Tuesday, April 22, 2008

No Country For Old Men – A Dust Bowl Odyssey


Not being a fantasy or sci-fi movie, I wasn’t going to post my thoughts about this flick. The fact that I initially hated it also played its part. But like it or not, this movie stays with you - it is one of those “different” sort of flicks that "get you thinkin".

And I figured that in itself is a kind of recommendation regardless of my initial reaction; is the movie you “liked” but forgot about a week or two after seeing it really better than one you “hated” but were still thinking about months later (when I say “thinking about” I mean something more than just feeling grossed out)?

SPOILER WARNING. If you ever plan on seeing this movie – STOP HERE. This movie’s effect hinges a great deal on surprise and you won’t enjoy it half as much if you know it in advance.

NCFOM is set in the Western US of 1980, its plot is unaccompanied by soundtrack, and follows a quietly rambling pace – punctuated by moments of extreme violence until its “conclusion”. I put quotes around that last because the movie doesn’t really end so much as the camera turns off (one of those).

I group this type of movie under what I call the “dust bowl” genre, for lack of a better term; cast in the West (often with little or no soundtrack), usually having a sense of general emptiness, quiet or desolation, it has some very basic character motivations occasionally contrasted with quirky or sometimes psychopathic behavior, and it falls in with the likes of The Hitcher, Wild At Heart, The Last Great Picture Show, Natural Born Killers, My Own Private Idaho, Into the Wild, and probably many more that I could have included but can’t think of at the moment.

There seems to be something about the West that lends itself to the offbeat modern story; full of big open spaces, its wildness and isolation bespeak a kind of mystery – even moreso now in the modern age than it was back in the days of the "wild west", as trends roll in from the coasts and acquire a distinctly Western twist before blending into the general stew of tidepool cultures where you never know quite what to expect, and the term “local” becomes meaningless. This to me is a kind of modern "magic", and is therefore partly what I meant when I said that NCFOM “grew on” me, because it made me realize that in this sense, “dust bowl’ movies actually are cousins to the fantasy genre I'm so fond of.

The first thing that hit me when I watched the movie was the thought that Javier Bardem looked a lot like Martin Landau in his earlier days, and I couldn’t shake the impression throughout the movie that the main character was being stalked by the commander of Space 1999. Since then I managed to get some side by side photos and I guess now they look more like distant cousins to me than twins…

By the way, no I’m not that old that I was an actual fan of Space 1999; I knew about it mostly because I grew up surrounded by my dad’s sprawling collection of sci-fi paraphernalia (issues of Starlog, Cinefantastique, etc). Just for the record.

But as usual I digress.

The thing most responsible for my original dislike of the movie was the sense that everything was hopeless, and that in such an environment Bardem’s character Anton Chigurh appeared as a kind of omnipotent force in a world consisting purely of killers and the waiting-to-be-killed.

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if John Ryder from The Hitcher had gone on to become a part time contract killer instead of being ventilated by a shotgun, this is probably the film for you. For my part, I thought I might have been the kind of person who would want to see that kind of movie, until I saw NCFOM.

Chigurh for his part seemed like a murderous Forest Gump, or maybe a cross between Forest and the Terminator. Quiet, plodding, inexorable, deadly (and sometimes plain annoying), he was always turning up in the shadows and committing random ultraviolence before disappearing again, accompanied by his “captive bolt pistol” (I had no idea what this was until I looked it up on wiki) and what looks like a semi-automatic shotgun with silencer (which unfortunately kind of underscored the Space 1999 thing for me, as it looked and sounded like a “pew pew” style raygun).

He is like a supernatural entity, even being described as “a ghost” by rival operator Carson Wells. Generally he stayed on Moss’ trail by way of the transponder hidden in the suitcase, so they explained that much, but how did he manage to track down Wells? Pure luck? I mean nowadays you can use the internet as an excuse for supposedly finding a person’s most hidden information in half an hour, but this was set in 1980.

And for what it’s worth, why was he apprehended at the beginning of the movie, other than for a cheap excuse to show his badass credentials by way of him breaking out of a police station? At least when the Terminator did his police station scene he actually had a recognizable motive...

Chigurh isn’t totally untouchable – if only to carefully demonstrate otherwise to the critics, they have the protagonist Llewelyn Moss put a round in his leg at one point (leading of course to the over-the-top drugstore scene), and Chigurh gets his arm mangled in a random (as in “Pulp Fiction” random) car accident near the end of the movie, but those are in stark contrast to the rest of the movie, and all in all I had a hard time finding Anton Chigurh very believable.

Then on the other hand you have his quarry Lleweyln, someone else who inspires mixed feelings – initially I kind of rooted for him as the “everyman”, but he was just so clueless about the danger he was exposing his girlfriend to, as well as several innocent bystanders who got (fatally) caught in the middle of things as he attempted to escape with the money, that by the time the Mexican Mob caught up with him I had become sort of indifferent to his fate.

Not to say Moss wasn’t believable – after all who wouldn’t want to keep $2 million he found lying around, and be spooked into making some stupid choices in the process of trying to do so? I’ve got no problem with greed being a primary motive; my indifference stemmed more from the way Moss’ character developed along lines similar to those in The Sopranos, i.e. kind of a clever, brutal animal who did what he felt he had to to get by, with no real aspirations to be a better man. If anything Moss was a little too believable, much as I hate to say it (yeah I know, there’s no pleasing me).

Tommy Lee Jones. After his initial voiceover, I kept waiting for this mild, unassuming but weathered lawman to do something extraordinary, maybe even make a difference of some kind… but no. His character Sheriff Bell makes one bright deduction about the timing of Chigurh’s escape early on, and then spends the rest of film stumbling along in the assassin’s wake, mouthing twangy western jargon and ultimately deciding to retire and dwell upon his dreams and their deeper meanings at the very end. One more person who just cannot manage to slow down much less thwart the progress of Anton the Unstoppable.

Those are all the things I didn’t like about the movie, however the film certainly has its good qualities too. Superbly acted, cast and filmed, it hooks you and reels you into its quiet, dusty atmosphere, and you’re never checking your watch even if you can’t manage to like any of the characters much, because you’re too busy feeling like you’re there, and taking it all in.

More than that, in a weird sort of way NCFOM cleanses the palate of the more typical good-guy-wins action/thriller movies, by showing you what happens if things don’t go in the hero’s favor every step of the way, something worth seeing once in a while if only to refresh your sense of danger and to let you go back to enjoying the “Die-Even-Harder-With-A-Vengeance-Yet-Again” movies (the sort of flicks that I normally want to enjoy).

And as with all “dust bowl” flicks, it’s an example of a plotline whose outcome you really can’t anticipate until you get there; here the “protagonist” and “antagonist” clash and rebound off eachother in a fast moving tangle of events that keep you guessing throughout and thereby transfixed.

If I would have changed anything it probably would have been to shine a bit more light on Chigurh’s more mundane motivations – after all the fact he is even nominally working for money despite being a compulsive psychopath indicates the existence of a more human (if not likable) side to his nature, and I think showing it a bit would have fleshed out his character more; why does he want money? Just to pay for food and gas? Or does he have a mortgage to pay, an ex to support or maybe a heroin addiction to feed (etc)?

The other change I’d have made is more of a “neatness” thing than something which would have made the film better per se; I’m talking about Sheriff Bell and his seemingly incidental role in the movie. He really does nothing more than provide random commentary, yet he is exactly the sort of unlikely hero that normally comes through in the end. Watching the movie closely you sort of get the sense that the book’s author Cormac McCarthy may have originally intended something like this for Bell, but dropped the idea midway through in favor of something more ambiguous and “real”.

That said, I think Bell could have at least taken out Chigurh toward the end (which could have been a very cool fight/shootout after all the buildup to it), even if it was too late to save Moss or his wife, without ruining the movie – after all, the “good guy” won in Pulp Fiction and at least arguably made it a better movie by doing so, so I don’t think the negative ending in NCFOM is so much essential to its being “good” as much as to its being its own quirky self – for better or worse.

