Matt – Page 63 – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

She, Herself and Spike

May 7, 2014MattLeave a comment

Spike Jonze is that rare creature, a filmmaker who is not only interested in but can actually combine the emotional and the intellectual. He did fantastic work with Charlie Kaufman (and indeed his elusive twin brother, Donald), and I greatly liked his adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, though I have to confess that I never read the book as a kid and have no loyalties to the original work. His most recent film, Her (described by Wikipedia as a “science fiction romantic comedy-drama”, that most perennial of genres), was successful with audiences and critics alike, and there is a lot to like about the film. It is smart, sweet and heartfelt.

It should have been the perfect film for me – yet it wasn’t. In part, that’s due to my inflated expectations; largely, though, it’s Charlie Brooker’s fault. Obviously. More precisely, I think I had his “Be Right Back” from the second series of Black Mirror in mind, where a dead spouse is imitated by an artificial intelligence. The comparison is not an entirely fair one: Jonze is telling a different story from Brooker, and his story about a man falling in love with his AI operating system wants to be romantic to begin with, something “Be Right Back” isn’t interested in being.

http://vimeo.com/61215171

The thing is this: I can accept the premise of a sentient, sapient AI with emergent feelings. I can buy a man, especially a lonely, depressed one, falling for his very personable operating system, especially if it’s voiced by Scarlett Johannson. However, in wanting to deal with this scenario in terms of romance, the film seems to ignore one thing: an operating system is a tool. It does what you tell it to do. This is not a relationship of equals, at least not to begin with – it’s a relationship where he can tell her what to do and she does it, and most likely he can switch her off or deinstall her if he wishes. She exists solely for him. I absolutely understand that Theo Twombly, more than ably played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his OS, Sam, and he’s nice and sweet in his interactions with her – but I have a problem with the film ignoring, or not recognising, the fundamental inequality of the relationship and the hints of Pygmalion, because to my mind these are inherent in the premise.

The film could easily work with this and still tell the same story. As Her develops, so does she – Sam, being a virtual being not only capable of evolving but predicated on it, outgrows Theo and moves on. I wouldn’t even need the gender dimension to be brought into it (although there are definitely gender-related questions to ask about the film, such as: why do all its nebbish male characters tend to be with more beautiful women? To what extent is Her an unacknowledged male geek fantasy?), but the way that Jonze ignores the digital elephant in the room, that to begin with Sam is entirely in Theo’s power, regardless of how much she’s supposed to be her own person, is an issue that kept me from fully engaging with the film. It’s almost as if Jonze was too much in love with his premise and ironically ended up idealising it too much – unless there’s a more self-aware subtext here that was intended all along, which might mean that my own private OS is in dire need of an upgrade, let alone of evolving.

Building worlds

Apr 30, 2014MattLeave a comment

Although I enjoyed Captain America: The Winter Soldier quite a bit, quite possibly more so than any Marvel film other than (predictably) The Avengers and (surprisingly) Iron Man 3, I won’t be writing a straight review of it. Enough has already been written about how it shakes up the fictional universe begun with the first Iron Man film and about its overtones of ’70s political thrillers, which don’t actually hold up all that well except on the most superficial level.

Suffice it to say, I liked the film – but mostly I like what it does, and what the Marvel movies have been doing, which as far as I know is pretty unique to cinema. Worldbuilding is something that so far has been done best in long-form formats: Tolkien, for one, did a magnificent job of it in The Lord of the Rings, but he has hundreds and hundreds of pages to do so as well as several other books to contribute to the creation of Middle-earth. Series in various media also have a lot of potential when it comes to worldbuilding, whether we’re talking about comic books or TV series. Some films have done the same, but it’s probably not the format’s main strength: you have examples such as the Star Wars series, but on the whole creating interesting worlds that live and breathe takes time, and the genres that lend themselves to worldbuilding (e.g. fantasy or sci-fi) also tend to produce plot-heavy – and setpiece-heavy – films that simply don’t have the breathing space that makes for the successful evocation of fictional universes.

