Author: Matt

Empathological behaviour

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On most message boards, forums and online communities that I’m a part of (all… let’s see… 3 1/2 of them) I probably post most frequently in threads relating to films, TV series, novels, plays, comics and other media that are largely dedicated to storytelling, characterisation and the like. One recent discussion I took part in was about the HBO series Game of Thrones, and while many of the topics were predictable (OMG sexposition! Just how much does Tyrion rule? Is there such a thing as posting that animated GIF of Joffrey being slapped too often?), one caught me by surprise: a poster criticised that there’s barely anyone in the series to root for.

The reason for my surprise was this: I realised that ‘rooting for someone’ has never been a measure of whether I enjoy a story or not. Of course I root for the Indiana Joneses and John McClanes, the Bastian Balthasar Buxes and… I’m actually finding it difficult to come up with more examples, which is quite telling. Some kinds of stories necessitate a ‘good guy’ to root for, but this isn’t anything I’m looking for in storytelling. On the other hand, what I am looking for is the potential to empathise with the characters whose lives I’m following. And that’s something I find quite easy – you could go so far as to say that I’m a bit of an ’empathy whore’. I’ve never really rooted for Tony Soprano, Richard III, even a Darth Vader – or, for that matter, a Cersei Lannister, not exactly one of the nicer characters in a series that isn’t exactly famous for its many loveable protagonists.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve greatly enjoyed series whose protagonists do questionable, petty, selfish things all the time, from the characters in Six Feet Under (as the series goes on, Nate becomes more and more selfish in his actions, yet that never makes me care about him any less), to the shades-of-grey cast of any season of The Wire (yes, I even care about Rawls, while fully acknowledging what a dick he is) to the moral monsters of The Sopranos. Which is also why the flip-side of rooting for a fictional character is something I very rarely do – I often read about other forumites wanting this or that character to die horribly, to get knifed in the back or thrown off a cliff or get a bullet in his head, which I just don’t get. I don’t get the vehemence and sadism with which these things are often formulated (and yes, I do understand that wishing death on a fictional character is not the same as wanting a real person to die), but more than that, whether a character is morally reprehensible or not doesn’t have anything to do with whether I want to continue watching them. Al Swearengen is a Machiavellian monster, happy to kill, or have killed, anyone who stands in the way of his plans, yet I can think of few characters who are as enjoyable to watch as him. Tony Soprano made The Sopranos must-watch TV for six seasons, even in the worst episodes. Even generally likeable characters like The Wire‘s Bodie or Rome‘s Titus Pullo do horrible, heinous things. It’s not just that I don’t get why or how the moralities of their actions would influence my wanting to watch them: it’s that their flaws, their ambiguity, often make them more interesting characters for me. (Obviously my enjoyment of the characters also has a lot to do with how they’re written and acted – I want to watch an Al Swearengen at least as much because of Ian McShane’s performance as because he’s a fascinating, complex character, and the same’s definitely true for Breaking Bad‘s Walt White and the fantastic acting by Bryan Cranston.)

However, there are characters – very few, but they exist – that don’t evoke any empathy on my part. There are some that I dislike so much I wouldn’t mind something horrible happening to them. I’ll admit it right here and now: every time I watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I hope that McMurphy will succeed in strangling Nurse Ratched to death this time round. I guess that while I’m a bleeding heart of the worst kind when it comes to fictional characters as well, there’s still a tiny little reactionary inside me wanting to get out and flip the switch.

Dark is L.A. and full of terrors

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When it comes to creating virtual worlds, Rockstar may just be the true heir of Origin Systems. Whether it’s the Liberty City of Grand Theft Auto 3 or GTA4, the fictionalised versions of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas in GTA San Andreas, the boarding school and small town of Bully or the dying Old West of Red Dead Redemption, in my opinion Rockstar’s greatest creation to date.

