Movie Recommendation Monday: The Boys & Girls' Guide to Getting Down

Part of growing up is experiencing the party scene. For at least one stage of our lives, we tend to go out with our friends every weekend to the hottest club or house party and get completely drunk/high. Well, most of us, anyway. For the rest of us, there's The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down - a comedic mockumentary that takes the viewer step-by-step through the party/clubbing scene.

Despite being a mockumentary, the information to be gleaned is quite valid if not over-the-top. From properly tipping your bartender to scoring drugs, and from faux-mo-sexuals to the legendary (but oh-so-real) "Pussy Power," The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down is an absolutely amusing and informative narrative on how to navigate your local party/club scene.

Possibly the one thing that may deter some potential viewers is the lack of big names or the lack of a large studio budget behind it. This, however, is actually where it shines. Whether it's the spoiled hot chick, the clueless average joes, or the ****blocking best friend, the characters are very easily recognizable. If you want to learn how to correctly infiltrate the party scene, this is for you. If you want a good laugh, this is for you. If those days are behind you & you want to reminisce, this is for you.

The End of "American Splendor"

Admittedly, I have not been familiar with American Splendor for that long a time. In fact, I only happened to notice them in the fiction section of my county library (unlike the other libraries in the county, they haven't created a separate section for non-juvenile graphic novels & manga) maybe a couple of years ago only because the series was on a higher shelf & and across from Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture.

Not too much long after, I began looking for new comics & manga that I'd never heard of and remembered those tall trade paperbacks that I'd neglected before. One of which had a picture of Paul Giamatti on the cover (which I'd later find out was the movie poster), another was subtitled "Our Cancer Year," a third was called "Our Movie Year," the fourth had a grungy-looking male character on the cover, and a far slimmer tale told about a black guy's experience in Vietnam. Not being too excited about a biography, but curious about Vietnam stories (I had read Punisher: Born not long before that) and wanting to err on the side of caution, I chose the Vietnam tale.

What I read was not at all what I was expecting. There weren't any gory tales - the man hadn't actually seen very much in the way of battle. Nonetheless, it was very straightforward in a way that I had never seen before. This prompted me to want to read more of these stories. Instead what I found out as I began to read the trade paperbacks was that this "American Splendor" was actually a rough autobiography. The author/main character was a cantankerous old man named Harvey Pekar. The previous straightforwardness that I had appreciated in his side tale about his co-worker, Bob McNeill was amplified in his own story. He wasn't looking to become famous, but he didn't want to be a nameless statistic in history. He wanted to earn enough to live, but had no interest in being rich. Both of these were traits I could understand and relate to. I noticed that he saw life for what it truly was. He knew that optimism & hard work don't necessarily get you anywhere and most people will never see a happy ending. It was a relief to finally be able to point to a real living, breathing person and say, " See?! HE gets it!"

Coincidentally, not too long after I finished "Our Movie Year," which details the storyline & what it was like behind the scenes of the American Splendor movie, IFC or Sundance (I forget which) suddenly started showing American Splendor. Not surprisingly, I loved that as well. It was probably somewhere around this point that I realized that I HAD to meet Harvey just to tell him how amazing his story was to me.Not because he triumphed over some major issue, not because he rose against the odds and defeated some form of internal demons, and certainly not because he perservered over some kind of tragedy. In the grand scheme of things, most people might look at American Splendor and ask, "What's so special about this? There's nothing interesting about his story." And that to me is where the interest lies. Harvey Pekar set out to prove that not everyone is going to have an amazing life. Not everyone can or wants to live the "American Dream." And this is why he became one of my personal heroes.

To add to that, as I write this and think about the traits that we share I'm realizing that he just may have had Asperger's, which would explain many of the traits that he noted were a bit "abnormal" as well. This would give me an even bigger reason reason for me to respect him.

Unfortunately, I will never get the chance I so hoped for - to share my appreciation with him, as he just has passed away. His wife, Joyce Brabner, found him dead this morning at 1am. Goodbye to an American legend. 

Harvey Lawrence Pekar

October 8, 1939 - July 12, 2010

"See, told ya so."

One of the things that kept me in gaming as I grew older was the way gaming allowed me to virtually experience things that I wouldn't get to otherwise experience. Medal of Honor: Frontline(the PS2 version of Allied Assault) is a game that made me appreciate WWII veterans more. While I have seen Saving Private Ryan, the movie didn't allow me to actually experience the battle as MoH did. That is a main point that I fully agree with James Gee on. Games in my opinion, can help people know what it's like to be in another person's shoes without having the major negative impacts that many critics claim they have.

