Author: Matt

A study in contrasts

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Earlier this week I almost made my brain explode. I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (no, that in itself wouldn’t have done the trick)… and then, the next evening, I saw The History Boys. From loud, complicated, essentially dumb SFX-travaganza to smart Brit drama in about 24 hours – it’s enough to give you a bad case of the cinematic bends.

At World’s End (or Pirates of the Caribbean III: Why does everything have to be a trilogy?) is undoubtedly a fine-looking film. The visual effects, by and large, are amazing, and the film’s visually inventive to boot. There are sights to behold that I’d never seen before on screen, and the digital artistry on Davy Jones’ betentacled head and face is quite amazing.

If only it was in service of a better script. Remember the first entry in the Pirates franchise? It wasn’t Bergman, but it was witty and fun, which is exactly what such a film needs. Starting with the sequel Dead Man’s Chest, though, the film lost in lightness and wit what it gained in complicatedness. Not complexity, mind you, because that would mean the plot actually adds up to something and benefits the films. Nope, what we got was messy and uninteresting. failing almost completely to serve the movies’ characters.

Yes, Johnny Depp was fun in the third film, as he was in the first two, but Jack Sparrow being Jack Sparrow is simply not enough to keep me engaged for three hours. Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa might have helped, but little was left of his wonderful scenery chewing in the original Pirates of the Caribbean. In fact, most of the actors acted their hearts out, but to no avail: the script is leaden and dull, only little better than George Lucas’ efforts in the Star Wars prequels. Honestly, Mr. Verbinski, here’s a suggestion: if you want to make a three-hour popcorn movie, give it a fun script, or don’t do it at all.

The History Boys, based on Alan Bennett’s stage play, is pretty much the opposite of Pirates of the Caribbean 3. It’s wordy and character-driven, it gives its cast a chance to shine, and it’s funny and moving. I’d never realised that Richard Griffiths did roles other than broad caricatures, but his Hector, a gay, sad English teacher with an absolute passion for his subject, is a beautifully judged, subtle performance with no trace of Uncle Vernon. However, as much as Hector’s at the heart of the film, practically every other part is as well acted and as necessary to the whole.

Bennett’s writing requires acting this good; I’ve seen amateur productions of his shorter works, and they all came across as terribly mannered and stagey. The dialogues in The History Boys are not realistic, they are stylised (as are the characters), but that doesn’t mean in any way that they feel phony. There’s a truth to all of the performances and writing that takes a bit of time to develop – during the first half-hour, I was thinking that some of the characters were a tad stereotypical, but that’s only true in the way that many people at first seem to fit certain types, and only as you get to know them they develop their individuality.

The movie’s also surprisingly good at not feeling like a filmed play. It may have a script that feels theatrical (which makes sense, given the subject matter – school is inherently theatrical and every classroom is a stage), but it doesn’t look like it wants to be on the narrowish confines of a stage (or like it desperately tries to escape those confines, which is often worse). The film breathes throughout the spaces it evokes.

The History Boys is definitely not for everyone, and if I want to be somewhat arrogant and dismissive about it, chances are that more people will like At World’s End. It’s a film that expects its audience to engage with it, intellectually and emotionally. But the effort pays off many times.

The end is the beginning is the end

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HBO has been known to do some killer season finales – no pun intended, although it would be a perfectly accurate one in the case of the last episode of Rome‘s first season. The lead-up to the murder of Caesar is masterfully composed and reminiscent of another plot to have a leader and father figure killed in another HBO series: Livia Soprano’s planned killing of that disappointment of a son. (Is it a coincidence that Livia was named for another larger-than-life mother from ancient Rome?)

Throughout the season I’ve been impressed with Ciaran Hinds’ layered portrayal of Caesar, a man whose fierce intelligence, pride and ambition inspire awe even when he’s at his most arrogant and dismissive. His death, even though it’s clear that it’s coming, is startling in its force and brutality – not just in terms of blood and gore, but in terms of the story and the characters. Another favourite of mine (other than Titus Pullo, of course, who’s just a big sweetie when he isn’t murdering people in a jealous rage) is Brutus, who is portrayed by Tobias Menzies with a fascinating mix of hurt pride, bitterness, self-loathing and, strangest of all, genuine love for Caesar.

