Pixels to Polys Hall of Fame - Week 10

In a rebellious and direct slap in the face to my fellow Pixels to Polys writers I actively procrastinated in the writing and posting of this week’s Hall of Fame.  I was bored all weekend, and even wanted to write it on Friday, but resisted the urge in order to twist the knife of my most hated friends; Pat, Matt and Intern.

This week Dabs inducts a libraries worth of books in a single week, Pat spams scoped pistol, and Matt wraps a flannel around his waste and broods his way through whispered verses and screamed choruses.  I’ll bring it all home with a movie that will have sex with your mind.

The Book: The Dark Tower Series - Stephen King

So my first induction of a book into the hall of fame is not one book, but seven. 

Stephen King is considered by most critics to be a pulp writer, with not much talent for writing literature, but rather scary novels that people like to buy in airports. I can buy into that. Some of his stuff offers no more than cheap thrills.

The Dark Tower series is a complete departure from King's usual horror shtick. In fact, one of the main reasons this series stuck out to me as a HoF candidate for this site is that it is truly a compilation of popular culture and existential adventure.

The story begins with The Gunslinger, which introduces readers to the series hero, Roland of Gilead. Roland is Clint Eastwood from the Outlaw Josey Wales or High Plane Drifter or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, take your pick. He is a gristeled cowboy from a forgotten time that is chasing a man he truly doesn't understand or really even know. Roland is mysterious and a fucking bad ass. He is a Gunslinger, a true and trained killer that could blow any specific part of your body off at any given time (Anthony, this might not hold true for you. Some things are just too small.) 

Roland's story overflows through time and space and through the next six books we are introduced to the group of people - a twelve year old boy from the fifties, a coke fiend from the eighties and a schizophrenic amputee from the sixties - that will assist Roland in saving not only our universe, but all universes connected to it.

The journey is intense. King mixes up every book with a new style and focus. The second installment, The Drawing of the Three, almost plays like an action movie, you can see the bullets being fired and taste the Pepsi that Roland drinks for the first time. The fourth book, Wizard and Glass, puts the whole story on hold and brings the reader back to Roland's childhood in his first official case as an ancient Gunslinger.

I won't describe every book because it would just take too long. 

King takes advantage of his detailed writing style and introduces a universe that connects Indiana Jones, the Good the Bad and the Ugly, Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey all in one. Any lover of modern American film culture will appreciate many of the references King has in this series and will enjoy the originality this book brings to the usual book "series" formula. Any lover of Stephen King will appreciate how he included nearly his entire repertoire (He wrote the Gunslinger in the late seventies, finished the final book "The Dark Tower" in 2003) in this series, tying almost all of his works together in a very neat knot.

So take the time to read this series. All the books are listed below and almost every library in Maine has fifty five copies of every Stephen King book ever written, so no excuses. Get to it.

The Gunslinger

The Drawing of the Three

The Waste Lands

Wizard and Glass

Wolves of the Callah

Song for Susannah

The Dark Tower

-Dabs

The Game: Halo: Combat Evolved

I really expected this game to be one of the first things on the HoF but then I realized that Matt really isn’t a first person shooter, Anthony is hit or miss when it comes to that type of game and well Dabs, I got nothing to compare to.

If you haven’t played Halo the only excuse I can assume one would use is that they are trying to avoid “consumerism” or “the crowd”. Sounds like another pitiful excuse I have heard for such triumphs of media, such as say, Star Wars. But that is an entirely different post. Halo, on the other hand was a massive launch game that at the time was to be one of the big titles for the launch as the Xbox was Microsoft’s first foray into the gaming console arena. I have to say; the crew at Bungie might have single handedly assured the survival of that first generation of consoles. 

Halo was a new type of game in that we didn’t really have much of any understanding of what the games true meaning was. Halo? What the heck does this have to do with a bunch of aliens and a kick-ass robot Spartan? The game gave you just enough to think you knew that this was the basic routine of humanity vs. bad alien guys. That story line most likely would have been a game killer, had it not been for the immense scale, multiplayer, and operatic cut-scenes and music which made the game so amazing when you first stepped into the world of Halo.

The twist in Halo was one of my favorite of any modern game, not at all what I expected, especially since I was up like a 2am in the dark and all of a sudden this music gets much more eerie and I avoid horror games like the plague. (even in daylight I need at least a body count of 2 or more to brave one) The sheer scale and amazing operatic music that was put into the game really paid off to the whole experience, taking what we thought was going to be the next Golden-Eye and really giving it not only the multiplayer but a stunning campaign as well. I still think the best campaign was in Halo 2 but again that’s another post. 

So if your still a hold out on some game (or movie) cause you think it shows that you have some discipline or maybe even a little more character than the average flunkey; get over yourself and your consumer celibacy. Go play it on your little brothers/sisters console like you know you’ve always secretly wanted to, we won’t taunt you because of it… too much.

- Pat

The Album: Doolittle by Pixies

Statement: we could sit here all day and argue which Pixie’s album I should have inducted today. Statement: that argument would be futile because all Pixies albums are great, even the ones critics say aren’t so good (looking at you Trompe le Monde). So how did I decide to induct Doolittle and not their other albums? Well, because I liked Doolittle just a hair better than Surfer Rosa and Bossanova…nothing real scientific there. For me, Doolittle gave the greatest bang for my buck. Tracks like Debaser, Wave of Mutilation, Monkey Gone to Heaven, and Hey are staples of alternative rock…and like vitamins should be received daily. I can’t stress enough that Pixies should be in every music lovers collection...quite possibly one of the few things I can praise from the 80’s. The whether it be the obscure lyrics, the “loudQUIETloud” dynamics, or the sheer fact that Black Francis can scream like a monkey with a car battery wired to its balls, Pixies are a phenomenal and influential band the reeks of Hall of Fame…and Doolittle…well, listening to Doolittle is comparable to huffing turpentine and seeing Jesus. Sure you’ll get a headache eventually, but damn was the spectacle worth it.

Matt

The Movie: Adaptation

Film’s most fascinating active screenwriter Chalie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine, Being John Malkovitch) piles on the layers in this mind bending comedy-drama-thriller.  Try and keep up, because I’m likely to get lost myself, and start weeping openly from trying to explain it.  Kaufman writes himself into the script as the star, an artsy screenwriter struggling to write a movie adaptation on a non-fiction nature-study buck called “The White Oleander.”  The book is real, as was Kaufman’s original attempt to write that movie.  Charlie Kaufman’s goofy and funny counterpart is his twin brother, Donald.  Both are played by Nick Cage, but Donald, the person, doesn’t actually exist outside the movie, but is given real credit as co-screenwriter for Adaptation (and he is the only fake person to win a real Academy Award when the film won for best screenwriting).  In “Being John Malkovitch,” another instant classic, Kaufman somehow got the actor John Malkovitch to play himself in a risky role that could have easily turned out terrible in the wrong hands.  Here he gets nature author, Susan Orlean, to allow herself to be portrayed in a negative light on film (played by Meryl Streep) as her interaction with Charlie moves far past his meager efforts to adapt her novel to film.  The movie could have simply been an exercise in cinematic flexing, as Kaufman turns the script inside out in almost indecipherable layers.  However, the writer never loses sense of action and humor, and the movie remains entertaining throughout.  He uses narration, and the semblance of reality, to be critical of the act of screenwriting, his own idiosyncrasies, and the idea that his attempts at an art-house-film all somehow build to a totally sell-out climax in the film.  If you understand anything that I just wrote, you’re a step ahead of me.  

- Anthony