Resident Evil: Retribution

So we went and saw Resident Evil: Retribution this past weekend.  As a longtime fan of the movies and the games, we were incredibly excited.  Zombie movies are probably our favorite kind of movie.  And then there was Retribution...

The first Resident Evil movie was good.  The introduction of the new character of Alice really helped the movie.  The zombies were great, the environment (The Hive) was great.  It felt new.  The second Resident Evil movie (Apocalypse) was a misstep.  We see S.T.A.R.S. in action and we get introduced to sexy cop Jill Valentine.  Aside from that, it was a completely forgettable movie with an epic boss battle with Nemesis that completely misses the mark.  Resident Evil: Extinction was amazing.  The post-apocalyptic setting (especially the destroyed Vegas) was fantastic.  Alice was struggling with her new powers and she was armed with dual kukris, which made her a legitimate bad ass.  The zombies were still the main enemies and proved to be excellent fodder for our team of traveling survivors.  Resident Evil: Afterlife stepped it up a notch with the 3D effects.  It was a little more over the top but still made for quite an entertaining movie.  Less emphasis seemed to be placed on the zombies in lieu of the giant axe wielding man (the Executioner lifted from the video game Resident Evil 5).

And that brings us to Resident Evil: Retribution.  We finally get to find out what happened on the freighter at the end of the last movie!  We finally get to see Leon Kennedy and Barry Burton in the movies!  Unfortunately, what followed was the worst movie I've seen all year.  There are SPOILERS ahead but, honestly, I would not recommend that anybody go see this travesty.

Where to start... the plot is beyond convoluted.  The narrative is spotty at best and makes no sense for the first half of the movie.  They eventually offer explanations that at such a late stage feel like a consolation prize.  The dialogue... my god, the dialogue.  I don't know what happened to Paul W. S. Anderson between movies considering he has written all of the movies but he dropped the ball on this one.  After watching Alice and Ada Wong walk through what is very clearly a holographic wall, he feels it necessary to give Ada Wong a line explaining that it is a holographic wall.  As if the audience would not have been able to understand that.  Most of the dialogue comes off as stilted, over-explanatory drudge that is blatantly intended as exposition.

It feels like this film was intended on being one giant appeasement for video game fanboys (and it even fails at that).  Oh, the fans of the game want to see Ada Wong, Barry Burton and Leon Kennedy?  Let's shoehorn them into our story!  Fanboys loved past characters from the franchise?  Let's pull in a handful of people from the previous films!  But wait, didn't most of these people die in those movies?  Doesn't matter!  Let's just use clones, those are always convenient plot devices.

Leon's movie debut is terrible.  He's too rugged and manly - in the games, Leon is much more of a pretty boy who can kick ass  The guy who plays Leon would have made a great Chris Redfield instead of the actor they chose for Afterlife, who had no charisma whatsoever.  Ada Wong's introduction in the movie is lifted straight from a scene in Resident Evil 4 where she sneaks up on Leon and he ends up with a knife to her throat.  It was a great little reference and the casting and costuming of Ada Wong was pitch perfect.  Sadly, her wooden acting and neutered dialogue killed what could have been as intriguing a character as she was in the games.  Barry Burton, who is played by Kevin Durand, is one of the few characters to be pulled off successfully.  He's a little bit cheesy but it captures the essence of Barry pretty damn well.

They even brought in the "Las Plagas" parasite from Resident Evil 4.  I was excited about this.  Resident Evil 4 is still one of the creepiest games ever and the seemingly unstoppable Las Plagas were great enemies, even if they weren't quite zombies.  Instead, what we get in Retribution are Russian Zombies.  I don't know how they are "Las Plagas Undead", as the movie informs us, considering they just look like Russian versions of the zombies from the classic movie, Dead Snow.  There is nothing Plagas about them.  Their heads don't pop off to reveal terrifying parasites.  Nope, they are just regular looking zombies dressed in Russian military outfits and armed with weapons.  We even get a random zombie with a chainsaw (just like in the game, OMG!), despite the fact that a Russian soldier wielding a chainsaw in Red Square doesn't even remotely make sense.  They even bring the Las Plagas parasite back into the movie at the climax, where one of the characters gets the parasite injected into her.  Does she show signs of parasitic infection?  No.  Does she look different at all?  No.  Apparently all it does is give her the ability to heal and makes her strong enough to crack sternums with a single punch.