Another HBO series finale that pushed all the right buttons with me was Generation Kill‘s final episode, “Bomb in the Garden”. It’s rare for a series that is so documentary in its approach to manage its story and character arcs so deftly, but David Simon and Ed Burns have done a brilliant job. The final scene recalls another work by Simon and Burns, namely the ending of The Wire’s season 2, both scenes using a Johnny Cash song (in both cases making me think that perhaps, just perhaps, I ought to check out that Cash guy’s music). And yes, I am quite okay with admitting my considerable man-crush on Alexander Skarsgard.

With all these endings, it’s only fitting that I finally finished Grand Theft Auto IV. So much has been written about the game already that I won’t add anything other than this: I enjoyed the latest installment of Liberty City. If there’s a more convincing, living and breathing city in any game, I haven’t played it yet. Take it away, Philip.

Als das Blog Blog war

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Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (a.k.a. Wings of Desire, if you like your titles a bit more on-the-nose, a.k.a. The Film That City Of Angels Is Just Barely Based On) is undoubtedly a beautiful film to look at. Its visuals are a love letter to Berlin as much as to black-and-white cinematography. It’s also a film containing many gems: the image of many, many angels hanging out at the library, watching over us; Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander sitting in a show car, comparing notes; their conversation about the history of the world; almost every scene that Ganz has with Peter Falk, and the conceit of Falk being an ex-angel himself. There are many quietly beautiful, poetic, even funny moments.

And yet, in spite of the accolades the film has garnered, even after two viewings I can’t shake the impression that it tries way too hard to be poetic, to be art. The worst offender is the poem that the film picks up again and again, Peter Handke’s “Lied vom Kindsein”, that interminable bit of pretentious doggerel that begins with “Als das Kind Kind war…”. Not only does it offer the appearance of depth rather than the real thing, Ganz also keeps falling into this childlike singsong, making it wholly insufferable. It’s a series of idealising clichés about the innocence of childhood that make me want to hunt down the poem’s titular child and send it off to boarding school.

What bothered me even more, though, is the trapeze artist that Bruno Ganz’ Damiel gives up his angelhood for. Her lines – both her thoughts and her dialogue late in the film with newly mortal Damiel – are painfully faux-deep, making me think that if I was Damiel and had just given up immortality for her, I’d feel pretty ticked off right now. That whole last dialogue seems to boil down to “The meaning of life lies entirely in man and woman having it off, and that’s what makes life, like, deep, man!”

I guess that’s my main problem: when the film doesn’t try its damnedest to be deep and poetic, it actually becomes these things. When it aims at depth, it comes off as an overly earnest transcript of one of those conversations first-year students have at 2pm in the morning after lots of cheap red wine. I also had these conversations, I enjoyed them, but there’s a difference between being young and drunk, as much on wine as on one’s sense of understanding of the world and all, and having to sit through them as an outside observer.

I’ll probably end up watching the film again, five years or so down the road, because there are so many people who love it dearly. Perhaps Der Himmel über Berlin just isn’t for me, at least not in its entirety, but I keep thinking there’s something I’ve missed. Or perhaps I missed the opportunity of seeing this film first when I was younger. “Als das Kind Kind war” and all that jazz…

A. K. – 1946-2009

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Early this morning I went to the city crematorium to say goodbye to my mother, who’d died four days ago. She’d been diagnosed with cervical cancer two years ago, but back then had responded well to the treatment. This summer, though, after some alarming symptoms the doctors found that she’d developed metastases in the brain and several other organs. They fought the symptoms with radiation first and then chemotherapy, which worked relatively well for a while, but it was clear from the beginning that she would lose this fight, and sooner rather than later.

I don’t usually write things here that are this personal. I don’t have this blog in order to share my life with the world at large. However, even if it’s usually about films, books or video games, the blog is where I express my thoughts and feelings.

My mother was an important part of my life. We weren’t necessarily all that close, although most likely I was the family member who was closest to her. Even like this, though, we didn’t talk much about her illness and even less about where it would take her. We had one conversation about the possibility of her death and what would follow afterwards. No, we didn’t talk about the notion of an afterlife or about God or resurrection or any of these things, but we talked about the memorial service. (Her main wish, very typically of her, was that it shouldn’t cost too much.)

Was I of any comfort to her during the last few months and weeks? I don’t know. I hope that I was as much of a comfort as was possible to her, but it’s clear to me that her main comfort towards the end was morphine in large amounts. I hope that I did as much for her as she would let me do. I hope that she suffered as little as possible. I hope that I will honour her with my memory – that I’ll understand what that means and that I’ll do it.

