Author: Matt

True West

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I’ve made a couple of posts on the subject of games, films, art, yadda yadda yadda. Boring stuff, and anyway, who cares whether Roger Ebert knows a gamepad from a Wiimote?

Rockstar, the makers of the infamous Grand Theft Auto series, take a strange position in the whole game/film argument. There are few games that borrow as liberally, and as successfully, from the movies and from TV as Rockstar’s. This has never been as obvious as in their latest, Red Dead Redemption, which is in equal measures Once Upon a Time in the West and Deadwood. The ghost of Sergio Leone haunts the game’s arid landscapes. I’ve rarely seen as effective and evocative an interpretation of the West as the one Rockstar have conjured up. Yet their games never become that most frustrating of hybrids, the interactive movie. They are both grandly cinematic and great games.

More than anything else, Rockstar excels at creating worlds to explore that feel alive: the faux ’80s Miami of GTA: Vice City, the parallel LA, San Francisco and Las Vegas of San Andreas and the not-quite-NY that is Liberty City.

None of these measure up to the accomplishment of Red Dead Redemption, however. I’ve played the game for five to ten hours, and in terms of gameplay it’s nothing revolutionary – missions here, duels there, horse riding, cow herding and poker minigames elsewhere – but it creates a sense of place that is simply amazing, as the video of the game’s time-lapse day/night cycle shows:

John Hillcoat, director of Australian neo-western The Proposition and the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, was asked to direct a short film using footage from the game – possibly a gimmicky way of advertising its release, but one that’s pretty gutsy, speaking not only of Rockstar’s confidence in their creation but also in their chosen medium. Is Hillcoat’s half-hour take on Red Dead Redemption an overly idealistic barrage in the Great Movie/Videogame War of the ’00s? Is it just something to do in between directing grim, gritty and depressing movies? Judge for yourselves.

Dream a little dream

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Inception. One of the coolest, smartest action flicks this side of The Dark Knight. A fun, brainy conundrum for those who prefer a bit of smarts in their big-budget entertainment.

And the source of some truly weird YouTubes.

Remember a year ago, when I posted about Psychonauts, a computer game that’s the bastard offspring of Tim Burton (when he was still good) and Terry Gilliam, where you explore psyches made real, tangible and pretty frickin’ weird locations? Well, this mash-up is beautifully executed and works disturbingly well:

Want to see (or rather hear) something weirder, though?

Reminds me of watching The Wire with my girlfriend and the two of us intoning the ending music. Good times.

P.S.: Next entry’s going to be more of a proper blog entry, with more than one sentence before there’s a picture or a YouTube video. Promise!

If you wish upon a star spangled banner

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We’re slowly sidling up to the fifth season of The West Wing – apparently the one where most people agree things went down the drain. From what you can read on the web, it’s held in about as much esteem as Buffy the Vampire Slayer S6. Well, if that means that we’ve got The West Wing‘s “Once More With Feelings” to look forward to, I guess I can cope.

We’ve just seen the President decide not to stand idly by while a genocide takes place in an African country. The situation’s an obvious take on Rwanda, and on the United States’ mealy-mouthed reaction to that genocide, right down to the semantic games played to justify inaction. President Bartlet asks one of his staffers, “Why is a Kudanese life worth less to me than an American life?”, and the staffer replies, honestly: “I don’t know, but it is.”

Except that’s not good enough any more for the President. He decides that the US lose any justification they have to self-righteousness if they do not intervene. Basically, Bartlet does what Clinton, back in 1994, didn’t do, for various reasons.

Watching The West Wing now, years after it was first broadcast, I was a bit non-plussed by this storyline. As it developed, it felt very much like a “What if?”, but one that had strong elements of left-wing wish fulfilment. What if we could go back to 1994 and act differently? What if we’d lived up to the standards we set for ourselves, and the image we project of the United States? Nothing against a “What if?” scenario, but this one felt a bit like “Well, if we finally do the right thing in fiction, that must be worth something, right?”

