Game review: Harms Way

Here's an XBox Live Arcade game that everyone needs to get. If only because it's totally free.

Harms Way is a really sweet little Live Arcade game where you play as either a shooter or a driver. There are four teams, one shooter and one driver each. The drivers race their cars around a circuit with the first one to complete three laps winning; the shooters jump from turret to turret and shoot them, with the one destroying the most cars winning. The winning shooter and winning driver get the most points, and the team with the most combined points wins.

The single player or split-screen co-op is fun enough, but when you take it online, it gets really sweet. We've spent a good part of the past week in Harms Way's online multiplayer...

Seriously, you can download the full game for free. Do that. It kicks ass.

Sucker Punch

Just saw Sucker Punch last week. Of course, when I first heard about it, I thought it was a Tie Domi biopic.

My blog: your number-one shop for two-minute photoshops. Stay tuned for the sequel:

**

Now to the actual movie.

I can't believe the bad press this movie has got. You saw the trailer and the poster, and based on those, you should have been expecting an action movie with console game visuals.

Well, Sucker Punch is that, and it's seriously cool. I mean, look at it.

The action sequences are awesome, and I absolutely loved them. As an added bonus, the soundtrack is excellent. The narration is very crisp, with none of the usual repetition and beating us over the head with the clue bat that we're all getting used to.

There is, however, a sucker punch that you really don't see coming. Namely, that this movie has a real, serious, feminist message. Now, this is apparently too much for some critics. To quote Wikipedia for a particularly glaring example:

A.O. Scott of The New York Times described the film as a "fantasia of misogyny" that pretends to be a "feminist fable of empowerment" and found that the film's treatment of sexual violence was problematic.

Since movie critics are herd animals, everyone's jumped on this bandwagon. Ooh, it can't be feminist, they're wearing short skirts and they're objectified.

I mean, oh my God, you can see some of her thigh. Quick, call Andrea Dworkin.

As a feminist, this enrages me. There is a serious, powerful feminist message in this movie, but it seems that our movie critics go so bananas when they see Emily Browning in a miniskirt that they can't detect it.

Without spoiling anything, the central theme of the movie is the way in which men can use the structures of society to inflict violence on women. The film treats psychiatry as a charade to enforce proper gendered behavior and as a form of violence, used by men on women to make them conform. The plot of the movie is victimized women fighting against gendered oppression.

And because they do it while looking hot, it's suddenly objectification.

In many cases, including this one, objectification is in the eye of the objectifier. I can't think of anything more demeaning, oppressive and downright patriarchal as dismissing this movie by reducing its female characters to pure eye candy just because of the clothes they're wearing.

The film operates on multiple levels, kind of like Inception except that it doesn't suck. The critics seem to be totally fixated on the level that deals with sexuality, and can't see past that to the actual scope of the movie, which deals with psychiatry, lobotomy and patriarchy. Instead, the overwhelmingly male critics seem to be, quite frankly, thinking with their dicks. To me, and the people I saw the film with, characterizing it as pornography is appalling. That's seriously not far removed from calling Schindler's List a glorification of genocide.

But this is the world of movies. Had the same crew and cast made a dreary, depressing drama movie about a woman wrongly committed to a mental institution, the same reviewers would be hailing it as a wonderful paean to female liberation. But because it's a kick-ass action movie, it isn't allowed to have a real theme. If it has a woman in it, she must by definition be only a sexual object. The critics won't let her be anything else.

So in that sense, the film succeeds as feminist empowerment on two levels: not only is the story and theme itself a strong feminist message, but it very brashly exposes what radical feminism has turned into. The critics, in all likelihood believing themselves to be great feminists and doing a good thing, have taken a kickass feminist movie and in the name of feminism, condemned it for violating gender roles. The director is presenting women wrong! The radical feminist orthodoxy seems to currently be that women must not ever be presented as sexy, because that will always be objectifying.

So in other words, in the name of feminism, these "feminists" want to ban women as sexual beings from the movie screen. Female sexuality is only allowed to appear in strictly controlled, radical-feminist-approved contexts like a homemade porn movie shot with a cellphone camera that gets shown at movie festivals. If a female feminist director makes a movie about kickass women, that's great and empowering, but if a male director makes a Hollywood movie that's feminist and kicks ass, that's horrible objectification.

You know what? Fuck you. I thoroughly enjoyed Sucker Punch, and I think it has a very powerful and important message. That so many critics can't be bothered to watch it as a serious movie with a serious message but print their knee-jerk dismissal just confirms me in my belief that movie critics are among the lowest forms of human life to bedevil this planet.

So seriously, screw you guys. I'm going to go see it again.

Fantasy roundup: The Black Magician Trilogy

Or, next up on my fantasy book review-o-rama, at least the first two books of it.

Verdict: Don't bother.

The first book of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy follows the life of Sonea, a young slum girl. She lives in a city where the poor are kept in line by the Magicians' Guild, but it turns out she can do magic herself, and hijinks ensue. If you want a proper blurb, read the back of the book.

I liked the first book. Sonea is a decently-written, almost memorable young girl, and not only are there some good moments in the book, but you end up sort of caring what happens to her. That's why the second book is such a crushing disappointment.

This may be a mild spoiler, but it's on the back cover of the second book. The second book starts with the main character studying at the Magicians' Guild. The plot is mildly interesting, but there are several small problems and one really big one. For starters, the language gets a bit embarrassing at times, especially when one of the wizards goes on a boat with rooms in it. I admit that knowing something about sailing ships and having read some first-class nautical fiction may spoil a person, but everything even remotely sea-going in the book is, at best, not quite horribly wrong. As I said, it's a bit embarrassing.

Sonea's life in the magicians' guild comes over all Harry Potter, which I suppose is to some degree unavoidable, but therein lies the one thing that made me stop reading the book: in the second book, she's not the same character any more. In the first book, she's a tough, resourceful, streetwise slum kid, who, unlike the usual computer role-playing game incarnations of such, is somewhat believable. In the second, the street kid has been replaced with a scared, whiny little brat. To give you an idea, in the first book, when someone lays hands on her, she punches them in the face; in the second book, when a spoiled kid calls her a name, she starts crying and hides in her room.

For Harry Potter, going to magic school brought about a miraculous transformation from nerd to jock. In Cavanan's character's case, it does the exact opposite and transforms her into a sissy. Now, if the point was that her old skills and connections are useless in this strange new world and she's confused, that would be fine; I'd even expect it. What I can't stomach is that through the simple act of being accepted into a school, she completely jettisons her old personality. The plain fact of the matter is that there are two different protagonists in the first two books, and for a character-driven story, this is a bad thing. It's a crying shame, as after the first book, I was looking forward to the sequel; about a third of the way in, I couldn't be bothered to keep reading.

The first book was an entertaining read and showed promise, but on the whole, I'd advise against reading it. If you like it, you'll just be horribly disappointed by the sequel.