randydolen

Portal

Portal Teaser Trailer

Finally getting around to this one.  I think I'm about five minutes of playtime away from finishing.  A brilliant and potentially productive idea done mostly right, this has a great narrative development near the end of the game that opens up its world, forces a reconsideration of what's going on, and raises the possibility of much more to come.  (And that clearly ties it in with the Half-Life universe.)  This has been a fun game, and I am looking forward to the coming sequel.

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Have One on Me

Joanna Newsom

Beautiful.

Field Music - Field Music (Measure)

Field Music (Measure)

Field Music

Solid, catchy, accessibly complex, but disturbingly airless.  This plays much, much better on a home stereo than it does in a car or on headphones.  The lack of room sound on the record sometimes makes it feel like an lab experiment.  Hearing it in an actual room is at least a partial corrective.

It's also too long, way too long.  That said, it's an enjoyable collection of songs, especially in small doses.

Let the Right One In

Let-the-right-one-in

When I saw Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) at a second-run showing tonight, it was preceded by a trailer for Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008).  The crowd laughed at the trailer but seemed to enjoy the feature; some of them even cheered at the end.  Twilight (or at least its trailer) does suffer from the comparison, though it looks like a very bad movie in its own right, comparisons be damned.
The comparison, though, also reflects back on Let the Right One In, bringing up the question of what it is about vampire mythology that gives it such a lasting fascination for so many people and also drawing out some of the cheesiness that seems to inhere in vampire stories, no matter the media in which they are told.
This movie relies heavily on genre expectations in the early going, building up tension by alternating between domestic scenes and ones with hints at the supernatural.  The mythological intrigue gets weaker as the film goes along, but Let the Right One In does have a lot going for it: a visual style that can bring to mind, often in a single shot, both Michael Haneke and Carlos Saura; a great performance from Kare Hedebrant, its young lead, as 12-year-old Oskar; a final shot that prompts a reevaluation of what the entire film is about; an offscreen action sequence unlike any I've "seen" before; lots and lots of old Volvos.
It would be too pat to call this "Cria Cuervos with dismemberments," but that film (Saura, 1976) came to mind during many scenes in this one.  That is a great film; this one is merely good, but there is something special about it.  It doesn't seem like a movie about children haunted by vampires so much as a vampire movie haunted by childhood.

The Fire Within

Film_430w_FiresWithin

The Fire Within (Louis Malle, 1963) feels half timeless and half of-its-time.  Like so many French films of the sixties, it is instantly recognizable as a French film of the sixties, with its philosophizing, its meandering plotting (and meandering characters), and its uniformly attractive actors and actresses.  It distinguishes itself on the one hand by its especially sensitive treatment of suicidal depression and on the other by its somewhat linear, deadline-based narrative.
In a great early sequence, we see protagonist Alain alone in his room in a Versailles mental health clinic, fiddling with things, pacing, and muttering, revealing a thereto-unseen dimension of his psychological problems.  Malle's camera picks up on details of the action that are revealing without being telling, and  Maurice Ronet's performance manages the rare feat of depicting mannerisms without itself seeming mannered.
The opening sequence fairly screams "this movie came out a few years after Hiroshima mon amour,"

Le Feu Follet (Malle)--Opening Scene

but that's not really a problem; frankly, I like what The Fire Within does better, anyway.  But that similarity points to a tendency that I think characterizes Malle's films, a desire to give the audience what they "want."  Although The Fire Within does contain its share of (locally) aimless wandering and drifting character motivation, it is all subsumed to a larger, overarching structure based around character motivation (depression, mentioned many times by name) and a goal (suicide).  This structure points forward to Malle's more (overtly) conventional later projects.  I liked this film, and some things about it will surely stick with me for some time.  I didn't like its very last shot--the image is striking, but the text laid over it sacrifices delicate sincerity for bathos just as the film is coming to a close.

Reactivation

Two days short of a year and a half after that last post, I hereby resolve to start making posts here again.  It's good to keep writing, I think, and I've seen and heard a couple of things lately that are worth writing about.

It's been a long year and a half.*  My last post, from relatively early in that last long presidential campaign, was about Obama's attitude about powerful women, something about which I still have some concerns.  But it's been a promising presidency so far, I think.  It continues to list toward the center, though, at a time when people might be on the verge of being prepared for some productive socialization.  If people get worried enough/unable to afford enough "essential" luxuries, we might be in a position, for once, for leftists to put the old "shock doctrine" into practice.

Anyway, I didn't (and won't) focus on politics with this voxblog before, and I don't intend to so much now.  Media is the name of the game.  Now let's see if I can follow through with this.

