Experimenter

Experimenter (4.5/5)

As Experimenter reminds us, the Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience and authority is found in nearly every first year psychology textbook, but the influence of Milgram’s work has spread much further than just the freshman college course. It’s the kind of experiment that has taken hold of popular imagination in such a way that high school teachers across discipline drop it as a little bit of knowledge. There’s something about Milgram’s experiment that makes for a great story. It’s a narrative all its own that confirms our worst fears. It also happens to be the focus of Michael Almereyda’s biopic, Experimenter.

Just a refresher: in Milgram’s obedience experiment, an unsuspecting subject is asked to play the role of a teacher while a second individual, who is an actor aware of the ruse, plays the student. A man pretending to be a doctor, garbed in a lab coat, explains the rules of the experiment to the subject, and during the experiment, the “doctor” sits behind the subject and directs his or her actions. The subject/teacher is instructed to ask the student a series of questions--the student would essentially have to memorize and repeat the second word in a series of word pairs--and when the student chooses incorrectly, the subject must shock him with an increasing amount of voltage. Throughout the experiment, the student/actor feigns pain from his place in a separate room. Despite reservations, the vast majority of subjects administered the highest voltage.

Experimenter is a surprisingly strong entry into that most maligned of genres: the biopic. The biopic has a reputation for being weepy Oscar bait at its absolute worst (see: the perfectly mediocre The Theory of Everything and the truly egregious The Imitation Game, exemplar of everything wrong with the genre). Biopics shouldn’t be this awful. There are some fascinating people who have interesting lives and exist in interesting times. If I were to diagnose the problem with the biopic, it is that they skew too heavily towards telling us one man or woman’s story without regard to the larger context. Why do these people matter? What do they say about the times in which they lived? Not only do most biopics take these questions for granted, they also try to stuff a person’s entire life into two hours, which is usually a fool’s errand.

Along with End of the Tour and Love & Mercy, Experimenter slips the curse of the biopic by paying attention to questions that extend far beyond the life of a single man. Almereyda uses Milgram’s life as a jumping off point to explore questions of power, authority, human plasticity, and authenticity. At times, the film feels more like a visual essay than a traditional film. Although screenwriting rules usually forbid voice-over and breaking the fourth wall may seem garish, Almereyda stuffs his film with both. Milgram himself becomes our Greek chorus, explaining his experiments, which are not limited to the one that made him famous, and leading us through his life.

Because his voice accompanies us throughout the film, Peter Sarsgaard must do plenty of heavy lifting as Milgram. The role of Stanely Milgram provides a wonderful opportunity for an actor, and Sarsgaard takes full advantage of being front and center, addressing the audience for much of the film’s running time. Sarsgaard plays Milgram as hunched and observational. He rarely interacts with any of the subjects of his experiment, and his ability to speak to the camera gives him a sort of God-like authority. And yet, he’s also unassuming. He may have a massive ego, but it has been honed by the rigors of scientific discourse.

Sarsgaard also subtly plays Milgram’s identity by ever so slightly incorporating a Jewish-American accent when he’s alone with family and friends but hiding it when he’s in a professional setting. As he mentions throughout the film, Milgram is the Yiddish word for pomegranate, one of the six fruits of the Hebrew Bible. Milgram’s work was influenced the events of the Holocaust and Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, an event that would lead the philosophy Hannah Arendt to coin the term, “the banality of evil.” From Eichmann’s point of view, he wasn’t a mastermind behind one of humanity’s greatest sins; he was merely doing his job as a small time member of a much larger machine. Evil, then, doesn’t come in the form of Satan; it comes in the form of a bureaucrat doing what he has been told and not taking responsibility. It’s just doing what the nice guy in the lab coat tells me to.

Milgram’s obedience experiment has imbedded itself into the popular consciousness because it purports to say something about human nature, and this is certainly true. But it also says something about how our environment molds our behavior and sense of ethics. The film emphasizes the importance of environmental factors by employing obviously projected backgrounds. Although the sciences purport to harden the world around us--to discover facts--the film’s playful form suggest that Milgram’s work does the opposite. He becomes a postmodern scientist, suggesting with his work that we do not exist except as constructs of the world that shapes us. There’s no I there.

