The first thing that came to my mind when I put on my Oculus Rift for the first time and found myself looking around virtual reality, was a line from the original Star Wars: “You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.” Thank you, Obi-Wan, you’ve put it well. While I haven’t yet spent all that much time in VR, only the occasional hour here and there, I’ve already stared up at the jaws of a T. Rex bellowing in my face, I’ve seen the Little Prince’s planet floating in mid-air just in front of me, and I’ve navigated a one-man submarine into the wide-open mouth of a giant prehistoric fish.
Author: Matt
In the Green Room, the neo-Nazis come and go…
Green Room (directed by Jeremy Saulnier, whose Blue Ruin I liked a lot), may just be the most effective slice of siege thriller this side of early John Carpenter. After introducing us to the film’s protagonists, a punk rock band down on their luck, it quickly sets up the situation that drives the rest of the action: after a last-minute gig at a backwaters dive populated by white supremacists, one of the band members accidentally comes across a murder scene in the titular green room. The band is locked in the room with one of the bouncers, while the neo-Nazis consult with the bar’s owner and their leader, the commanding Darcy (played to pragmatic, evil perfection by Patrick Stewart), who concludes that the only way to resolve the situation is to kill the witnesses.
Captain America v Iron Man: Much More Fun
Reader, I smiled. I had a big, goofy, excited grin on my face as I exited the cinema where I’d just seen Captain America: Civil War. If you had asked me ten years ago if I’d even go to watch a film called Captain America (with or without subtitle) at the cinema, with a protagonist of the same name, I’m sure I would’ve laughed in your face and possibly bought a ticket to some Swedish drama, but Marvel has convinced me.
Lars and the real girl?
Is it ironic or intentional that Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac didn’t get much of a rise out of me? I wouldn’t call myself a von Trier fan, but I very much liked Melancholia and The Five Obstructions, and I found many things to appreciate in Dogville, Antichrist and even Dancer in the Dark, even though there was also a lot about these films that irritated me. In online discussions about the Danish enfant terrible and his films, more often than not I’ve defended him: his provocations are smarter and less adolescent than they may look at first (though I’m sure the director is quite happy being an adolescent by choice at times), he’s not just screwing with his audience because it gets him all hot and bothered. He chafes, but the friction is there for a reason.
… or: How I learned to stop bingeing and love the wait
Let’s say I was given a choice: either I give up all the movies in my collection or I say goodbye to all the box sets I’ve got. Which do I let go of? The Criterion disks I’ve amassed since I first discovered the Collection would make this a difficult choice, but in the end I think I would want to hang on to the series I’ve got. The thought of not having constant and (nearly) instant access to Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos, as well as some of the later additions such as Treme or Hannibal is arguably worse than suddenly being bereft of the many, many films filling the shelves of the many, many Billy bookcases that we have accrued.
The Art of the Watchable
I like good political TV. If done well, I like politics both as a theme and as a setting; arguably, a series such as the original BBC House of Cards looks like it’s about politics, but it’s really Richard III in a pinstripe suit, set in and around Westminster. It’s very much concerned with power and corruption, but does it tell us anything meaningful about politics? You may very well say think that; I couldn’t possibly comment. Then there are series such as The West Wing, and while may be something of a US-centric liberal fantasia, it is intensely concerned, and not a little in love, with the democratic process, which makes it a very different beast from House of Cards. Even if you look beyond conventional drama to genre TV, you’ll find politics: for much of its running time, I’d absolutely say that Battlestar Galactica (the Olmos/McDonnell one, not the ’70s extravaganza) was a deeply political series in both senses.
Until all that’s left over is the question mark
I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
— Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love
Remember the days when we were all wondering what was down that hatch and what the hell those numbers meant? (I sometimes can’t remember what I ate the previous evening, but I will be able to list those damn numbers on my deathbed: 4, 8, 15, 16…) Remember when we were itching to find out more about Jacob, or the Others, or what the hell that black fog creature was? And remember those last couple of seasons that basically mocked us for wanting to know by saying, “Answers? Answers are for dummies. Have a trite, saccharine scene in a church instead.”
Vertigo for two, or: Co-op is the new VR
This weekend, something weird happened to me, and for the first time, I believe: I felt vertigo in a video game. There I was, running around the apocalyptic sandbox city of Harran in a zombie action game called Dying Light. A few hundred metres away was a radio tower – and as I’ve been conditioned over the last few years, towers are there to be climbed. There may be goodies at the top, or you get a better overview of the area and, more often than not, your map reveals points of interest that previously were invisible to you. So there I go, climbing the tower slowly and carefully, since no tower in video games has ever just had a single ladder taking you more or less safely from the bottom to the very top: it’s always a broken, rusty ladder here, some outside scaffolding there, and always at the risk of plummeting to your death and momentary rebirth at a safe place previously unlocked.
I call the big one Bitey! Fairness and Alien: Isolation
Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility… I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality… I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.
This apt description by Ash, everyone’s favourite hobbity murderbot, very much fits Alien: Isolation‘s recreation of the alien originally conceived by H.R. Giger and brought to the screen by Ridley Scott and crew. The creature is deadly: it is single-minded and has no conscience. Accordingly, it lacks yet another quality, one that most people would consider essential to good video games – whatever else the alien is, it isn’t fair.
They Create Worlds: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
This was a peculiarly English end of the world. No guns, no running and screaming, no heroes or monsters. Just nosebleeds, headaches, fear – and then the light. What remains of everyone is brightness, and voices… and the world they inhabited.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 