"Wanted": logic, depth, and morality...oh, what the hell, it's fun

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

"Wanted" is a film you really shouldn't like or tolerate, but it's really too goofy and stylized to give much to react to. Sure, the opening few minutes has six humans getting bullets through their heads, some in slow motion with beautiful hand crafted chunks of metal. And sure, there's probably 50 or so deaths to follow, including several ordered by an elaborate sweater-making machine. But it's all so ridiculous and odd and well done that it's hard not to at least wink at. Plus, if you were at all a nerdy, picked on 13 year old boy, the wet-dream fantasy of it is hard to put away with smug adult rationalizations.

I mean, who wouldn't want to be picked up by a uber sexy femme fatale, included in a fraternity (I never got to be in a fraternity, and the one party I ever attended at a frat house, I wore the wrong clothes and got mocked), shown how to fight and shoot cool guns, and then gets to shoot real people because a loom told you to.

That's actually about the whole story, except for the betrayal and final retribution. The structure of the movie is actually exactly that of a typical first-person shooter video game. The protagonist is plucked from his normal, drab life and given an orientation (the training period where you learn the controls and weapons). Then you have a number of unrelated challenges, here, two assassinations. Then you go after the hoards of minions, being the beautifully shot mill shootout. Then the henchmen are taken one by one in protracted fights. And finally the showdown with 'the big boss', being Morgan Freeman. (I'd love to go mano-a-mano with Morgan Freeman.)

If you saw the director's Russian films, Day Watch, etc., you'll remember the odd Hollywood-through-Russian-Eyes aesthetic: slightly muted color palette, stylized camera movements, shifts in speed, and baroque violence. And a physics engine (that's a term from video games, for non-geeks) that's half-way between here and Wiley E. Coyote. Which means, they make an attempt at explaining the magic in terms of physics--the cars form a wedge and he flies in the air; the arm is whipped in a certain way and the bullet curves--but it's basically just to look cool.

But though there are all the elements of a Western Hollywood film, there's still something just odd and foreign about the production. There are all the Hollywood icons, the chases, the wish fulfillment for thirteen year olds, but it's like an early Beatles tune played on a Sitar: there's odd over and under tones even though the melody is the same.

And just like there's a nod to real-world physics, there's a nod to real-world morality. The director strikes me as more sterilized version of Lars von Trier, a man with a masterful sense of film as a technical and stylistic medium, but the moral sense of a pre-adolescent. The morality of "Wanted," like the logic of the story, has to be seen from a certain precious angle, like that sculpture of the impossible box. It's that wire frame box that can't exist because the edges interweave, but when viewed from just the right angle, appears like a living paradox. But you step away just a bit, and the illusion is clear.

There's not much wiggle room in terms of where you stand to view the morality of this film. And the logic has as narrow a perspectival tolerance. Heather brought up the unraveling point that the loom, while it does name names, doesn't tell you what to do with the names. Maybe when Joe Smith is spelled out in binary code of missed stitches, it means go give the man a kiss. Or money. Or love to convert him from his evil ways. How did the interpretation, a 1000 years ago, that you had to kill the loomed-named, how did that triumph? Did the more compassionate weaver have to leave the room to piss during that debate?

Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant, because the director seems to not really care whether you see the illusion of it all--dare I say, threadbare quality?--because the illusion is so obvious within the frame of the film, and the little winks and nods are, um, woven into the tapestry of the film. Like in the big operatic/Matrix-ic factory floor shoot out, there's all these flourishes that play out as, "Gee, isn't this fun?!" The protagonist grabs guns out of the air from dying minions, then shoots a henchman (remember the video game sequence of challenges?) through the head and commences to carry his body as a shield, hanging off the gun that now is embedded in his head, and shoots other minions as he continues to run through the battle. Now that is, well, gross, but totally cool!

Then end has our protagonist being neither the Mariner nor the Wedding Guest from the "Rime of Ancient Mariner": he's neither relieved of guilt by sharing his story, nor sadder but wiser from hearing it. He's Wiser and Butcher, and Morally Finger Pointing to boot. His last line, after describing how he's taken back control from the Big Boss (by shooting him through the head in the same way as his father was killed) and looks at the camera, asking us what we've done lately. It's hard to think that the film would put me sitting with a distressed client, or Heather interviewing to work with under-privileged urban youth, in the same category as murdering a bad guy. But then, after he shoots the bad guy and has to go take a crap, whose going to fix his toilet if it's broken?