We do the same. – The same? – Exactly the same. (pause)

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I’d be curious: did Michael Caine and Jude Law talk about Alfie on the set of Sleuth? Did they compare performances? Did they get drunk and watch the Stallone version of Get Carter? Or did they just stare at each other threateningly until Kenneth Branagh shouted “Roll camera”?

The Sleuth remake sounds like quite a compelling proposition at first: one of the grand old English actors facing off against a glittering, promising young guy. (Admittedly, Jude Law hasn’t quite followed up on the promise of his early films, has he?) Directed by Kenneth “Four fucking hours of Shakespeare” Branagh, who has a deft hand behind the camera when he isn’t trying to showcase his own thespian ego. And the original play and film adapted by Harold Pinter, master of intellectual menace and keeper of the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Alfie? Never seen it. Sounds like rubbish.

In practice, though, Sleuth is dead as a film. It has occasional moments where the individual contributors flare up and come to life, but it’s like putting an electrical current into a dead frog. Its twitches are easily mistaken for signs of life, but the poor little green guy is still as dead as, well, a dead frog.

Michael Caine probably fares best. He slips into the Pinteresque dialogue with ease and manages to make it sound relatively natural. Caine comes closest to convincing us that the film has a beating heart – but even he cannot sustain this against the wooden staginess of the proceedings. The script might work on stage, with the immediacy that a live performance brings to things, but if some scripts jump off the page, this movie lurches back onto the page.

I’ve liked Jude Law in a number of films, first and foremost Gattaca, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and The Talented Mr Ripley, and he’s got moments in Sleuth where he shines – but all too many of his line deliveries sound as if he imagined that This Is What Pinter’s Supposed To Sound Like. It gets worse in the second part of the film, after the first major twist, which I felt was badly handled; I sat there wondering whether it’s a genuine twist or whether the film suddenly decided to go all post-modern on us. I would have prefered the latter, since the twist made the characters even less credible. In any case, after half an hour Law turns up as a new character, but while his body language is convincing, his accent couldn’t be more fake. Yes, he’s supposed to be fake, but if it’s so transparent to us that this is Jude Law in disguise, it makes the Michael Caine character look stupid if he doesn’t get it… and since the film tries to convince us that the characters aren’t stupid while showing them doing utterly stupid things, it’s difficult to take anything happening on screen seriously.

The third act introduces a homoerotic component that seems to have popped in from a different film altogether. While the casting should work brilliantly here – Law has always had a peculiarly feminine quality – seeing Michael Caine trying to get his menacing paws on the younger man rarely feels anything other than awkward because the development comes out of left field, from another game, in a different country altogether.

Would the film have worked better for me if I’d seen the original? Perhaps – but I doubt it. Branagh’s main mistake in the end was to think that the staginess of the script could be counteracted by ‘clever’ (read: obvious) cinematographic choices. However, no weird camera angle will distract from the script and the performances if they’re geared towards the stage. Seeing this live might have been riveting. Seeing the film? Well. Dead frog.

Princely update

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In case anyone’s interested, Rock Paper Shotgun has a “Wot I Think” on Prince of Persia. They say much of what I think about the game, putting it much more succinctly. I guess that’s why they are professional games journalists who get paid for this sort of thing, and I’m a lowly fan with a big mouth.

Also, after seven games and two reboots, the Prince of Persia series gets a movie  version, which will make any film afficionado rejoice. Or regurgitate. It’s one of the two. In any case, it’s got proper actors and even a director who’s made good films – which is more than most video game movies can say for themselves. It even features good ol’ Satipo:

You throw me the idol and I throw you the whip... as soon as I stop screaming, that is.

Could this be an actual video game movie that is worth the admission? Or will we be wishing afterwards that we could use the Sands of Time to rewind the previous two hours?

He may be easy, but he’s a prince

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What makes a video game enjoyable? It’s obviously different things for different gamers: some like non-stop action, while others prefer games to be slower, more cerebral experiences. Some are graphics fetishists, while others say that gameplay complexity trumps visuals every time. Myself, I like a good narrative in a game, but I also want the gameplay and storytelling to be intertwined.

In the end, however, what it boils down to for most people, and in the most circular fashion at that, is that most people want games to be fun. They want to be taken out of their everyday lives for a while. Obviously that’s one of the reasons why so-called ‘casual games’ have been a major success in the last few years. Whether it’s Peggle or Plants vs. Zombies, or indeed one of the gazillion variations on the theme of Mah Jong, they’re all making money compared to what they cost that make most ‘non-casual’ games cry into their DVD boxes.

