It's Only Like Three Blocks: Hopscotch 2012 Recap

I’m not sure what it says about my experience at the Hopscotch Music Festival this past weekend when the most indelible memory involves my friend dropping his beer. Or rather, seeing his beer knocked out of his hand when an unidentified object came flying across Berkeley Café (tossed by the guitarist from the band Last Year’s Men) and made contact with my friend who was at the time quite oblivious to the threat of aerial attack. But that was the first thing I thought of when I began writing, just a few dozen hours removed from the festival, thinking of a way to define my third trip to Hopscotch in downtown Raleigh. Like the previous editions of the festival, everything was a whirlwind and hazy blur—though I saw only about 30 of the 175 acts performing over the course of the weekend, I felt like I never stopped moving and was never not listening to music coming from somewhere. I never got to digest anything whole before I was whisked away into the thick night air and down Martin Street once again. I don’t count that as a bad thing, though. There’s a kind of  maddening excitement that comes from knowing there’s music being made behind every brick wall in a one-mile radius and feeling you must do all you can to see as much of it as possible.

If this were a real music review, I would tell you about how Yo La Tengo’s quiet whisper somehow filled the massive (for Hopscotch) Memorial Auditorium, or how I could have sworn Jenn Wasner from Wye Oak was wielding not a guitar, but some kind of swift blade that kept rousing me from near slumber early Sunday morning at Lincoln Theatre. But the trouble with describing things this way is the fact that they feel less like solid memories and more like slowly dissolving dreams. I know as fact that I saw these things happen. I know how much I enjoyed seeing Roomrunner at Tir Na Nog, and how I sang along too loud with Built to Spill on City Plaza, and how I kept thinking Zeus seemed a million times better at a sparsely crowded White Collar Crime than the time I saw them with thousands of people in the hot sun in Toronto. But the fine details of the sounds that we paid good money to hear? Lost, it seems, forever.

As the number of festivals I’ve attended has grown to more than a handful, I have begun to realize these events really aren’t all about the music after all. They aren’t about checking off dozens of bands from some wish list or being able to tell your friends you were at X seeing X (so be impressed).  It’s about sitting under an overhang while the clouds unleash torrential rain on a Saturday evening, mumbling about the band Oneida, and thinking of all the numerous places and possibilities that were around you. It’s about stumbling into a place out of the rain and being pleasantly surprised by music you’ve never heard before and will probably never hear again. It’s even about taking a stupid rickshaw down the street to the next venue just to say you’ve done it.

Thursday night, as we stood in an ever-growing, yet unmoving queue outside the Pour House, we came to the realization we were not going to see Dan Deacon as we had planned—even though it was supposed to be the must-see show of the day and we would have scored major cool points for being there. But then it dawned on me, in just a matter of steps we could be somewhere else, and it didn’t really matter who we saw or what anyone else thought about it. We could have a good time around the corner, down the street, or just sitting on the balcony at Busy Bee watching all the people stumble around down below (which is exactly what we did).

I’ve now come to the conclusion that music festivals are ‘big picture’ events, made up of a sloppy stew of bits and pieces of sights and sounds you really can’t make out. But they all need to be there in order for it to work. I may not be able to make sense of a lot of what happened. I may not be able to replay perfectly in my mind Lonnie Walker’s exact set list or figure out the name of that Pictureplane song that I couldn’t get out of my head. But I know that I enjoyed it. And I know I can’t wait to do it all again.

