I've never been able to shake the feeling that I'm part of a generation that suffers from a profound case of arrested development (by which I don't mean a) the best American sitcom post-Seinfeld or b)the rap group that I'm fairly certain is my friend James' all-time favorite hip hop act). Maybe it's something that we inherited from the bastards in generation-X. And it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I mean. Part of it is when a movie like Transformers comes out, and people like my future brother-in-law (a genuinely intelligent person, albeit with occasionally questionable taste) are legitimately excited about seeing it- way more excited than they are for equivalent Hollywood summer epics. Part of it is the proliferation of cell phone ring tones based on 8-bit video games. Maybe this is actually the case for every generation that grows up in a media-saturated environment, but it seems like my peers are getting nostalgic at far too young of an age. And maybe I'm entirely mistaken. Gods only know just how far my fingers are from the pulse of society (you'd think reading Entertainment Weekly would have me more up to date, but I always skip the parts on celebrities who aren't Levon Helm or Lupe Fiasco, and since they aren't really even celebrities- well, you see how it all falls apart).
And while I've been able to avoid things like the MySpace and Guitar Hero that people who I happen to share a demographic with are drawn to like those birds that collect shiny things, I fear that I'm marching in a complete fucking lockstep with part of the arrested development thing. I mean, why else do I spend more time playing old games on the Virtual Console than I do on actual Wii games?
Sure, there are perfectly reasonable explanations that can function without the assumption of any sort of nostalgia- I'm mostly playing games that I never had on their original consoles- games like Super Metroid and Paper Mario and Actraiser. And the Wii has suffered from a lack of quality titles that aren't collections of minigames or ports of Playstation 2 games. But, given that I had 700 points left on the card that I got for Christmas, why oh why did I download the original Super Mario Brothers? I mean, I played the hell out of this game on the original NES. I already have like five Mario games in one form or another for the Wii. Six, maybe, now that I think about it. So, why did I download it? I'm worried that I did it simple for the nostalgia of it, and that's what is annoying me. God help me if they ever put the NHL game for the Genesis onto the system- I'll probably spend revert right back to spending all my time listening to Nevermind and trying to have a perfect season with the Chicago Blackhawks.
Anyway, all of this was just misdirection. I was actually thinking about my own arrested development earlier today, long before I surprised myself by downloading the damned game. What happened was, I went out this morning and got my drivers license. It took nine damned years, and two failed tests, but I finally got the fucking thing. Which puts me ahead of David Sedaris and Alfred Hitchcock (actually, Hitchcock might have had a license, but in Donald Spoto's biography of the greatest director who ever lived, he wrote that Hitchcock never drove at all, mostly because he had an overwhelming fear of being pulled over. There's a longer story behind that, and it actually goes a long way towards informing viewings of most of the Hitchcock's films, but that's really not my point. I don't know what my exact point is, just that it almost certainly has very little to do with Strangers on a Train), but behind the idiot teenagers in my neighborhood who have yet to realize that lacrosse is a stupid sport played by people who aspire to be Maryland fans. I don't know what that means, I just know that it's fucking true. They all secretly want to be Nik Caner-Medley. And Nik Caner-Medley doesn't want to be Nik Caner-Medley. He wanted to be a fucking lacrosse player.
Changing the subject, I spent a few hours this weekend (after I finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men during commercial breaks while watching the NCSU/FSU game but before I made a noble but flawed effort at making beef stroganoff) catching up with the Filthy Critic. I haven't read Filthy since last summer, and it had been even longer since I really spent time with the man who is almost certainly the finest film critic on the internet tubes(I say this with no sarcasm or irony whatsoever. I don't agree with a lot of his opinions, but his work is never boring and almost always genuinely insightful. His style means that you often have to work a bit to realize that he isn't simply funny, but fucking close to brilliant. I'm serious.) I love that he gave Kings of Kong the incredibly elusive "five fingers". It's out on DVD now, and if you haven't seen it, you really should check it out. It's probably my favorite documentary since American Movie, (although I'm having a hard time remembering that many documentaries I've liked this decade. The Aristocrats and Lost In La Mancha both come to mind, but that's about it. Super Size Me and Bowling For Columbine were both all right, but both were also very deeply flawed as films.) I'd fucking love for someone from the Oscars to try and explain how Kong wasn't even fucking nominated. But then again, this is the award ceremony that honored the terrible Fahrenheit 911 and ignored Hoop Dreams. They aren't as bad as the Grammys at giving out statues to people, but they aren't particularly skilled at it, when you get right down to it. Oh, that's right. I loved Beyond The Mat, and that came out in 2000. That was my favorite documentary since American Movie. Kings of Kong is probably better than Beyond the Mat, actually. It's a close call, at least.
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