Admittedly, this isn’t altogether fair to the series. For one thing, the storyline has only just begun, and I doubt it’ll remain as clear-cut. The series has never suggested that what ought to be done is easy or that it doesn’t have any repercussions. More than that, though, President Bartlet’s decision to intervene is obviously not entirely selfless – after all, the previous season’s final episode had him deciding to have the Foreign Minister of a Middle Eastern state assassinated due to his close ties to Islamist terrorists. While The West Wing has a weird habit of forgetting everything about characters it doesn’t quite know what to do with (Where’s Ainsley at? Where’s the girl, Jed? Where the fuck is Ainsley, huh, Jed? – Ah, to be honest, she can stay lost in the same place as Mandy, for all I care…), it doesn’t forget its characters’ transgressions – and hey, if there’s anything white liberals, especially of the lapsed Catholic persuasion, are really good at, it’s guilt, isn’t it?

On a very different note: when Donald Moffat turned up as C.J. Cregg’s dad a couple of episodes ago, my first thought was: “It’s the President!”  Moffat’s one of the US actors who have played POTUS (in his case in the Tom Clancy movie Clear and Present Danger) – which made me think that it would be fun to have a West Wing episode where all the guest stars are erstwhile presidents of the United States. Of course James Cromwell would beat them all… and a quick Google search has revealed to me that he may just turn up on the series. Guess what he’ll be playing…

On getting old and soft

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I used to like a good, dark, depressing ending. I used to watch Seven as a feelgood movie. I used to think that Brazil‘s ending was actually as close as possible to a happy ending, given the situation Sam Lowry’s in. (I still think that.)

I don’t know what exactly has changed, but this seems to be an older, gentler me… who actually likes films not to end on a note of utter despair. They can still be pretty dark – but please, please, please, don’t think you need to bring about the complete and utter destruction of mankind, at least in Europe, Africa and Asia to make me enjoy a film. Killing most of the population of Britain’s horrible enough; you don’t actually need to top that one. It’s overkill. Haha. Erm.

Yes, we watched 28 Weeks Later, thanks to the kind programming people at Film4. The film’s actually surprisingly good, well filmed and cast, taking the premise and ending of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later further in intelligent ways. It isn’t a necessary, as far as sequels are concerned, nor does it manage to be as disconcertingly lyrical and moving as the first film is at its best, but it’s a smart, scary, effective horror film.

But it doesn’t half heap up the dreariness at the end. It’s not enough that kiddo is infected. It’s not enough that all the good guys die in various horrible ways: clubbed to death by Robert Carlyle, burnt alive by US soldiers (hey, at least Jeremy Renner got to come back and defuse bombs in Iraq, which has got to beat being fried by your own guys in the process of a zombie apocalypse), having your eyes squeezed into your skull by the hubbie who left you to be eaten by the Infected. Life in post-apocalyptic Britain isn’t pleasant to begin with… so do we really need to end on dozens of Rage-infected Frenchmen running towards the Eiffel Tower, most likely after having had a good nosh on us?

It’s totally silly, I know – but I appreciated that there was a note of hope at the end of 28 Days Later. It wasn’t a happy ending by any means, what with most of England dead and gnawed on, but at least it could get better. Ending on “You thought there was hope? Nope, unless hope in your books means, ‘Well, the Frenchies get killed too! Haha!'”? Now that’s just plain mean.

P.S.: Something Awful tends to have lots of crap jokes, but their most recent Photoshop Phriday produced this thing of rare beauty:

You know, for kids!

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Alice in Wonderland (and its sort-of-sequel, Through the Looking Glass) is an odd book, and my memory of it is just as odd. I can remember liking it, but when I try to remember the book, what comes to mind is John Tenniel’s illustrations, images from the Disney movie, scenes from Jan Svankmajer’s surrealist dream/nightmare – or, more recently, American McGee’s Alice with its twisted, dark Wonderland and music by Chris Vrenna.

Anything, but not the actual Alice in Wonderland. The original has become a sort of collection of memes: the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Jabberwocky. It’s a hypotext whose influence throughout literature, cinema, comic books, video games etc. is strong, but Alice itself has become distorted and murky behind all the copies, pastiches and parodies.