Dead Aim: (Finally) Saying Goodbye to AOL Instant Messenger

Every day was the same. I’d clench my teeth for almost an hour as our school bus waltzed through the labyrinthine suburban streets between Parker Middle School and my little corner of the world on the other side of town. Once we finally arrived on my shady lane, I’d run inside the house, tell my mother my day was ‘just fine’ and then I’d dash up the stairs to the family computer, quietly resting there each day like a present waiting to be opened. I’d wait for what seemed like hours for the machine to wake up, go through the anxiety-inducing process of hearing the buzz and hum of the modem making synaptic connections through wires and space, arriving somehow on the world wide web. Then, at the word “Welcome,” we had liftoff. I was transported to the world of screen names and chat rooms and emoticons, which in my juvenile mind, was akin to some blindingly bright heaven on earth. All the people I passed in the hallway earlier in the day were there. So were all my friends from camp. So were millions and millions of strangers who, after the requisite “a/s/l?,” were potential best friends for life. It was a thrilling experience, signing on every day to chat about nothing but who was going out with whom, what you were doing this weekend (nothing), and what music videos on TRL were totally overrated. It was as big as my world got at that point. And even if the spatial range was quite limited, the possibilities it contained seemed endless.

I have a strange tendency to hold on to things longer than I should—be they t-shirts from sixth grade or old letters from forgotten friends or 10-day-old pizza in the refrigerator. Even after something has become useless or moldy or passé or devoid of any real meaning, it’s still not easy for me to get rid of it and banish it from my life forever. This propensity to hold on too long explains why, as recent as this past week, I was signing on regularly to AOL Instant Messenger (aka AIM)—nearly 15 years after I first appeared on the scene as “Carthage45” (a reference to the North African home of Hannibal—in case you had any doubts that I was not a dork)—in spite of the fact that I didn’t know anyone else who used it anymore. For the uninitiated, AIM was created as an instant messaging service initially part of America Online (AOL), an internet service provider that unbelievably still exists. AIM soon developed as a stand-alone instant messaging system that allowed you to compile a ‘buddy list’ of screen names of people you knew who you could then chat with. From the time it first became available, I was hooked. It has now been part of my life for so long as a source of communication and connection and the airing of grievances, it has become daunting to say farewell, in spite of the fact that AIM has completely lost all the usefulness that initially drew me in.  

What AIM has meant to me over the years is hard to quantify. It was, in its earliest stages, a way to solidify friendships, obtain breaking news updates from the soap opera that was middle school, and gain a foothold in some external space even when I lived in a world that was regimented by parents who were hung up on making sure I did my homework and got to bed on time. Later, at boarding school, it became a lifeline to the distant outside world—as it was the only practical way I could keep in touch with friends back home or people who were locked up in other dorms after lights out. In college, the device lost a lot of its luster, but it still served as a means to keep in touch with friends from high school, and a way to easily figure out where people were going out or what the assignment in English class was. Since that time, it has basically been a quiet, uncrowded room where people from the past would appear without warning, out of thin air, to say “hello, how are you?” and then disappear into the murky deep once again. One by one, the screen names I was so used to seeing pop up on my buddy list each afternoon like clockwork vanished completely until only one or two appeared with any regularity. In the last couple of months, even those few remaining holdouts have completely abandoned it. Now, I feel like I’m the last person in the room, left behind to turn out the lights before the party is closed down for good.

With the prevalence of so many means of digitally communicating with people—from Gchat to Facebook to text messaging—the utility of AIM has declined drastically in the last five to seven years. Some studies report that AIM held over 50 percent of the instant messaging market as recent as 2006, a number which has now dropped to less than 1 percent—a staggering decline even in the ever-changing world of communications. People stopped using AIM simply because there were suddenly so many other easier, hipper ways to tell someone you were too tired to watch a Star Wars marathon. Especially as mobile phone technology has grown, the ability to stay in touch with friends at every hour of the day has become a real possibility (and for some, a necessity). No longer do you have to wait to get home to sign on and hope that someone else is online—you can just text them or send a message on Facebook or tweet at them or facetime them or whatever. As has been the case with much of our recent technological advancement, communication tools are forever shifting and adapting to find new methods to make our interactions with others more instant and more controlling of our lives. Though AIM was for many people an obsession that took up a substantial amount of time, there was still the ability to eventually sign off and return to a haven without the ding of a new instant message. That wall that provided some sense of privacy and distance has since been shattered by ‘improved’ technology, thus destroying the need for an Instant Messenger service that was dependent upon making yourself available at the exact same time someone else did. Somehow, I miss that idea.

