… shame about the writing – especially since I’m talking about the adaptation of a novel.
I’ve just watched the Cloud Atlas trailer, and it looks amazing. It would look even better if I hadn’t also been listening to the lines from the film that are intoned in the trailer – most of which strike me as portentous yet facile drivel. Was the book like this? I have to admit I don’t remember; when I read Cloud Atlas, it didn’t particularly click with me. Still, the trailer is well worth looking at. Visually the film would seem to risk becoming garish, but it definitely looks very intriguing.
Has it finally happened? Have I gone off Alan Moore? What’s next: will I stop liking rare steak? (I admit, I like good quality beef and my carbon footprint looks like nothing so much as a gigantic hoof-print…)
Well, what has happened is this: I used to get most if not all new Alan Moore comics by default, and after reading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009: Are there any more subtitles coming this way? that’s simply not the case any more. I haven’t liked any of Moore’s recent works as much as those created during his heyday – masterworks such as Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta – but I’ve found enough things to like even in decidedly lesser Moore such as Smax, his Top 10 spin-off.
For the record, I think that the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes are fantastic examples of strong storytelling and characterisation. Thematically they may not be as complex and rewarding as the works that made Moore famous, but they’re still examples of an author at the top of his craft. The continued adventures of the League though… To my mind Moore made two mistakes: one being that his ambition to create a world where all fictions are true overrode any wish he had to tell a good story with great characters, the other that the closer the story came to our present the less Moore had to say about the culture he was riffing on. 1910 and 1969 are still well crafted, and the latter even manages to intrigue as a story, but 2009 simply doesn’t say anything much of interest about modern pop culture. Its critique is shallow and lazy, making the Grand Old Madman of Comics come across as an old coot going, “You kids, get off my lawn!”
The greatest crime, though, is that a series that once featured extraordinary characters written with depth and sympathy (for the most part) – well, that series ended up with versions of the surviving characters that were uninteresting and exchangeable. Mina and Alan, as the century rolled on, were reduced to pale shadows of their former selves, in ways that made them boring to read rather than resonating thematically, which may be what Moore was aiming for.
It’s a shame, because throughout Century there are scenes that show Moore has still got it, and one of my favourite bits in all of the League is the deus ex machina he employs at the end of 2009, managing to be funny and chilling at the same time. But it doesn’t quite make up for the increasing tendency in the comics to indulge in Where’s Waldo-style “Spot the reference!” games – and, what is worse, games that lack the gleeful joy of earlier instalments. Too much of 2009 feels perfunctory. So, quite seriously, has Alan Moore become too much of a caricature of himself?
Sadly, even Kevin O’Neill’s art feels lacking in 2009 – perhaps because the (near-)present is a less exciting playground than the fictional past. He’s still got some great visuals, but both in terms of writing and art 2009 feels tired too much of the time. Perhaps it’s time for Moore to take a holiday? Watch some good TV? Get over himself?
If there’s one word I wouldn’t mind seeing banned from use for the next, hmm, fifty years, it’s this one: authenticity. Yup, that’s the one, the word I’ve come to dislike as much as its closeish relative, the phrase “Based on a true story!” What’s my beef with it? It’s either phony, self-aggrandising or both. A certain doddering old father once told his son, “To thine own self be true,” and as a motto it sounds quite nice, except – I think this notion of an “own self” to which you should be true is silly. Do something because you want to do it, because you think it’s right to do it – but talking about an authentic self that you should honour? That’s fine, as long as your “own self” is one of the good guys – but what if you consider your authentic self to be that of a xenophobic bastard who hates those bloody foreigners? Does the notion of authenticity* ennoble your arseyness? People’s identities, their characteristics, are fluid, and pretending that there’s a ‘real you’ inside you that’s a yardstick for all your actions is romanticised claptrap at best, disingenuous bullshit at worst.
If you’re still reading after this rant, you’re probably wondering: why does a geek blogger who usually writes about movies, games, books and comics post a diatribe against the word “authenticity”? Doesn’t he have first-person shooters to play and pretentious wankery to write about them afterwards? Bear with me, gentle reader – relevance (of some sort) is just around the corner. It’s basically this: the overuse of the A word extends to art critics and the culture pages of newspapers and magazines. “Authenticity” is used as a word of praise for movies, when usually writers use it as a way of making their “it’s, like, for real, man!” comments sound sophisticated. Let’s be frank: authenticity in art – including any art form that’s primarily about narrative fiction – is an effect. It’s an artifice. It’s like a Photoshop filter: turn up the authenticity to 10, eh? It’s the fashionable, and often trite and superficial, name given to works that used to be described as being in the style of realism or naturalism. It’s an author’s conscious choice on how to present their material. It’s a style, an artifice, pretending not to be one.
So, what’s brought on this tirade? Probably the fact that I recently re-watched Drive, a film I greatly enjoyed the first time and downright loved the second time. How does it tie into this extended waffle on authenticity? Pretty much by eschewing the Authenticity Effect altogether. Nicholas Winding Refn uses a decidedly theatrical style – perhaps not as much as in his earlier film, Bronson, but Drive is still markedly focused on its own artifice, in its visuals, its central performance, its choice of music. The director’s hand is visible throughout. Refn is clearly not interested in the pretense of reality – yet his film, for all its artifice, resonates with me. While I’m watching it, the Driver feels real to me – not in spite of the artifice but because of Refn’s immense skill at using artifice as one of the colours on his palette.
Art, at its best, doesn’t try to replicate the look of reality in a facile way. It embraces its own stylisedness, using whatever style is most suited to achieving a certain effect – and yes, that effect can be realism or naturalism… but neither of those automatically makes a film more authentic, unless our understanding of authenticity is hopelessly naive. “Based on a true story” doesn’t make that story more real, documentary visuals don’t render the subject more authentic. After all, what we’re looking at here is art, and the moment art denies its own artifice, it becomes schizophrenic or shallow. If art wants to be true to its own self, then it is most authentic when it accepts its own dependence on skilled, intelligent, passionate artifice.
*I seem to dislike the word so much I keep spelling it as “authenticify”… To mine own self spell true, eh?
P.S.: Having grown up in the ’80s, the aesthetics of Drive may very well feel more ‘real’ to me, because that’s what my childhood, filtered through TV, looked and sounded like.
I’ve been away for work and needed to recover from my lack of sleep, which I hope excuses the lack of recent updates. I’m back now, though, with a healthy list of films etc. to blog about. To start off with, here’s Wot I Watched On My Telly Recently. (More Variety Packs may follow later this month!)
Lourdes
An Austrian-German-French co-production about pilgrims and/or tourists visiting Lourdes looking for miracles – probably doesn’t sound particularly appealing to most, does it? The film is definitely not for everyone, but it’s well worth checking out nevertheless, deftly mixing different themes and genres, from satire to psychological drama to a critique of the faith industry and of petty sanctimoniousness, while always feeling of one piece. Lourdes is also smart in that it doesn’t rely in any way on the viewer’s own beliefs (or lack thereof), and the performances are subtle and effective throughout. It’s the kind of film, though, where the truly interesting things go on inside the characters and remain implicit to the viewer.
A Night To Remember
Ah, Criterion — mon semblable, — mon frère! I’ve rarely gone wrong with Criterion DVDs, and the 1958 precursor to James Cameron’s Titanic didn’t disappoint either. The film makes an interesting counter-point to Cameron’s iceberg extravaganza; taking a disaster that lends itself to melodrama of the worst kind (which Titanic – the 1997 film, not the ship – indulged in some scenes, avoided in others), A Night To Remember is the more restrained, more British (for want of a better word) film, though it is exactly this restraint that makes it all the more devastating. It’s as impossible to avoid dramatic irony in filming the sinking of the Titanic as it is when referring to Mr. Lincoln’s night at the theatre, but the film doesn’t overplay its hand, nor does it go for a simplistic, smug class warfare view of 1st class passengers as parasites and steerage passengers as accented, saintly victims. Also, considering the film’s age, its effectiveness in depicting the disaster is in no way lessened by the datedness of its effects, which speaks for the quality of the directing, acting and script.