Eventually, the film makes its way down the rabbit hole of inauthenticity. In 1976, CBS produced a fictionalized account of Milgram’s obedience experiment, starring none other than William Shatner (Kellen Lutz) as a fictionalized version of Milgram. This leads to scene in which Milgram as played by Sarsgaard converses with Shatner as played by Kellen Lutz dressed as Milgram on the set of a cheesy 70s film.

The film even questions Milgram’s ability to navigate ethical concerns in science. There is no way that the obedience experiment would make its way past an institutional review board today (“informed consent” is a hell of a thing), but Milgram seems disconcertedly dismissive of the kind of emotional harm he may have caused others. Tellingly, it’s the women in the film who mostly call him out on his lack of concern, which suggests that Milgram may have had a gendered ethical blind spot. In the end, the film asks us to think about ethics in a postmodern world. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Vonnegut, which I’ll leave you with: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

David Bowie - Blackstar

David Bowie - Blackstar (5/5)

On The Next Day, David Bowie self-consciously looked back through his legacy. The repurposed “Heroes” cover art and the songs about youth (both of unnamed protagonists as in “I’d Rather Be High” and Bowie’s own as in “Where Are We Now?”) signaled Bowie’s intent on sifting through memories and taking stock of a life fully lived. On Blackstar, his follow up album, Bowie seems more interested in breaking from the past and once again making a massive leap into the unknown.

Always the consummate collaborator, Bowie this time not only brought in his long time producer Tony Visconti but also enlisted the work of the Donny McCaslin Quartet, a group that melds jazz and electronica. Because he has devoured so many genres over the decades, jazz isn’t necessarily new to Bowie. “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” from Aladdin Sane and “Bring Me the Disco King” from Reality immediately spring to mind. While Blackstar demonstrates Bowie’s most sustained engagement with jazz, it should come as no surprise that Bowie tackles the genre from his own askance perspective and fully fleshes it out with his ever shifting personality.

In addition to jazz, 90s trip-hop and ambient electronica are equally important to Blackstar’s sound. The eponymous album opener is a nearly ten minute opus populated with mythic, future-fantasy lyrics that sound as if they were assembled from William S. Burrough’s famous “cut up” technique that Bowie has been known to use. Set to a stuttering drum beat, Bowie sings of the “villa of Ormen” in the cadence of a Gregorian chant. The archaic lyrics showcase Bowie’s interest in medieval European culture and narratives, but here they brush up against electronic arrangements resulting in something that both sounds like it always was and will never be. If past and present are two similarly charged magnets, then “Blackstar” stands at its very center. A little over the halfway mark, “Blackstar” takes a turn towards the theatrical, from a Broadwayesque crescendo into a slinking 1930s cabaret number. As if that weren’t enough, Middle Eastern sounding woodwinds and strings eventually creep into the proceedings. Within ten minutes, “Blackstar” seems to be reaching towards everything at once, but still maintains a cohesive identity all its own, much like Bowie himself.

As expansive and experimental as “Blackstar” sounds, it’s still more inviting than the more streamlined “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” Both songs employ polyrhythm and syncopation to unsettle the listener. While the Donny McCaslin Quartet attack their instruments, Bowie layers his patented croon over the carefully controlled chaos. Donny McCaslin and company deserve a good deal of credit for their aggressive playing, giving the songs real bite, but both tracks were originally demoed by Bowie himself prior to anyone else’s involvement, and they showcase his real ability to really investigate disparate genres and then make them his own.

Letting his quintessential Britishness poke through, Bowie borrows the title of “‘Tis a Pity” from a seventeenth-century English play about an incestruous tryst between brother and sister, certainly an allusion and subject matter you aren’t going to find from any other rocker. Likewise, the lyrics of “Girl Loves Me” are partly in the style of Nadsat, the fictional dialect developed by British author Anthony Burgess in his dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. As if these disparate influences weren’t enough, “Sue” and “Lazarus” in particular play up the album’s noir feel, which is also echoed in the album title and artwork. At only forty minutes in length, Blackstar contains multitudes. The album name is actually supposed to be styled as ★, and so much of the work sounds like an artist trying to slip the constraints of language and rigid rationality.

The album’s last two tracks, “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” are a little friendlier than those that precede them. Both are midtempo pop songs driven by indelible melodies. After the dark collage of music that constitutes most of the album, the final two tracks offer a little sliver of light and some emotional release. This tension has always been within Bowie’s music. From the beginning, the light has always kept darkness at bay, if just barely. And here Bowie is in his late sixties and reinventing himself once again. In “Dollar Days,” he sings, “I’m dying to / Push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again,” a mantra for both this album and Bowie’s life. I picked up Blackstar on the day it came out, and after listening to the album repeatedly, I thought to myself, “I can’t wait to see what Bowie is going to do next.”

But, of course, we’ll never know. As everyone knows by now, David Bowie died of cancer two days after the album was released. In retrospect, it’s clear that the album was written while Bowie was contemplating his own fragile mortality, and death and dying are found throughout the album, something I vaguely recognized when listening, but I mostly chose to ignore because the idea just seemed unfathomable at the time. Producer Tony Visconti called Blackstar Bowie’s final parting gift, an idea present in the lyrics and title of the final song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” The album speaks to Bowie’s generosity of spirit--that, in the end, he poured out nearly everything he had for his art and his fans. And who but Bowie could craft a final work of art that brilliantly looks towards the future, exploring new sounds and ideas all the way to the end.

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I first became interested in Bowie when I was about eighteen and I bought Ziggy Stardust. Before then, I had heard his radio hits, but I had never really delved fully into his work. Listening to the album at the time felt like a world opening up to me. It was catchy, theatrical, campy, and mercurial in the way only Bowie could manage. Back then, gas was cheap, and I drove around in my shitty, bluish-green Ford Escort nearly non-stop, and for some time Ziggy Stardust became my soundtrack to the woods of rural Ohio.

From then on, I was hooked. The first paper I wrote in college that I was somewhat proud of was written for my freshman composition class, and it focused on the questions of gender and sexuality in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was only through Bowie that I came to more fully comprehend--rather than merely “know”--the fluid nature of gender and sexuality.

Before listening to Bowie, my understanding of these concepts were rather rigid and staid. I was brought up in an evangelical household, and while I had abandoned much of the regressive politics of that culture by the time I was a senior in high school, I had yet to fully come to terms with homophobic thought and language. I was still quasi-religious at the time, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around why homosexuality was supposed to be a sin. I reasoned that if it was a sin, then it must have been on the level of lying or some other kind of act that wouldn’t imperil your soul. But I also used the occasional unthinking homophobic slur. While I was moving in the right direction, I still had too much of a regressive attitude towards gender and sexuality. Bowie’s music allowed me to become more open and accepting.

In other words, Bowie’s music did what great art is supposed to: it transformed the way I saw the world. I realized that many of the harmful and bigoted ideas I had about others were incommensurate with the person I wanted to be, and they needed to be discarded. I can honestly say that listening to David Bowie gave me empathy and understanding. His music has since weaved itself into my life. Whenever I’m on a long plane ride, I always listen to the entire Berlin trilogy, and I even incorporated music from the “Heroes” album into my wedding ceremony.

Bowie’s musical contribution is vast. In his discography there are universes within universes that I suspect I’ll be exploring from here until my dying day. His output in the 70s is unparalleled, but he continued to surprise. There’s a lot more to Bowie than the way he played with gender and sexuality. Questions of identity were central. The truism about Bowie was that he was a chameleon, but every new personae still felt like it was somehow still him. He always is and never was David Jones, David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and Aladdin Sane. He’s like a postmodern Bodhisattva.

In fact, I had a hard time reconciling the Earthling era David Bowie that populated the airwaves when I was growing up with the 60s folkie he started off as. Over time, Bowie’s unceasing transformations started to become one of his constants, a concept he played with by purposefully reemploying the iconic “Heroes” cover for The Next Day. His contributions also spanned far more than his music. He was an incredible stylist and a great actor. Who other than David Bowie could have pulled of the outrageous fashion of Jareth the Goblin King in The Labyrinth? But he could also go for subtlety as in The Prestige and The Man Who Fell to Earth or play with his iconography like he did in an episode of Extras.