A few months ago, I pulled out the old laptop that I had in high school. Out of curiosity, I turned on the shockingly clunky apparatus just to see what was contained inside. Amidst the folders for Napster and papers for 10^th grade history class, I noticed a program known as Dead AIM, which if I remember correctly was somehow ‘better’ than your average AIM. Unbeknownst to me, that program had logged every conversation I’d ever had while using it. And I, perpetually bored and self-reflective, decided to read all of what was documented there, trying to decipher cryptic messages like they had been transmitted by unknown beings from outer space. Like my recent foray into examining old notebooks of poetry, this experience was uncomfortable and unsettling—envisioning myself so long ago, typing furiously into the night, trying to be funny, trying to sound smart, trying to create real connections with people. It captured, in just the couple of months that I used Dead AIM, so much about what high school was like. Whether I was arguing politics or reveling in oblique away messages (which would soon be replaced elsewhere by ‘status messages’), the chats were all foreign and fascinating, like some kind of time capsule I had forgotten I’d buried in the back yard.

Just as my reticence to throw away old shoes has nothing to do with any deep-seated love for the rubber in their soles, my inability to sign off from AIM forever has nothing to do with its design or functionality.  I’m not attached to the medium itself, but to what happened there. That feeling of possibility, of being able to instantly and directly communicate with dozens of people with the reckless abandon of adolescence is what I feel I’m leaving behind. Because in many ways, I still chat as I did then, just in a more mature and limited form. But it somehow isn’t the same. Even on this occasion, as I finally decide to not sign on to AIM anymore, I doubt that I will actually delete the program from my computer. I will leave that primitive golden yellow running man icon on my desktop so that I can be occasionally reminded of what it was like to come home after school and chat with friends or stay up late into the night telling bad jokes and quoting terrible song lyrics to people I hardly knew and not think a thing of it. And I guess, in the end, that has to be worth something.

Kool Thing of the Week # 5: Hopscotch Music Festival

For the third consecutive year, downtown Raleigh is gearing up for the Hopscotch Music Festival, which kicks off this Thursday evening. Started in 2010 by the Independent Weekly, the 2012 edition of the event will be the largest yet, featuring  175 acts from a wide array of musical genres at 15 venues around Raleigh. The festival, as its name suggests, is all about hopping from one show to another, as the schedule features a veritable smorgasbord of offerings for your musical enjoyment. Festivalgoers have the chance to see some of the capital city’s finest venues, ranging from Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, to the Contemporary Art Museum, to local hangouts like Kings and Slim’s.  Headliners The Roots, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Built to Spill will play at the City Plaza stage outdoors in the middle of Fayetteville Street. While the main festival runs during the evenings from Thursday to Saturday, day parties in the downtown area kick off around noon each day and will feature plenty of music, fellowship, and in some cases, food (score).  For the more intellectually-minded, visit one of the panels at the Edward McKay Used Books & More Cultural Series, which will take place at the Raleigh City Museum at 3pm each afternoon.

Having attended the previous two iterations of the festival, I can say without reservation that it’s a pretty awesome experience. Whether it was seeing Chapel Hill band Embarrassing Fruits play twice in one day or witnessing Guided By Voices tear it up on the City Plaza stage with the glistening Raleigh skyline behind me, Hopscotch has provided me with a boatload incredible memories in just two short years of existence. It’s a wonderful showcase for downtown Raleigh and all the exciting music that’s being made in the Triangle, yet it also provides a great opportunity to see talented acts from all over the world. Organizers have done a stand-up job in crafting the lineup so that, while choosing which bands to see is no easy task, the high quality of the options ensures that you really can’t go wrong no matter which course you decide on.

For more info, check out the Festival website: http://hopscotchmusicfest.com/

Oldies Corner 
In honor of Hopscotch, I thought I'd post a video from one of my favorite bands who will be performing at this year's Festival--the pride of Boise, Built to Spill. This here is a live version of the song "Stop the Show," which appeared on the near-perfect Perfect From Now On, an album released way back in 1997. I've seen Built to Spill live two or three times before, but I'm still really looking forward to seeing them again this Friday at City Plaza. So, rock out and enjoy.

Kool Thing of the Week #4: Nighttime Music

After going on hiatus last week, Kool Thing is back once again to close out the month of August with a bang (kinda). This week, you should probably check out the new bedtime-relevant Wild Nothing album Nocturne, which will be officially released Tuesday on Captured Tracks. Much like the New York-via-Virginia band’s previous album Gemini, Nocturne sounds a lot like the end of summer/beginning of fall—so its release date is perfectly timed to coincide with the changing of the seasons. As to be expected from this band, the songs here are hazy and shimmery, sounding the way the moonlight looks on the ocean at night. Album opener “Shadow” is probably my favorite cut of the bunch, but the whole album is impressively solid. It’s a very relaxed record—one that I imagine I’ll be listening to quite a bit as we transition into the time of pumpkin beer, falling leaves, and crisp autumn nights. 

Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can stream the album before its release here. 

Oldies Corner

It was a bummer to hear of the passing of Neil Armstrong over the weekend. Being the first human to step foot on the moon is a pretty huge deal, so in memory of Armstrong, here’s the song “The Moon” by Cat Power. This track appeared on The Greatest, which I can barely believe is six years old already. This is also good time to remind you that Cat Power has a new record called Sun due out September 4. Hopefully, that album will contain a song as stunning as “The Moon,” which, with its haunting, nighttime melody, has long been a favorite of mine. So maybe tonight, after it gets dark, you should look up at the moon, turn on this song, and pour one out for Neil Armstrong. Rest in peace.

Carolina Blues: Disillusionment and the Modern Sports Fan

The first time I ever saw Julius Peppers play football was sometime in the fall of 1997. Though I hadn’t heard of Peppers before, my uncle convinced me this guy from Southern Nash High School was going to be a superstar at UNC—my college team of choice—so we needed to check him out. In spite of my nascent adolescent fears about the big, scary world that existed at high school football games, I went, and I stood on hollow, cold, metal bleachers and thought this is what it meant to be growing up. Most of what happened at that game has been lost thanks to the passage of time, but I can still vividly remember how Peppers towered over the opposition (and his own teammates) and basically turned the contest into a one-man show. Even though it’d be years before I enrolled at Chapel Hill, I was thrilled with the prospect of a guy from my own backyard tearing it up on the football field at Kenan Stadium on crisp Saturday afternoons. Once Peppers got to Carolina, I watched from afar as he did indeed become an incredible defensive back for the Heels, earning first team All-America honors his junior season. At 6’7” Peppers was even able to contribute to the basketball team before heading to the NFL, where he’s found a great deal of success. Though I don’t think about Peppers often these days, I still consider him to be a superior athlete and a source of pride for me and my university.

A few nights ago, just before I fell asleep, I found myself straining my tired eyes to view what appeared to be an academic transcript, more than a decade old.  My fatigued brain couldn’t figure out where it had come from and why someone had decided it was a good idea to post it online. As discovered by N.C. State fans and widely disseminated by the News & Observer, the transcript and the downright atrocious grades contained in it ostensibly belonged to Julius Frazier Peppers. As I scoured the list of acronyms and digits, I realized the only classes that provided a lifeboat to the rapidly sinking GPA were in the African and Afro-American Studies department—the same division that has recently been implicated in a far-reaching scheme of conducting dozens of sham courses that either never met or had puzzlingly minimal requirements. The majority of the students in many of these questionable classes were athletes, mostly football players, so questions have naturally arisen as to whether there was some kind of ‘understanding’ between the athletic and AFAM departments to keep athletes eligible. Though the connections between what has taken place as late as 2011 and as early as the late 1990s have not been definitively proven, it seems hard to deny that something was going on. This latest revelation comes on the heels of more than two years of uncertainty, investigation, and self- and NCAA-imposed penalties related to academic cheating, improper benefits to players, and inappropriate ties to agents that violate NCAA rules. The resulting mess has cost several people their jobs and several more their eligibility to play college football. Now that an independent investigation is underway to tackle these claims of academic fraud—which may spill over into men’s basketball—it appears this saga will drag on a good deal longer.

Being a sports fan, for me, has always been about entering a world outside the bounds of reality. It’s always been about shelving rational and civil discourse and rooting like hell for your team to beat the crap out of the other guys. It’s always been about seeing a human being launch into orbit and slam a rubber ball through a metal rim and nylon hoop--no matter how many times you’ve seen it before, no matter what other pressing concerns are going on around you. The unabashed glory of sports also has a flip side—the way that it draws us in and clenches us with its talons means that we will occasionally get carried away; we’ll shout obscenities we’ll soon regret, and we’ll feel intense pangs of sadness in our gut when a stupid ball rolls under someone’s glove. It’s a strange existence being a sports fan. But no matter how high the highs are and how lows the lows are, it has typically been segmented and contained into one compact portion of life, separated from the real world. This isn’t true at all, of course. But it’s the shimmering façade I had constructed, one that has now reached a perpetual state of defacement and desecration.

Disillusionment has become the natural product of so much reality crashing into the sporting world all at once. The man we believed to be an upstanding and exemplary coach turned out to be shielding a child molester in order to protect the good name of his college football program. The guys we cheered as they blasted homeruns turned out to be jacked up on steroids. Professional football teams have been caught offering bounties for taking out opposing players. Long-standing collegiate conferences have been collapsing thanks to a desperate rush for money. Many of the best cyclists have been doping during impressive Tour de France runs. Even badminton players sometimes do the unthinkable and throw matches on the sport's biggest stage. The list of these types of egregious actions seems endless and constantly growing. Sometimes I fear that if the sporting world continues on its current path, I’ll one day view the pastime with the same lifeless lack of interest as I do most discussions of tax policy. What once was a way to avoid the stressors and burdens of life has grown into nothing but. One day, you’re in the stands, seeing nothing but touchdowns and high-fives. The next, all you see is exploitation, crass commercialism, and the misguided predominance of sports over any other of life’s necessary concerns. It’s jarring and disheartening. As a fan, there’s only so much you can take.

Julius Peppers, though not my favorite Tar Heel athlete of all time, does represent for me the period in which I grew from casual childhood fandom handed down from my parents to an individual who has “Carolina fan” indelibly attached to his identity for the rest of his life. This current predicament has been shifting my long-established view that everything ever done by the Heels was right and perfect and I won’t consider the alternative forever and ever amen. But now, what do you do when it appears the school you have followed so closely may have put the wool over your eyes in order to be successful? How do you come to terms with the very real possibility that much about what you believed about your alma mater has been untrue? What will I do if they have to take down those banners in the Dean Dome?

Of course, scandals in college sports are rampant and constant, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise. Major programs often blur the line between professional and amateur, bringing in athletes to make money for the university all while requiring them to attend classes and keep up grades, even if they are unprepared or have little interest in doing so. The dirtiness involved in exploiting unpaid young people is conveniently overlooked a lot of the time, because frankly, college sports are a great deal of fun. As college sports—football in particular—have grown exponentially more popular in recent years, the question grows ever more pressing: do the benefits of running a successful (profitable) athletic program at the university level outweigh the costs?

I don’t have a lot of answers to these questions, so I try to get back to the basics.  Like many Carolina fans, I recognize that the academic integrity of the University of North Carolina should be paramount to any other consideration. If the University cannot manage to be both a well-regarded public institution of higher learning and a powerhouse athletic program, we must always err on the side of academics—no matter how badly it hurts the wallet or our plans for Saturday afternoons. Our society can likely weather the scandals and indignities of professional sport, but when athletics poison the academic well, we compromise everyone’s future. Those institutions exist to prepare the next generation by educating them and teaching them to lead lives as decent human beings. Shoe contracts, stadium expansions, and TV deals should have no seat at that table.

