Overthinking It

From the Blog

Feb

Posted by Perich at 9:17 am

overthinking it

Hey folks! I haven’t been updating here, I know, but I’ve been cranking out pop culture posts on Overthinking It for your entertainment:

Is Batman a Virgin?: Examining how Batman subverts the usual action hero trope of superior virility.
Suits and the Unsustainable Premise: How long can a show’s core premise strain our suspension of disbelief before breaking? And why do we let them get away with it?
Mass Effect 3 and the Ethics of Revolutionary Choices: In which we talk about the ending of ME:3.
The Evitability of Football Narratives: Why the stories we craft around sports – particularly football – are built differently from all other stories.

So read those, why don’t you?

Nov

I loved Skyfall, if you were curious. I thought it was a better Bond than Casino Royale^*, which would make it the best Bond in ages^**. If you want to know more, listen to the other Overthinkers and I discuss it on the Overthinking It Podcast, episode #228, “That’s Some King’s Quest 2 Level Detective Work.”

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* Casino Royale still being phenomenal, but suffering from narrative and plot pacing issues in the third act, whereas Skyfall is a more expertly paced blockbuster.

** The next great Bond film prior to that, in my ranking, is The World is Not Enough.

Feb

and it’s greatly to his credit

Posted by Perich at 10:33 am

I haven’t forgotten part 2 of my theories on building tension, but I had to hurry something along for Overthinking It this week: the next installment of OverWinging It, my review/analysis of Season 2 of The West Wing. This one covers “The Midterms,” “In This White House” and “And It’s Surely To Their Credit.” Ainsley Hayes! AIDS in Africa! H.M.S. Pinafore! And more.

Jan

in the shadow of two gunmen

Posted by Perich at 11:58 am

A few weeks back, I polled the readers of Overthinking It to ask which season of The West Wing I should watch if I were only to watch one. They overwhelmingly voted for S2. Today I kicked off my analysis of the season on Overthinking it, tackling the two-parter “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.”

You should check it out.

Nov

toward a more perfect build

Posted by Perich at 10:19 am

New post up on Overthinking It: a bit of a rambler about how players use video game builds (statting out your character in an RPG, or, more recently, an FPS) to imprint their personality on the game experience:

Builds ultimately owe their existence to the wargame hobby. You can trace a direct line from the assault class of MW3 to the chit-stacked tables of Advanced Squad Leader. And understanding this ancestry is crucial. As any serious minis hobbyist will tell you, the chief purpose of wargames is to start arguments; the secondary purpose is to paint miniatures; replicating battles is the least of a gamer’s concerns. And the more important a build is to your game of choice, the greater the ratio of time spent defending your build in online fora vs. time spent playing that build.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.

Oct

achewood, 2001-2011

Posted by Perich at 2:32 pm

New post on Overthinking It, giving a recap and light analysis of Achewood, the best webcomic the 21st century has produced so far:

Yes, drum machines can be confounding. Why is Philippe standing on the instructions for the drum machine? No reason given. Five-year-olds just do odd things sometimes. Why not get him to move? Maybe because the simple pleasure a five-year-old gets from standing on an arbitrary thing is worth more than finding out how to play with our complex electronic toy right this second. Maybe because we get more satisfaction out of positioning ourselves in relation to products – wanting, owning, maintaining, discussing how utterly confounding they are – than we do out of using them as instruments to achieve our goals. Maybe because there’s a Taoist simplicity in saying the thing that you observe. Panel two: “Philippe is standing on it.” Panel three: Philippe is standing on it.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.

Sep

blueprint for a monument

Posted by Perich at 7:36 am

New post up on Overthinking It about a happier 10-year anniversary from this past Sunday: the release of Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint:

The shadow of Biggie’s absence was growing more and more notable. Someone needed to step up and become unofficial chairman of the East Coast once more. And by critical consensus, attention fell on the two most prominent MCs in New York: Jay-Z and Nas. Nas had the critical depth, having produced one of the most acclaimed hip hop albums of all time just a few months before Biggie’s own Ready to Die came out. But Jay-Z had the mainstream success, stepping up with several MTV-friendly hits and embracing the glamorous aspects of the gangsta lifestyle.

To put New York back on the map would take a classic album, one that revived the East Coast technique of funky samples with profound rhymes. The strength of the samples depends on the strength of your producer, though. For his sixth studio album, Jay-Z found that producer, a young man from Chicago named Kanye West.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.

Aug

the killing finale

Posted by Perich at 7:28 am

Today, months after anyone cared, I wrote a post for Overthinking It walking back my earlier enthusiasm for AMC’s The Killing in light of its awful season finale:

Season 1 of The Killing plays out like a bad improv show.

Suspects are introduced and then flatly discarded without leading anywhere else. Rosie Larsen’s ex-boyfriend was molesting another girl on camera, not Rosie. Bennett Ahmed was misleading his students and the detectives because he was smuggling a girl to Canada to avoid genital mutilation. Rosie was making home movies; Rosie wanted to see the world; Rosie was tricking for an online escort service; Rosie was making large withdrawals from a casino ATM. All of these leads are summoned up, brooded over for an episode or two, and then discarded.

This would be worse than amateur improv, summoning up maybe a few pitying chuckles from the audience. For a show with a supposed script? It’s inexcusable.

More indulgent than my usual posts, in that I do little but apologize for being wrong, but I think there’s still some good matter. Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.

Aug

words are wind

Posted by Perich at 7:25 am

New post up on Overthinking It, in which I talk about some of the phrases George R.R. Martin uses a dozen times or more in A Dance with Dragons:

ADWD is the first Song of Ice and Fire novel that I read on the Kindle. This has several excellent advantages over traditional hardback or paperback editions. First, I can publicly read a book that has the word “dragons” in the title without bringing embarrassment to the Perich name. No one on the subway will know! Second, I can bring the book just about everywhere without putting undue strain on my spine. This saves my back muscles so I can hunch over a keyboard for hours, writing overthought articles about the book I just read.

But most important, reading ADWD on the Kindle lets me do a quick search to find every instance of the word “leal.”

Warning: CRUCIAL SPOILERS that will DIMINISH YOUR ENJOYMENT OF THE BOOK abound throughout this article. Don’t read it until you’re finished the last page of A Dance with Dragons.

And then please read the whole thing.

Aug

the five ages of Hollywood

Posted by Perich at 11:54 am

New post up on Overthinking It today about the way Hollywood brackets all actors, regardless of their actual age, into five broad age buckets:

When you’re an actor, no one cares how old you actually are. All the producers care about is which of the five ages you fit into. Angelina Jolie has played a sexy action star for over a decade, and Tom Cruise has managed it for nearly twenty-five years. It just takes a certain look and the right kind of agent.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.