Zohan!

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

After our swing dance class last night, with our perky Swedish instructor Cat ("tree-pull step!"), we went to see You Don't Mess with the Zohan. I wasn't expecting much. Adam Sandler has had about one good movie and one half-funny movie (Punch Drunk Love, and Anger Managment), and a lot of dumb-ass productions, like drawn out SNL skits.

But this was not only funny in an outrageous but not heavy-handed or contrived way, it was actually very sweet. Sandler's clueless superhero Zohan, an Israeli counter terrorist agent who apparently usually works on his own because he doesn't really need anyone else (he catches bullets in his teeth and up his nose, and sticks a piranha down his pants without flinching), comes to realize that he's tired of all the fighting, and longs to go to New York to be a hair stylist. OK, funny setup which could play the macho Israeli male stereotype against the male stylist stereotype--which does get some play, but Zohan is so sincere and unaware of the stereotypes, without irony, that he comes across as rather clean and pure. When he talks with the young man whose mother takes him in, and whose mother Zohan quickly starts screwing, he sincerely tells the son how happy his mother is and how could he want anything different (apparently in Israel there's no such thing as the primal scene, i.e., walking in on your parents having sex). And he really means it, and you believe it totally. There's really not a wink-wink nod-nod in relation to Zohan. You are expected to take him at his word.

Thus what we get is something of a checking of the American ironic stance via this foreign transplant, who doesn't even understand irony and is fearless about his own sincerity. When he starts seeing hair clients, little old women from the neighborhood, and adds a little shagging at the end of his hair care, you get the sense that he really and truly appreciates these women whom American culture (and American film culture) view as hags or sexless wisdom figures. Zohan sees an inner quality of beauty and lustiness that is so obvious to him, that you start actually seeing the obviousness yourself. It's in this way that the film really tweaks some of the dehumanizing that goes on in American culture.

Not to mention what Zohan is doing with the Middle Eastern conflicts. It's essentially a pacifist and humanistic film. All of the characters (except the evil-doing mall developer and his hick-terrorist hireling) have dreams of a better life, free from conflict and inherited hatreds and divisions. The super-terrorist The Phantom (played wonderfully by John Turturo) secretly wants to sell shoes. His hatred of Israel is something given to him, and forced on him by circumstance; essentially, he wants to live a useful, joyful life doing something he loves.

Same with Zohan, the master soldier, who is tired of the constant fighting and wants to make the world "silky smooth." He also wants to serve others, not support division and dis-integration. He also wants to find his own internal integration, where he does not have to choose only one incarnation of himself, the soldier, over the lover or the servant or the artist. He is tired of only choosing a part of himself, and having his culture insist on only that part.

So in a sense, the film is upholding a cherished, and older, value of America, that you can come here and shed the Old World--the cultures of rigid relationships and inherited animosity--in favor of a life of opportunity. However, here's where the film updates this story to one of not Horatio Alger-like rising to the top, not a narcissistic climb over the bodies of your fellows, but of self-integration, the expansion of the human community to include all struggling, yearning beings. Even the hick hireling--played by Dave Mathews, in a weird and wonderful casting decision--is not killed in the end, but rather catapulted by the combined, uh, singing of The Phantom and Zohan--never done in 2000 years!--into the gay party helmed by George Takai (nee, Sulu from Star Trek). Even he is given an opportunity to face his fears through exposure to the feared community, which presents itself as both wonderfully idiosyncratic and totally human.

I am such a sucker for such films, because I so believe in and yearn for this deep healing and recognition of connectedness. And I love the archetypal nature of pop culture, how it can express in simple terms deep longing and hope. And I really love genre literature and art, in its both honoring the structure/tradition/community of life, as well as the joyous reinterpretation of that life by the artist, a conscious expression of what we all do all the time.

So, the reason why "you don't mess with the Zohan" is not actually that he's so tough and macho, it's because his essential nature is loving, and there's no way to fight that.

Indy!

Well, pretty flaccid and tired. I said to James, it was like after making Schlindler's List, how can you get that impassioned about another rehash of trashy early-century serial dramas? I hope the filmmakers and actors had fun with each other, because I came out feeling battered and without memories of anything...memorable.

Here's Fresh Air's spot-on take on the movie, here.

Beowolf - Look how much that's going to cost!

