Une haine incommensurable...

Uncharted 4: videogames are pretty dumb, and I feel like a stonecold dumb-dumb playing them, but I just really love these Naughty Dog games.  This one, the story’s not as good as the Last of Us, by any means– it’s really kind of exactly the same story as Uncharted 2 and 3– bro realizes that his lady means more than some treasure; but just done better than they’d done those, at least to me, in dozens of small ways.  Like, there’s nothing as fun as some of the big set pieces in Uncharted 2 or 3, either, but the end of those games are all crazy stupid and get too big, whereas this felt like it picked a tone and actually stuck to it.  It’s never as “creative” on a “what the hell is this even trying to be” level like a Hideo Kojima thing, and I can think of folks who’d be bored by that, by the middlebrow of it all, the hokiness of the long-lost-family-member plot, but I just found the comparative smallness of it were kind of surprising and, I don’t know, pleasant.  It’s the most pleasant of the Uncharted games.  (Plus: Tom Bissell’s names in the credits as a writer– I always liked his work at Grantland.) (Nice Faith Erin Hicks shout-out in the game, too).  

Or I just really liked how astonishingly boring some parts of the game were– there are at least THREE levels (if not more– depends how you count them) where you just wander around a house???  I love that kind of shit, but I always figure I’m unusual that those are my favorite parts instead of, like, boss fights. I found those all kind of fascinating (especially the last one)– everything in a game has to be built for it to exist, so the fact someone built, like, 20 different kinds of dirty laundry for a house, I always just like seeing that kind of stuff.  I didn’t really like Gone Home, not much at all, but I find it interesting how much the Naughty Dog folks have tried to bring the spirit of that game into the AAA space…

It’s weird watching these Ghostbuster trailers and having to feel like I have to root for this terrible-looking movie to make hundreds of millions of dollars, just to prove people who I’ve never met on the internet are wrong.  Except for Kate McKinnon who it really looks like they nailed it on, that movie looks fucking awful– but I still hope it makes all the money in the world because that will make unhappy a complete stranger who makes Youtube videos I don’t watch and can only imagine I would not like if I ever did see them which I never will because why would I do that why would anyone do that.  I want it to be the biggest movie in the summer purely to “win an argument” that I don’t participate in and as a pretty shitty dude, I really have zero vested interest, if not sometimes my own set of annoyances with.  I’m absolutely going to see it because I like Paul Feig and I’ve liked all his other movies, and I liked Spy or whatever, and I hope a massive chunk of our populace sets aside every signal the trailer has sent and really that any trailer could possibly send of this being a bad movie, and goes to see it, and that we are all enormously surprised and it’s a lot like the movie equivalent that Wyld Stallions album that Bill & Ted promised would bring the entire universe into harmony, not so much because i care about harmony but because I care that people upset about the existence of a movie with a series of ghastly trailers don’t feel even the slightest bit validated over their tomfoolery because oh boy imagine living in that world.  This is healthy!