The movie feels completely disingenuous.  It too often breaks from the flow to go into some CGI screen from the Red Queen's perspective.  The same Red Queen who has somehow now booted series villain Albert Wesker from his spot at the head of Umbrella and is now trying to bring about the downfall of the world.  It feels like a video game with all of these scenes and yet it lacks the spark of ANY of the video games.  There's even a scene towards the end where two people are beating the shit out of each other.  It comes off as very visceral and brutal, which was perfect.  And then, right in the middle of the scene as one character is about to break the other's arm, we cut to a CGI x-ray looking screen showing the bone breaking in the arm.  Because people wouldn't have figured it out if you had just put in the bone crunching sound?  Or if you had shown the bone poking through the skin?  Or just about any other way of showing such a thing rather than breaking from the intense action to show a completely out-of-place video game-esque screen really ensuring that we know this guy's arm is broken.

It goes on and on.  Did we need a five minute scene of Alice fighting and killing the same set of zombies over and over again?  No, probably not.  Did we need yet ANOTHER scene of the god damn laser corridor coming to chop somebody into pieces?  Fucking hell no.  Considering this is now the third movie (out of five) to show the laser hallway, I'm over it.  Was it fresh and impressive the first time?  Absolutely.  But again and again and again?  Not so much.  Same goes for the ridiculous elements that were intended to be 3D.  In Afterlife, they showed the edge of the axeman's axe swinging at you.  In this movie, the exact same thing.

So how do you make the movie seem fresh?  How about inventing some magical plot about Umbrella creating environments based on Suburbia, Moscow, New York and Tokyo?  That'll make for some great scenery!  Even if you buy into it, the logic that they created doesn't follow through.  Movies in general require a suspension of disbelief, but this one just never earns it.  One example is at the very end, where they are trapped at the bottom of an elevator shaft because the Red Queen cut the power.  And then the explosives go off and everything starts flooding, but aren't they going to drown!?  No wait, the elevator suddenly works in the nick of time with absolutely zero explanation.  Thank goodness!

The same lack of logic pervades Retribution.  The Red Queen wants Alice and Ada dead REALLY BADLY because Alice is a threat.  So when they get to the New York simulation, what does the Red Queen do?  She releases two Executioners and that's it.  She can run full scale zombie epidemic simulations, infecting all of the clone test subjects with the zombie virus and she releases TWO Bio-Organic Weapons.  Again, that's it.  She needs to destroy Alice and all she does is send Jill Valentine (who is being controlled by a device on her chest that literally gets gently brushed off by the end and that curiously causes her hair to turn blonde) and a group of Umbrella soldiers (whose thick body armor inexplicably gets pierced by every single bullet) and two big, lumbering axemen.  No zombie hordes.  Nothing else.

Alice, the bad ass woman who has been decimating zombies for five movies now, has been through hell and back.  She gets shot in this movie and bleeds out for most of the movie (which is completely irrelevant to anything else) and it barely slows her down.  Hell, she even survives having her sternum completely cracked and having her heart stop for a couple of seconds.  And yet, she discovers the clone daughter of clone Suburbia Alice and suddenly she's Suzy Homewife.  No longer liberated, she spends the rest of the movie trying to protect the daughter that isn't really hers.  It's an absurdity that feels like a cheap plot point to make Alice seem vulnerable, even though she already is more vulnerable without her powers.

Another point of lazy screenwriting - it would have been horribly inconvenient for Alice to have her powers in this movie (because everything would have been way too easy) so we had Wesker conveniently remove her powers at the end of Afterlife only to have him restore them at the end of this one.  It's just so damn predictable.

The score was a ridiculous blend of dub step and noise.  There was no tension whatsoever.

Which also comes down to one thing... where the hell were the zombies?  The Las Plagas Undead in Moscow were a joke and behaved more like ugly humans than zombies.  The Bio-Organic Weapons (the axemen) were scary looking but nothing like typical zombies.  The Tokyo zombies suffered from the fact that they apparently could take infinite amounts of damage and keep getting up, which made Alice's extended battle with them seem incredibly pointless.  That leaves us with the Suburbia zombies, which happened to be the best part of the entire movie.

After Alice is knocked unconscious and we are taken to a completely unrelated narrative, we see Alice and Carlos living happily in Suburbia with an unnecessarily deaf daughter (seriously, what did this character trait contribute to the movie at all?).  They go about their normal morning routine and then shit hits the fan.  It is very reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead and carries a great amount of tension and dramatic weight.  Unfortunately, this sequence lasts only a few minutes and is completely waved away by the fact that they are all clones.

Like Afterlife before it, Retribution's ending is one giant cliff-hanger, serving as an instant segue into the next film.  Regrettably, this is one conclusion that I am no longer looking forward to.