In the end I’d have to say for all my disappointment in the villain’s unstoppableness, the hero’s animal baseness and the sheriff's cluelessness, the storyline, casting and cinematography are nonetheless very well done, the tempo is great and it gets you thinking. It just takes a while for it all to sink in.

Go rent it.

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Thursday, April 3, 2008

Shaman – Not So Bad, Actually


Despite getting a bad rap shaman are a pretty good class in my experience.

Although my favorite class remains the hunter, shaman are the next best thing in my book; many deride them for being the proverbial “jack of all trades and master of none”, however this view misses the point of what shaman are all about – shaman are properly viewed as the sum of their parts rather than through the exclusive prism of how they rate on the damage/heal meters.

In other words, the same title “Jack of all trades/master of none” can actually be a strength, if you know how to play your class.

Most classes are optimized heavily toward offense or defense and do great when the fight is on their terms but things tend to get ugly fast when it’s not; and yet when players die, it’s not usually so much that they got flattened by an infinitely superior mob(s) but rather for lack of just a bit more adaptibility to changing circumstances.

If you’ve ever solo’ed as a warrior, think how many near-wins could have been won if someone had tossed you even a single, mediocre heal when you were getting low on HP, or times you’ve played a paladin and wished for a bit more DPS to take out the squishy NPC casters before they all unloaded their heavy spells on you – just a little augmentation in your area of relative weakness would often have made the difference.

These are just general examples – I know full well that creative people can somewhat offset these weaknesses with various specialized trinkets, epic gear and the like however the basic fact remains most classes are deliberately designed to have greater strengths matched by greater weaknesses.

That’s where shaman excel – they may lack the legendary DPS of a fire mage or the tanking strength of a protection warrior, but they also lack the offsetting weaknesses of those classes too (flimsy cloth armor, no heals or etc), and so you will always have options – solo, or in groups/raids where the party needs to adapt quickly to tricky bosses and so forth (i.e. “ok its mega-shield is down for another 10 seconds, everyone switch to DPS! Oops picked up an add, need some more healing!” etc).

The shaman has something in his bag of tools for pretty much any circumstance be it combat or something more obscure like water breathing, water walking, far sight, reincarnation, faster hearth cooldown etc, and this is why I like “shammies”; more options = more interesting to play (which is also a big reason why I like hunters so much, and from what I’ve seen druids also can be very flexible, though I’ve never rolled one).

I’ve been playing my elemental spec shammy for several years now, off and on; the greater part of my experience has been in solo play although I’ve done my share of grouping and raiding as well. I’ve witnessed many different changes to our spec trees, and I’ve learned a few things during that time – through a lot of trial and error which I’m hoping I can spare a few others from. This is by no means a comprehensive list but hopefully it will give you some ideas with your own shaman.

1) Stats. The basics are +spell crit, +INT and +STA, but as with any caster, +mp5 and +spell dmg/healing are also important; if you're gearing up from the auction house you might consider putting sorceror or elder aspect gear on half your slots and invoker on the other half - the main problem here is that no aspect is a perfect fit, since invoker is the only one to provide +spell crit, and that lacks any +STA; the solution in most cases is to seek out quest gear that gives more optimal stat combinations.

2) Elemental Mastery. You should get this talent the minute you hit lvl 40, and hold it back for the multi-mob fights to guarantee an auto-crit chain lightning (followed by a magma totem now that you have a lock on the aggro); this big damage burst greatly weakens most normal mobs and is pivotal to not only surviving multi-mob fights but doing it in style.

3) Weapons. 1h and shield is what you want to use if you’re solo’ing - enhancement shammies are really the only ones who can get mileage out of a 2 hander. Remember your spells are your primary offense not your weapons. For grouping, keep a +spell crit staff in your back pack if you have one, but even then be ready to switch back to 1h/shield if you pick up aggro.

