indefinite articles

George,

I don’t fancy myself a fantasy nut, but my fancy has been struck, and your A Song of Ice and Fire novels are the ones doing the striking. You’ve made peace with the obligatory Lord of the Rings influence that plagues your peers, but you’re smarter than those chumps. Instead of brainlessly letting magic act as prime mover, you use it to set the scenery as the actions and words of your characters play out like great works of history.

You’re also about to turn 60, and you’ve got three more of these bricks to churn out. I’m not some fanboy ordering you to hustle — for the love of God, exactly the opposite. Keep yourself relaxed, or you are going to die.

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The Coen Brothers caused a sensation with their 1996 Fargo. It wasn’t just the Minnesotan inflections, Frances’ McDormand’s fine performance, or the infamous wood chipper that caused such a stir - it was also that the film stated that it was based on a true story, making the insane events of the film come off as being even more outlandish than they would be if it were simply a work of fiction.

As you likely already know, the Coens’ statement was… well, a different kind of truth. The Coens had hobbled together various facts from various true crimes, but had turned those bits and pieces into a wholly original and completely fictional film. Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s films tend to occupy the same, “not-quite-fictional” space the Coens briefly touched on, and blur the line between fictional narrative film and documentary even farther.

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The Republican National Convention a near reality, 47 Words discusses the aliens, action heroes, and robots who forged the party’s fictional history. Earlier this week: Democrats.

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Quick, what do you get when you cross the protagonist from any high-grossing movie from the past year, a pop culture celebrity, and a cliched comedic trope? If you’re one of the millions who have seen one of the many spoof movies penned by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer over the past several years, you probably already know the answer to this one. The response of the millions of viewers who have seen Date Movie, Epic Movie or Scary Movie 3 has been nearly unanimous: “a steaming pile of crap.”

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In honor of the Democratic National Convention, 47 Words recounts the party’s idealistic, fictional leaders of yore. Coming later this week: Republicans.

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In 1988, playwright and monologist Eric Bogosian and director Oliver Stone got together to take Bogosian’s off-broadway Talk Radio and bring it to the big screen. It turned out to be an incendiary fever dream, a disturbing and vertiginous descent into the dark underbelly of America brought to the surface through call-in lines and AM radio waves. The film didn’t make a whole lot of money, but it got a lot of attention and four stars from Ebert.

In 1996, Bogosian joined forces with Richard Linklater to do the same with subUrbia, Bogosian’s off-broadway satire about the misguided youth of America. Linklater must have been an obvious choice for the producers, as he had just made three slightly comic, curiously observational, now classic films about youth — Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise. Unlike Talk Radio, subUrbia barely made it into theaters. It’s not on Netflix.

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This Preemptive Strike is part of a cross-post between Indefinite Articles and The Eaten Path. You can read Jake Mix’s full review of Chili’s here.

In March 2008, Men’s Health Magazine unveiled its declaration against the twenty worst foods in America. The announcement arrived as part of a marketing campaign for editor-in-chief David Zinczenko and nutrition editor Matt Goulding’s new book, Eat This, Not That!, which sets America’s most frequented fast food and family restaurant chains in the crosshairs of the simplest of nutritional analyses. Fans of modest self-improvement hailed Eat This, Not That!’s approach as a shield against the disorienting avalanche of fats, salts and sweets that make it nearly impossible for American consumers to navigate the uphill struggle towards a healthier lifestyle.

The most salient revelation of Zinczenko and Goulding’s efforts, however, lies in the fact that eight of the twenty worst foods in America are served at restaurants owned by Brinker International. Currently the world’s second largest casual dining corporation, Brinker has managed to construct a multinational bad taste obesity empire fueled by America’s very tendency to eat That!, not This.

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I’ve never been a big fan of spectator sports. The Olympics, regardless, have held a special place in my heart since I was a kid. Though I always make sure to tune in for the big-name events like swimming and gymnastics, I also keep an eye out for less popular but equally entertaining events. There’s one that’s obscure enough and oddly named enough to truly stand out: the modern pentathlon.

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Episodes viewed: “Amok Time,” “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “The Changeling,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “The Apple,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “Catspaw,” “I, Mudd”

Behold, the dawn of a new season! A program’s second stroll around the calendar is a risky venture. Smart show runners interpret a network’s decision to renew a series as a mandate to be awesome. But all too often the process of upping the budget and raising the stakes leads to a serious overstepping of boundaries; Friday Night Lights fans recoiled in horror when their favorite breezy small-town rubes chucked a corpse into a river. Trek had survived the first leg of its five-year mission – but what next?

Not a man to cower at the challenge, Gene Roddenberry instead took his beloved creation to Warp 9.

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This week: The art of controller throwing. Kojima masturbates. The final panicked hours of Snake Eater.

As the mass video game market has increasingly become a blockbuster oriented industry, big budget game design has slowed to a crawl, with gamers expectations of graphics and depth rising to previously unknown heights. At the same time, as it becomes easier to get games online through quick & easy downloads, smaller games flourish in the gaps between larger releases. As such, there’s been something of a renaissance of classic arcade gameplay, with bar-raising shooters, puzzle games, and sidescrollers coming out each month.

But over the past few weeks, I’ve diligently turned off N+ and Geometry Wars to return to the elephant in my room: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Over four consecutive nights, I sat down in front of the TV determined to beat the game before heading to bed, feeling achingly close to the end credits.

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