L.A. Noire‘s sun-drenched yet crime-riddled 1950s Los Angeles is both an amazing feat and, quite possibly, Rockstar’s greatest wasted opportunity. It’s an impressive recreation, looking just like the movies, from Chinatown to L.A. Confidential – but where I enjoyed exploring San Fierro, New Austin and Liberty City, I never felt at home in this noirish L.A. In Rockstar’s other games, I’d forgo all automated options of getting around the place, I’d drive everywhere myself, just because I enjoyed hanging around in these cities. The games and their locations, they were one and the same. In L.A. Noire, though, I quickly started to ask my partner to do all the driving. In spite of the game’s title the place itself, Los Angeles, is a mere backdrop – and as it’s rarely integrated well into the game, it feels like an elaborate loading screen, or like a technically impressive but essentially lifeless cardboard backdrop – like The Truman Show‘s Sunhaven, and I was the unwitting Truman stuck there.

Unfortunately, L.A. Noire is full of wasted opportunities. The writing is great, as is most of the (voice) acting, but the game’s signature motion-capture technology veers into Uncanny Valley as often as it succeeds at bringing its characters to life.

The occasional disconnect between the characters’ faces and their bodies is one thing; another is that L.A. Noire doesn’t do photo-realism, doesn’t try to, so the animations, realistic down to the imperfections of involuntary twitches, don’t gel with the more stylised look. It doesn’t matter whether the latter is due to technical limitations – the result, while often impressive, does pull its audience out of the moment too often.

L.A. Noire could have managed to pull everything together with its gameplay, but alas, that’s another strike against the game. It’s not so much that it plays badly – what hurts L.A. Noire is that as a game it is bland. Rockstar’s other titles tend to be generous to a fault in the gameplay department, where you might get new elements introduced two thirds into a game’s plot. In its ’50s crime-and-punishment saga you’ll be doing pretty much the same from the first case you’re working to the last. Here a foot chase, there a car pursuit – and the game’s signature interrogations suffer from a lack of internal logic (seriously, guys, at times the choice between Doubt and Lie seems to have been down to a coin-toss).

In spite of all this, though, I’d be lying if I claimed that L.A. Noire didn’t have its compelling moments. As you progress from the first crime desk (Traffic) to the second (Homicide), the single cases start to connect, and the story ties in cleverly with the Black Dahlia murder. As the plot begins to cohere, the characters become more interesting, and the protagonist Cole Phelbs, while rarely likeable, turns into one of Rockstar’s trademark flawed anti-heroes. By the game’s ending, I felt for the guy and his messed-up issues.

In the end, L.A. Noire is a weak game with strong elements – and for a Rockstar game, it’s a failure. It’s a fascinating failure, though, and I’m curious to see how its experiments and assets – the motion-captured acting, the story structure, the ‘real’ location – pay off in future titles by the developer. Grand Theft Auto V will again be set in Los Santos, Rockstar’s earlier take on LA; I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing L.A. Noire‘s fingerprints on it.

Bereavement: a game

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What exactly makes video games different from other mediums? The go-to answer to that question is obviously interactivity – games require their audience (their ‘readers’, if we want to use the word in an extended sense) to interact. Now, clever-clogs will say, “Aren’t films and books interactive as well? After all, the reader is always engaged in co-creating meaning together with the text. Eh? Eh?” At which point you kick the clever-clogs in the nuts and send them back to the literature departments whence they came. (Please note that I myself was one of those clever-clogs for a long time, and I still have a fair amount of affinity with them. Doesn’t stop me from the whole nut-kicking thing.)

Granted, there is no such thing as an entirely passive audience. The interaction that games require, though, is of a different kind; it is not purely mechanical (like, say, flipping pages or working the DVD remote), nor is is purely a mental process (which covers anything from mere comprehension to interpretation to other forms of intellectual, psychological or emotional engagement with a text). It is tied in with the concept of agency: the player is more directly, more immediately involved in generating the actual text, although the freedom he has in this can be immense or minimal.

Where does this leave games such as the recent indie title Dear Esther, in which the player-reader-person holding the mouse (and wondering when he’ll find his first automatic weapon) is little more than a floating camera with ears? Playing Dear Esther, if “playing” is indeed the right term, means using the mouse to select where to look and the keys to move around. There’s no jumping, no shooting, no meaningful interaction with the environment – and more, there aren’t any goals, puzzles or challenges other than navigating the environment and looking for the spot where the next level or chapter begins. You walk around a foggy, damp island and look at things, and every now and then the narrator speaks his next monologue, about some guy called Donnelly, a long-dead shepherd called Jacobson, about Paul – and about Esther, the narrator’s wife. Over time, it becomes clear that Esther is dead, most likely killed in a car crash. Walking across the island, the narrator gives a voice and shape to his feelings of loss, sometimes through metaphor, sometimes through a simple retelling of events, sometimes through associative, allusive stream of consciousness.