In the Marvel films, the makers have succeeded at this by creating a network of characters and events that relate to each other yet still result in individual stories. You can watch Captain America 2 without knowing what happened in the Iron Man films, The Avengers or even the first Captain America movie, but having an idea of what happens outside the confines of this one film adds a sense of scope that the usual SFX of Mass Destruction don’t have. As I was watching the movie, I wasn’t thinking of sequels, prequels and franchises: I was thinking that here was a world that’s alive beyond any individual entry. What is going on in Captain America 2 resonates beyond Cap’s story. Even if the stories being told are still pretty basic, predictable tales of superheroics – and no, Robert Redford does not make this film Three Days of the Condor – there’s something exciting to the way the Marvel films have come to suggest that there’s plenty of space to be coloured in beyond the lines of Captain America 2 or Iron Man 3 or The Avengers. To me, it feels there’s a world out there, and it exists whether we’re presently looking at it or not – and that may be one of the best things that can happen to a fictional world.

It also presents a storytelling challenge, because I’d argue that in the long run it gets boring if every single story told within this universe is about averting some world-shattering calamity. That’s one of the strengths of serial formats: they give the storyteller space to tell the smaller stories too. Not every Marvel comic is about some super villain’s latest plot to destroy New York, the Earth or the universe. Look at something like Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Angel: yes, there are Big Bads and plot arcs, but there are similarly more intimate stories. Does Hollywood have something similar to offer? Can there be Marvel movies that aren’t about defeating this bad guy or stopping some major evil plot? Or will we get to the point where each and every one of these films is essentially the same story given a slightly different coat of paint based on which superhero has the lead part? If this happens, all the world-building will fall flat, because at this point the universe no longer feels like one and begins to feel like a Setpiece Generator. There have already been hints of this, for instance in Thor: The Dark World‘s “Let’s destroy London!” climax. Here’s hoping that Marvel can continue to build on what’s most intriguing about this project and that they avoid having created a world that lives and breathes only to bore the hell out of us.

Short cuts

Apr 22, 2014Matt1 Comment

There’s a tendency among some gamers who’ve been pursuing their hobby for decades to measure the worth of a game by its length. I myself remember many a week and month spent playing single games, and there’s definitely something to be said for roleplaying games that deliver a huge world and an epic plot to match – but I’m also coming to appreciate the beauty that can come with brevity. Especially indie developers often benefit from providing a short but focused burst of gameplay, creating encapsulated experiences that, like short stories and short films, can succeed in ways that are essentially different from their longer – and at times too long – brethren.

So, in lieu of a regular Variety Pack, I want to introduce three short titles that I’ve recently played and that both occasional gamers and more old-school, hardcore (read: nerdy) gamers may have ignored. All three games excel at imagining fascinating, evocative worlds without the extensive, often tedious expository worldbuilding that game designers sometimes indulge in… and that some gamers mistake for deft storytelling.

Year Walk

How to describe this one? It’s as if Ingmar Bergman were to reimagine The Blair Witch Project by way of a puzzle box. Taking up the motif of the Nordic year walk, during which travellers encounter mystical creatures as they try to get to their village church in search of visions of the future, the game is one of the visually most unique miniatures I’ve ever played. It is exquisitely atmospheric, creepy and redolent of sorrow and guilt.

The Swapper

In general, puzzle-heavy games tend to lend themselves to a shorter format; even the most ingenious puzzle design gets old if repeated for hours upon hours. The Swapper is a perfect example of this, using its simple premise to great effect: the player guides an astronaut through a derelict space station. Using a swapper device, this astronaut can be cloned up to four times, their consciousness transferred from body to body. This allows the player to stand on buttons, pull boxes and do similarly banal things to progress through the station – but it also tells a subtle yet effective story of identity and the ephemerality of the soul. There are echoes of Moon, but also of Michel Gondry’s more melancholy dreamscapes in the game’s clay-moulded space scapes.

Botanicula

When I was a child, I watched the samey Saturday morning cartoons from America and Japan that were on TV, but there were also Eastern European children’s series that were both much more mundane, set in a world I recognised as being similar to my own (I probably missed all the subtext about living in a Communist system), and more surreal, even subversive. The heroes and sidekicks especially of the US cartoons all pretty much followed the same visual and character templates, while the series from Czechoslovakia were often much more unique, as if the oppressive systems they were created under forced them to find other creative outlets.