I don’t blame Peppers for any of this. He was and is an outstanding athlete. He showed an incredible amount of humility and generosity by admitting the transcript belonged to him and then donating $250,000 to a UNC scholarship fund for African-Americans. I can’t help but think he was likely steered towards the University of North Carolina when he shouldn’t have been by people who should have known better. And that’s the whole problem: there are adults who should know better than to allow these systems to exist. Adults who shouldn’t have to depend on an unpaid 18-year-old kid passing an Introduction to Drama course so that he can maintain his job and his million dollar contract. This kind of thing goes on all over the place, I know, but that doesn’t make it any more right.

I claim no inside sources. I have no idea how this issue will play out. Whether it’s a lack of leadership, lack of oversight, or insight, there has been an incredible void of anything that should have been done during this debacle at UNC. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a wonderful place, with an outstanding faculty, a gorgeous campus, and a diverse and talented student body. It’s simply not worth it to sully the strong legacy established more than 200 years ago for the glory of playing in a second-rate bowl game in Charlotte. Hopefully, the new phase of investigation will get to the bottom of this issue once and for all, and we will finally be able to accept the truth, fix the problems, and move on. I really do hope those banners stay flying in the rafters in the Smith Center for the next 100 years—but I only want them there if they were won fairly. We shouldn’t accept them any other way. Because even in this muddled world, I do know that the right thing is to shed light on the truth. Even if we won’t like what we find.  

Totally Pointless Debate: Deep Impact vs. Armageddon

This past weekend, while the rest of the world was out catching rays and riding waves, I mostly stayed indoors and spent some quality time with the television. Quite uncharacteristically, I took in a slew of movies, ranging from the incomparable 2004 ‘instant classic’ Fat Albert, to the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn-Sydney Poitier juggernaut Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, to the Canadian roadtrip film, One Week, starring Joshua Jackson. While all these films were enjoyable in their own ways, two other movies I watched really took my weekend to the next level. Purely through the powers of serendipity, TBS decided to air Deep Impact on Friday night, and on Saturday evening, FX put on that film’s brother-in-arms/eternal archrival Armageddon. These two blockbusters from the summer of 1998 deal with mind-bogglingly similar topics (imminent destruction of the planet by some kind of space rock), and are responsible for creating a zeitgeist for the ‘apocalyptic earth destruction film’ in the late 1990s. I saw both of these films around the time of their release and probably thought they were okay, though I cannot say I've seen either one in the last decade. In an effort to trick myself into believing this was a productive weekend, I figured it would be a useful exercise to compare and contrast some specific elements of these films. While they have a lot in common, it will be interesting to see which has better stood the test of time.

Cast

Deep Impact: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman, Mike O’Malley

Armageddon: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, voice of Charlton Heston

While both of these films have some undeniable star power, few movies have brought in a haul of big names like Armageddon. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of any of the major actors in that film, but it’s always good to see a bunch of familiar faces, especially when an audience is tasked with coming to terms with the potential end of the world. Though Morgan Freeman’s role of U.S. president in Deep Impact makes this a closer call, Buscemi and Thornton get the job done for Armageddon.

Music

If you like Aerosmith, Armageddon’s the film for you. (I don’t like Aerosmith). “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” still carries with it the haunting chill of awkward middle school dances, so I have attempted to avoid that song at all costs in the ensuing years. The Armageddon soundtrack also features the likes of Journey, Shawn Colvin, Jon Bon Jovi, Our Lady Peace, and ZZ Top. So, yikes. The score for Deep Impact was composed by James Horner, the man behind the music of Titanic, amongst several other big time motion pictures. The music in Deep Impact didn’t have much of an (ahem) impact on me, and the film obviously wasn’t swinging for the fences to create pop chart hits like Armageddon was. But really, simply based on what music was not featured in the movie, Deep Impact gets the win in this category.