Discussing whether this is a game risks being as pretentious as this short description of Dear Esther already sounds, most likely… and, truth to tell, I’m not particularly interested in finding a definition of what constitutes a game. On a very personal level, I wouldn’t say I “played” Dear Esther, I experienced it – and there I go again, skirting pretentiousness. Thing is, there’s no way around this. Dear Esther sets out to be artistic, from its themes (loss, mourning, life and death) to its visuals, to its writing, as this excerpt illustrates:

I collected all the letters I’d ever meant to send to you, if I’d have ever made it to the mainland but had instead collected at the bottom of my rucksack, and I spread them out along the lost beach. Then I took each and every one and I folded them into boats. I folded you into the creases and then, as the sun was setting, I set the fleet to sail. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned you to the Atlantic, and I sat here until I’d watched all of you sink.

Now, since the interactivity that Dear Esther offers is minimal, couldn’t the same be done in a short story or a film? Why make this a game (in the loosest sense of the word), other than in an attempt to help the still fairly young medium gain seriousness or credibility, to save it from the accusation that video games are reserved for adolescents looking for escapism or intent on enacting their power fantasies (save the princess, save the world, shoot turbaned bad guys, that sort of thing)? My own personal answer is no. Even if walking around the island and looking at ruined houses, painted symbols and snippets and texts, the lighthouse in the distance doesn’t constitute agency in the sense that you’re affecting the story or the characters in any way, you’re still experiencing it in a way that is inherently different from reading a story or watching a film. In fact, what Dear Esther (and similar games) remind me of most, perhaps, is theatre – and specifically the sort of theatre that says, “Screw the fourth wall” and requires its audience to experience what is going on in a more direct way. I remember reading a review of a play performed in a series of rooms, and the audience walks freely from room to room, witnessing scenes that exist separately from the audience’s journey; the sequence in which you see the performance, the points at which you enter or leave a scene, all affect your experience of the play.

Games like Dear Esther go further than this, in that they can create a theatrical space and experience involving elements that are difficult or even impossible in live performance: the voice you hear as you explore the island is disembodied, it isn’t the player’s, but nor is it a third-person narrator – it takes up a space in between. In some ways, games are that weird beast, the second-person narrative: you don’t become a first-person narrator, you put them on like a mask, and you’re always aware that there is a distinction between you and your character even while you perform this character. For me at least, when talking about a game, I usually slip into second person: “So, you’re this guy who’s lost his wife, and you explore this island that he’s withdrawn to. You walk up the hill to the ruined house, hoping to find… something. Some sign, something that will help you understand. Dunno… You play it, okay?”

Playing, reading, experiencing Dear Esther isn’t like being an audience, nor is it like being an actor. It is more like a lucid dream, and this dream-like state lends itself to experiences that none of the other mediums can provide in this exact way. Theatre can perhaps come closest, but traditional theatre, with its literal actors and spaces, cannot recreate that final, heartbreaking, soaring moment that Dear Esther delivers. The game isn’t its medium’s Citizen Kane, its The Dubliners or Starry Night, but it is unlike anything I’ve read or seen in the way it uses its means to make me think and feel. Doesn’t mean I want all my games to be like this – but I’m looking forward to others exploring the medium to see what it can do, what it can be. Others can call this pretentious all they want – I’m quite happy to soar with Esther.

P.S.: I very much like Eurogamer.net’s review of Dear Esther. Well worth reading, whether you’re generally interested in games or not.

Doctors and vampires and ghosts, oh my!

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Okay, time for a confession: although I have a UK passport, I fail the Brit Purity Test on several counts. 1) I don’t like football. 2) I am painfully indifferent to cricket. 3) I neither love nor hate Marmite.

The most egregious, though, is this: 4) I don’t get Doctor Who.

Let me repeat that: I don’t get Doctor Who. Admittedly, I’ve only seen a handful of episodes, but what I’ve seen has left me… non-plussed, I guess. Somewhat confused at what all the fuss is about.

Let’s start at the beginning. My mum, the born-and-bred Brit in the nuclear family, was never much into sci-fi, and she told me at an early age that Doctor Who was a load of rubbish. Living in a country far, far away (let’s put it like this: we can see Europe from here!), it was never on TV, at least as far as I could tell, so I was never able to catch an episode as a kid. I had some faint awareness of the series and its trappings: that weirdo blue phone box-looking thing, a ’70s guy with curly hair and a long, multicoloured scarf, and low-rent, evil R2D2-alikes going “Exterminate! Exterminate!” like so many homicidal Stephen Hawkings. But I’d never seen an episode.

Growing up, I picked up info about the series here and there – but it was only a few years ago, when Doctor Who got the Christopher Eccleston treatment that I thought perhaps I should check it out. A few years later I got a three-episode DVD set for Christmas, which had been gathering dust on a shelf until a week or two ago, when I decided that The Time Had Come. I was going to check out the series and finally get an idea of what all the fuss is about. (For the record, the three episodes I’ve seen are the first episodes featuring Eccleston as the Doctor.)

For the first two episodes (“Rose” and “The End of the World”), I simply didn’t get it at all. The acting was broad, the writing lacked wit, Billie Piper… actually, Piper, an actress I don’t usually like, was probably the best thing about it, keeping things relatively grounded. My main problem, though, was that the series seemed to be firmly aimed at kids. I understand that it’s something of a UK tradition for children to watch the series while hiding behind the sofa because it’s allegedly scary (hundreds of thousands of British kids must’ve grown up afraid of plastic trashcans…), but since so many of the people extolling the virtues of Doctor Who were in their 20s and 30s, I expected something more, well, mature? I don’t mind tongue in cheek, but the winking, isn’t-this-a-lark tone reminded me mostly of Christmas pantos. The humour mostly fell flat, and the cheesy production values didn’t feel charming so much as smugly self-satisfied, less idiosyncratic style than shtick.

I came this close to getting it, though, with the third episode, “The Unquiet Dead”, featuring Charles Dickens (acted by Simon Callow with genuine charm) and space zombies. The ingredients were the same – moderately scary villains with a sci-fi slant, tongue-in-cheek humour, Billie Piper’s mouth hanging open – but Mark Gatiss’ scriptworked, added to which the episode knew well enough to take its central conceits seriously enough. With the tone a lot less all over the place, I could see why people would take to the character and to the series’ mix of sci-fi, mild horror and British eccentricity. (In fact, I hope this Gatiss fellow finds some more writing jobs – if only there was another BBC series about an eccentric, intellectually brilliant main character with a loyal companion where the man could use his talents…)

I might end up checking out more episodes, in the hope that they are more along the lines of “The Unquiet Dead” – but I’m not sure I trust the series to balance its tone so it doesn’t come across feeling silly rather than charming and pandering rather than scary. We’re currently watching another BBC series that to my mind has similar problems with tone: Being Human. I enjoy the series well enough, but it is very hit-and-miss in how it combines high-concept, whimsical sitcom, horror clichés, Neil Gaimanesque supernatural-meets-the-mundane and character-driven drama.

In fact, both of these series have given me a new appreciation for Joss Whedon’s work on Buffy. Whedon isn’t always perfect, and when he’s bad he’s ghastly – but he is amazingly deft when it comes to juggling wildly different tones and managing to be funny, poignant and scary at the same time. While his sense of humour is also very ironic, it maintains the integrity of his characters and what they’re going through; the occasional wink to the audience is handled well enough for the audience to chortle but still take the protagonists seriously. And all of this in spite of similarly cheesy production values as in Doctor Who.

So there it is, good people. Give me Whedon instead of Time Lords in Tardises (Tardii?). The question remains: where do I hand in my passport?

P.S.: None of this would’ve happened if I had been raised on a steady diet of Doctor Who, The Ashes and Man U. But I did watch Casualty religiously for several years – shouldn’t that count for something?