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I was watching the last part of the recent film "Beowolf," with my clients at the halfway house. It's a clever high-tech hybrid of real actors and computer animation, and tells the story of King Beowolf and his travails. The climactic scene is him battling his son-cum-dragon, who is rampaging across the country burning villages and so forth. He goes after Beowolf's concubine and wife, who are standing on a stone walkway between two high towers. Of course, the dragon burns chunks out, bites other chunks, all but destroying the construction. Earlier, he burned a wood bridge across a chasm.

So where does my mind go? To think, who's going to repair that? What a waste of workmanship! All the drama is nice and all, but in the long term, some poor group of schmucks are going to have to do a lot of heaving and hauling to get the bridge up, the walkway reconstructed. Probably some will get injured or fall. The kingdom's coffers are going to be drained for the construction, and resources that otherwise could have built infrastructure have to go for these repairs.

Oh, how easy it is to destroy, how difficult to build...

Dogville

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

There is something utterly disgusting about Lars von Trier's "Dogville," which is belied by the richness of production and the sheer weight of acting talent. It's the story, shot as a play without an audience, of what seems to be a gun moll escaping to a small Colorado town for refuge. The town slowly plays out its suffering on her, like a J.G. Ballard story, where the human race slowly devolves into its most primitive forms. She turns out to be the daughter of a mafioso, and she orders the execution of the whole town in the film's finale.

But the disgust is not in the story, it's in the sheer adolescent arrogance of the director, in his pompous and supercilious dismissal of human weakness. The end montage, of America's downtrodden, is really horrific to see, like some Versailles aristocrat pointing out their window at the suppurating peons in the slums below. The setup is so easy and yet the payoff so self-righteous, and psychologically stupid.

The film sketches certain moral issues, about responsibility, liberalism, but never plays them out with any integrity. What you get is a cypher for the director to play out his own disgust, to make of the characters what the characters make of the mob daughter: a scapegoat and screen for projection.

Because the production is so skillful, it wasn't till the very end of the film, as the denouement was reached, that the simple point of the film was reached, and the director got to piss on everyone and walk off content. It's like listening to a long, sophisticated speech about race relations, which then ends, "And that's why I hate niggers."

The disgust of the film is supposed to be directed at the morally weak, while in truth its deserved focus is the director himself.

The Bank Job, Across the Universe, South Park, Eastern Promises, Domino - Some movies

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I seem to have seen a slew of movies recently, more than usual. I just got back from "The Bank Job," which was curiously bloodless. Maybe because it was British, and they can't help it. It felt like an exercise in genre, well done, nice people, derived from a real event. But at the end, I kind of shrug. The denouement was rather anticlimactic, bland. So, that's that.

We also watched "Across the Universe" on dvd, which was a colorful, fun trip through the late '60's in America done through the music of the Beatles. But at the end of the day with this one, not much substance, and kind of a string of stereotypes and stereotyped situations. Like they looked through the papers of the time, and stripped the major headlines and cultural figures: there's Janis Joplin, and Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the radicals turned bombers, the student movement, the soldiers. And that's pretty much it. It was nice though, to see Joe Cocker playing a singing hobo.

Ok, and then there's "South Park the Movie," from years ago, which we never saw. Actually, the TV show is, in general, much funnier than this movie, I think because on basic cable you have to censor yourself. Where here, the boys are swearing up a storm, which kind of takes the edge off. It was funny seeing what you'd always thought, that Saddam Hussaine is Satan's lover...and batshit crazy.

Also, "Eastern Promises," David Croneberg's second film with Viggo Mortensen, a story of the Russian mob in London. It was a more straightforward story than "History of Violence," that horrible mess of a film. This one has the nice, order-affirming twist at the end, and the baby is saved. Yeah! Well executed, but pretty forgettable.

Anything else? Oh, I saw "Domino" on the on-demand cable, and was really impressed. Which was curious, because it got TOTALLY panned in the press when released. I just checked Rottentomatoes and of the credible critics, 9% liked it. But Roger Ebert liked it, which makes sense (here). I almost always agree with Ebert; I wonder if we're the same Ennegram number? I love the way he can love the scraggly dogs that no one else wants to let in the house, or can see the beauty of.