Hey, at least Resident Evil 6 comes out in 14 days.


TL;DR: Resident Evil: Retribution sucked.

More Punk Than You

Want to know a secret?  I’m more punk than you.  That’s right, I said it.  I have got to be more punk than you.  You know why?  Because while the counter-culture was changing musical history, I was moving counter to the counter culture.  That’s right, I made it 26 years into my life without ever really listening to Nirvana.  I even visited the Rock and Roll Museum in Seattle and saw the exhibition “Taking Punk To The Masses”, which featured a ton of rare memorabilia from Nirvana’s torrid past.  Despite all that, I still possessed not more than a passing interest in the band.  I showed more interest in the fact that Sub Pop Records had played a substantive part in Nirvana’s explosion into the music world.  Sub Pop would later go on to release one of my favorite records, Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, as well as some other notable albums like a Death Cab For Cutie single and The Postal Service’s one and only LP.

 

I knew the general details about Nirvana.  They played grunge and Kurt Cobain was a tragic rock star, Courtney Love is a whore, and Dave Grohl would go on to form the Foo Fighters with one of the guys from Sunny Day Real Estate and all the rest of that jazz.

Perhaps one of the things that put me off of Nirvana was how many people I saw wearing Nirvana t-shirts in high school and what those people were generally like.  I still see these same kind of people.  From the too-cool-for-words poser strolling through Wal-Mart to the way too young to be at a punk rock show kid wearing his black Nirvana shirt from Hot Topic.  Not that I would choose to listen to (or not listen to) certain music just because of its fan base but the only other t-shirts I used to see as much were Slipknot and Insane Clown Posse.  I may have just gotten a false connotation of douche baggery in my head.

I knew who Kurt Cobain was.  When I bought the vinyl re-issue of Jawbreaker’s seminal album, Dear You, I loved the picture on the inside of Kurt Cobain sitting there wearing the classic Jawbreaker shirt with the Morton salt girl on it.

I had heard Nirvana songs, mostly as interpreted by the bands I listen to.  John Nolan had recorded a cover of “Drain You” when he was in Straylight Run.  Yellowcard had provided a cover of “All Apologies”.  Ben Gibbard even made "All Apologies" a part of his set list for his solo acoustic tour.  There were numerous bands that had recorded covers that meant nothing to me.  I figured that Nirvana must have been pretty important but, outside of that, I still didn't really care.

Flash forward to me sitting here at work, listening to the all-too-awful pop station playing on the radio in the cubicle in front of me and a 90's nostalgic alternative internet radio station playing from the cubicle behind me.  It's not a diverse collection of music, certainly.  You are bound to hear Sublime and Nirvana at least three times an hour, amidst other music like Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I began paying a little bit closer attention to the Nirvana songs.  I don't know what the point of no return was.  I don't know when something clicked.  But it did.

All of a sudden, I could not get enough Nirvana.  Nevermind became my new favorite record.  I read all about the history of the band and their discography.  I now understood the fascination and why the music means so much to so many.

It's not that Nirvana were the sole purveyors of a new kind of music called Grunge.  At its heart, it is still punk rock, hence the name of the exhibit "Taking Punk To The Masses".  Some people still don't understand the Nirvana thing,  It's really quite simple - they wrote really beautiful pop songs that were absolutely filthy, dirty and sloppy.  The melodic differences between Nirvana and say, The Beatles, is really not as big as you would think.  Perhaps that is where Kurt Cobain's biggest strength resided, in his ability to craft perfect little gems from waves of noise.

Nirvana proved that the alternative could crossover into the mainstream.  Who could have imagined that an album recorded by a bunch of punks from Aberdeen, WA (a town of no more than 20,000 people) would go on to sell over 30 million copies worldwide?  It was all the justification that the music scene needed to show that alternative music in general could top one of pop's bestselling "artists", Michael Jackson, on the Billboard Charts.  It's a trend that would continue throughout the early and mid 90's.  The late 90's would grant success to horrible "alternative" music like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and every other kind of ridiculous nu-metal, rap hybrid.  Even as we crossed into the new millennium, the alternative shifted more towards pop punk.  Despite existing for near a decade, bands like Green Day began selling more records than they could have ever imagined.  Thus, the trend has continued, for better or (mostly) worse.

It is interesting that I would discover Nirvana on the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind.  Never having listened to them before and then suddenly being inundated with their legacy is a strange feeling.  All at the same time, my favorite artists were popping up with tributes and compilations celebrating the seminal album.  Frank Turner appeared on Kerrang!'s Nevermind Forever, where he contributed "On A Plain".  SPIN also put out a compilation called Newermind.  Kevin Devine even recorded Nevermind in its entirety and released it for free.  It's truly amazing how similar his voice sounds to Kurt's.  There have been several bands that have recorded live Nirvana tribute shows, including Weezer (under the pseudonym Goat Punishment) and the always fun Arrogant Sons of Bitches.

After 20 years, Nirvana's legacy continues to grow.  As the artists that inspire us nowadays expose us to the artists that inspired them, newer generations will continue to hear about bands like Nirvana.  I'm just sad that it took me this long to give them a real chance.

Yeah, I might be rehashing what everyone has known for two decades now, but it's still new to me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to this new band I just discovered.  I think they're going to be huge.  Their name is kind of weird though... The Smashing Pumpkins, I think?  Keep an eye on these guys.

First Impressions: Say Anything - Anarchy, My Dear

Ah, the new Say Anything album.  Scheduled to be released on March 13th, 2012, this album leaked two months early, to the day.  To provide context for the band, I wrote a recap which can be found in this blog's previous entry.  When describing the new record, lead singer Max Bemis said the following: "Anarchy, My Dear is our first attempt to write a true ‘punk’ record; thematically speaking, it’s a collection of songs about subverting society and destroying the boundaries humankind has placed upon ourselves both physically and in our minds. Coincidentally, it also happens to be the first record we’ve made in years where we had total freedom to explore our ‘edgier’ side and present a raw picture of what the band is truly about onstage."

And now for my first impressions of the eagerly anticipated album:

The record begins with a song of rebellion... "Burn A Miracle" was a fantastic choice for a lead single and it's one of the strongest tracks on the entire album.  It's rough around the edges, raw and abrasive.  The lyrics play off of the similar sounding chorus "burn america".  It vacillates between clever stanzas like "Pleasured himself to the music / Of well-dressed, inbred college students / As his girlfriend starved on the alter / To his blog of the sickening things he would call her." and semi-groan-worthy phrases like "I saw Stereohead \ They looked a lot like the same band \ but they were deaf \ And their singer \ kept twirling around \ on a slick middle finger." 

The album loses its momentum almost immediately after track 1.  Track 2, "Say Anything" sounds like a half-baked Painful Splits reject.  Yes, the band Say Anything now has an album and a song named Say Anything.  The song is a repetitive acoustic guitar based song that uses the same chords and progressions that Max Bemis has played to death.  For an album supposedly about "subverting society", there are an awful lot of these "I'd do anything for you" songs about his wife.  I find it hilarious that when a video came out of Max playing this song at an acoustic show prior to its release, everybody loved it and said they couldn't wait until the full band album version.  Who could have known that the album version would still be almost entirely an acoustic guitar with a tiny bit of bass and drums thrown in?

"Night's Song" is the third track and it also doesn't resonate with me at all.  It's strange though - this song features some of the most impressive, poetic lyrics on the entire album, yet I don't really care for it at all.  It feels very generic.  The verses feature wonderful words like "Under the sun god's stare, I wince and blossom hives / Counting the fractions of day, rotting away / As businessmen just drink away their eyes / But when the stars once shy, come bloom and blanket earth" but the end of the chorus, "praise the night / The only time I feel alright" just feels like it's been done before.  This may be one of the songs that grows on me in time.  The very first time I listened to the album, my immediate response was one of repulsion.  It was an eww-what-is-this kind of listen.  Thankfully, a number of the songs did begin to grow on me with repeat listenings.

Anarchy, My Dear takes an unexpected turn with the fourth track, "Admit It Again".  The spiritual successor and sonic sequel to the closing track on ...Is A Real Boy, "Admit It!!!", this song picks up where the other left off and turns its ire towards more modern atrocities, like Rihanna.  I really like this song with its lines overflowing with vitriol.  Max delivers biting stabs with lyrics like "Your entire facade is a line that you feed to anorexic actresses / Who would have laughed at your jacked-up Navajo haircut, less than a decade ago."  The song does have its flaws.  Max's seemingly bizarre refusal to include swear words on the album (despite their obvious inclusion in live shows) comes to a ridiculous and embarrassing head when he delivers the line "I'm sure you're proud that you've usurped the "popular kids table" / You son of a.. [mumble]"  It feels so awkward to have such an enraged bitter song and then to pull a punch and stop short of calling someone a "son of a bitch", which at that point is not even that bad.  The song starts off with the phrase "lecherous douche" so why refuse to include the word "bitch"?  In fact, why is it that Max has stopped swearing on Say Anything's albums entirely?  Is it mere coincidence that the swearing on the albums stopped the moment he married Sherri Dupree?  Doubtful.  The album before her had a song called "This Is Fucking Ecstasy" and not a single cuss word has made it onto an album since then.

