Winter's Bone

Backwoods Missouri has never been captured so well in motion.  Everything from the local actors to the frozen wastelands where it was filmed adds to this movie’s authenticity.

        

 I wouldn’t recommend Winter’s Bone if you want a cheery, feel good movie.  If you  want to be cut to the core by brilliant acting however, then I would give it five stars.  Jennifer Lawrence does a fantastic job starring as Ree Dolly, a character similar to her role as Katniss in the Hunger Games.  Although the two movies start out in equivalent poverty, they take very different directions as Ree finds her fighting with adults rather than children in her quest to find her crystal cooking father.

        

The stakes are brutally high and you find yourself more and more enwrapped in the lead’s life as the film progresses.  Again, fantastic movie, utterly chilling. 

Trailer

Movie Info

Interactive Art

There are two possible objectives an artist can have.  One is to create something the people will remember, and the other is to make money.

        

Unfortunately, artists have different opinions about what makes a piece memorable, and so when they work together the only way for them to stay unified is to orient themselves towards making money.  That’s why it’s rare to find massive, big budget movies, video games or TV Shows that are truly enlightening.  Unless they are directed by an artist with an iron fist, those forms of entertainment rarely accomplish more than making a profit. 

       

And that’s why in terms of artistic mediums, video games fall short.  Unlike books or independent films, it’s not very easy for an individual to set out on his own and program a video game.  Coding takes a lot of work and a huge team of people, that’s why the big budget games, despite being fun, are rarely very memorable.  Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, such as the indie game Braid created by Jonathon Blow.

        

Most games that are unified under a single artist’s vision tend to be cheap and short.  Here are just a few I’ve found to be exceptional.

      1.  Loved.  Loved takes about four or five minutes to complete.  However, once you’ve finished it I guarantee you will want to return and explore the mechanics because even though there is only one result, there are multiple ways to complete the game.  What’s amazing about this tiny platformer is that two people with different personalities can play it and have entirely different experiences.
Loved

     2.  You Find Yourself In a Room.  Do not play this script based story game unless you want to be insulted and have your inner essence torn out and ripped apart.  It is frustrating, disturbing and more than a little inappropriate as it breaches the subject taboo to gamers of, “Why are you wasting your time with this?”
You Find Yourself in a Room

      3.  400 Years.  I’ve never been brought to tears by a game, but this beautiful platformer came close.  It’s short, sweet and sad – you play as a rock trying to save the world in four hundred years by waiting for rivers to freeze, trees to grow, and people to develop civilization.
400 Years

Pabst & Jazz

To say I’ve heard every rap album would be a huge exaggeration, and  to say I’ve listened to every mixtape would be an even greater falsity, but as a long time rap enthusiast, I’d would have to say Pabst and Jazz is the best collection of songs I’ve come across.

       Now before I let loose the praise I should probably list a couple shortcomings of this Asher Roth Mixtape. 

·         There are about two or three songs that, no matter how often I listen to them, I never develop a taste for, i.e. Insurance, Golden Midas and Useless, a song with a well suited name.    

·         The hooks are, I wouldn’t call weak but they aren’t exactly audacious.  They don’t stand out and because of it, on your first few listens to the album the songs sort of blend together and appear all the same. 

·         This is probably my greatest peeve, Asher seems to have a taste for featuring the worst possible rappers in every one of his songs.  Now I understand that it’s financially beneficial to feature a large number of other rappers in your mixtapes, and that when you’re still relatively underground it’s hard to attract good rappers.  Honestly though, I would have appreciated more songs with just Asher because every other one was ruined half way through by some misogynist, dry rapper blurting out some pathetic excuse for lyrics.

Now on to the good stuff.  When I first listened to this mixtape, I was only moderately impressed.  However, the songs kept popping back up on my shuffle and pretty soon I found myself skipping forward to hear them.  Pretty soon I stopped fighting it and just start listening to the mixtape, all the way through, sometimes on shuffle sometimes in the order Asher meant it to be.

          

·         The mixtape starts out with the song Pabst and Jazz, which, as you can imagine, features a retro, jazzy rhythm.  This is a quintessential example of how the mixtape flows, it has a nice relaxed, Miles Davis feel, and if I were more of a stoner it would undoubtedly be the best smoking music available. 

·         The song after it, Choices, breaks up the relaxed feeling and replaces it with smooth, bold rap. 