The Czech developer Amanita Design may not be working under the shadow of Soviet rule, but they have clearly inherited the creative drive of their forebears. Amanita’s games are gorgeous, unique toyboxes filled to the brim with personality, and Botanicula is a perfect example of this. Some of its puzzles may be annoying, but it is always a joy to inhabit an Amanita world, and this one is no exception.

Check your Easter nests…

Apr 17, 2014MattLeave a comment

… because we’ve got a special Easter present for you: we’re doubling the number of regular writers for Eagles on Pogo Sticks – to two! Mege1 has contributed to the blog in the past, and he’s now joining the site as a permanent, regular fixture, so you’ll be able to read more of his thoughts on films, literature, music and the like.

Here’s what Mege1 writes about himself:

Mege1 has a proper day job, but likes to type away like so many monkeys until there are short stories, novels, plays and screenplays. He also has opinions about movies, books, plays and suchlike and is not afraid to share them. He hails from near Bern, Switzerland.

We’re currently crossing our fingers that there may be more additions to the site’s stable of pop culture addicts in the future. In the meantime, though, happy Easter – and don’t overdose on candy eggs and chocolate bunnies!

“Overrated” seems to be the hardest word‏

Apr 16, 2014Apr 16, 2014MattLeave a comment

There are some words used especially in internet discussions of films, books, TV series, games, albums and other media that are 99% certain to make me stop reading. One of them is “pretentious”, which is criticism’s analogue of Godwin’s Law – only the sturdiest of discussions survive its use intact.

While it’s not quite as bad as “pretentious”, I don’t like the term “overrated”, because usually it just expresses that the person using it doesn’t agree with the majority at the same time as believing that they’re right and the majority is wrong. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to believe that something is overrated… and yet, I’m about to desplay exactly that amount of arrogance, and possibly more.

When I read Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, I couldn’t help feeling that it was pretty much the encapsulation of an overrated work. Like so many paperback novels, it starts with several pages of praise. Not just any bog standard praise, mind you, but superlatives along the following lines:

A dazzling debut… The Art of Fielding might be the best book you’ll read this year…

A triumphant first novel.

… the most delightful and serious first book of fiction that I have read in a while…

… a magical, melancholy story about friendship and the coming-of-age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer… earnest, deeply felt emotion…

How to deal with such hyperbole? Do you just ignore it as the obvious sales ploy it is? I sometimes find it difficult not to take on a somewhat antagonistic attitude towards both the reviewers and the thing they’re reviewing: This is the best thing since gold-plated sliced bread that performs tasteful yet exquisitely exciting sexual favours? Prove it! Without the hyperbolic praise, I might not have read The Art of Fielding expecting it to either be amazing or fail to live up to those expectations – but then, I might not have read the novel, period. To be fair, The Art of Fielding is not bad – but this is where I will go into arrogant territory and beyond. The novel is pleasant, it’s an easy read. It’s great, for a while at least, if you’re tired and don’t want anything taxing. For a story that’s about a sport I find boring and the men who love it, it’s entertaining enough. Is it anything more than that, though? To be honest, I don’t see it. The writing is competent but not as clever as it seems to think. The characters are sketched quickly and deftly, but they never really become more than those sketches, and there are characters that come across as glib, smug cartoons that make me turn against the novel and its writer rather than against the characters themselves.

What bothered me most, though, may be exactly what makes the novel a pleasant read: it’s harmless. It has no edges whatsoever. It’s toothless. I don’t necessarily hold with Kafka’s dictum that “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us” – but Harbach’s novel never really gains characteristics beyond its pleasantness. There is something downright amorphous to it, an amoeba-like quality of having had all its edges sanded off. I like books that have personality, but this one never gains much personality beyond its generally sunny disposition, and as a result it felt vague and unconvincing when trying to convey stronger emotions. The drama it aims for in its plot lacks energy, conviction and the bite of real emotion.

Yet, going by the reviews the book wasn’t just generally liked, it was loved, a reaction I’m puzzled by. I can imagine people enjoying The Art of Fielding‘s pleasantness, but I cannot fathom anyone mustering the kind of strong reaction that the reviews hint at. Is this the flipside of the more usual, glib cynicism which makes it easier to tear into something than to praise it? I expect reviewers to have more of a range than either panning something or praising it as if it were the Second Coming. Or perhaps the fault, dear Brutus, is in myself – it is possible that as I am tone-deaf to the pleasures of baseball I am equally oblivious to what makes The Art of Fielding not just pleasant but great? Is the novel overrated… or am I overrating my own critical abilities?

Breaking points

Apr 7, 2014MattLeave a comment

First of all, let me be absolutely clear: I like Breaking Bad a lot. I consider it one of the best TV series of the millennium to date. It’s ambitious, smart, exceedingly well acted (with some exceptions in the minor parts), and it has a grasp of complex characterisation like few other series.

I also think that in some ways Breaking Bad is overrated. It’s not quite the perfect series it’s sometimes made out to be, and while it exceeds in many respects, there is room for improvement in others. Granted, I may be talking out of turn, as I haven’t yet finished the series; we’re five episodes away from seeing the last of Mr. White. However, as I’m currently rewatching the first four seasons in parallel to finishing season 5, I think I can safely address what I consider the series’ main flaw.

More than many of my favourite series, from The Sopranos via Six Feet Under to Deadwood, Breaking Bad is heavy on plot. It uses plot to talk about its characters, but it still puts a considerable focus on What Happens Next. This in itself isn’t a flaw; what is, in my opinion, is that while the characters develop in an interesting five-season arc, the season-to-season plotting undermines these arcs to some extent.

To a large extent, Breaking Bad is about Walter White oscillating between pathetic, disempowered male, anti-hero and outright villain, and the discrepancy between how he sees and presents himself and how the audience sees him. The tension between these different positions is always interesting, but the series spends a lot of its dramatic ammunition too early, moving Walt into villainous territory only to retcon him – or, more accurately, our view of him – in the following season to some extent (Warning: the following will spoil events up to and including season 5.)

One of Walter’s main crimes in the final season is the way he glibly accepts the murder of an innocent child as something that couldn’t be avoided and that, he thinks, wasn’t really his fault. We watch the scene and its aftermath and we see him as the monster he has become. However, is this act more monstrous than his watching as Jesse’s girlfriend Jane suffocates on her own vomit while she’s in a drug-induced stupor? Especially if we consider what Jane’s death leads to, namely an air crash that kills hundreds. No, Walt doesn’t pull any triggers – but then he rarely does when he’s at his worst, does he? – but his actions lead to those deaths, both the more abstract hundreds of victims of the crash and the more immediate death of Jane. As in season 5, his reaction is to rationalise his actions and his involvement, coming to the conclusion that he is not to blame. Is this more villainous in season 5 because we see the victim, a young boy on his BMX bike? Or is the series suggesting that people may not remember season 2 and the beginning of season 3 (if indeed they were watching Breaking Bad at the time) and the point needed to be reinforced?

There are other points in the overall narrative that hit similar points – Walt getting Jesse to kill Gale, a defenseless and relatively innocent man, for instance – that in the context of their seasons and the surrounding episodes make perfect sense, but when you look at the overall narrative beats they feel like we’re revisiting ground that has previously been covered. It makes some sense if you consider that audiences watching the series on TV would have several month-long breaks between seasons, so there’s a purpose to treading old ground – but in hindsight several mini-arcs feel redundant in terms of how they develop the characters. They feel like the makers of Breaking Bad either didn’t know where they were taking the series, or they didn’t know how many seasons they had left to tell their story. Especially Walter White’s overall arc almost depends on the viewers forgetting or ignoring where the series had previously taken its characters and how far they’d progressed into full-on villain country.

The fact that Breaking Bad still works eminently well is largely due to its stars; even when revisiting old ground, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s performances feel fresh and immediate. The same is true for Anna Gunn’s Skylar, although arguably the series and its writing have been less generous to her at times; rewatching the previous seasons, I was struck by how similar her arc in the first half of season 5 is to how she developed in season 3, yet Gunn delivers a great performance. Nonetheless, if it were possible to go back and redo Breaking Bad, it’s the overall plotting that would require attention. If my suspicion is correct and vince Gilligan didn’t always know from one season to the next if the series would be renewed plotting accordingly, it’s understandable that he would have aimed for arcs that hit certain character beats, not knowing whether he’d get another chance later to do so – but it did leave him with characters whose overall arcs have built-in redundancies. While this makes for clever design, it makes for slightly frustrating storytelling. More so because there are so many things Breaking Bad does not just well but better than almost any other TV series.

And that’s before we even mention The Awkward Case Of The Ricin Cigarette – so let’s leave it at that.

P.S.: Another thing that I’ve realised while rewatching especially season 1: Marie Schrader may just be the character that benefitted most from the series’ evolution over the course of its five seasons. In season 1, she is a two-dimensional character at best, slipping at times into flat caricature; by the final season, she is as rounded, complex and capable of tragedy as any of the main characters. While I may see this as something of a flaw of early Breaking Bad, in this case I prefer to look at it the other way around: the series definitely got better over time. This is also clearly seen in its villains: there’s no comparison between psychotic Tuco “Loony Tunes” Salamanca and the much more nuanced Gustavo Fring.

Look at the size of those pixels!

Apr 1, 2014Apr 1, 2014MattLeave a comment

I’ve written about pixel art before, but as someone who was playing games already when pixels were bigger than my hand there’s something about them that speaks to me, and it says things other than, “Put that away! It’s horrible!” I’m wondering to what extent this is nostalgia talking – big pixels remind me of the time when I was young, full of promise and had hair on my head rather than my ears. What does a non-gamer, or someone whose gaming career started at resolutions beyond 320×200, see when they look at pixel art? Do they see technical limitations, or do they see what I and my fellow gaming Methusaleas see?

For me, the stylistic choice made for instance by the developers of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (yup, that’s its actual title) is a valid one, since its pixel-heavy goodness achieves a unique effect. It’s not just retro-hipsterish affectation – it’s a valid form of abstraction that is particular to video games. When I look at a screenshot from Sword & Sworcery, I find a highly evocative quality in the image that reminds me of Scott McCloud’s writing on comics. In that medium, the reader is engaged to some extent by the elliptic quality of the frame-by-frame format: we fill in the blanks that are between the individual images. Retro pixel art asks us to fill in the blanks between the pixels; it’s a very specific stylistic cousin to blurring an image for artistic effect. A simple high-resolution paint job would make the picture more specific, more precise, but that evocative potential would be lost in the process. If I think of films that work largely through allusion and ellipsis, such as Andrej Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I imagine something akin to the pixelscapes of Sword & Sworcery more than the more realistic (though also evocative) vistas of the Stalker computer game, a distant cousin of Tarkovsky’s film with very different intentions.

Undoubtedly there’s an economic side to pixel art in indie games: the resources needed to create a game featuring old-school graphics are on an entirely different scale than what goes into flashy, hyperdetailed 3D environments. Beyond this, though, I don’t think that titles such as Papers, Please, Echo of the Wilds or Hyper Light Drifter (you’ll find trailers for all of these below) went with pixel-based artwork because it’s cheaper – all of these aim for a specific effect, an abstraction that at its best can be as gorgeous and evocative as high-detail photography. Even the purposeful ugliness of Hotline Miami and its grotesque ultra-low-res ultra-violence aims for a visual quality that I expect does not only speak to the oldtimers clutching their gamepads. The bigger the space between some pixels, the more space for gamers to lose themselves in.

P.S.: It’s quite fitting that today Rock Paper Shotgun posted an interview with Dave Gilbert, whose Wadjet Eye Games develops old-school low-res pixel art adventure games; in the interview Gilbert says the following: “The great thing about pixel art is it can, how do you explain it? It’s more like your mind fills in a lot of the details when it’s done the right way. When it’s done the wrong way it just looks ugly, that’s the case with any art.”

He’s not the Antichrist, he’s a very naughty boy!

Mar 31, 2014Mar 31, 2014Matt1 Comment

Note (to self as much as to anyone else): This should’ve gone up a while ago, but it seems it’s been stuck in draft limbo. If anyone feels they’ve already read this one, let me know, because that would be a sign that my mind – or at least my memory – is pretty much going.