Tim Burton’s most recent film is called Alice in Wonderland, but it’s less of a direct adaptation than a hodgepodge of half-digested ideas and images from over 100 years of Aliceology. Like most of Burton’s films, it looks gorgeous, but like too many of his recent movies it feels like warmed-over Burton, down to the Danny Elfman score. The visuals are admittedly cool (and I have to admit that I watched the film on a BA transatlantic flight – small, fuzzy screens aren’t the best way to appreciate a Tim Burton film), with some fantastic character design, but the plot is predictable, the dialogues leaden and most of the acting vanishes behind the CGI. It’s as if Burton was given a beautifully surreal world but basically decided to tell Generic Fantasy Story X in this world. Despotic ruler, check. Chosen one, check. Needs to discover her powers and believe in herself, check. Special blade, check.

It’s a shame that such a creative, talented cast and crew could have come up with something that combines Lewis Carroll’s original story and Tim Burton’s sensitivities in weird and wonderful ways – but Burton’s sensitivities at this point seem to be a pale shadow of his earlier creativity. Worst of all, the man seems to have gotten old the way that Steven Spielberg has gotten old, meaning that in creating something that should burst with childlike energy and wonder, he’s come up with something that feels like a director in a midlife-crisis trying to pander to what he thinks is youthful and energetic. The worst example of this is the dreadful dance the Mad Hatter does towards the end of the film: even Johnny Depp with his considerable talent and charm can’t make it into anything other than an awkward attempt by the film to be ‘cool’ and contemporary.

Anyway, enough about Alice in Wonderland. I may get back to my 12 hours of blurry free films at a later date, but for now I want to leave you with this strange, strange video telling the Complete History of the Soviet Union through the lens of Tetris:

On being too old for this shit

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First of all, my apologies for not posting in a while – I’ve been in Brazil for almost two weeks now, busy at work. If you’re interested, you’ll find some info here on what I’ve been doing. I definitely feel old now, being between 11 and 17 years older than all the participants…

Talking of feeling old: last week we were working in a hotel in Rio. Nice enough but nothing upmarket, probably a three-star place. In other words, not the kind of place where you expect to be in the elevator, the doors open, and in comes Danny Glover. Yes, that Danny Glover. With his young, attractive wife… or at least that’s what he said. Twice, in the space of 15 seconds. Methinks the Glover doth protest too much.

Once I’m back, I will have some updates on the joys of airplane movies, especially SFX extravaganzas directed by Tim Burton. Now there’s someone else who seems to be getting too old for this shit. Oy.

Seeing through the eyes of a gamer – and an announcement

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There are some games that, while I’m playing them, change the way I look at the world around me. I remember times spent playing real-time strategy where in my mind’s eye I’d draw selection boxes around the people I’d see, or around a herd of sheep, and I’d plan out strategies of where to send these people to do my bidding. (I was young and silly at the time.) Or, when I was a teenager and had to bike to school, I’d see everything through the lens of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, zooming down the deathstar trench and evading incoming laser fire. Yes, I was and still am a geek.

One of the games I’ve been playing a lot of lately, Assassin’s Creed II, has definitely taken hold of my visual cortex – not least because of where I live. Check out these videos from the first and second Assassin’s Creed games, taking place in medieval Acre and Renaissance Venice respectively:

Living in Bern, I can’t help looking at the 17th and 18th century architecture and thinking, “Hmm… If I jumped up there and grabbed that ledge, then pulled myself up there and did a leap over to the other side… and the spire at the top should give me a great vantage point from which to plan my next assassination.” (Note: by ‘assassination’, I mean ‘shopping spree’. Or ‘cuddly kitten’. Or something else that’s inoffensive and doesn’t make me sound like a psycho.) Frankly, though, I think there’s only a slim chance that Assassin’s Creed III will feature the best of Swiss sandstone architecture – although Swiss banking would fit in nicely with Assassin’s Creed‘s conspiracy storyline.

More importantly than my geek musings, though, I’ve got an announcement to make that’s been a long time coming: a friend of mine will be posting book reviews on Eagles on Pogo Sticks. I asked him ages ago but then never got my act together. No more excuses, though – please give my friend a round of applause as he gets ready to introduce himself.

You better show Don Bartlett some respect, paesan!