Fool me once…

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… and the award for Best April’s Fools Joke goes to – The Criterion Collection, who advertised that this masterpiece of modern cinema would soon join their ranks of superb DVD and Blu-ray editions:

And yes, they went the whole hog. Check out their synopsis of Reitman’s often underrated gem:

Historically, the policier and the family comedy were two distinct categories. Then, in 1990, Kindergarten Cop gave us all a lesson in genre revisionism. With muscular sensitivity, Hollywood’s last action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger embodies detective John Kimble, who is compelled to go undercover as a teacher of five-year-olds in order to catch a ponytailed drug dealer. Though it’s distinguished by pulse-pounding suspense, a Crayola-bright palette by cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver), and trenchant observations about education in the Bush I era, the film’s emotional center is Schwarzenegger’s gruff yet good-tempered interaction with a class full of precocious scamps, including a tumor-forewarning death-obsessive and a genitalia expert. By leavening a children’s film with enough violence to please even the most cold-hearted bastard, director Ivan Reitman shows that he refuses to color inside the lines.

Which is only topped by some of the extras:

  • New high-definition digital restoration of the 1990 director’s cut, presented in 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition
  • New audio commentary featuring Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, author of It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Can Teach Us
  • Excerpts from the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps: “Ivan Reitman”
  • Kindergarten Cops Today, a new hour-long documentary featuring former New York City police detectives Frank Serpico and Robert Leuci, former San Francisco police inspector Dave Toschi, and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • From “Fingers” to Finger-Painting, an interview with cinematographer Michael Chapman
  • Archival video of Schwarzenegger’s acceptance speeches for the Favorite Movie Actor award at the 1989 and 1991 Kids’ Choice Awards
  • The Kids Aren’t All Right, an analysis of all the cuts made to ensure a PG-13 rating
  • More than six hundred minutes of rare behind-the-scenes and archival footage
  • Seven theatrical trailers
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by former police reporter and creator of The Wire David Simon and a reprint of James Agee’s original review of the film

I would so buy that in a heartbeat – even before checking out the Criterion “Three Reasons” video:

 

The Good Man of Albuquerque

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It took me a while to warm to Breaking Bad – and the main reason for this is that it took me more than a season to understand what the series is doing. I’m fairly late to the game, only just having started watching season 3, and one of the main reasons for this is that I’d heard so much hyperbolic praise for the series: “Best thing currently on TV!” I’d heard that sort of thing before – but it rarely held up in any way. Seriously, Dexter? Heroes? Entertaining TV, perhaps, at least initially, but neither of those series was anywhere close to the Pantheon of The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire and their HBO brethren.

So anyway, Breaking Bad. The premise intrigued me – it’s one of those stories that appeals to my pinko liberal, borderline socialist self: only in America…! Healthcare, shmealthcare, right? If the healthcare system barely deserves that name, cooking meth is a perfectly sane alternative, isn’t it? To my mind, Walter White was a fundamentally decent human being driven to doing something downright insane because of The System, Man, and everything followed from that. Crime, murder, secrets and lies, matrimonial crisis.

Thing is: Walter White is not a fundamentally decent human being. Yes, life has screwed him over – lung cancer when he doesn’t even smoke? – and he doesn’t deserve the hand he’s been dealt. Yes, for much of the first season he doesn’t have time to stop and think about what he’s doing; he’s reacting to the fallout of his first, fateful decision. But once we see Walter make decisions that don’t happen under intense pressure, and we realise: it isn’t cruel fate that makes him do what he does. It’s his own self-pity, self-centredness, and his downright monstrous sense of pride. In fact, in the way he rationalises his increasingly dubious actions, he is a brother in spirit to that greatest of all TV villains believing themselves to be anti-heroes: Tony Soprano.

Note: If you haven’t seen the series at least to the end of the second season, this video won’t make much sense to you – but it will spoil a fairly big plot point. In other words, do not watch unless you know what I’m talking about!

Having said all this, the series does take roughly an entire season to become great. Much of the first season doesn’t exactly know what it wants to be: comedy, drama, bit of both? Are the characters realistic, caricatures or something else altogether? I’m also somewhat doubtful whether the series creators were right to have Walt commit a major crime (no, I’m not talking about some piddly meth cooking) within a couple of episodes of its beginning. Season 1 was entertaining and showed more promise already than, say, the Dexters and Heroes of TV Land, but it’s only in the series’ sophomore season that Breaking Bad fully comes into its own. And now I’m hooked, more so than on any current-gen HBO series – the series is my blue meth.