I told Heather that "Domino" is like a Joss Whedon production on methamphetamine, a story of a totally dysfunctional, but loving family of thrown-togethers. If it were shot in a linear, cinemagraphically conventional way, it would be banal. But Tony Scott's crazed Vegas color scheme and ADD editing style gives the film a vibrancy and surreal sweetness. Some films look at their characters as if they were either planets floating in space, or a bunch of billiard balls knocking into each other (The Bank Job was a bit like this). Others, like "Domino," somehow see their characters as both people, representatives, and locations of spirit. Which is weird to say of a film so violent, so on edge, and so darkly comic. But these people really seem, in their brokenness and unpolished and unaware selves, reflect that Leonard Cohen line, "There's a crack in everything/And that's how the light gets in." There's a lot of light here because there are really tremendous cracking in this world. And Tom Waits as the desert prophet in a Cadillac is wonderful.

Plus, the totally audacious scene of a man having his arm shot off at the shoulder by a double barrel shotgun, in front of the ex-stars of Beverly Hills 90210 is, well, jaw droopingly ballsy. Christopher Walken's character, a sleazy reality show producer, just looks and says, "Wow."

So, that's my movie roundup.

Posted by MC at 9:44 PM

A show only a therapist [i.e., your mother] could love

"In Treatment" began airing on HBO last week, and will run for 9 straight weeks, 5 days a week. And what you get is two or three people talking for a half hour each day, mostly in the therapist's office, or in his supervisor's office. That's it. But man, it's like therapist porn! I'm not sure how anyone who's not a therapist--not just in the mental health or healing trades, but a working shrink--could possibly love such a show.

But I find it riveting. The acting is mostly solid and the stories are real enough (though they've definitely selected the more extreme cases), and the therapizing is pretty accurate. Paul Weston, the psychiatrist/analyst played by Gabriel Byrne, is a competent, caring clinician who is falling apart in about the way most therapists I know are. His marriage is imploding, his relationships with his children are thin, and he hates the supervisor who he keeps returning to for support and to punish. In fact, Friday with the supervisor is some of the juiciest interactions in the show, because you have two veterens of the game playing doing very high level sparing with rather low-level emotions. Watching Paul lie to her without even realizing it is thrilling!

The verisimilitude is a bit strained, but that's ok, since it's being adapted for dramatic television. For instance, 30 minutes is pretended to be a 50 minute session, which is a little mind bending as it happens (because you see the total session), but you can handle it. And as I said, the intensity level is higher than in most therapies.

But what you get is an intense presentation of one man and his many relationships, in which little nuances carry great meaning. He says in one of the first episodes, to the cocky fighter pilot, "In our profession we have a saying: 'The customer is always wrong,'" which he later explains as that a chunk of his work is to expose how his patients are lying to themselves and to him. Watching this unfolding and unpacking happen is riviting, and really funny at times, though the show is in no way a comedy. What's funny, to me, is seeing these common human train wrecks happening, and watch the games and machinations of the human psyche laid out so clearly. It's not a phony or supercilious clarity, though, because there are times when people are so clear and obvious.

It would be a much paler show if you didn't get to see Paul interacting with his wife and with his estranged supervisor, which then changes the way you see him interacting with his clients, even though his demeanor is consistently professional and competent. Like the one scene where he's spent most of the episode fighting with his wife after she exposes her having an affair, and then after she is dismissed from the room, he straightens his jacket, wets his hair, and opens the door to greet his next client, who launches into his own self-centered stuff. It's funny because it's so accurate, and is a juxtaposition of tones which is part and parcel of the therapists life. There are unresolved contradictions which are simply held, which is also so much of a therapist's work.

Seeing a portrait of a mature psychotherapist is a treat for such as me, relatively green in the field. Because it's a complex portrait of a complex man, who is both very skilled and personally very flawed. And it gets the therapy situation right--they must have good consultants. It's like seeing a show shot in your home town. You get to point and jump up and down: "Ooh, I've been there!" Good stuff.

Speed the Plow: A review of a play more interesting in the disection than the viewing

Saturday rained like a million Clydesdales pissing, and I, seemingly in some egotistical notion that by virtue of not being prepared for inclement weather, the weather would bend to my will. Instead, in the attempt to find the A.C.T. theater on Ellis, after my consultation group, I couldn't drive my scooter fast enough to get between the rain drops. Drenched from top to bottom, in a punishment of my hubris.

And then I get to the theater, looking for my wife to be standing there, awaiting me with pitying eyes, I see no one familiar. She hasn't left yet, telling me to come home and get dry, and we'll set out again. I'm irked by her absence, but at the thought of sitting through lunch and a two hour play wet, it seems a pretty good idea.