·         The next notable song, although there are several good ones in between, is Common Knowledge.  To this day I’m still trying to understand the lyrics to this song and I’m beginning to believe Asher just made up random shit to confuse his fans.  Regardless, the flow is pristine.

·         Possibly my favorite song on the album, and the first one I listened to extensively, is Ampersand.  Ampersand, is different from anything song in the album, it is more mellow and even borderline Melancholy.  Give it along hard listen, it is a special song. 

·         The album raps up with Dope Shit.  A long, almost tedious song critiquing the hip-hop industry and its fans.

·         Honorable mentions are in store for Charlie Chaplin, Running Away, In the Kitchen, More Cowbell and Get By. 

I think there are a few things that made this Mixtape stand out to me.  First of all, the sound is amazing.  All the beats have a jazzy, pre-digital Felly sort of feel.  Also they are unique.  If you listen to rap long enough you get tired of the same old themes and beats, and when a rapper changes it up it is like a breath of fresh air.  Lastly, rarely even on cleaned up albums do I find more than two or three songs that I really, really like.  In Pabst & Jazz there are thirteen. 

      Pabst & Jazz is a special Mixtape in that it grows on you.  Instead of getting tired of the songs, possibly because of Asher’s confusing, thickly layered lyrics, the more I listen to them the more I want listen to them.

Download It Free:  http://www.datpiff.com/Asher-Roth-Pabst-Jazz-mixtape.295436.html

Esports: Entertainment of the Modern Era

In recent years, esports have grown exponentially, creating a market that generates millions in revenue as hundreds of thousands of teenagers log on to watch a kind of sporting event they can relate to.            

                Although traditional sports with testosterone high clashes and full grown men butting helmets are still popular across the country, their prominence has started to fade from the younger generation.  This is perhaps a result of the decline in sport-based activities.   Fifty years ago, sports were played by almost every kid-regardless of whether that kid made it onto his high school basketball team, they were simply a way of life.  Naturally, as the children of that generation grew up they took an interest in watching the sports they had loved during their childhood, now played by professional athletes.  Watching sports is both an exciting, adrenaline pumping present day activity, as well as a reminiscent reminder of the long summers they spent playing baseball back in the sixties.

                For teenagers nowadays though, unless you are a varsity bawler and dedicate your life to shooting hoops, sports are only played during P.E.  Most kids, discouraged by the highly competitive world of high-school sports, find better ways to waste their time.  If they’re a testosterone driven male, conditioned by years of evolution to compete with their peers, they usually turn to the modern form of competition: videogames.        

                Finally, as time has advanced, we are seeing some of the children who grew up on videogames reaching adulthood.  Just as their fathers before them who found that they didn’t have the time with their careers to play sports on a regular basis, young adults who grew up on videogames are spending less time simply playing them, and more time watching them.  In 2012, the total number of viewers for the League of Legends world championships were over half the viewers for the baseball World Series final game.   Eight million compared to fifteen million.               

                Despite its surprisingly large following, if you were to stop a stranger on the street and ask them their opinion on esports, they probably wouldn’t know how to respond.  Unlike with sports, that provided physical exercise to their children, parents were quick to attach a negative to stigma to videogames in which they saw no real benefit.  Judgments about gamers being nerdy and lazy spread like wildfire, until gamers were forced into none-expressive shells, only talking about their exploits with other gamers.  If mentioning your interests in video games to outsiders is taboo, then talking about your fascination with esports is even more so, even kids who accept video games into their lives still have a mocking attitude towards watching games played by other people.  Watching esports is considered the pinnacle of nerdiness.   

                Yet there are still eight million viewers to be accounted for, not all of whom can be complete nerds.  The truth is that more people watch videogames than let on.  It’s free, and easy and is an activity they can participate in without any commitment, so a large amount of teenagers venture into the realm of esports without any fear…and once they pick up on the rules and strategies of the games the viewers are instantly hooked.

                Whether or not esports are the entertainment of the future is up to debate, as of now they have a cult following but with the nerd label it would be surprising if esports spread to a wider audience.  There is also the problem that in western culture videogames are not pastimes that girls find attractive in males, or that most girls even care about themselves.  Unlike with sports, professional gamers really are restricted to one-half of the population to find fans.      

                Despite this, esports are here to stay and I, along with eight million other fans, will continue to enjoy them.               

                      

League of Legends Free Season Three Coverage:  http://na.lolesports.com/

Starcraft Esport Center:  http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/esports/