I’d been avoiding Lars von Trier’s Antichrist for a while, mainly because I dislike provocation for provocation’s sake, and that’s what Lars von Trier’s public persona largely seems to be about. Having finally seen the film, I have to admit that it didn’t strike me as adolescently provocative as the man himself – and credit where credit’s due, von Trier makes highly unique films* that are fascinating examples of the craft. Antichrist is a striking film, although for each effective scene there’s another one that overuses a certain technique, causing a bit of von Trier fatigue. Nevertheless, it is only fair to say that the director is eminently skilled.

Having said that, I do think Antichrist goes off the rails and after a strong beginning becomes too random. Stylistically it remains fascinating, but it doesn’t so much bring up motifs and raise themes as throw them against the wall like so much psychosexual spaghetti. Grief! Despair! Pain! Clash of genders! Misogyny! Men are logical, and logic is evil! Women are emotional, and emotion is evil! Nature is evil! Woman is nature! Men can’t cope with women and so burn them! Antichrist flirts with all of these but doesn’t end up doing all that much with any of them. None of it seems to add up to anything much, feeling like window dressing for what is in effect an arthouse slasher movie. For all of the scenes of extreme violence, cruelty and self-harm, I rarely felt particularly involved – nor even all that shocked. When you feel non-plussed rather than anything else at fairly explicit scenes of genital mutilation, you have to wonder what exactly Lars was trying to do.

I imagine that courses on film, gender, violence and Lars von Trier will have a field day with Antichrist, and in fact I might enjoy a discussion about it more than I enjoyed the film itself. In the end, though, I have to wonder whether von Trier, always a consummate trickster, didn’t primarily enjoy the idea of doing a genre film and chose the various thematic overtones more as a game, a puzzle without a solution for the audience to try and solve in vain. It would be interesting to check out the Criterion edition of the film, which seems to be choc-a-bloc with excatly these kinds of discussions by scholars – but while I usually have to be physically kept from ordering yet another Criterion disk, I don’t think I have an urgent need to see Antichrist again, commentary track or not.

I am, however, slightly more curious about Nymphomaniac than I was before, so as an expensive, extended advert for Lars von Trier’s work the film seems to have done its trick. I’m sure his body doubles will appreciate this.

*When I say “unique”, though, I have to relativise that statement – especially at the beginning I did feel I was watching a mashup of David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman’s work, although with more graphic sex than you’d find in either of those.

Hollow Men

Mar 24, 2014MattLeave a comment

Francis, Francis, Francis… I tried to like you, I really did – or, more precisely, I tried to like House of Cards, the American reimagining of what may have been Ian Richardson’s best performance. It had excellent production values, good actors and a lot of potential, but in the end I failed to warm to it, which may well have been by design, but neither was I chilled by the series or its calculatingly evil protagonist. For too much of the time I was left deeply indifferent to the intrigues in Washington DC.

It’s a shame, really: the raw materials were there. Kevin Spacey has proven that he can play lying, scheming yet deeply human monsters such as Richard of Gloucester, and he’s adept at the kind of character Francis Underwood is and how he relates to the audiences: making them his confidantes and, eventually, implicating them in his cynical plans. However, as Richard III he had one of the best scriptwriters ever, and that’s what was missing in House of Cards, doubly so because compared to its BBC predecessor it had roughly three times the screen time to fill. I often complain about US series with 20+ episode seasons needing to build in filler material, turning flabby in the process, but House of Cards was flabby at thirteen episodes. Plots meandered, characters went through the motions, repeating variations on the same scene over and over – and where the series could have scored points with witty lines, it fell flat with dialogues and asides to the audience that, quite simply, weren’t smart enough. Frank never made the prospect of the audience’s complicity fun, and as a result I never felt I was made complicit in his crimes. The trick to pulling off a Richard III has to be a long con, charming the audience into rooting for you even when it knows you’re no good for it in the long run.

Perhaps House of Cards wasn’t trying to go for what made the BBC version tick, but if so, it should have dropped the UK version’s (and Shakespeare’s) formal strategies. Frank Underwood isn’t charming in that coldly droll way that Francis Urqhart was. It’s not fun watching him construct his schemes and bringing them to fruition. House of Cards flirts with being a pitch-black comedy, but in the end it goes for drama, which weighs it down to an extent that makes too much of the series leaden. It has moments of genuine drama when it deals with flawed human beings that can evoke our sympathy – most of all in Peter Russo, the doomed, sad pawn in Underwood’s game – but too often the drama comes across as perfunctory and generic. The main victim of this is Frank’s wife Claire, played better by Robin Wright than the clichéd material deserves.