So, to the play. "Speed the Plow," by David Mamet, is a piece of theater that talks a lot, has people move around in small spaces, and says very little. Not that the characters say little; they actually are saying a lot, even when they're saying nothing. It's the work itself that has people expressing meaning in empty patter, and yet, in its gestalt, says nothing particularly revealing about its subject. I found more in it on the walk back to the car with Heather than actually sitting in the theater.

So. "Speed the Plow" is about two old Hollywood survivors who have risen together through the studio ranks, one in the lead and the other ("The Parasite," my term) on his coattails, struggling through a 24 hour period, blown around by the introduction of Kathy the temporary secretary ("The Idealist"). The Mogul and Parasite are set to make an empty but profitable blockbuster with someone I kept hearing as Tom Cruise, a prison buddy movie blah blah. They're going to make a lot of money: the Mogul will continue to rise, and the Parasite will finally get some juice around town, and long coveted wealth, and longer coveted ability to get some payback for having to eat shit the last 20 years.

Enter the foil, a young woman working as a temp, filling in for the Mogul's sick secretary. She acts as the voice of idealism, who, in a bid to get her in bed, the Mogul invites to read a book on the transformative value of radiation in human history and soul. She comes to his house and pitches the book to him, which he buys because she taps into his long dormant need for basic human sustenance: purpose and emotional meaning.

But he's a duck out of water in those realms, and stumbles into the office the next day, the day of the big meeting with the head of the studio, and tells his old partner that he'd doing the book, not the blockbuster. The Parasite struggles through the next 20 minutes, from cajoling to physical attack, and finally does a brilliant maneuver on the Idealist, a beautiful judo move that throws her to the mat and out of the ring. The partners go off to serve their appropriate function.

Now, I have never like Mamet. I find his people odd cyphers, not devoid of real life, just so filtered as to be relatively useless. His men are a particular narrow, and at the end of the day, particularly uninteresting and unrepresentative variety of humanness. They're like testosterone that has been thinned with water. They have the carapace of power, they move like power, but they're wispy inside.

As a send up of the Hollywood system, it was a bit of a yawner, and besides, what's easier to skewer? But it's not really a satire, because the most likable person, the most honest and worthy of empathy is actually the Parasite. He isn't confused about who he is or what he wants. The Mogul wants redemption, in the same way a dim ember wants to burst into flame, but finds itself on a dark night, totally without wind. The Idealist closets her yearning for power in ideas and phony emotions, in intellectualized pathos for the world, in her desire to reshape the world in her own image, the right image.

The Parasite calls it right and honestly when he says to the Mogul, "You're a whore and I'm a whore." That is true. And there is integrity in the admission and embrace of that. The Idealist is the ugliest character on stage because she doesn't really know herself, is lying to herself throughout the play, learning nothing at the end, baffled by her own failure because she cannot recognize her own machinations. The Mogul's redemption is actually his return to lucidity about his own identity: he is no longer lying to himself.

The Idealist is willing to have the Mogul sacrifice his 20 year relationship with the Parasite, and all that the Parasite has yearned and worked for, without a second thought, without a trace of empathy or understanding of what she is doing. She sells the Mogul on the arrogant totalizing of the Radiation book without realizing she's selling, or that she's manipulating. When she says to the Mogul, after admitting, when pushed by the Parasite, that she wouldn't have slept with the Mogul if he hadn't agreed to making the book, "Come, we have a meeting," you see the ugliness of her unacknowledged manipulations.

When, in the program notes, the play's director, in a single paragraph in a two page article, refers to the Idealist as pure or honest, I was totally surprised. The Idealist is the dishonest one, and more brutal in her way than the business men because she will sacrifice both on the altar of her own righteous ideals. The book won't make a great movie; it's horribly written, and intellectualized in its spirituality. The Mogul will be ruined and not at all redeemed, because he has found only a toxic mimic of spirituality and soul, and will realize this in the hail of scorn over the movie. The Parasite will be thrown away, made the scapegoat of venality for the other two's palsied reach for salvation.

The Parasite and the Mogul actually have a bond, a relationship, and when the Parasite says he loves the Mogul, you believe him. Thus the Idealist's encouragement for the Mogul to toss away the Parasite is not an indictment of the Mogul--he's been exposed to the pheromones of Spirit and is totally un-moored--but of the Idealist, who in the guise of caring and meaning will cut the throat of the unworthy and unconverted. She doesn't know it; it's buried a few layers down and only emerges in a couple comments, but is there in her actions. Given enough power, you could see in her why the far left and right often come out acting the same, even if one is dressed in organic cotton and the other blue blazer.

At the end of the day, it's the aware corruptions who are more sympathetic than the unaware idealism. The system is what it is; you're dealing with huge sums of money and therefore there's huge constraints and dynamics at work. That's the real world, and the Parasite, and then the Mogul, know what world they're living in. They're not exercising a subtle violence against Spirit by insisting that the real world is a corruption of something else. Plus, they have a relationship formed out of real struggle and loyalty, and against the de-centered, other-focused pull of the Idealist, that's something to be admired.

BioShock and my history of gaming

James and I, in our impromptu walk on Sunday, spent time talking about this game, which I was rhapsodizing about. And in that talk, he brought up "The Game Room," an arcade where his friend used to work at during high school. I haven't thought about it forever, and it's apparently been deceased for a long time. Which, given the current state of video games, doesn't surprise me. The quality of console (xbox 360, Playstation 3, the new Wii) and computer-based games is so good that these shops are totally antiquated. There was a place down the street that tried to do an arcade with desktops, but it failed quickly.

BioShock, a game released this year for the new Xbox 360, is probably the clearest example of why the Game Room's of the world are gone. The 360 gives performance and graphics which are just stunning, not photo-real (yet), but getting close. Which would be neither here nor there if the game was not so sophisticated--beautiful and empty is no unfamiliar phenomenon in this photoshoped and CG'ed world--basing itself on classic dystopian novels, and sending up the Libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand and her wacky crown (a whole different post, believe me...).

The story has your character (it's in the genre of the "first person shooter," with some elements of "adventure games") in a plane crash in the middle of some icy ocean, landing right next to a dark, moonlit tower poking up from the frigid waters. That's the entry to Andrew Ryan's utopian Libertarian experiment, a world where "petty morality" can be transcended by the artists, scientists, industrialists. Of course it goes really, really wrong: the genetic modifications have turned the denizens either into corpses or zombified "splicers" (i.e., genetic splicing into the persons DNA code), who wander around attacking each other and you. (By the way, my favorite line from these splicers--as they do their murderous perambulations, they spout different comments--is "Don't you fucking judge me!") The place is leaking icy water all over the place. There's lots of decay and fires, blood everywhere, but with the artifacts of the functioning city, like the 1950's style perky advertisements and loudspeaker announcements that tell the history of the city's decline into fascism and civil war. You go through the huge city (that's the images in this post), from level to level, accomplishing various tasks towards learning the history of this sick place.

Now, NOTHING like this existed even 10 years ago, in terms of the technical and storytelling sophistication. But in terms of brain modification, it's pretty much the same experience after a point as playing Pacman back at the Game Room.

As fun as these games can be, and as clever and immersive as they are, much of their appeal is that they are diversions, and that they induct the brain into a fugue state. These are not, usually, the choice of the integrationist. And they are usually built to encourage a forward-leaning progress of half-satisfactions, leading onward to the longed-for finale, an addictive process of pulling you out of the present, as you lean into the future, anticipating the Big One.

That's the way they've always been, if they fit into the rubric of "video game." Back to pong, through the arcade games to the early text-based adventure games, then into these modern technical masterpieces (like BioShock).

Which is not to slam them, really. I like my coffee, and try to limit it to one cup in the morning, knowing that if there are more, I'll be an anxious mess the rest of the day. Same with games, you have to know how to use them in moderation, and not do them to excess or for the wrong reasons. Which are all easy to do--as I said, they're built for addiction.

That said, BioShock really is a masterpiece of the genre. And it points up the amazing cultural phenomenon of these games, the intense use of resources (apparently, even before marketing, the modern console games cost $15 million to make, and BioShock I'll bet too more than that), and the incredible profits (2K, which produced BioShock, will net about $1.4 billion next year with the release of the new Grand Theft Auto IV). I've seen a few film sets and it's always awesome and appalling how much it takes to produce even the worst movie.

BioShock's most amazing aspect is its set design, the exquisite art deco environments and flourishes (my favorite is the redwood trees individually encased in glass at the bottom of the sea), and it must have taken a butt-load of money to stable a group of artists that talented. This is the sort of place you can just wander around gape-jawed, regardless of the story or combat.

So, my history with these games continues, more complex and sophisticated than when I was ten and whacking a white dot back and forth on a TV screen, but with the same ambivalence and awe, joyfulness and dread.