Butler's 2010 Favorites

Butler keeps the pop culture superlative train running smoothly with his pick for top video game, movie, and novel of the year.  Is he completely full of it? Find out after the jump!

Best Novel: Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

When we live in a world where there are entire sections of Barnes and Noble dedicated to "paranormal romance", it's pretty easy to lose faith in modern literature as a whole.  It probably doesn't help that almost all of my favorite books were written by people who are long dead.  Anyway, what I'm driving at is that it warms my shriveled and blackened heart down to the sub-cockles to find empirical proof that not all hope is lost in the bland sea of trite crap being spewed out by every asshole with a word processor.

Or every smug twat with a word processor.  I don't

discriminate, Ms. Meyer.

Mr. Peanut is a somewhat dense book revolving around a video game designer and struggling writer named David Pepin who may or may not have had his wife killed and made it look like an accident.  The two detectives investigating it, in spite of their feeling that it is an open-shut murder, get drawn in to a very dark place as the disintegration of Pepin’s marriage prior to the murder begins to mirror their own in unique ways.  A large part of the narrative also features a creative and gripping imagining of the infamous Sam Sheppard murder.  Most of the book focuses on the paradoxically violent nature of love, and let me tell you, it is dark.  I have never read a book featuring such spiteful, angry, and yet wholly real characters.  Each thread of the narrative is amazing, simultaneously compelling you to cease intruding into these peoples' private and distressing lives, yet at the same time encouraging your inner voyeur to keep going.  Even in spite of an ending that I felt was a slight cop-out and some creative liberties with what a "popular" video game would entail (video games are used as a pretty extensive metaphor in the first half of the book), I could not put this book down and finished it in a day and a half.  It certainly isn't for everyone, but if you're someone who appreciates a wholly intense experience in their art from time to time, I cannot recommend Mr. Peanut highly enough.


Best Movie that wasn't Inception: Black Swan

I can't devote any more time to sucking off Inception, hence the overly specific title. And yes, I realize we have already covered Black Swan as well, but you know what? It was just that goddamn awesome, alright?  Maybe its the fact that never considering anything you do to be good enough is a theme to which I can relate somewhat uncomfortably well, or the masterful and near imperceptible transitions between reality and Nina's hallucinatory nightmare world, or the fact that every actor brought their A-game and nothing less to the table at all times, but this movie was a no brainer as my alternate #1.  I saw it twice in one week, figuring knowing what would happen next would make the experience less psychologically horrifying, but you know what? It makes it that much worse.  And I of course mean "worse" in the most complimentary way possible.  Black Swan is not a movie that is supposed to make you feel good, just like it is not the intention of every painter to create things that are standardly "pretty".  Like Mr. Peanut, it's not for everyone, but it is one of the most powerful and draining experiences I had all year, and that certainly deserves commendation.  Also, if this movie loses a thing to The Tourist at the golden globes, I will simultaneously shit and vomit pure rage before exploding in a violent, cataclysmic supernova of hatred on the pure matter of principle.

That movie was still shitty when it came out last summer and

was called Salt.

Best Video Game: Mass Effect 2

Those of you who know me and my infamous love of the Fallout games may be somewhat surprised that New Vegas was not my pick of the year, but like I mentioned in my review, it was basically Fallout 3, making it a late "best game of 2008".  No, Mass Effect 2 is what 2010 was all about.  It's predecessor was a very very good game that was marred by a somewhat bulky and unwieldy user interface, horrible vehicle sections, and party members that felt redundant at best.  ME2 managed to deftly fix every single one of these problems by streamlining the class systems, removing the godawful vehicles, and giving you a party of characters that were fascinating, well rounded, and just all around fun.  There were complaints that the plot was more of a bridge to the upcoming third installment rather than a smooth continuation from the first, but I feel that anyone who leveled that complaint missed the point of the game.  What made ME2 so great was the sheer depth of the in-game universe, with a vast myriad of different species, planets, customs, histories, and factoids to explore.  My first playthrough of the game took about 35 hours, and as the credits finished rolling, I immediately went to the main menu to start a new game simply because I knew that I had only scratched the surface.  The second and third playthroughs were admittedly shorter, but Steam has me clocked in at a solid 74 hours total.  I logged that in about a month and a half, and the only reason it took that long was because I took a break to play Bioshock 2 in early February.

Also, there was a lot of time lost to those pesky hours where I

was technically asleep.

The point is that Bioware clearly understands the sci-fi audience.  So much of good science fiction is in establishing the setting, but the balance between effective integration of these details and simple, dry exposition is a precarious one at best (for a great example of the former, read Ender's Game. For the latter, read Neuromancer).  If you didn't get around to playing this game at some point in the last twelve months, I simply feel sorry for you.  Go rectify that now.  NOW.  Seriously.  Steam sales end on January 2nd and it is ripe for the picking.