Is it just me, or is casual gaming more sexy than sweating, bespectacled nerds hunching over their gamepads for whole weekends? Or is that just evil advertising messing with my brain?

Now, old-school gamers like myself, who remember the times when a pixel was bigger than your head and the height of gaming was yellow pill addicts running through mazes and frogs crossing the street… Many of those gamers have nothing but disdain for casual games. Why? Because they’re easy. There’s little to no challenge in Puzzle Quest, they claim, so even your grandmother can play them and succeed. The most embarrassing examples of such old-school gamers will then go on a rant about the evils of instant gratification and those horrible people who feel entitled to winning a game every now and then without serious training.

Myself, I like a challenge every now and then – but to be honest, next to working 100% and having a relationship, I definitely see the appeal of games that are not punishingly hard. I see the fun in games that you can pick up, play for 15 minutes and drop again feeling that you’ve had a good time and cleared your mind.

However, there is such a thing as a game being too easy. I’m currently playing Prince of Persia, a reboot of a reboot of a classic gaming series back from the days when computers were big as houses and joysticks had one button. It’s a beautifully crafted game: it looks and sounds gorgeous, and it tells a nice story to boot. But, honestly: if I wanted a game that practically plays itself, I’d watch a DVD.

Behind every weirdly dressed man there's a woman with glowing hands. Or something.

It’s a real shame, because the game could easily have been as much fun or more while still providing a bit of a challenge. As it is, you never feel like you’re controlling your character – and for me, that’s one of the big things when it comes to good games. If it’s there, you never think about it, but the moment that control is taken from you, you can’t help noticing. In previous incarnations of the Prince of Persia series, your character performed the most amazing free-running acrobatics, but the controls were tight enough to make you feel that you were the one making the Prince run along walls, parkouring his way through Arabian Nights-inspired worlds. In this game, however, it’s enough to run roughly in the right direction and press a button at roughly the right time, and hey presto! you’re running along walls as if gravity was completely optional.

Without a bit of a challenge, without the feeling that you’re actually controlling your character, the gameplay actually becomes a bit of an annoyance much of the time. It’s like watching a film on DVD (or Blu-ray, of course!), and every time you get to a new scene you have to play Tic Tac Toe against an idiot. You’re sure to win, but it breaks the flow of the game. At what point does a game become so easy that it might as well consist of one button: “Press X to watch the next cutscene?”

But yeah… the game is oh so pretty. Behold (and if you’re a fan of the final episode of Six Feet Under, you may want to brace yourself for a tune you know very well – once you’ve accepted this as something other than utter blasphemy, it actually works quite well):

Habemus PS3…

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… and a stomach bug brought home from Egypt. All in glorious HD.

So why have I, a stalwart PC gamer (with a PS2 obtained originally for entirely academic purposes, I swear!), got myself one of those newfangled PS3 Slims? Two reasons, really: 1) Blu-rays and 2) The Last Guardian. Obviously I had more reasons than that, but they’re the main ones.

1) When we originally got digital TV, I was told that our connection was fast enough for HD channels. And yes, it was pretty glorious (in a nerdy way) to be able to record and watch both volumes of Kill Bill in high-def. Even boring old football (that’s “soccer” for y’all yanks out there) just popped off the screen in a way that made it watchable. For five minutes. At most. But you could see every blade of grass, and every pore on people’s faces! (Makes you feel all Walt Whitmanesque…)

But then our digital connection was downgraded. Why? They couldn’t tell; in fact, they were pretty mystified why I’d been told to begin with that the connection was fast enough. Guess I imagined all those red pixels in Kill Bill…

In any case, yesterday we watched our first complete Blu-ray disk, Sunshine. To paraphrase another brainy sci-fi flick, “My god, it is full of details.” While I still have problems with the film’s ending, this visually stunning film becomes doubly so in HD. Almost makes you want to dive into the sun yourself… in a good way.

(If you’re interested in seeing a good comparison of DVD vs. Blu-ray, check out this YouTube video. Make sure to watch it in HQ though.)

2) This one is a bit more esoteric, perhaps. Two of my favourite games on the PS2 are called ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, and they may just be the main reasons why I got the PS2 to begin with. I was writing a paper on games as art (Et tu, Roger?), and both of these seemed to fit the bill, combining subtle storytelling, beautiful art direction and gameplay in ways that few other games have managed. The developer’s new project is called The Last Colossus, and the trailers definitely have left me more than curious: