I call the big one Bitey! Fairness and Alien: Isolation

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Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility… I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality… I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.

This apt description by Ash, everyone’s favourite hobbity murderbot, very much fits Alien: Isolation‘s recreation of the alien originally conceived by H.R. Giger and brought to the screen by Ridley Scott and crew. The creature is deadly: it is single-minded and has no conscience. Accordingly, it lacks yet another quality, one that most people would consider essential to good video games – whatever else the alien is, it isn’t fair.

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Would that it were so simple.

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hail-caesar01Hail, Caesar! is the Coen brothers’ most positive comedy. I admit that I was prompted to think there would be a fair amount of political abuse because of the trailer for Trumbo they showed beforehand, but no-one gets really hurt in the feature. The worst that happens is that Hollywood superstar Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is abducted from the set of his biblical epic by a group of Communist screenwriters who call themselves The Future. Theirs is the friendliest abduction in movie history, which is surprising because the movie is set in the late 1950s. They cannot bring themselves round to telling Whitlock that he has been abducted, but fill his thick head with talk of production and economics and the value of the little guy and that with his studio’s money, they could support the cause. Gentle old Dr. Marcuse (John Bluthal) tells him about the end of history. Whitlock doesn’t get any of it, but he likes it there in that beach villa, reclining in his deck chair, cigarette and martini in hand, still in his Centurion’s uniform. Continue reading →

They Create Worlds: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

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One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

This was a peculiarly English end of the world. No guns, no running and screaming, no heroes or monsters. Just nosebleeds, headaches, fear – and then the light. What remains of everyone is brightness, and voices… and the world they inhabited.

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Bloody. Unpleasant. Hateful?

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I used to be a big Tarantino fan. In fact, I’d still consider myself one; I can still remember the exhilaration I felt after first seeing Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill (both parts) or Inglourious Basterds, and they still feel fresh and exciting to me now. Even Death Proof, which many of his fans were, let’s say, ambivalent about: the film puts a big goofy grin on my face.

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They create worlds: Alien: Isolation

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One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

When I was a kid playing pirated games on my beloved “breadbox”, the C64, games based on movie licences tended to be ubiquitous, largely interchangeable and mostly dire affairs. Whether they were mediocre shooters or bad action adventures, if it wasn’t for the title screen and (if we were lucky) a bit tune rendition of the movie’s theme, it’d be well-nigh impossible to know that what you were playing was supposedly an adaptation of Licence to Kill (yes, those two dozen huge pixels represented Timothy Dalton) or Platoon (a surprisingly enjoyable action game, albeit one that dropped the film’s anti-war angle in favour of some more mass market-friendly Vietcong shootery). Whatever connection there was to the films that purportedly inspired the games ended up being mostly imaginary.

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‘Twas the bear that done it: discussing The Revenant

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12 Oscar nominations, a budget of $135 million and one very angry bear: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant is the revenge flick that’s likely to continue being the talk of this award season. Reason enough to discuss the film one-on-one, like a better behaved Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Hardy, though with less grunting and accents that are easier to comprehend.

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50 Shades of Lepidopterology

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Watching The Duke of Burgundy was a pleasure, albeit an unexpected one: for one thing, I didn’t expect an all-female film depicting a sado-masochistic relationship between two lepidopterologists to be so relatable, for another I didn’t expect to laugh out loud at a sly yet strangely sweet joke concerning urophilia. Berberian Sound Studio, the previous film by director-writer Peter Strickland, intrigued and unsettled me in equal measure, but at the same time it didn’t much engage me emotionally. In spite of a typically strong performance by Toby Jones, it struck me primarily as an exercise in style, atmosphere and genre – and one, at that, whose intended audience didn’t really include me, as my knowledge of Giallo is slight.

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Twin sons, one mother or another

Mege1 Comment

ichsehichseh1Although Goodnight Mommy is not rich in jump scares, it is very much a horror flick. Comparisons to Haneke’s earlier work, especially to Funny Games, are in order – the two first-time directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are Austrian, like Haneke. Veronika Franz is also the co-writer of all of Ulrich Seidl’s screenplays, whose Paradise trilogy I’ve reviewed elsewhere. That should give you a clue as to the movie’s atmosphere, although there is not much of Seidl’s symmetrical rigidity here.

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Money is funny. Funny how?

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thebigshort4If I had known Adam McKay was the idea man, writer and director behind Will Ferrell vehicles such as the Anchorman movies or Step Brothers or Talladega Nights, or even the writer of Ant-Man, I might have avoided The Big Short. I’m glad I saw it, not least because it covers similar territory as Margin Call. The Big Short is McKay’s first movie as a director without Ferrell, and maybe more serious than his previous work. It’s about the credit and housing finance collapse in 2007. Yes, it’s a comedy about greed, cluelessness, unemployment, financial ruin, indifference and death. It’s not flawless, but it’s witty and fast-paced, and it has an ensemble cast that speaks for itself.

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Carol for Christmas

Mege2 Comments

Todd Haynes’ Carol is a great way to end your movie year, or to start the new one. The movie works well on many levels, the most noteworthy of which is that Cate Blanchett’s role as the title character seems to have been written for her. It wasn’t – the movie is based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt from 1952, but I couldn’t see anybody else in that role.

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