Plot

The plots follow generally similar trajectories: we learn an asteroid or comet is headed towards earth and someone decides the best way to avert this disaster is to send people to the space rock and blow it up. The stories take different approaches to the same structural framework though. In Armageddon, we spend an awful lot of time on an oil rig, then an inordinate chunk of the movie dealing with a rag-tag group of oil drillers who must be made into astronauts, then an even longer portion trying to figure out how to implant explosives on the asteroid. I became increasingly impatient as the film refused to move on to the major, important work of actually saving the earth from destruction. There are also only 18 days before the asteroid hits earth when the film begins, which does not seem to be a reasonable amount of time to expect people who have never been to space to try to figure out how to land and to maneuver spacecraft. Couldn’t we have found some astronauts who could handle this work? There is also a lot of joking and light-heartedness while the team prepares for their mission. This cuts the tension a bit, but as someone who ostensibly would have perished had the plan not worked, I kept thinking these folks should have taken their job a bit more seriously.

In Deep Impact, we get several narratives woven together to create the storyline, as we examine how the president, the news media, a space crew, and average Americans digest a dire situation which may lead to the end of the world. Fortunately for humanity, there is much more time to come up with a plan to stop the comet from hitting us than in Armageddon. So it doesn’t seem so far-fetched when the team of assembled astronauts is able to manage the daunting challenge of landing on a comet or when we learn the U.S. government has constructed an enormous bunker in Missouri to save one million people. In Deep Impact, we must deal with several dilemmas—how do we inform the people of this kind of event, who do we try to save from dying, where do we want to spend our last moments alive, etc. This format of following different people opens the door to wider discussion of ethical issues, which makes it easier to overlook glaring implausibilities of the film, like (spoiler alert) when Elijah Wood’s character travels from Missouri to Virginia by motorbike to save a girl from the tidal wave and escapes its wrath by mere inches.   

While much of the screen shots in Armageddon are impressively expansive, the story in that film feels much smaller. You don’t get a good sense of how people on the ground are handling this situation. It’s all about Bruce and Ben fixing the problem and figuring out how to get back home to Liv Tyler—a scenario which is less interesting to me than figuring out how different people would respond to the impending end of human history. The resolution in both films involves sacrifice to save humanity. However, given the stakes, Deep Impact gets things worked out in a more digestible way. In that film, a lot of people die as we are unable to fully stop the comet from striking the Atlantic and creating a massive wave that swallows a great deal of land and people. We lose some key characters along the way, but in the end, Morgan Freeman and the nation vow to rebuild. In Armageddon, at the very last minute, Bruce Willis pulls the trigger, the asteroid explodes, and its constituent pieces manage to miss earth entirely. Sure, it’s a happier ending, but it feels a lot more forced and a lot less realistic than what transpires in Deep Impact. Also of note, Deep Impact accomplishes the feat of saving earth in 30 fewer minutes than Armageddon, which I count as an extremely good thing.

Special Effects

With a budget of $140 million (versus $75 million for Deep Impact), Armageddon easily gets the nod in this category. As should be expected for a Michael Bay film, the shots of the crew in space and the depictions of the asteroid itself are pretty spectacular. The asteroid is oddly beautiful and frightening at the same time, which enhances a film with an otherwise shaky plot. Deep Impact’s best effects occur after the comet hits and the tidal wave crushes Téa Leoni and most of the eastern seaboard. Outside of these shots, though, none of the effects were particularly memorable.

Overall Evaluation 

The fact Paris was the only city (aside from a few boats which were bombarded in Shanghai) destroyed in Armageddon was an insult this Francophile could not forgive. Notwithstanding the incomprehensibly low odds of a piece of rock hitting that exact spot, this occurrence underscores the major issue with Armageddon: this movie is about ensuring Liv Tyler is not forever separated from Ben Affleck, the rest of the world be damned. In Deep Impact, by following different stories of people dealing with the implications of the end of the world, I got a better grasp of what this kind of threat would mean for the planet. Also, I am a big fan of rooting for the underdog, and Armageddon and its massive budget outdid Deep Impact at the box office by more than $200 million. So if I ever find myself in the unlikely position of having to choose one or the other to watch again, it would certainly be Deep Impact. Though I think it’s a safe bet I won’t be tuning in anytime soon—unless an asteroid or comet starts heading this way, and I determine the best course of action is reviewing late 20^th century motion pictures for guidance.