In some ways, there’s a Bowie for everyone. But I think that for fans, all Bowies are necessary. After buying Blackstar, I found myself scouring the internet for stories about Bowie, and I spent hours perusing Consequence of Sound’s ordering of every Bowie album from worst to best where they staunchly defend his much maligned work in the eighties. I disagree with plenty of their reviews (soon I’m certain that Reality is going to get a reassessment), but the fact that the critical attitude of Bowie’s oeuvre can shift so dramatically demonstrates that when it comes to Bowie nothing’s unnecessary. However uneven, each album has always been a new facet of a restless artist. He’s left us a body of work that will take a lifetime to explore, and for that I will always be grateful.

Much has been made recently about the “Lazarus” music video, which takes as its subject a bedridden David Bowie and includes the lyrics, “Look up here, I’m in Heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.” Death is present throughout Blackstar, but like an idiot I mostly ignored these obvious hints. A world without David Bowie seemed inconceivable, especially since he was still making vital and important music. There was more work to be done. It’s amazing to me that even as he passed away, Bowie had the utmost control over his image. It’s equally amazing that he had such generosity to give us one final parting gift. Few other than Bowie could transform their death into a work of art.

I’m sure the death and resurrection story of Lazarus appealed to Bowie’s playful instincts. And he’s not wrong. He will rise again, if not in flesh, then in culture. Like Wintermute in Neuromancer, Bowie has achieved something like non-corporeal sentience. His iconography will live on, and other artists will take Bowie the saint and remake him for their own purposes. Artists have been creating their own David Bowies for some time now, from Hedwig and the Angry Inch to Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine to The Venture Brothers to a Neil Gaiman short story. Bowie is an artist, a revolutionary, and an idea unbound by time, space, life, and death.

Despite (or because) of this, it still seems unthinkable that David Bowie has died. Even as he aged, he seemed ethereal as if he had already slipped this plane of existence long ago. Rest in peace, David Bowie, and thank you.

Reflection on the Star Wars Universe

Reflection on the Star Wars Universe

I’d like to make a quick programming note about my exploration of the Star Wars Expanded Universe and any further Star Wars related reviews in the near future. When I started investigating the Star Wars EU many months ago, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. Would the novels recreate the joy twelve-year-old me had of discovering a galaxy beyond the original three films? Or would they be embarrassingly bad like so much of the popular cultural detritus of the past? Turns out it was somewhere in between.

As much as I enjoyed revisiting the Star Wars EU, not all of it worked. At the very least, even those works that capture the character and feel of the original trilogy--such as the Thrawn Trilogy--were hampered by the fact that the Clone Wars saga had not been fleshed out, meaning any references to events prior to A New Hope never fully meshed with George Lucas’s overall plan as it unfolded from 1999 to 2005. But there were also some goofy ideas that felt like hastily written fan fiction (Dark Empire, I’m looking at you).

I’m planning on continuing my journey through the Star Wars EU. After all, I still have to finish off the Thrawn Trilogy. It will be interesting to see the Star Wars EU now that we have a very real “official” vision of how the saga should continue. I would also like to take a look at the new ancillary novels and comics that have the Disney stamp of approval. Of course, I won’t be able to immerse myself in all Star Wars all the time. I think it was Jesus (aka Young Anakin) who said, “Man cannot live by Star Wars alone.” But I might keep this up until the release of Episode VIII. Hell, I haven’t even watched those Ewok movies yet, which will likely require some time, whisky and gumption to get through.

Finally, I wonder how my time spent in the Star Wars EU affected my experience watching Episode VII. As I noted in my review, I liked Episode VII, but I was also ambivalent about how much of A New Hope the film borrowed. If anything, familiarity with the Star Wars EU eased expectations I had of Episode VII. Of course, the roman numerals in the title ask the audience to see this entry as even more important. They’re telling us that it’s a part of the cyclical myth of the Skywalker family, which has always been central to Lucas’s vision. But, at the same time, it’s also one of hundreds of stories told using tools fashioned by Lucas. I love having all of these stories, but they by necessity make the films a little less special. After all, if you increase the supply, then the value of the “product” diminishes.

For me, the original trilogy will always be the very heart of Star Wars. After that, the prequels and the Clone Wars cartoon constitute Lucas’s insane and uneven vision. Everything else, good and bad, will stand apart. And I’m okay with that. I love Lucas’s influences and the world he built, and I’m just happy to get some more stories told within that galaxy. For now, I’ll take it.

Star Wars: Episode VII--The Force Awakens

Star Wars: Episode VII--The Force Awakens (4/5)

For many Star Wars fans, they have been waiting thirty-two years for The Force Awakens, both because the film continues the story of Han, Leia, and Luke and because they don’t consider the prequels a worthy follow up to the original trilogy. Disney, the new corporate stewards of Star Wars, seem to be acutely aware of fan reaction, and they have crafted Episode VIII with these disgruntled fans in mind. In order to do so, they brought in J.J. Abrams who has garnered a reputation as a fixer when it comes to franchises run astray. He directed an installment of Mission Impossible after Tom Cruise’s star had fallen, and then he helmed the rebooted Star Trek as well as its unsuccessful sequel. From his first announcement as director, I was disappointed to see J.J. Abrams in charge, largely because it seemed like such an unimaginative choice. Without a doubt, The Force Awakens is the best outcome we can expect from someone like J.J. Abrams (which I know is both something of a compliment and an insult).

I’ll try to make this review relatively spoiler free, but if you want to go in without knowing anything beyond what you may have gleaned from the trailers, then you might want to skip the review until you’ve actually seen the film.

In a knowing nod to the audience, the new generation of characters are themselves immersed in the tales of Star Wars. They’ve heard of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, the Millennium Falcon, and the Rebellion, but to them these stories are little more than myths. You can read this as cynical audience manipulation if you like, but the four new characters--ace pilot Poe Dameron, reformed Stormtrooper Finn, orphaned scavenger Fey, and Darth Vader wannabe Kylo Ren--all earn their place in the Star Wars galaxy. They’re genuinely interesting characters who have their own conflicts and arcs over the course of the film, and the actors turn in great performances, something that has long been missing from Star Wars.

But those of us who first fell in love with the original trilogy probably aren’t coming to The Force Awakens primarily for the new characters. We’re showing up for our old favorites whether we want to admit it or not. I was skeptical of the plan to bring back the big three from the original trilogy. Why reuse characters whose stories have already been told, I reasoned. But when Harrison Ford finally arrives decked out as Han Solo, I’ll admit to becoming a little giddy. Not only was it exciting for Han to show up but for Ford to show up as well, since he has seemed completely absent for his last several performances. I’m not sure what Abrams did--perhaps slip some whisky into Ford’s morning coffee?--but Ford is by turns funny, charming, and gruff. And when he finally rendezvous with Carrie Fisher as General Leia, I may have become a little verklempt.

Most moviegoers will get a vague wiff of deja vu for most of the proceedings, and that’s because the film cribs heavily from the original trilogy. In fact, The Force Awakens largely plays out like a mix and match A New Hope. There’s a desert planet, a character with a greater destiny, an older mentor, and a giant superweapon (we’ll get to that soon). In fact, The Force Awakens feels like a reboot in multiple ways. First, the film isn’t too far off from being a remake of A New Hope. Second, the film’s goal appears to be resetting the series after the poorly received prequels. From the recycled plot to the smaller focus to the use of practical effects, The Force Awakens aims to go back to basics. Still, it's clear the film was made with genuine affection and reverence (but perhaps too much of the latter).

How much enjoyment you can ring out of the film’s retread of old favorites depends on what you expect from a Star Wars movie. Personally, I went back and forth on the issue. The one retread that genuinely bothered me was the return of yet another Death Star superweapon. Learning that they were bringing back a version of the Death Star gave me terrible flashbacks to all of those awful superweapons from the 1990s Star Wars novels. At one point Han Solo voices my feelings, saying that this new planet sized weapon is just like the Death Star, to which another character swats away such concerns, basically saying, “Naw, dude. This isn’t anything like the Death Star. It’s, like, much, much bigger.” (I’m kind of paraphrasing here). But unlike in A New Hope, where the Death Star plans drive the plot forward, the new superweapon seems mostly incidental.

I’ll admit to both enjoying The Force Awakens and feeling somewhat ambivalent. For all their faults, the prequels strove for something new. George Lucas didn’t have to answer to anyone, and he gave us something that was weird, unique, and, yes, sometimes terrible. What he didn’t do is repeat himself. Disney won’t let that happen again, you can be sure. And according to fan reaction, the public has largely welcomed our new corporate overlords. Perhaps it’s a fool’s errand to hope for something unique and exciting from big budgeted entertainment. At the same time, that’s exactly what George Lucas gave us with A New Hope, a postmodern bricolage of cowboys, samurai, myth, WWII, and experimental cinema. It’s unlikely we’ll ever see something like that in the Star Wars universe, but we will get a string of some pretty good movies. I guess for now that’s good enough.

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (3.5/5)

As you might guess from the title, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, was designed to follow the lead of Empire Strikes Back by going darker than the original installment. Where the first game attempted to recapture some of the energy of the original trilogy, Sith Lords really rubs our noses in the darker side of Star Wars. Once again, the Jedi have been nearly wiped out. (The Jedi seem so prone to mass extinction that it’s a wonder they’re still around four thousand years later). Your character stands as the last Jedi, but you have lost nearly all of your Force powers.

Slowly your backstory is revealed. During the the Mandalorian War, previously mentioned in the original game, your character decided that the Jedi Council was too slow to act and joined Revan and the other Jedi who mounted a defense against the Mandalorian onslaught. Upon returning to the council, you were stripped of your connection to the force and exiled. Since then, the Jedi have seemingly disappeared from the galaxy, and a bounty has been placed on your head, because you are the last of their kind. Eventually you discover that other Jedi exist, but they are in hiding, attempting to uncover the threat facing them and to strike when the moment’s right. Your goal is to assemble these Jedi and face this threat together.

Like most RPGs, Sith Lords follows the Wizard of Oz narrative structure of a long journey where new and strange character join your party as you continue on your quest. There’s the soldier, Atton Rand, the blind Force wielder, Visas, the bounty hunter with a heart of gold, Mira, a Mandalorian only known as the Mandalorian, and of course the droids from the first game, HK-47 and T3-M4, who, liked Artoo and Threepio, make a reappearance. This list is hardly exhaustive, and like too many RPGs, the number of characters are overwhelming. I don’t think I once included in my party, G0-T0, the robotic avatar of a crime boss (don’t ask).

But perhaps the most important character is Kreia, an old crone who has a strong connection to the Force and bond with the main character. You first meet Kreia after waking up on a seemingly abandoned mining facility. Kreia is neither fully Jedi nor Sith, and instead represents a middle path between the warring philosophies. This is best illustrated in the game in a cutscene that occurs after you have given some money to a panhandler on Nar Shaddaa. Kreia advises you against this seemingly altruistic action, suggesting that it may have unseen consequences, which turns out to be the case since the man you gave money to is later attacked for his recent boon. There’s an interesting comment here about how actions reverberate across the galaxy in ways unknown to us.

The Sith Lords was a notoriously rushed game, and it’s obvious to anyone who plays it that the story’s incomplete. Recently, a bunch of good samaritans developed a patch that restores a good deal of the lost content, but The Sith Lords still feels unfinished. However, there are those who have championed the game as better than the original. While I enjoyed playing The Sith Lords, I can’t agree that it’s necessarily an improvement. With the exception of some more micromanaging, the gameplay is nearly identical to its predecessor. (No one finished an RPG and thought to themselves, I really wish I could spend more time tweaking my weapons and armor). And because of the game’s unfinished nature, you don’t delve as much into the characters. I never felt as if I knew my allies as well as I did those in the first game.

I think some who claim The Sith Lords is better than KOTOR fall under the false assumption that just because something is darker then it is necessarily more complex. Certainly, a game can be gritty and explore complex moral grey areas, as this game accomplishes during the cutscene on Nar Shaddaa. But just as often, going dark can merely be a juvenile’s idea of what it means to be adult. In The Sith Lords, any moments of genuine moral exploration are counteracted by sophomoric understanding of dark and gritty.

**SPOILERS AHEAD** The worst instance occurs after you have finally found and assembled the remaining Jedi on Dantooine. And they are all quickly killed. So the main focus of your quest is rendered moot. What’s more, most of these members of the Jedi Council are kind of jerks. What makes this development less interesting is that the prequels, which have plenty of their own problems, actually explored the destruction of the Jedi and the difficulty of seeing the consequences of our actions in a more interesting manner. I would take questions of how war makes fascists of us all in the prequels over the veneer of dark and gritty The Sith Lords too often presents. So while the original game attempted to reignite a sense of fun and adventure missing from Star Wars during the prequel era, The Sith Lords competes directly against the prequels in their own arena and somehow ends up losing. **END SPOILERS**

Still, there’s plenty to like about The Sith Lords, especially if you liked the first game. While underdeveloped as characters, the designs of the Sith antagonists are admittedly pretty cool. Darth Sion is nothing more than charred remains apparently fueled only by his hatred, and Darth Nihilus dons an awesome mask that appears to be influenced by Japanese Kabuki theater. With more time, the game may have fulfilled its promise, even if it may never eclipse the original game.

Guided by Voices Reunion Albums

Guided by Voices - Let’s Go Eat the Factory, Class Clown Spots a UFO, Bears for Lunch, English Little League, Motivational Jumpsuit, Cool Planet

On September 18th of last year, the seminal indie rock band, Guided by Voices, released a statement on Facebook announcing their unexpected dissolution, thus ending their four year “original lineup” reunion. The break up occurred in the middle of a tour, and the announcement provided no clear reason why the band had decided to throw in the towel then and there. I was lucky enough to have seen the band live a few weeks prior to the break up, and they were just as energetic and rowdy as a bunch of fifty-something rockers could be. (Perhaps a little too rowdy. Robert Pollard’s excessive on stage drinking often threatens to tip over from funny drunk to scary drunk, and plenty of people have suggested that this may have been the cause of the break).

Despite rumors of Pollard’s prickly personality, Guided by Voices’s reunion in 2010 wasn’t completely unexpected considering that reunion tours have become de rigueur among  90s alternative rock stalwarts. But the creative force of this reunited GbV was unexpected. Alternative rock reunions have run the gamut from artistic triumphs (Dinosaur Jr.) to quick cash grabs (The Pixies). Starting in 2012, after some time playing live shows, GbV pumped out six albums in about three years, each album a shotgun blast of about twenty songs. Over the course of these three years, GbV produced the equivalent of what would be the entire discography of certain bands.  

While some music critics recognized the startling quality of this reunited GbV, most critics leveled the same statements they had been making about GbV and Pollard’s work for years: it’s uneven. But this simple dismissal doesn’t do the reunion albums justice. Any band would be lucky to produce these six albums, much less within such a short time frame. So a little over a year after GbV unceremoniously broke up, I’ve decided to do a brief rundown of all six of their reunion albums, many of which surpass the work Pollard was doing in the late nineties and early aughts.

Let’s Go Eat the Factory (5/5)

If there’s one consistent criticism of Guided by Voices it is that they are unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. Too many weird song fragments disrupt the pop perfection of GbV’s best writing, or so the story goes. But for GbV fans, the weird shrapnels of music heighten the band’s best songcraft and the albums as a whole. For those looking for the more experimental side of GbV, Let’s Go Eat the Factory, delivers the goods. Many of the songs sound purposefully clipped and incomplete. The sugary and non-sensical “Doughnut for a Snowman” fades in on a wind instrument and fails to make it to the two-minute mark. The following song, “Spiderfighter,” along with “Waves” sound like pop music made by a swarm of bees. The album also makes plenty of room for strings on tracks like “Hang Mr. Kite,” “Chocolate Boy,” and “We Won’t Apologize for the Human Race,” the album closer that would inaugurate a string of absolutely killer album closers on each reunion album.

Class Clown Spots a UFO (4.5/5)

For those looking for the highs of Robert Pollard’s best pop songs, Class Clown Spots a UFO absolutely delivers. The title track, “Class Clown Spots a UFO,” and “Keep It in Motion” eschew the group’s usual lo-fi antics for a fuller sound, and either could have been radio staples two decades ago. There are also a handful of acidic, guitar meltdowns that draw on the band’s psychedelic side. “Tyson’s High School” combines Pollard’s typical lyrics about grade school with a wall of guitar fuzz. Class Clown is arguably more uneven than Let’s Go Eat the Factory, because there is a larger gulf between the catchy songs and the weird ones. But any album that provides space for “Lost in Spaces,” a sub-one-minute piano ballad by Tobin Sprout is a winner in my book.

