It's been a weird, fucked up few months where I haven't been able (or willing) to write a lot, leaving me with just enough time here and there to peck out a sentence or two. Through all this, a few reviews have somehow, despite themselves, been able to congeal forth from the muck. Herein lies the latest batch of Randviews, in which our brave-ish protagonist delves into the most controversial subjects possible: Baltic Boomshoots, Stoner Rock and Children's Movies. May god help us all.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter

(Beaten on Normal difficulty via the "Serious Sam Classics Revolution" remaster)

You know how back in school, you'd be joking back and forth with your friends, and there'd always be one kid who'd drag the joke on too long or too far and kill it dead leaving an awkward silence? That's basically every encounter in this game after the first few levels. I dove into this on account of its recent 25th anniversary, because frankly, I hadn't played it much since it first came out. Parts of the experience were quite a pleasant surprise to come back to with fresh eyes: The engine is highly impressive for the era with its large, high-detail environments, and the art makes a decent fist of standing up to much higher-budget titles of the era like Quake 3. Other parts, however, came up less well in modern light. Specifically, the individual encounter design just kinda sucks. The designers have an uncanny knack for finding a good, fun encounter with a neat little gimmick, and then dragging it on a couple of waves too long to the point where it just kind of exhausts and ruins itself.

Still, it's an utterly fascinating piece of history: Made by a small indie studio well before the Digital Distribution Indie Boom, using their own cobbled-together engine and tools because they couldn't afford Quake, made in a country that had just come out of a war when the game started development, knocked back by 30+ publishers before internet buzz got them onto shelves... At it's core, Serious Sam's sheer existence is a story of succeeding against the odds, and of people-power and sheer chutzpah pushing through the era's impenetrable barriers between developers and the public.

In many ways, that's the real legacy of Serious Sam - as an awkward, gangly, low-budget crowbar to pry open the doors and make way for greater, more Talos-shaped things much, much later on. The art is lovely, the tech is fantastic, the level design veers towards atrocity at random intervals, and whether or not it's actually fun to play isn't enormously relevant compared to the future it gave a glimpse of.

• Best Bit: Karnak, of course. It's their best foot put forward for the demo, then inexplicably made harder and shoved into the back end of the campaign.
• Worst Bit: Metropolis. It's a featureless corridor playing host to somewhere in the field of 700 skeletons and werebulls, and its designer deserves to go to jail.
• Worth The Price: Classics Revolution (which also includes The Second Encounter and a fan-made mini-campaign) routinely drops to like two bucks during Steam sales.

Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows - Inexorable Opposites

I'm not a patriotic person by any particular stretch, but I take a little bit of selfish joy in living in a city with an absolutely incredible live music scene, if you're able to find a venue that hasn't been forced into the grave by bloated insurance costs or NIMBY-assed neighbours and willing to look past drink prices that occasionally border on the extortionate^[1]. This is how I was first introduced to Jack Harlon and the Dead Crows - not from a playlist lovingly caressed by the bloodied talons of some biomechanical nightmare algorithm on the American East Coast, but as a behatted silhouette emerging from a sea of blinding lights, deafeningly elongated riffs and theatrically-thick plumes of smoke, some of which might have even come from the venue's fog machine at some point.

It's a good way to learn what you truly like in your heart of hearts, to be honest. There was one specific gig a few years ago which completely rewrote my musical tastes, but that's a story for a whole other time. Anyway, Inexorable Opposites, the latest piece by these self-described Psychedelic Western Rockers, is here to wake the dead, and as it turns out, I'm quite enamored with it. Well, most of it at any rate.

Album-opener Moss lays the band's traditional deck of cards out on the table for all to see, kicking off with a Morricone-inspired solo before settling into reverb-drowned vocals echoing out from behind the chest-height barricade of fuzzed-out riffs. So far, so Harlon, setting tone and expectations such that the rest of the album can break cover and explore... maybe not new territory, precisely, but certainly adjacent turf. Venomous kicks up the tempo for a whistle-stop tour through a pissed-off mind before grinding down the gears for a slow, hard shout-along chorus and a slower-still headbang-inducing finale thast feels like it's tearing itself apart at the seams in the best possible way, bolts and gears pinging out of the machine as it attempts to lumber to some inspecific catharsis.

Mt. Macedon is that catharsis, and frankly, it's the odd man out among the bunch. Sandwiched between riff-laden tales of pain and despair sits an oddly cheery, almost country-inspired ditty about - as vocalist Tim Coutts-Smith cheerfully explained during the launch tour - driving halfway up the titular mountain, lighting a joint and watching the local eagles do eagle stuff. It's not bad per-se (there's a fun riff there) but it feels a bit less focused and like the wrong tools were bought to bear, like a birthday party drawn in charcoals instead of watercolours.

Credentials established and mood raised, it's time to defy both. Dave is Done is the high point of the album, with Coutts-Smith stepping out from behind his reverb filter and cowboy fictions to tell the metaphor-laden eulogy of a fellow traveller lost along the way, punctuated by a blasting chorus solo that, were there any justice, would be blasting out of every alt-rock radio station in all of Christendom. A feel-bad hit of the winter, wrapped in killer riffs and a sense of theater that I can only assume will stand firm in the back-end of setlists for a long time. We should be so lucky.

Junior Fiction returns to what passes for the norm in Harlon land, with new drummer Brayden Becher given the spotlight, mixing emphasis and full opportunity to show off his talents, the riffs dancing around his driving percussion like bullets thudding into the floorboards surrounding their feet. Seer drives up the tempo again, with Becher once again taking center stage, using the entire kit as the rest of the band crank the fuzz up, before cranking down the pace again for a big finish.

Another favorite of mine, On the Overwhelm slows things down and strips things back for a slow, relentless march through the metaphorical desert, one foot in front of the other, the vocals once again given center-stage. It probably fits that my favorite tracks on this are the ones where Coutts-Smith isn't concealed behind three different vocal filters and concealed in the mix, huh? With this, the album slowly glides to an end with To Die, which is effectively a lullaby, the last wisps of campfire smoke dissipating in the wind. No percussion, no riffs, just vocals and guitar ambience to gradually close things out. It works in context, but unless it's during a stumbly midnight walk home where it'd hit just right, this is probably The One You Skip if it comes up on shuffle.

Inexorable Opposites is the tale of a band trying to lean a little less on past crutches without betraying their own sound, trying one or two new things in moderation. These additions and subtractions work a real treat, and I can't wait to see where they take their learnings from these experiments in future adventures.

• Best Bit: Dave Is Done is the album's clear peak, but I have a place in my heart for the marching groove of On The Overwhelm.
• Worst Bit: Mt. Macedon isn't bad per-se, but it's oddly out-of-place.
• Worth The Price: Openly and extensively.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

(Watched during the original theatrical run, written when people actually briefly cared about this thing.)

If you look at the professional critic reviews for the sequel to Illumination's sophomore shot at Kyoto's finest, you'd be forgiven for believing that Cinema Is Dead, And We Have Killed It. A nightmarish, whirlwind mess of bright colours that even the kids find boring. Hell, one critic even declared it to be "worse than AI"^[2]! Meanwhile, on the other side of the reactionary spectrum, social media inmates who have made owning a specific manufacturer's consumer electronics their entire personality scream to the heavens with a throat-bloodying rawness that anyone who doesn't like it lacks joy and whimsy in their heart, and also Mario games have never been much for stories anyway, and also also also i can't let the hedgehog movies win dude my therapist would never understand

So, which is it? Nadir Of The Artform or Elixr of Happiness? I descended into the belly of the beast (a midday screening during school holidays, laden with the movie's target audience) to answer this question for myself, and the answer is frankly quite a bit duller than either: It's More Of The Last One. No lessons were learned from last time^[3]. Improvements (and regressions) are by and large marginal - if you didn't like something about the last movie, it's not magically going to be better at it this time around.

At the core of the movie's issues is the pacing, which can only be politely described as "wonky". Some segments last long enough that you might actually forget about the characters not in them, while others come and go in a couple of minutes (The entire Honey Bee Kingdom bit could have been an e-mail!) It's not the TikTok Nightmare Hellscape reviews scream of, but the story is largely peripheral outside of getting characters from one setpiece or fight scene to the next, with anything resembling a character arc quickly brushed past. Which I'd probably be praising if this was a videogame, but, well, you know. The pacing is stoppy-starty enough that it almost feels like a lot of slower moments were cut to get the runtime down below 100 minutes - the few moments where the movie remembers it's supposed to have something resembling themes, like the puppet show that establishes everything about the two Bowsers' relationship and motivations, almost feel out of place.

It's a pity, because as with the prequel, I was quite enamored with the technical side of things and the individual components that make up this uneven whole. When the environment artists are allowed to make something other than a grassy landscape with Nintendo-Hire-This-Man levels of disconcertingly-realistic texturing, they really cut loose, with setpieces absolutely teeming with cute little details. The presense of Yoshi allows the cartoony animation to go a bit whackier to great effect, the orchestral score does a great job of hitting familiar cues without leaning entirely upon and exhausting them, and some of the new members of the increasingly-inexplicable celebrity cast show considerably more enthusiasm than their precursors (Donald Glover's committment to The Bit as Yoshi is particularly worth polite applause).

In the end, this continues on the previous film's trajectory of basically being Another Illumination Movie With Everything That Implies with the addition of Stuff From The Videogames to point at like DiCaprio^[4]. Like the last one? Great! Here's another hour and a half of that. Hate it? You won't like this one any more. Wish kids movies were more like Secret of NIMH and stuff again? I'm not gonna disagree, but expecting Illumination to make something like that is a bit like expecting your dog to checkmate you. In the end, the needle remains unmoved, and the inevitably-teased conclusion to the trilogy isn't going to do much to budge it.

• Best Bit: I'm not sure whether it was on its own merits as a cartoony kung-fu fight^[5] or merely because I'm a SMB2 Sicko™, but I quite enjoyed the Casino sequence.
• Worst Bit: The pacing being so whack that the character the story basically revolves around only gets a couple of minutes of screen time.
• Worth The Price: I saw this during the theatrical run, so from the perspective of time-of-writing, it depends on a complex balance of socioeconomic factors, with many variables to consider such as how many kids you're taking with you and whether or not you're willing to take out a mortgage for popcorn. You might need to break out Wolfram Alpha to crunch the numbers.

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1. FOURTEEN FUCKING BUCKS FOR A JACK AND COKE?!?!?!?!?!?! ↩︎

2. Which seems like a bit much, considering - last I checked, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has only given three 40-plus tech executives psychosis, as opposed to however many it takes to hold up an economy. ↩︎

3. Well, that's not 100% true. As far as I can tell there was only one Popular Music Needle Drop this go around. ↩︎

4. I would have said this was specifically for the parents in the audience, but I heard enough whispering of "That's Chappie" from the grade school crowd at my screening upon any hint of a cameo to dispell that. ↩︎

5. I thought we'd be done with the "fantasy princess does an uncharacteristic karate" thing after Shrek 1, but here we are. ↩︎

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