It also pains me to have such an engrossing song and then to have a large part of the chorus be the refrain "And the crap reigns/rains down".  You couldn't think of something a little less cringe-worthy for such an otherwise great song?  Little things like that tend to mar the experience as a whole.

The song "So Good" follows and it's a little slower in tempo.  It falls in the category of sweet love song directed towards his wife, like a couple of the other songs.  The lyrics are esoteric but adorable.  His wife, Sherri, provides backing vocals towards the end and they actually compliment the song.  Unlike her ridiculous vocals on "Cemetery", off of 2009's eponymous album, her vocals on this song never cross into overbearing or oppressive territory.  They just perfectly compliment Max's singing.

The album picks up in tempo with "Sheep".  This song reminds me a lot of  "She Won't Follow You" off of 2009's Say Anything.  It's one of those songs that isn't really all that great of a song but it will somehow find a way to reside in your head longer than you'd like.  It gets exceedingly repetitive with the line "It's my life and I'm living without you" with the rest of the lyrics just being cliché lines that fade into the background.  Aside from being repetitively catchy, I haven't found a saving grace for this song. 

"Peace Out" is one of the worst songs that the band has ever created.  I don't know what their creative thought process was behind this song but they failed catastrophically.  It begins with a softly plucked guitar and devolves from there.  It is ironic that Max would choose to include a line like "A curse of such a fetching fraud without a soul to speak / Inspired thirty songs I could have written in my sleep" and then follows it with horrible lines like "You snort a line of syphilis and run the marathon / Your mentally deficient friends just ask you what you're on" and the even worse chorus, "Oh I'll be fine / Sever this for all time / I'll laugh it off when this ends / You can just go get high with all of your dumb friends."  As if the song hadn't been lame enough, the band chose to end it with an instrumental outro that lasts for over a minute.  It sounds exactly like the Asian influenced crap that you'd hear in a massage parlor.  The phrase "out of place" doesn't even begin to cover this ending.

"Overbiter" follows and I actually like this song.  It's got a very fun vibe to it, accentuated with a piano riff.  This feels like it's the other bookend to "So Good" since the chorus to this song includes the repetition of the line "I want it bad, so bad, I want it so bad".  Sherri's vocals make another appearance providing background vocals to the choruses.  They almost derail the song when Sherri gets her own verse to sing but the song is somehow able to overcome that blemish.  Otherwise it's incredibly catchy and fun.  The prominence of both of their voices leads me to believe that this would have made a better song for their husband-and-wife side project, Perma.

Track 9 is "Of Steel", a superhero themed song that also falls into the grouping of love songs directed at his wife.  Remember when this was supposed to be an album about anarchy?  This song doesn't catch me at all.  Repeat listens have yielded nothing new.  For now, it's about as middle of the road boring as the album gets.

The album closes strong with tracks 10 and 11.  Track 10 is the title track, "Anarchy, My Dear".  This is a love ballad directed at anarchy itself (or herself, in this case).  I really like how this song comes together.  The inclusion of piano was an excellent choice and it breaks up some of the instrumentation.  The way the song crescendos is perfect.  The lyrics and their personification of anarchy bring a smile to my face, save for the line about god which misses the point of anarchy entirely.

The closing track is "The Stephen Hawking", a seven and a half minute opus that might just be my favorite song on the album.  It transitions seamlessly between different aural textures and Max's lyrics shine brilliantly.  The melodies and musicianship are superb and it leaves you wanting more, which is about as much as you can ask for from a concluding track.  It doesn't drag on and it finishes proudly.

Ultimately, I think the few standout songs from Anarchy, My Dear will continue to grow on me.  But it won't have the same staying power as their self-titled album, which I played to death.  My wife was tired of hearing that album because I couldn't bring myself to take it out of the CD player - it was just too much fun and too good to stop listening to.  This album doesn't evoke anywhere near the same level of enjoyment.  I definitely can't consider it their worst effort to date but it's also nowhere near their best, even if you exclude ...Is A Real Boy.

The album, as a whole, is a disappointment.  There are a couple of the songs that shine as unique and unexpected surprises and they will remain in my playlist for a good while, but they were the minority on this album.  My biggest gripe about the album is that it doesn't really sound or feel like a Say Anything album.  Now I'm not about to blame Yoko Dupree... ok, maybe I will.