"Who ARE these People?

One of the great things about the internet to me is the community. People with all sorts of interests and whatnot can get together regardless of location and be able to communicate. MUDs are only one of those methods. There are also online message boards, chatrooms, and video games. However, one of the problems of this is that quite often, people tend to get caught up in their online personas and tend to lose themselves. Most of the time, when people lose themselves, it is socially harmless. Occasionally, though, there are those who like to break the rules when they lose themselves. Mainly, it's the medium's rules, but when there aren't any written rules, it is the unwritten rules that are broken.

I believe that the only reason a lot of these personas seem to come out in video games is because gaming is one of the few mediums that allows you to actually become a different person.

"Next up on the news...

In Prince of Persia, I have found the secret copy of the original PoP shareware game, so I decided to give it a go since the last time I played it(over 10yrs ago). I forgot how aggravating that game was. The movement was incredibly sluggish and laking, which was the main thing I remembered that annoyed me about it.

On the other hand, just to prove my last point more, I reached a bridge on the top of the maharajah's castle only to get taken on a trip down memory lane when I played ICO a few years ago. Here are a few photos for comparison.


Outdoors
ICO:

PoP:

Indoors
ICO:
PoP:

"I'm the KING!!"

One thing I noticed after a while of playing Prince of Persia - it reminds me a lot of Tomb Raider & ICO with a touch of Dark Cloud/Sonic the Hedgehog & The Matrix. ICO in that the plot seems to be somewhat vague and the setting also seems to be in one very large main venue. Tomb Raider in that the puzzles are somewhat similar...however, ICO's puzzles are just as tricky. The narration style is also like that of the Tomb Raider series. In terms of wht that hero is doing, however, that's where the other games come in. In Dark Cloud, the hero is trying to save the world from a wizard who basically tries to empty the world of all life - not necessarily kill everyone, just make the planet devoid of it. In Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic is saving his friends from being turned into robots. To me, it almost seems like if you combine those together, and replace "robots" with "Sand-of-Time Zombies," and then give the hero the acrobatics of Neo in Path of Neo, and it seems like the basic premise. I'm not complaining, though - since PoP has that ICO sense of complete continuity(there are save points, but no true "levels/stages") it makes it very hard to put down the controller.

"It's bout Bloody Time...What Do They Plan On Doing?"

I've just picked up Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for PS2. Late, I know, but late is truly better than never. I do actually have Final Fantasy VII that I still haven't finished, but I'm really not interested in finishing it anytime soon. I've only played a little bit of Sands of Time before, but not much of it. I still remember Prince of Persia when it was PC shareware on 2.5" floppies. Prince of Persia, from what I remember, seemed to be pretty fun, but it was just one of those titles that I never seemed to get around to buying along with a lot of other titles, like God of War, Psychonauts, DESTROY ALL HUMANS!, Devil May Cry, plus a lot of other classic games including about 80% of the Final Fantasy series. As I was reading the manual, one of the things that I seemed to remember was that (as far as I know,) this series was one of the first (of platformers at least) mainstream games that allowed the player to remove the concept of "Game Over" as we knew it. Well, I'm no game maker, but because of that I may be able to provide some insight simply from the perspective that only a hardxcore game fanatic can give.

One of the nice things, however, is that once I finish playing this, I'll have a decent amount of games to talk about since I have been gaming all semester.

"I'd hit it with the Power Glove"

Video games are still a new medium. That is one thing that bothers me whenever people look for a new scapegoat to blame for the degradation of society. All living things have a penchant for violence, no matter what it is - whether it's humans, animals, or even plants, violence is a way of life and there is no way to completely shield people from it. What makes a rational human being is being able to differentiate between worlds....and i've lost my train of thought. crap.

"...I'll take The Rapist for $200, Alex."

Online gaming is something that is somewhat interesting to me. While I don't play MMORPGs(they're too pricey for me), I do play games like Star Wars: Battlefront & Tony Hawk's American Wasteland or even the occasional Yahoo! game. To me, it seems almost like a chat room or forums with interactivity. Since I have been frequenting forums and chat rooms for about 10 years, it's very common to see people very similar to Mr. Bungle/Dr. Jest. My personal interpretation of people like them is that they are most likely people who either view their own lives as incredibly boring and see doing things like that as making their lives more interesting or people who feel that they have been so screwed over in life that they feel like they need to share their bitterness.

Not everyone takes it to that level of violence, though. Usually, the kind of violence that is seen in games such as Star Wars: Battlefront is reflected through the destruction of one's own teammates, which is usually rewarded with booting by said teammates.