Che
I used to be a big fan of Steven Soderbergh. Starting with Out of Sight (still by far the best Elmore Leonard adaptation in my opinion, and the best use of Jennifer Lopez), I enjoyed almost every single one of his films, in terms of craft and storytelling. Yes, there were exceptions – Full Frontal comes to mind – but even slight works such as Ocean’s Eleven were examples of a director pretty much at the top of his craft. Then, probably around Ocean’s Twelve, something changed. I still liked the second cinematic méringue for its French New Wave experimental frothiness, but I started to get the impression that Soderbergh was mainly doing these films to scratch some private itch, and whenever he became aware of the audience and its wants and needs, as with Ocean’s Thirteen, there was something calculating and cynical about the films. Soderbergh, who’d always led with his intellect, seemed to have lost what heart there was in his films. I haven’t yet seen his most recent work, but Che, his two-parter about some guy on a t-shirt, failed to grab me, nor did it excite, educate, intrigue or irritate me in any way beyond the vague irritation that this Soderbergh guy used to have something to say.
Both parts of Che are beautifully shot, well acted and examples of great craftsmanship, but especially part 1 so assiduously avoids any suspicion of biopic clichés that it ends up a handsome but strangely empty variation on the theme of “What I did on my holidays”: And then Guevara went there. And then this member of his band of rebels died of a cough. And then that outpost was taken. Part 1 picks up towards the end, and part 2 benefits from the story’s more dramatic angle – if the first film is about Che’s (military) rise, the second depicts his slow, drawn-out fall – but just a bit more character, just a smidgen of story would have helped. As it is, the films feel strangely like a documentary shot by a cinematographer who wasn’t interested in much beyond how his film looks. You can do unconventional biopics and avoid the trap of facile psychoanalysis without stripping a film of personality altogether, Steven, m’kay?
As a nerd/geek since childhood, I’m a bit of an odd duck. I never read superhero comics as a kid. Asterix, yes, as well as Tintin, and for a while there I also read some of the Disney stuff, but never very avidly. The caped crusaders, men of steel, the uncanny mutants and amazing arachnid-boys, though? Nope. I was never particularly interested. Yes, I watched the occasional superhero movie and am still a fan of Burton’s Batman Returns and Nolan’s takes on the dark’n’depressed knight, I did catch most of the X-Men, Spiderman and Iron Man films at the cinema, but I never felt all that engaged. At their best they were a fun way of spending two hours, at their worst they were forgettable but had some cool special effects, but I didn’t get what would make people go and buy regular instalments of their favourite heroes’ comic series.
My first superhero comics were the more revisionist ones, Moore’s Watchmen, Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (which I can safely say I didn’t like), later Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, all of which riffing to some extent on the comics that had gone before, and that I was aware of in a second-hand, “I’ve read about these…” way. The traditional superheroics, though? I wasn’t interested – unless they were written by someone whose writing I really liked. When Joss Whedon did his run on Astonishing X-Men, I bought the trade paperbacks and greatly enjoyed them, but I always put that down to Whedon doing his thing, not to anything intrinsic to comic book heroes. Same with Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways, which reminded me a lot of Whedon’s TV work. (Ironically, I’m not a big fan of Whedon’s run on Runaways, which should have been a perfect fit but the writing was unengaging.)
What I liked about these especially – Whedon’s X-Men and Vaughan’s Runaways – was that they had characters who weren’t defined by their powers or gadgets. These were characters I’d want to spend time with even if they weren’t saving the world, beating up baddies or fighting their nemeses. And, more than that, they were about dysfunctional (surrogate) families, that old old Tolstoyan chestnut… Families that brought out the best and the worst in each other. Just like those other families in Whedon’s work, the Scoobie Gang, the crew of Serenity, even the team of Angel Investigations.
I didn’t realise that at their best, the superhero comics (at least Marvel – I have to say, I don’t know DC particularly well, although Vertigo’s Sandman is also about a dysfunctional family, of course) are exactly about that. They’re not about the BIFFs, the ZINGs and the POWs, they’re not about being able to punch someone through a mountain, climbing up vertical surfaces like a human spider or running at supersonic speed. And that’s exactly where Joss Whedon’s The Avengers took me completely by surprise. I went in thinking, “Well, I liked Iron Man, I like Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner, and Scarlett Johansson is relatively easy on the eye. Perhaps Whedon will make this work.” I thought I’d probably not give a toss about Captain America (how can I, as a European pinko liberal commie of the worst kind?) or Thor (seriously, that outfit? the hammer?) or the Hulk (green, grotesque, always angry – Mr Hyde’s boring descendant, right?).