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Ah, The West Wing. Part political drama, part Whedonesque comedy (replace the supernatural or sci-fi elements with politics), part character-driven melodrama, part actors’ showcase. Part pinko liberal wish fulfillment.

I enjoyed the series from the beginning, but after lots of HBO fare season 1 often looked pedestrian in comparison. Great dialogues, great acting, but does TV have to look like TV, namely drab, conventional, boringly shot? Even dialogues can be filmed more interestingly – and no, WFTF (Walk Fast Talk Fast) doesn’t make for interesting cinematography after the nth time it is used.

We’ve now arrived at the end of the third season, and while the series hasn’t aspired to the cinematic heights of The Sopranos or Carnivale yet, it has definitely had its cinematic moments – and none more so than the season 3 finale. Not only do we get Shakespearean scenes of plotting in the shadows (okay, that’s dramatic rather than cinematic – but the dark-light contrast still looks as good as it did when the German Expressionists used it), the entire ending takes not just a page but entire chapters out of the Godfather playbook. Jed Bartlett watching a rousing Edwardian song during a performance of The War of the Roses (entire US administrations could rise and fall during the time it takes to perform all of these plays) while US operatives ambush and assassinate a Middle Eastern defense minister… The only thing missing is a few strains of Nino Rota and possibly a horse’s head, although reports have it that there was a shortage of good horses, in parts or otherwise, during Shakespeare’s history plays.

For all the homages in “Posse Comitatus”, the one scene that stands out most in my mind is the one that is quintessentially West Wing:

Give me such a scene and I’ll become a US citizen just to vote for Bartlett!

P.S.: Was “Posse Comitatus” originally broadcast before every single series decided it needed a sad scene set to Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”?

I am not Prince Dastan, nor was meant to be…

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In storytelling terms, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – the game, not the film of the same name – is quite possibly the most elegant game I’ve had the pleasure to play. It’s not deep, it’s neither Ulysses nor Shakespearean tragedy nor Moby Dick, but within the medium it tells a story, tells it well and does certain things that would be difficult to pull off as nicely in any other medium. Differently from the film, it also knows throughout that it’s basically a tale from the Arabian Nights. It doesn’t try to complicate things. It’s straightforward, and in that straightforwardness it finds a grace the film can only dream of.

There’s something ironic in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – the film this time – being more video game-like than the game that spawned it. It features a dagger with a big red button (okay, it’s a ruby, but it’s basically a button on a sharp, pointy gamepad) without even a sense of self-awareness. It does the whole slow-motion thing just to look cool. It has big-name actors called in to do very little of interest, but in grandiose RP accents.

What it mainly has, though, is a director who doesn’t know how to direct action in an interesting way, who doesn’t even seem to be interested in action scenes – which is fine, if you’re directing, say, Donnie Brasco (which I still like a lot), but I already thought that Mike Newell was the wrong man for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Funnily enough, that film felt like a video game to me: in this level, you need to retrieve the golden egg, in that level you must free your friends from the mermaids’ realm, and in the final level you must navigate the hedge maze and face the boss enemy. (Thing is, levels are okay in games, but in movies they make for clumsy, mechanical structure.)

There are many action setpieces in Prince of Persia: The Subtitle of Subtitles – but they’re largely handled in a clumsy way that breaks the flow when that is the last thing you want to do. Have a main character whose talent is for parkour? Don’t film and edit the scenes in a way that makes it hard to believe the guy is actually doing all those tricks. Tighly controlled continuity is key in such scenes (Casino Royale did this pretty well in its Madagascar sequence), but Newell insists of cutting after an acrobatic movement’s already begun and/or before it finishes, so what we get is disjointed staccato scenes that have as much flow as mud.

What is just as sad: the film aims for charming banter between its two main leads, but much of the time I found myself thinking, “The game had better banter.” Disregarding the plot differences between film and game (and there are many), if a computer game has banter that is better written than that of its big screen adaptation, you need to get a better script. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Prince of Persia: The Thingamy of Doodah featured horrible writing – it was serviceable for most of the time, but it was oh so plodding. It was clunky. And whoever okayed Ben Kingsley’s lines and then decided to give him the direction, “Act as if you want the audience to find out you’re actually the villain five seconds into the movie”… Well, as I said: I don’t think that Mike Newell was the right man for the job. He wasn’t even the right man for the non-action scenes. And I’m starting to think that Donnie Brasco was a fugazi. Fuggedaboutit.

P.S.: One of my favourite parts of the game – the story is told in retrospect, by the Prince who has already lived through the adventure and is trying to convince the Princess of his tale. (Great reverse Sheherazade move, that one.) When his tale comes to the point where he falls to his death, is impaled by spikes or cut in half by a spinning blade (due to player carelessness), he stops himself and goes, “No, that’s not right. I didn’t die. Let me retell this part.” He basically retells those bits until he gets the storytelling (and the player the moves) right. Lovely touch of meta.

Arrivederci Roma!

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The second season of HBO’s Rome was… well, let’s say that it was less than it could have been. Its main problem was this, it would seem: the series creators realised that Rome wouldn’t be back for a third season. Seeing how they had planned for a five-season arc, they were faced with a dilemma: should they speed up the plot so they could bring it to some semblance of an end, or should they let things play out at the pace they had planned and risk leaving us with yet another Carnivale or Deadwood, ending way before it was finished?

They decided to go for the first option, telescoping their plot for the hoped-for seasons 2, 3 and 4 into the second season. And that’s pretty much what the season felt like: four or five episodes into the story, someone suddenly pressed the Fast Forward button, and off we go like a rocket sled. Pacing? That’s for wimps and people whose series are allowed to run their course.

I remember how frustrated I was especially with Deadwood, where we got three quarters of a complete story. It was as if someone had ripped the last 100 pages from a novel, from every copy ever printed. And then they’d deleted the last 100 pages on every backup of the manuscript. Okay, I realise how thinly stretched the simile is – but the point remains: an unfinished story is a frustrating story.

What is similarly frustrating, though, is a story that doesn’t have time to pace itself. At times the second season of Rome felt like its own “Previously on”: okay, now Brutus is dead! Now Anthony’s in Egypt! Now Servilia’s offed herself! Most of the main characters are dead and have been replaced by twenty-somethings! The kids get half a dozen years older over night! This rushed feel wasn’t necessarily helped by the series’ replacing the young man who had played Octavian with another, slightly older young man playing the same character – while practically all other characters around the same age were still played by the same people!

The letstelleverythingasquicklyaspossiblesowecansqueezeasmuchplotintothisaswecan approach meant that we found some sort of closure, but it also meant that the characters lacked breathing space – and as was the case with so many HBO series, the characters is where it’s at. Brutus’ death, for instance, was still moving, but it could have been infinitely more so with a more generous build-up.

The last episode, though? We were rudely jarred out of Fast Forward, but that meant that at least we had an hour where Rome was returned to its former glory. I admit, I was never too keen on the character of Marc Anthony (as portrayed by James Purefoy): he had all the arrogance and cockiness but little of the charm, which made it all the more difficult for me to understand why certain characters would fall for him. Cleopatra, too, annoyed me more than anything else, striking me as an antique oversexed bimbo with the personality of a urinal.

Give these characters good, meaty deaths, though, and suddenly they become grandiose, they become tragic. They gain the ability to move us. And boy, did they take that opportunity and play it to the fullest. A couple of series have done this: make me care about a character just to kill him or her off – but here it wasn’t a cheap ploy to make us care, it was earned. Anthony and Cleopatra’s deaths, while not the near-perfect scene that Julius Caesar’s murder was, count among the series’ strongest moments, together with the death of Cicero and Lucius Vorenus saving Titus Pullo’s life in the arena.

In spite of the whiplash-inducing pacing problems of the second season, I miss the series. I miss the characters, I miss the plotting and intrigues, I miss the visceral quality of the language and imagery. My hope lies in the Rome movie that is still much more likely to happen than the fabled Deadwood film that’s supposed to wrap up the story. Hey, if HBO can greenlight Sex and the City 2, can’t they spare a few sesterces for Pullo and Vorenus, the most beautiful love story to grace the small screen in years?