* Because 2008 was a leap year.

Obama on Clinton: "She's smart"

300h

    Last night, I watched an entire episode of "The Daily Show" for the first time.  I don't like the show much; its somehow manages to be both droll and unfunny, which I'd previously thought was a contracdition in terms.  Jon Stewart gets off a good one now and again, but the show usually comes across as off-puttingly desperate.
    I tuned in last night, though, because I'd heard Barack Obama was going to be the guest.  (Here's a video of his appearance.)  The democratic debates have been such crowded messes that I was eager to see one of the front-runners in a more intimate, less combative setting.  It was a more-or-less charming interview, as one might expect from a guy with a reputation for room-filling charisma.  I didn't learn anything new about Obama's positions, as the interview focused mainly on the experience of campaigning for president and Obama's thoughts on his fellow candidates.
    Most of that discussion focused on Hillary Clinton, who is, at present, in the lead for the projected Democratic nomination.  Stewart characterized the decision as something like "Clinton is unlikeable but experienced; Obama is inexperienced but brings hope for change."  Stewart then asked, what experience does Clinton really have?  She has only been a senator for a few years; does her time as first lady count toward her "experience"?  Or, as Stewart put it, "Was her husband's résumé under hers?"
    This was an easy (and probably choreographed) set-up for Obama to praise Hillary Clinton's record in the senate while asserting his own superior qualifications for the job at stake.  What troubled me the most about it was that, at one point, Obama made an off-hand comment that Clinton is "smart."  If Obama is so interested in moving forward from business as usual, he should try to avoid falling into the classic sexist trap of powerful men referring to powerful women as smart.   Of course Hillary Clinton is smart--we should all be taking this for granted, but it's easy for somebody like Obama to unthinkingly (and I don't think he did it on purpose) slap her back down into her place as a woman by casually passing judgment on her intelligence.
    Can you imagine what would happen if Hillary Clinton, asked about Obama's qualifications, said "he's so well-spoken"?

The Bourne Ultimatum

Bourne Ultimatum - International Trailer

    Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum follows Doug Lyman’s The Bourne Identity and Greengrass’s The Bourne Supremacy, as well as Greengrass’s well-regarded United 93.  I saw The Bourne Identity on its release and did not much care for it; I skipped  The Bourne Supremacy.  United 93 is impressive in its construction and, to many, for what was regarded as its “restraint.”  It is not a polemical movie, nor is it a sappy or sentimental one—something that had been regarded as a risk given its subject matter.  I remember reading an IMDb comment criticizing the movie for having one of its terrorist characters be conflicted about what he was about to do.  The idiotic thrust of that comment was that the September 11 hijackers were beings of pure evil and that the movie makes a mistake in humanizing them.  My problem with the movie is not with the way it humanizes the hijackers (not possible—they were human, after all), but in the way it “humanizes” all of its characters.  The impression I took away from United 93 was not of real people more or less faithfully transposed into the cinema, but rather of cinematic ciphers given “human” attributes in an attempt to make them more believable.
    The Bourne Ultimatum is guilty of all this and more.  I saw the movie this afternoon, and there were a couple of things I liked about it: (1) there was a sequence with real-looking car crashes and (2) Tangiers looked romantic.  That’s about it, though.  It’s fragmented film with breakneck pacing, shallow as a Petri dish.  It spans the globe, but it lacks any sense of space or grandeur.  Actions are elided in the silliest ways,  but what is left in is often an incoherent mess.  The movie does some pretty impressive things with kineticism and screen direction, but it doesn’t do anything that hadn’t already been done by 1930 by films like The Smiling Mme. Beudet  and Ballet Mécanique—it just does more of it, more rapidly, and to the beat of one of the year’s worst scores (a prominent motif of which is blatantly lifted from DMX’s “Party Up (Up in Here)”).
    Perhaps it is time to make a distinction between editing and découpage.  This film is certainly a triumph of editing—you can feel the instinctive (or perhaps meticulously planned) decisions being made in assemblage by Greengrass and his crew.  But it does not add up; the impression the film leaves is one of one moment leading into the next—a formal unity lacking in a unity of purpose, not because its purpose seems to change from one moment to the next but because the film has no discernable purpose at all, save for separating another summer’s worth of rubes from our money.