In the end, the drama doesn’t work for me because the character at its centre is hollow, yet the series fails to understand this. Protagonists that are revealed to be empty can work, but this requires smarter writers than House of Cards has, and while the series occasionally hints at things going on inside Underwood, this comes across as lip service. We get an episode which is obviously supposed to reveal that there’s more to the character than is immediately apparent, but the episode seems to have wandered in from a different series, and it wanders off again as soon as it’s over. Having seen season 1, I’d say the potential is still there – but I can also say that I have little confidence in the series’ writing team to pull off that potential. In the end, I could never shake the feeling that I’d rather be watching Ian Richardson – or that grandpappy of powerhungry schemers, Richard III himself.

Great Expectations

Mar 10, 2014Matt1 Comment

I’ve seen both of the main winners at this year’s Academy Awards, Gravity and 12 Years A Slave – and I came away from both of them feeling just a bit underwhelmed. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those “Why the Oscars suck!” posts, not least because I don’t really feel particularly invested in them to begin with. What I want to talk about instead is this: expectations.

With 12 Years A Slave, I went in expecting to be as much bowled over as I was with Hunger and Shame. I was stunned when I caught Hunger on TV a couple of years ago; his visual language and his storytelling, combined with Fassbender’s amazing performance (is the guy ever any less than very good?), struck me as something I’d never seen. Shame built on this, engaging me both emotionally and intellectually in a way that’s rare in films. 12 Years A Slave is by no means a bad film, in fact it’s very good, a beautiful example of moviemaking craft on all fronts – but it didn’t stun me. It felt less unique than McQueen’s previous films.

Gravity, too, is an exquisitely crafted film. It’s been criticised for being (allegedly) thematically shallow, all spectacle and no substance – which I don’t agree with. No, my beef with Gravity is this: I watched the trailer on a large screen in HD, and it pulled me in, evoking a real dread of floating in outer space, untethered, with nothing there but stars that are trillions of miles away. It’s not that the film itself didn’t summon this dread, but it didn’t build on it: basically the thing I liked best about the film was already there in the trailer. More so, actually, because it was distilled into two minutes. It doesn’t help that I’m not a big Sandra Bullock fan, finding her bland rather than relatable, but mainly my disappointment was similar to what I felt after 12 Years A Slave. I was disappointed, not because the films were bad, but because they didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, meet my expectations.

In some ways I think those expectations weren’t entirely fair, if fairness indeed comes into the matter. If I hadn’t seen and been so receptive for that particular Gravity trailer, the actual film might have wowed me more thoroughly. If I hadn’t been stunned by Hunger and Shame, I might not have expected 12 Years A Slave to be stunning in that particular way, and this in turn might have allowed me to appreciate it more for what it was rather than being disappointed at what it wasn’t. Then again, without the trailer I might not have gone to see Gravity to begin with; I might not have gone to see 12 Years A Slave at the cinema just because of Chiwetel Ejiofor (no doubt a great actor, but I don’t go to the cinema just because of a particular actor).

How many films could I have appreciated more if it hadn’t been for very specific expectations? And how do you manage your expectations anyway? I’m not sure I could, or would want to, watch a trailer and go, “Yeah, fantastic trailer, but I’m sure the film won’t live up to it. I’ll go and see it, but ho hum…” I want to be enthusiastic about things, I want to have that feeling of anticipation – and when such expectations aren’t just met but surpassed, it feels amazing. If anything, the problem may not be how much I expect but how specific my expectations are.

Anyway: sometimes when I rewatch films that underwhelmed me the first time, I enjoy them all the more the second time around. I’m sure that in a couple of years’ time Film Four will show 12 Years a Slave and Gravity, just in time for Cuaron and McQueen’s latest works – and if I go to see them expecting to be just a bit disappointed and underwhelmed, perhaps I’ll come away enjoying them all the more.