4) Healing. Elemental spec shammies are no more of a main healer than they are of a main tank, i.e. they do it well enough to keep themself propped up when solo’ing, or in a 2 or 3 man quest maybe, but when it comes to full 5 man instance groups you need resto spec to function as a shaman main healer; the elemental shaman always works fine as an assistant healer (you can never have too much healing, and their chain heals are a nice way of keeping everyone topped off), but that’s the extent of it (I once tried doing scholo pre-BC as an elemental main healer and we got flattened just a few steps inside the door).

5) Kiting. Kiting in WoW, if you didn’t know this already, means shooting the mob from a distance while keeping far enough away to avoid getting hit. Although I don’t see this tactic used a lot, the elemental shaman is actually quite good at this, thanks to his frost shock, and the extended range and reduced cooldown on his lightning bolts – you simply alternate 1-2 lightning bolts, frost shock, run away a bit and then repeat as needed. Having the minor speed enchantment on your boots makes this quite a bit easier and will result in several extra bolts over the course of a fight – highly recommend getting this enchantment ASAP and renewing it every time you upgrade your footgear.

6) Totems. Most of these are fairly self explanatory and don’t need special comment, but there are a few I think are noteworthy.

a. Grounding totem. Stops a nasty damage spell every 15 seconds (if you are good about renewing it); kind of high maintenance but well worth it anytime you’re fighting caster or caster-like mobs as it goes a ways toward neutralizing their heightened offense and is key to winning a spell war.

b. Tremor totem. Breaks fear, sleep and charm; you don’t need this terribly often, but when you do need it, you need it, so keep it hotkeyed somewhere close by and remember to use it, because it changes fear using mobs from being difficult to easy.

c. Windwall totem. Kind of an obscure totem, but it will greatly increase your survival rate against archer/marksman types if you remember to use it.

d. Tranquil Air Totem. If you're in a group, and the tanks have less than a perfect lock on aggro, stand way back and drop one of these - and encourage the other casters to stand near you as it lowers threat by 20% for everyone in a 20 yard radius.

7) In melee. Make sure all four of your totems are down at the start of any serious fight; since patch 2.4 these have reduced cooldown and so you can now get a full set planted pretty quickly. Once that’s out of the way I pretty much just use shocks when they're up, and lightning bolts when they're on cooldown – any melee hits I throw are purely incidental.

8) Eject. If things go pear shaped and you need to bail quickly, drop an earthbind totem, switch to ghost wolf form for a faster getaway (they accelerated cast time on GW from 3 seconds to 2 seconds in patch 2.4, which is a big help), and run like hell. As long as the enemies don’t have any nasty slow/root effects this should get you clear.

9) Scryer/Aldor. Don't make the mistake I did of choosing Aldor, and then having to work your way over to Scryer with basilisk eye farming; Scryer is the one to go with for the simple reason that they get the +spell crit shoulder enchantment (Inscription of the Orb) at honored; no matter how good your gear is, it's always nice to have a little more +spell crit.

10) Cool spells at level 62-68+. These are just the "new" spells, to give you an idea of what to expect. I'm holding off talking about the L70 spell as I haven't gotten that far yet.

a. Water Shield (L62). Lasts 10 minutes, passively increases your mana regeneration between fights and actively increases it by a chunk when you get hit. Has to be renewed after 3 hits, but if you stay on top of it you will usually have more mana than you know what to do with. I keep this going at all times.

b. Wrath of Air Totem (L64). Increases spell damage, great if you're going full offense and don't need a grounding totem or tranquil air totem.

c. Earth Elemental Totem (L66). Like having the ability to summon a voidwalker every 20 minutes, these are reasonably tough, and great at taking and holding aggro if you have a ton of mobs on you or just need a tank for something nasty that's immune to kiting.

c. Fire Elemental Totem (L68). This is what you use if you get attacked by a group of casters, or just want some extra dps.

That’s about all I can think of; if any other shaman players happen to read this and want to offer suggestions of their own in the comments I’d be happy to see how other people play the class.

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