Hollywood's Videogame Anxiety

Crank Trailer

    Much of the historical development of Hollywood filmmaking style has been motivated by institutional anxiety.  The rush to implement sound cinema in reaction (in part) to the growing popularity of radio led to a series of stylistic adjustments motivated by relative complexity of shooting with sound.  As television became more popular, the cinema reacted both by trying to show that it could do things that television could not (widescreen, color, and other novelties) and by incorporating television aesthetics and techniques into its own productions, including The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962) and Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960).  Turmoil internal to the industry--the ascendance of the "tent pole" production in the 1970s, the increasing power of agents in the 1980s--has also left its mark on the stylistic evolution of a collectively-produced medium that tends to be especially sensitive to the anxieties of the corporations that birth it.
   While videogames have qualities that clearly distinguish them from other representational and narrative media, their market ascendance has clearly been regarded as a threat by Hollywood.  After all, Hollywood films aren't just competing with one another or with similar media; they are competing with anything on which we can spend our leisure money: videogames, fancy cookware, funicular rides--the list is endless.  And videogames also happen to be a huge market in exactly the demographic that the film industry has historically targeted: boys and men from adolescence to early adulthood.  It is understandable that the industry has been eager to "tap into" the appeal of games but has also been anxious to contain their perceived threat to the Hollywood bottom line.
   The 1990s and early 2000s saw a major wave of films based on games.  Many of them took storyline, characters, and settings from the games and adapted them into well-worn Hollywood plotlines and aesthetics.  A few made at least some attempt to mimic the visual aesthetics of games; Doom (Bartkowiak, 2005) contains an extended point-of-view sequence that mimics the look of the game on which it is based.  During this time, games were also showing up in films in increasing numbers.  One notable example is Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003), which makes a cursory connection between a violent videogame and a school shooting.  Paranoia of this sort about the connections between game violence and real world violence can be seen in films as far back as TRON (Lisberger, 1982) and WarGames (Badham, 1983), and, I am sure, earlier than that.
  In the past year or two, I think, there has been a more-canny attempt to capture something about games that deals not only with their themes and visual aesthetics, but with what many claim is their fundamental element: their gameplay.  I don't mean that films are getting more "interactive," because they are not, but rather that interactivity has become a preoccupation in recent films, especially action films.  I have two in particular in mind: Déjà Vu (Scott, 2006) and Crank (Neveldine and Taylor, also 2006).  Neither of these films is much good--Crank, in fact, is borderline terrible--but both of them mediate narrative information in interesting ways that evoke the relationship between videogames and their players.
  In Déjà Vu, the Denzel Washington character must learn to make his way through what is, in effect, a virtual world.  A camera has been invented that can see into the past, and Washington has been enlisted to try to use it to figure out who bombed a passenger ferry in New Orleans.  At first, Washington is only able to control the camera itself (an opportunity afforded to videogame players but not to film viewers), but through a series of developments, he becomes a roving figure--himself controlled by "players" back in the control room--on the streets of the city and later a physical presence, with the ability to effect change, within the previously-only-observable world of the past.  Washington thus goes from "director" to avatar to game player over the course of the movie.
  Déjà Vu is by no means a wholly successful film, but Crank is much worse.  It does, however, manage to achieve a sense of "playing" on the part of the main character.  The movie starts in medias res for both us and the main character, a hitman played by Jason Statham.  We learn, along with him, that he has been poisoned a short time before the film began; we learn along with him that in order to delay the effects of the poison, he must keep the adrenaline in his body flowing at as high a level as possible.  This leads to a more-or-less unbroken series of action sequences in which Statham does whatever he can to keep his adrenaline level high while also making his way across Los Angeles in search of revenge.  This is a pretty ingenious idea for a film, but one that was all but destined to be botched, no matter who made it.  The setup allows for the film to hinge on many of the experiential qualities of games: improvisation, constant monitoring of both physical status and the status of the mission at hand, and the use of miniature deadlines (also a fixture of film, of course) within a larger, overarching quest.  In the case of Crank, unfortunately, this all adds up to something that is less than a videogame and also less than film.
  We'll see where all of this leads.  I don't think that games will prove to be the threat that Hollywood thinks they are.  The film industry has a long history of clumsy, worried dealings with new media, but it has weathered a century of such storms with no end in sight.  Whatever the shortcomings of Déjà Vu, Crank, and their like, film aesthetics seem to, at least, be finally reacting to what games really are rather than to a superficial idea of what they mean.  I am confident that this bump in the road will eventually be passed and that games an film will go on as mutually-informed but discrete media, freeing Hollywood to continue its own gradual descent into artistic bankruptcy on its own terms.

AT&T Wireless is terrible

I hate it, is all.  It's been nothing but headaches, mistakes, and bad breaks since they took over our service.  AT&T Wireless is so bad, in fact, that it is causing tension in my marriage.  I'm on hold with them right now, by the way.