And yet, I sat in that cinema giggling with glee, whooping with joy, cheering at the heroic poses, applauding as an enormous motherfucking space serpent thing was punched in the face and went down! For the first time I realised what a joyous, potent blend these superheroics could be, and it was because Whedon made me care. I still don’t particularly need to go and watch Captain America or Thor (probably I will if it’s on TV, but I won’t go out and buy the DVDs), but watching the film’s heroes become a family, warts and all, overcoming their flaws and dysfunctions, and kicking some intergalactic ass? I get a big, goofy grin just remembering the film.
Some of my favourite bits:
Colour me green with surprise, but I loved the Hulk in this. More than that, I loved Ruffalo’s Banner and his Hulk. Poignant one moment, laugh-out-funny the next. “Puny god”, indeed!
Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury wasn’t a showy role, it didn’t go for the SLJ effect (which by now has become as much of a cliché as Al Pacino’s “Hooah!” persona), but I loved the ambivalence. Yes, he’s a good guy, but he’s primarily a master manipulator. Usually these films reserve the manipulativeness for the bad guys.
Captain America’s joy when he finally got a cultural reference!
The confrontation between Loki and Black Widow. In so many ways.
Naked Bruce Banner and Harry Dean Stanton’s caretaker, accepting that this guy just happens to turn into a huge green monster occasionally. No big thing.
The moment when the Avengers finally, well, assemble. The moment is cheesy, glorious and 100% earned.
I came out of that cinema thinking, “I want to watch that film again. And again. And again. And possibly send Joss Whedon, his cast and his crew all the Swiss chocolate I can get my hands on.” I’d be lying if I said the film was perfect – it suffers from a beginning that is somewhat generic and unengaging – but I’ll say it again: The Avengers made me whoop with joy. It made me cheer at the heroic poses. This is no “good enough for its genre” flick, it’s no “well, there’ll be explosions, right?” In some ways it’s the polar opposite of Nolan’s Batman films – as good (or even better?), but doing something entirely different. I’ve seen and read the reinventions of the super hero genre. I’ve seen the revisionist takes. Only now have I seen what these stories can be, in their original form.
And I like it.
P.S.: I also like Film Crit Hulk’s take on The Avengers. The guy’s all-caps Hulk spiel takes some getting used to, and I understand that some people give up, but the guy writes well and makes intelligent points, and he cares about this stuff. Well worth checking out.
When we left everyone’s favourite chemistry teacher/meth manufacturer at the end of Breaking Bad‘s second season, he was a figure of monstrous, murderous self-pity and passivity. This continues well into season 3 (sometimes to hilarious effect). Colour me surprised (in a nice meth blue, mayhaps) when, as the third season’s penultimate episode comes to a car crash of an end, I couldn’t help sitting there and thinking, “Damn… That. Was. Badass.” Breaking Bad does a lot to make Walt first a more hateful, irredeemable figure, and it then pulls him back to the brink of redemption, even heroism.
And then he turns around and pushes the person he became a murderer to save, his Jiminy Cricket – he pushes him over the edge. Blam.
It’s amazing how far Breaking Bad came in its second and third series. Its first season was well acted and cleverly written, but it didn’t indicate that the series would be one for the ages. Good, yes. Memorable, definitely. Up there with, say, The Sopranos? Nope. To be honest, looking back I still consider the series’ first year not just its weakest but also something of a liability. Its main antagonist, Tuco, is one of Breaking Bad‘s weakest characters, he’s over the top to the point of becoming a cartoon, although I can’t quite make up my mind whether that’s due to the actor, the writing, the direction or all three. There are plot strands that feel like they’ve walked in from a weaker series, and that are dropped (unless we’ll get back to them when we least expect it – a trick that Breaking Bad has a fondness for), such as Marie’s shoplifting. And there’s the biggest problem, as far as I’m concerned, that Walt kills a man in cold blood, much too early in his descent to a personal hell. In hindsight, much of season 1 feels like a rougher, more sketchy series with a handful of missteps without which the setup for later seasons would be stronger.
However, if season 2 made me forgive these missteps, season 3 practically made me forget that they were made by the same series. It ratchets up everything: the tension, the comedy (and for such a dark series it’s amazing how funny Breaking Bad can be – not least compared to actual comedies…), the personal stakes, even the action. While I think that the Sopranos comparison has become increasingly valid as the series goes on, Breaking Bad covers a wider range of styles and even genres, and it does this well. Without ever sacrificing the integrity of its characters, the series manages to take characters that should be as cartoony as Tuco and turns them into frightening antagonists. It presents us with what may be one of the most heartstoppingly tense action sequences ever put in a TV show. And, more than that, it uses the sequence to add depth to a character – definitely no mean feat in any genre or medium!