Bears for Lunch (5/5)

There are a couple of easy rebuttals to the criticism that Guided by Voices albums are uneven. If you don’t like the weirdo song nuggets on Bee Thousand and Alien Lane, then all you need is to look at Under the Bushes Under the Stars, which, minus the noise track “The Perfect Life,” contains twenty-three (twenty-three!) killer songs. For me, Bears for Lunch stands as the unofficial follow up to Under the Bushes Under the Stars, because each and every song aims to embed itself in your brain and stay there. Despite the fact that Bears for Lunch was recorded decades after the band’s golden period, it actually serves as a great introduction to GbV, mostly by encapsulating their great songwriting skills and musical influences. Punk, psychedelia, Pete Townsend guitar heroics, and 90s indie rock all find a place on Bears for Lunch. The album also serves as a great showcase for Tobin Sprout whose often lighter touch nicely compliments the work of frontman Robert Pollard. Sprout’s responsible for many of the album’s highlights, including the Beatlesesque “Waking Up the Stars” and the CSNY inflected “Waving at Airplanes.” It’s Sprout’s prettier songs that really balance out the album, and it’s often true that Pollard works best when someone works as a foil. While he has written a few great solo albums (including the incredible From a Compound Eye), Pollard benefits from working closely with other creatives, which is why outside of GbV, his best work is with the band Boston Spaceships. What’s truly amazing about Bears for Lunch is that at a moment when GbV should have been tiring out (this was their third album of 2012), they sounded more energized than ever.

English Little League (3.5/5)

2013 must have been a pretty relaxed year for the reunited Guided by Voices, since they released only a single album. English Little League leans more heavily on longer songs (by GbV standards). There are only two songs shorter than two minutes and none under a minute in length. The more out there songs don’t land quite as well as on the band’s previous three albums, and a couple of the longer cuts could have been shaved in length. Still, there are plenty of highlights on English Little League, even if not all of them hit you immediately. Album opener, “Xeno Pariah,” starts with some “ooohs” and “ahhhs” borrowed from the Beach Boys and only gets better from there. “Flunky Minnows” stands out as one of the album’s absolute pop gems. And, as is true of everyone of the reunion albums, the final song, “W/ Glass in Foot,” absolutely sticks the landing.

Motivational Jumpsuit (4.5/5)

Motivational Jumpsuit opens with “Littlest League Possible,” a sort of manifesto and call to arms about finding enjoyment out of being a big fish in a small pond. It’s a great attitude not only for aging alt rockers but for anyone looking to produce art in our splintered culture. Not even half of the songs on Motivational Jumpsuit stretch past the two minute mark, and only a single song eeks its way past three minutes, making the album sound more tossed off than even their previous efforts. For most bands, this would be a dig at the quality of the album, but Robert Pollard and company have always allied themselves with the spontaneous prose, first-thought-best-thought philosophy of the Beats. Because of their blink and you’ll miss them length, it might take a couple of spins for the songs on Motivational Jumpsuit to sink in. But if there are great songs, they’re easy to find on the album, including the optimistic sounding “Record Level Love,” the exuberant “Planet Score,” and riff heavy “Zero Elasticity.” And while it’s a fool’s errand to look for meaning in most of Pollard’s cryptic lyrics, “Writers’ Bloc (Psycho All the Time),” in which Pollard sings “The last recording nearly killed me,” might have been our first inkling that this reunion line up was not long for this world.

Cool Planet (4/5)

Coming out months after Motivational Jumpsuit, Cool Planet sounds in many ways like a companion piece to the earlier record. Like its predecessor, Cool Planet consists of a smattering of quickly written and recorded songs that get much of their energy from their six pack and a tape deck origins. Sadly enough, the album was the final product of Guided by Voice’s productive reunion. This time around, the boys of GbV have a cool story to go along with the album. During the brutally cold and snowy winter of 2013/2014, the band decided that while they were stuck inside, they might as well write an album. (This kind of makes me feel bad for watching so much Netflix during that winter). As always, the album contains a number of standout tracks. The nearly over before it starts, “Pan Swimmer” is a welcome injection of yelps and guitar. Pollard sounds like he’s having so much fun on “Males of Wormwood Mars” that he nearly lets the song break the three minute mark. And “All American Boy” sounds like a ramshackle Mott the Hoople. The entire affair ends with the title track, “Cool Planet,” a tightly-wound pint-sized epic that serves as a fitting end to a hell of a second act.