind-mill farm the size of Wyoming or just another coal-burning plant in the Ozarks.

Volunteerism, Friedman believes, will result in “carnage,” so by Job, we’ve GOT to start introducing some new regulations to keep ourselves from turning the planet into a giant snow ball. One of the examples he notes is how Honda’s compound vortex controlled combustion engine revolutionized vehicle production in the automobile industry. Had the Federal Clean Air Act not been passed in 1970, he argues, there wouldn’t have existed an impetus for Honda - or really, any other major manufacturer - to look at ways to create less polluting goods. And before you start calling bullshit on Friedman when he suggests unplugging soda machines at night might save us a ton of money in the long run, just remember - the recent SEER 13 air conditioner mandates, which made such products about 30 percent more energy efficient - ultimately ended up saving enough energy that a DOZEN 400mW power plants never had to be built.

And of course, Friedman’s book just HAS to conclude with a chapter on China, the natural resource devouring titan that he compares to the time-bomb-equipped bus in “Speed.” Basically, Friedman says that China’s economy HAS to grow by eight percent a year, or it’s automatic recession time. Where the U.S. can gain an upper hand here, Friedman believes, is getting a jump on renewable energy projects, so that by the time all of the Chinese and Indians are choking to death on car exhaust fumes, we will be able to sell them renewable energy goods at retardedly high prices.

Two of the final points Friedman makes in the book seemed the most profound to me. First, he said that for all of the Chinese government’s faults, they can pass regulation like mofos when shit gets real. You know how it took the U.S. 20 years to officially get all of the lead out of our gasoline? Well, the Chinese were able to do that in just two years. Friedman argues - and boy, is it a solid one, at that - that China’s ability to actually CARRY out top-down regulations might give them an advantage in the upcoming energy wars - and since the United States Department of Energy has only spent about 20 percent of it’s R&D funds on renewable energy since 1948, you can kind of see where bad turns to worse here.

Friedman’s final argument - which he lays out using some pretty clumsy allusions to the civil rights movement and World War II mobilization efforts - is that unless the government gets behind renewable energy, we are effed, and firmly. While Germany is passing solar feed-in-laws, we here in the States are passing on hybrid cars designed by MIT kids that get 200 miles per gallon. His ultimate call to arms - the consolidation of our nation’s numerous departments into a comprehensive, federal energy behemoth - comes attached with this nice little quote; that when it comes time to truly adopt green energy policies, it’s our leaders, not our light bulbs, that we’ll have to end up changing.

Friedman is one of my favorite contemporary sociopolitical writers, and while his green energy ra-ra can become annoying after awhile, there’s no denying that the dude has laid out a pretty solid argument in favor of his “only renewable energy can save America!” thesis. It’s mildly outdated, but still pretty entertaining, and loaded with tons of facts that you probably never would have learned about, otherwise. For example, did you know that the term “rival” originally meant “people that had to share a river,” and that in Indonesia - a country with almost 250 million people - only about 6,000 of its residents have PhDs?  At 400 pages, it does have its moments were it hit’s a few skids, but overall? If you’re looking for a quick manifesto about what all this green energy hullabaloo is all about, I doubt you’ll find a more thorough - and more importantly, readable - treatise out there.

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