And as far as poor, decent, selfish, evil, monstrous Walter White is concerned, I’m sorry, Walt, you can’t blame the US healthcare system at this point. I believe Novalis said it best: Character is fate.

Oh, how the ghost of you clings…

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Is there another medium as nostalgically in love with itself as film? You don’t really see many paintings about the painters of yesteryear, or novels about novelists from the 19th century. Hollywood, on the other hand, loves looking at itself back when it was younger, had fewer wrinkles, and Michael Bay wasn’t even a twinkle in ILM’s eye.

In the run-up to the last Oscars, there were two major examples of cinema yearning for its heydays: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and The Artist, a French film whose point of reference is nevertheless the American movie scene of the early 20th century. Both received a fair share of accolades and both put a lot of emphasis on charming their audiences. Both movies are accomplished in many ways, but I’m somewhat torn on them: while I loved Hugo more, I have to say I appreciate The Artist more as a film.

Scorsese’s obviously one of the greats of cinema, and deservedly so. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, but also The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun or the concert film Shine a Light – the man has a strong style, but he doesn’t remake the same film over and over again. Hugo is strange for him in some ways, as Scorsese’s never shied away from gritty, violent themes; trying his hand at a family movie is decidedly new for him. Having said that, there are definite stylistic links between some of his more recent period pieces, especially Gangs of New York and The Aviator, and Hugo, in that a lot of emphasis is put on creating a world. And what a world it is – the Paris of the film is not real in any way, but the train station in which most of Hugo takes place is a beautifully imagined, intricate world.

At the same time, Scorsese’s latest feels like it’s at least two different films, one for children who enjoy Little Rascals-style capers and broad characterisation, and one for people who love the cinema. Narratively these two are bridged by the sadness at the heart of the film, embodied by the titular character who has lost his father, but the result is a work that doesn’t always feel coherent. After seeing the film I walked out of the cinema feeling a warm glow for the love letter to the movies that I’d just seen, but I also sat in the dark feeling impatient for the slapstick, the scenes of Hugo running away from a panto-style villain and the “gosh, it’s an adventure, isn’t it?” enthusiasm of Chloë Grace Moretz’s character to end and for the film to get back to Méliès. The scenes that are primarily about the magic of movies are beautiful and poignant – much of the rest of the film first and foremost made me think that it’s been decades since I was twelve years old. Perhaps I’m not the ideal audience – but I honestly wonder whether a twelve-year old would be all that likely to respond to the scenes focused almost entirely on Méliès and on film history. How many twelve-year old film buffs are there?

While I share Hugo‘s love for cinema, I’m by and large indifferent to silent movies, to the extent where I don’t even remember if I’ve ever seen an entire one. (Yes, I do feel a bit guilty about never having seen Metropolis. Happy now?) I’m not sure The Artist‘s makers are nostalgic to the era where films were silent, either, or that they wanted to start a new wave of dialogue-free films. (Our cinema showed a Swiss short beforehand, also silent and fashioned as a pastiche of the original films of the ’20s. It was unbearable, smug and shallow, having nothing going for it other than wanting to emulate the style.) Take away the self-conscious, meta-cinematic elements and The Artist doesn’t work; but it’s this (dare we say postmodern?) playfulness that is as central to the film as the considerable charms of its two leads, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. The film’s a meringue, as I would put it: sweet, delicious and so light the slightest puff of air could blow it away. It doesn’t have much substance in any conventional sense – but charm, style and wit can have a substance all of their own.

What The Artist finally does better than Hugo is this: it’s perfectly formed, it comes together into a whole. It is a complete film rather than two half-films patched together, with considerable skill that nevertheless cannot hide the join. And for all of Scorsese’s talent, The Artist works better because it has made a decision what sort of film it wants to be, and then it’s about the best such film it can be. As far as meringues go, it’s just about one of the best I’ve had.

Looking for Murder, Love and Death in all the wrong places…

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Yeah, I still owe you a genuine blog update, don’t I? Planning to write one on films in love with cinema (is that incestuous or masturbatory? or both?) this weekend, but in the meantime here’s a fascinating infographic from a site called Very Small Array: Popular IMDb Keywords Associated With Countries. Sounds boring, I know, but do check it out, and make sure to check out the map at the maximum available size.

