Noiseless Chatter Archive

A lot of discussion about Better Call Saul centers around Chuck. Specifically, it’s the question of whether or not he’s right. In his thoughts, in his behavior, in the way with which he wields his authority. This is a question that speaks volumes about how effectively muddled the show has kept its ethics. After all, we’re now three seasons in; shouldn’t we know whether this guy deserves our spite or our pity? To be fair, many viewers already know their own answers. But the discussion is kept alive by the artful way in which Better Call Saul toys with its audience. We’ve seen Chuck in various states by this point…sometimes deserving of scorn, and sometimes deserving of sympathy. But the show never lets us land decisively on either side. We may wish to see Chuck one way or another, but we’re left instead to circle, without a conclusive answer. We ended last season with Chuck tricking his brother into confessing a felony, which is a shitty thing to do, for sure. But ...

Prior to this review, I had seen Big Top Pee-wee exactly once in my life. After this review, I can assure you I’ll never watch it again. As we discussed last week, I loved Pee-wee. I loved Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. I loved Pee-wee’s Playhouse . And yet when Big Top Pee-wee came out, I had no desire to see it at all. You’d think, maybe, that I had tired of the character or his antics, at least to some degree. But I know for a fact I hadn’t. Big Top Pee-wee came out in 1988, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse was still on the air until 1991. I watched that show until the very end, and was surprised and disappointed when it didn’t come back for another season, so I’m sure I didn’t suffer from Pee-wee fatigue. And I know that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was still in our regular movie rotation. Many of my friends had copies, and we’d still pop it in and watch it. I remember this because one of my friends — only one — also had a copy of Big Top Pee-wee . And we never wanted to watch ...

Welcome back to Rule of Three, a series in which I take an in-depth look at three related comedy films, weekly, beginning on April Fool’s Day. They could be films in the same series, films by the same director, films with a common theme, or films with any relationship, really. It’s a spinoff of the Trilogy of Terror series, but with less disemboweling. I started this series looking at three Jim Henson-era Muppet films, which was an easy choice for me, because the Muppets were and remain an important creative presence in my life. This year, I’m going to look at another of them: Pee-wee Herman. I’m pretty sure that when I was a kid, VHS cassettes were still quite expensive. I have no idea how much my parents paid for our copy of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure , but I can assure you they got their money’s worth. I loved Pee-wee’s Big Adventure . I don’t mean that I watched it a lot or enjoyed it or never really got sick of it. Those things are all true, but those things aren’...

Let’s talk about a masterpiece. Mega Man 2 is, simply, a game that cannot possibly be spoken of too highly. It’s one of the most important games of the NES era, and one of the absolute best games overall. It’s not perfect — whatever unhelpful definition of “perfect” we decide to endorse today — but it does much of what it sets out to do perfectly. It’s a finely honed, impressive, addictive, tight, magical experiment that pays dividends far beyond what anybody — gamers, critics, the developers themselves — ever imagined. That’s certainly great. What makes it even better, though, is how little Mega Man 2 actually had to do differently from its predecessor. Almost everything here was already present in Mega Man . All Mega Man 2 had to do to become one of the best-regarded games of all time was tighten the bolts. It singlehandedly demonstrates the importance of polish. In fact, Mega Man 2 feels a bit like a rewrite. Forgive me for going all literary on you, but tha...