In the year 2000: The Beatles are back and Barenaked Ladies get their due

 

The first Beatles stuff that I listened to when I was a kid was from my brother's copies of the Red & Blue Albums, so I'm not going to get on any kind of high horse about the value of greatest hits records (in fact, due to the Red Album version of Help!, which includes a piece of the movie's score in the opening, being superior to its regular version, I guess I'm occasionally in favour of them). 

That being said: there really wasn't anything new for me here. I enjoyed the listen, to be sure, but I'll take the brilliant Love album over a standard compilation. What's fun and wild, of course, is that a Beatles greatest hits record became a top-seller in 2000.

In the Great White North, the Barenaked Ladies were nabbing a Juno for Album of the Year with Maroon. It's a fine album, but this may have been a "Sorry we gave so many awards to Celine Dion when you probably deserved one for an earlier album" kind of thing. 

So, what have we got? Pinch Me is a great single. Falling For the First Time is really good, too. Non-single stand-outs are Sell, Sell, Sell and the terrific closing track combo of Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel followed by, praise be, a CD bonus track (I miss them so much) called Hidden Sun. It makes for a tremendous album closer.

What's with Steven Page writing some 75%-ish of the songs on this album, though?

In the year 2000: Survivor takes over TV

Survivor was must-watch TV for my wife and I for the first three seasons; the shine was already lessening by the time our son arrived in 2003, and then we fell off almost completely all the way until South Pacific in 2011. Not long after that we started watching with our son and daughter and it's been a family affair ever since.

There's some real kismet in catching up on the first season, the highest-rated show of the 2000, right now in my project. The tape in the picture above is a full-season recap and behind-the-scenes featurette, found in a thrift shop a couple of years ago and just waiting for its time to come. Also, the 50th season just began, bringing with it all sorts of nostalgia and retrospectives.

The tape, which mostly features player profiles, their auditions, their eliminations, and their final confessionals, lost sound about halfway through - but that's okay, I've been trained to watch TV with closed captioning for years now. 

They actually didn't show a lot of challenge material, but I'm glad they focused on the final challenge of simply not letting go of an idol pole. I always like the simplicity and endurance of that one.

This show is the primary reason we still have satellite TV.

In the year 2000: Virtua Striker 2, Dragon Quest/Warrior VII, Pokémon Gold & Silver, and The Sims

While Virtua Striker 2 holds onto the top spot in arcade gaming (and remains, unfortunately, out of my grasp as far as finding a site for playing it), but I had plenty to occupy my time in getting a start in Dragon Quest VII, known in North America as Dragon Warrior VII, which was the top-selling console game of the year (on the PlayStation).

At this point I think to myself: hold up, does that mean this is a descendent of this NES favourite of mine?

Yup! I didn't know that Dragon Warrior had gone by another name elsewhere in the world, and I'd certainly never kept up with the series to know about its sequels. I did love this game, though.

It was a nice treat to get back into the world as I explored, gave my dad a fish sandwich, spoke to a king, and maybe performed some kind of dark magic with his edgy son? I made it far enough to kick a storyline into motion. The movement (and some character design) felt very Zelda-esque, but the mechanics of the gameplay are somewhat more complex and that's exactly what I remember about the original game.

Also coming back, sort of, is Pokémon with new versions of the game with Gold & Silver. Times have changed from its previous iteration: it's again the number-one handheld game, except this time it's on the original Game Boy and Game Boy Colour. There are new Pokémon to find, battle, and capture, a new region to explore, and a phone interface to call people because, you know ... kids and their phones.

I battled my way around a bit, learned some information from Professors Oak and Elm, and said farewell to my mother ahead of an adventure while also agreeing to let her to manage my money for me. Dang, was this game meant to prepare kids for growing up?

Finally, for the number-one seller on home PCs, I unfortunately (and interestingly) couldn't find a playable version of The Sims and had to again check it out via some gameplay footage.

I never would have imagined that I'd have as much trouble finding ways to play games from the turn of the millennium as I did from the 70s, but I think I can guess why: while it's obvious that I was never going to find a full cabinet version of Wild Gunman from 1974, it also makes sense that, because The Sims is recent and popular enough that it's still for sale as a downloadable game, I can understand why it's not readily available to play for free on retro sites. I'm hoping this doesn't become a routine issue.

I don't recommend watching this entire hour-long video unless you loved this game and are craving nostalgia, but as I skipped around through it I admit that it was entertaining. I would like to get my hands on a playable copy sometime, but for now I was amused by the Civilization-style unintelligible muttering by the characters, the fun interactions you set up as puppet master of the people, and the clever interface of the see-through house.

I've written in previous posts about how wild it is when two properties, like a pair of movies or, in this case, a game and a TV show, can come out at about the same time after months to years of development. I'm talking about Big Brother, of course, which came out only months after this game. Would that have given TV execs enough time to throw together a real-life version of the game, or was it coincidence? No matter which it was, both correctly banked on the interest viewers had in a house of people with see-through walls. 

In the year 2000: Scott's Gladiator is better than I remember, and Howard's Grinch is worse

Trust me, I get the irony here.

Before this project started, I would have been hard-pressed to think of a movie that I was least-looking forward to watching. Now that it's here, though, Ron Howard's version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas should have been an obvious pick.

I disliked this winking, cash-grabbing, reductive, stand-up routine by Jim Carrey when I first watched it on video not long after its release, and time has not been kind to it. At heart is the same problem that should have handcuffed the animated Horton Hears a Who, which is taking a rather perfect short story and stretching it out into a feature film by adding less-than-perfect filler, but I never felt the same drag with Horton. The fact that Carrey is taking the lead in both films means that it wasn't just him that brought The Grinch down. 

Anyway, I don't need to spend too long bemoaning this number-one movie of the year in 2000, except to say that surely there was a better option for people to see. But, this one drew in the families over and over again, I'm sure. Actually, now that I think about it, it's an incredible feat for a movie released in November to grab that top spot.

Like I said up top, I get that I'm being Grinchy about this movie, but it's just not for me.

Gladiator, on its way to winning the Oscar for Best Picture, was a little more up my alley when I first watched it, but I nonetheless found it to be remarkably okay back then. I was much more impressed by it this time.

I remember feeling that the ending was a bit of a letdown in terms of what was promised. I mean, here's Derek Jacobi saying that no army has entered Rome in 100 years, so that sounds pretty cool - and then that plan is immediately squashed. It was a letdown, historical accuracy or not.

I knew even then, of course, that this was one man's story and not really about a siege of Rome, and this time it clicked for me that all of the scheming surrounding Maximus and the efforts to use his skills and name meant little to him; he had his personal mission and was steadfast in chasing it.

Maybe now that I've seen Gladiator II, and relished its over-the-top action scenes, that itch was scratched and I'm now seeing this first one as a comparatively subdued and personal affair.

In the year 2000: Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winner joins the super hero fray

While there's no accounting for the long process of publishing a book or producing the movie, it sure seemed like there was a concerted effort to re-frame comic books and their heroes in 2000. Along with Unbreakable, Spider-Man, X-Men, Mystery Men, and any that I'm forgetting, comic books were pushing for a new age on the big screen, and in the midst of this was Chabon delivering a remarkable re-telling of the golden age of comics with his own hero. I've seen the book described as a historical fiction, but maybe it's more of a historical tribute. 

Chabon introduces Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clay as cousins brought together by circumstance and a shared skill in art. That's more Kavalier's bag as the somewhat reluctant artist, while Sammy is more of the business-minded optimist. I can't help but picture them as Josh and Ivan from Tapeheads. 

Their amazing adventures are all tied up in the world of comics as Superman hits the stands and gives the cousins, along with most everyone else, ideas of how to create their own Man of Steel. They do, with the Escapist, a do-gooder whose skillset is based on Kavalier's dalliances with becoming as escape artist himself. This part is really fun.

That's really just the beginning, however, and though I get the feeling that the subsequent amazing adventures (the outbreak of World War 2, the parting and reconciling of friends and family, and Joe and Sammy growing into themselves as adults) are the elements that pushed this over the edge and into a Pulitzer Prize winner, I just didn't enjoy it as much as the stories from the world of comics. 

1999 in video games: Pokémon stays on top, SimCity launches, Final Fantasy evolves, and I'm a striker, not a fighter

 

Let's start with the number-one arcade game for 1999: Virtua Striker 2. Having recently played Virtua Fighter 2, one of a long string of fighting games that claimed top spot, I presumed that this was some kind of off-shoot of the franchise. Upon my first search, I was surprised to see that it's a soccer game.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for a little change of pace and playing something other than an arcade combat game was deflated as I couldn't find a site to play it. I was bummed and more than a little surprised; I wouldn't have thought that anything from the 90s onwards would be difficult to find online, but I had to settle for watching a video for now. It's crazy how good and smooth this gameplay looks.

Next up: I've always known that Final Fantasy is a big deal but it's just never drawn me in from afar. I was already sufficiently impressed by my introductory gameplay of FFVII, but seeing the big leaps made in Final Fantasy VIII, best-selling console game (for the PlayStation) , has definitely earned a deeper dive into the franchise sometime.