To my mind, Breaking Bad also manages to drop the occasional facile cynicism it affected in its early days in favour of a more rounded, more human range of tones. I’ve mentioned the comedy – and Saul Goodman is an amazing creation – but the way the series’ writers, directors and actors juggle this with Breaking Bad‘s increasing darkness and its genuine tragedy is quite breathtaking at times.
Okay, enough with the hyperbolic enthusiasm. Let’s just say that Walter White isn’t a good man, not by a long shot, and it’s likely he’ll never again be a good man… but boy, it is good – and getting better by the season – to follow his rise and fall.
I’m sorry, this isn’t the promised Breaking Bad post yet – I got started on that one, but life (and exhaustion) got in the way even of mediocre writing. So, to distract you, here’s something shiny! (To my occasional guest blogger: I have an inkling that this may not be your kind of film – but hey, the trailer features John C. Reilly!)
So, for those of you whose childhood was sadly devoid of “Insert Coin” and “Press Button to Continue”, and whose dreams aren’t haunted by the WAKA-WAKA-WAKA of Pacman’s eating disorders, here’s another trailer, which is a good bit and has Christoph Waltz in it.
Hang on, weren’t computer games about (male teenage) wish-fulfillment? Weren’t they about pretending to be overly-muscular he-men carrying weapons the size and weight of Texas, or knight templars wielding enchanted swords, or cocky, ersatz–Indiana Jones explorers making sexy small talk while exploring dark tombs looking for the Whatsit of Certain Doom?
Instead I’m spending time in front of the telly running after my son, knowing I won’t get to him before something horrible happens. I spend time shaking the controller so that my overweight on-screen avatar shakes his asthma inhaler, then I press right on the analog stick so he actually takes a puff of his medication. And all the while the rain keeps pouring down.
Heavy Rain is a weird game. It’s derivative: the atmosphere is pure Seven, which is nowhere as obvious as when I visit a suspect’s apartment and the man, a religious nutter, has crucifixes hanging from his ceiling like so many Little Trees car air fresheners, and the music sounds like Howard Shore’s B-sides. The characters lack subtlety and their dialogues often clunky. There’s something almost laughable about how hard the game tries to be melancholy, weighty, tragic. And the gameplay feels like a mix between Dragon’s Lair quick-time events (press R1 now not to get knocked out by the prostitute’s choleric john!) and one of those hipster-witty, highly meta indie games mocking the usual epic dick-waving of video games by making you do utterly mundane, pointless things: yes, you can open the fridge, take out a carton of orange juice, shake it (wouldn’t want all the pulp to remain at the bottom of the juice carton!) and take a gulp, but it won’t get you any closer to finding the Origami Killer. In fact, I’m a couple of hours into Heavy Rain and most of the interaction I’m offered is of the juice-carton or asthma-inhaler shaking kind. There are important decisions (do you shoot a suspect? do you foil a robbery?), but they don’t make up the bulk of the game. Is this some weirdo wish-fulfillment for pretentious, self-aware dweebs approaching middle age – an ironic power fantasy for the disillusioned?
The thing is, though, the gameplay, allowing for actions veering between boringly banal and surreally pedantic, works in one important way: it puts you in the role of the character you’re playing in a most effective way. Heavy Rain provides the player with agency that precisely isn’tof the “I am a Jedi!” kind, which is always essentially “I am myself, but I am also invincible! Take that, 3rd grade bully who’s become an Imperial Stormtrooper!”; instead it makes it easier to slip into the skin of depressed father Ethan Mars or asthmatic private investigator Scott Shelby. It’s a bit like acting, where it can be the small actions and gestures, irrelevant to the plot, that make a character come alive – it’s the bits in between the showcase fights and high-tech investigation, between entering a suspect’s apartment and fighting off hooded intruders, that make the player empathise.
I’d hesitate to call Heavy Rain a good game. I’d definitely not want other games to copy its gameplay. But as an experiment in the potential and the limits of agency in gameplay, and in player identification, it’s fascinating. And I want such experimentation to be possible not only in small-scale indie games but also in Triple-A titles. Just like L.A. Noire, Heavy Rain may get quite a few things wrong, but what it gets right it does in ways that few other games have even attempted.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 