March Variety Pack

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Another month, another variety pack. I’m planning to write longer posts on Hugo and Breaking Bad – and possibly Being Human, depending on my mood – but in the meantime here are some shorter takes on a few of the films I’ve seen recently. Everything from teenage killing machines to Bostonian remakes of Heat and tragicomic Irish policemen – oh, the humanity!

Hanna

Joe Wright’s film about a teenage assassin and her odyssey is an odd ‘un. It’s definitely strikingly different from what you might expect reading the blurb on the back of the DVD, and it’s got a lot going for it – but in the end I don’t think it works all that well. Hanna, starring the unpronounceable Saoirse Ronan, is basically three different films: a gender-swapped Bourne Identity, a modernised L’Enfant Sauvage and a stylised, symbolist-bordering-on-the-surreal fairytale. It pulls off the first two, but it is both most interesting and least successful in the latter: there are elements reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood, with the weirdest variation of the Big Bad Wolf ever (played by Tom Hollander as an artsy, flamingly camp psychopath, which should give you an idea), but these more stylised elements stand out like sore thumbs compared to the almost-realism of the more Bourne-inspired parts. It’s a shame – there’s a lot to admire about the film, from Ronan’s acting to the cinematography, but there are bits that feel half-baked or even outright ridiculous. And if Cate Blanchett’s accent even comes close to resembling the way any real human being talks, I’ll buy a 40-gallon hat and eat it.

The Guard

I am a big fan of Brendan Gleeson. I like black humour. Don Cheadle is one of the most criminally underused actors in Hollywood. And In Bruges was one of my favourite films the year it came out, making me laugh and cry in equal measure.

The Guard feels like like it’s trying to go for an In Bruges feeling in some ways, and Gleeson’s character has the same sort of laconic, melancholy humour going – but it doesn’t even come close to the earlier film’s… integrity, for want of a better word. The Guard is funny, undoubtedly, but its tentative attempts to be more than a pleasantly diverting, dark comedy don’t lead anywhere. Worse perhaps, The Guard is lazy in how it seems to think that it’s enough to have Gleeson play his usual part (or even a reduced version thereof) and have some jokes, and the rest will take care of itself. It isn’t, and especially if you’ve got Don Cheadle in the film it’s a massive waste to give him the most underwritten part in the film. If The Guard, whose author is the brother of In Bruges’ writer director Martin McDonagh, had come first, it might have been less of a disappointment – as it is, it’s difficult not to think that the time it takes to watch the film would be better spent on the earlier, better movie.

One thing, though: it’s great fun to watch the scenes shared by Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong. If there were ever a prequel spinoff focusing on their two characters, I’d watch it at the drop of a hat.

The Town

Talk about films that would play better if you hadn’t seen earlier film X… I’ve never been a big fan of Ben Affleck as an actor – I don’t dislike him, but I find him fairly bland, perhaps 0.47 McConaugheys – but I very much enjoyed his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone (starring his kid brother Casey). The Town shows the former wasn’t a fluke – Affleck definitely has a talent for directing, and I was surprised to enjoy his acting in the film more than in most other things I’ve seen him in, even though I’m usually suspicious of actor-directors who put themselves in the main part. The film is also well written, acted and filmed – but it is practically impossible to watch it without thinking Heat… and more specifically, that Heat does everything better than Affleck’s film. There are too many echoes in The Town to Mann’s masterpiece, so that halfway into the movie it was difficult to focus fully on what was happening and not sit there thinking, “Yeah, this is just like that scene with Ashley Judd, and that’s very much like that bit with Tom Sizemore…” I liked The Town quite a bit – and am definitely planning to keep my eyes open for Rebecca Hall – but it brings too little to the table compared to Heat not to suffer from the comparison. In a world without Mann’s movie it might be different, but as it is I have to wonder: was there ever a moment when someone on the crew, the Director of Photography or one of the producers, said, “Listen guys, great work’n’all… but I’ve seen this film before, it was called Heat, and why exactly are we doing a Boston-based reskin of that movie?”