Gone were the cute sprites for characters; we're now into an era in between LucasArts' The Dig and Knight of the Old Republic and it's a cool shift. I can only imagine that this change in style, on top of the cinematic opening, more or less blew people's minds. 

One thing that continually surprised me was how a cutscene would end and I'd just be standing there for a few moments before I realized that there was no transition from the scene to gameplay - it just went continuously from one to the other. 

As with most every game in this project I'm just playing enough to get a sample, but here I even found that took a little time. I wasn't forced along a path as I had been in VII, and my free roaming ways were rewarded to the extent that while I'm sure there was an important mission to begin, I'd just found a hotel and did some shopping, so let me enjoy my life.

I finally did get to a testing ground of some sort where I faced off against a demon-y kind of mini-boss, but I'd made a fateful decision earlier in giving myself only ten minutes to traverse a volcanic pathway and defeat the demon (I could have given myself up to half an hour, I think), and though I was seemingly doing all right ... I ran out of time. A raincheck, then.

In handheld gaming, Pokémon Red/Green continues to rule the roost. I didn't play it along any further this week. 

I did, however, give some time to SimCity, number-one PC game for the year. This is yet another game that is brand new to me (I haven't even ever played any of the spin-off Sims games, but that will be another box checked soon enough). 

It's yet another progression forward in world-building games, though unlike Age of Empires or Civilization, this is much more of a world-management game. I put myself into a scenario in which, as you can see above, I had to help get Frankfurt ready to host a big party. That would be easy enough if, while I was looking for a good venue, fires weren't breaking out in the city, forcing me to figure out how to send out emergency services and putting my party planning on hold. Then, naturally, came riots. It's like these people didn't even want me to throw the party at all.

So I never did. After three riots and a bunch of burning buildings, I figured Frankfurters just had their own ideas of fun so I let them destroy their own cultural history while I built many police stations. 

I quite enjoyed this game.

1999 in movies: Star Wars returns and Spacey reaches his peak

By the time The Phantom Menace finally arrived in theatres to take the crown in the box office for the year (side note: I saw it on May 22, three full days after its premiere, which is better than my track record with Terminator 2, for example, but still surprisingly late), I had so successfully avoided spoilers and news of any kind (another side note: by not, for example, looking at the names of the spoileriffic track titles on the already-released CD soundtrack) I didn't even know who was playing which role. As it happened, then, in a buzzing AMC movie theatre in Oakville, I missed the first time that Qui-Gon Jinn called Obi-Wan by name, so it was almost an hour and a half into the movie before I realized who Ewan McGregor was playing.

This is my first time, out of so many times, watching a blu-ray version of this movie. I'm not actually sure if I've ever seen a blu-ray of any Star Wars movie, but that seems unlikely so I'll guess that I must have. It looks fantastic. 

Unfortunately, after the rush of the opening titles and crawl, it wasn't long until I was a little bored and just waiting for the podrace, which, for the record, I don't find all that exciting either, but seeing as it's basically the whole reason for Lucas to have made the movie at all, he certainly puts his heart into it.

Other than that, it's still the same poorly scripted and directed, stiffly acted, loveable, cherished piece of my life.

Now, conversely, this is only my second time watching American Beauty, which would go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture the following year. The first time that I watched it was on DVD and I remember feeling impressed in the way that one sort of feels like they should be impressed. In truth, I didn't like it all that much, and I liked it less this time around.

What it tries to do is soon to be done much more effectively in Fight Club, and I settled on something that I believe I always felt but couldn't articulate at the time: Lester is a loser. And I don't mean in the context of the movie that he was a loser and then came to life - I mean that he was a loser all the way through. 

Spoilers follow for a nearly thirty-year-old Oscar-winning movie...

I think of him as a loser because one of his big triumphant moments is telling Carolyn off in juvenile fashion in the middle of the night, then tucking himself in with a satisfactory grin on his face like he just delivered a historic burn. He remained a loser while blackmailing his office because he couldn't even dream big - a year's salary (with benefits) was a paltry lowball offer on his part. And, of course, there's the element of his teenaged daughter's teenaged friend inhabiting his fantasies. 

On a related note: both he and Jane should stay far away from Ricky. Ah, that's probably just me now watching as a dad. But seriously: stay away from Ricky.

For Spacey, who won Best Actor for his performance, this was a turning point, professionally speaking, as what had been a career with terrific performances in great movies would soon turn into ... K-PAX and such. Allison Janney probably came out in the best shape in the long-tun.