tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72410060387350036492024-03-04T23:39:32.761-08:00Into the MirrorDrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-83716866511622516502014-07-22T15:46:00.002-07:002014-07-22T15:49:33.812-07:00Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Under the Skin (2014)<i>(Written for <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/">The Film Experience's</a> Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. Thanks, Nathaniel! So nice to have an excuse to actually write.)</i><br />
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Choosing a "best shot" from <i>Under the Skin</i>'s tableaux challenged me not only because they are as gorgeous as they are diverse, but also because it's difficult to do them justice with only one still image. Conceptually the film's visual language is often powerful, if a little obvious at times; in motion it's true art, bounding between gloss and low-lit murkiness, dim shabby shacks and vibrant cosmic sunbursts, without ever seeming garish or inconsistent.<br />
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Initially I wanted to pick a shot from Johansson's touching "revelation" scene, in which she first contemplates the grandiosity of the humans around her in a montage of their moving gold-filtered figures, layered continually over each other, with her face eventually emerging in the center like a black hole. I found it too hard to get a screen capture that adequately captured the clash between its alien heroine's fundamental emptiness and her new sense of wonder. See below for an approximation:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3adHLGt3ip7wnZ4JT4V0BD8k5owthxjI7vZp0v2LvQ_qJLT2WgrO0hAnVMZzgEWGXpN1sqdclipuCuG-D4ajNRYL-epXhxU2IqF0nrGmm9IGcvk779W-4nyzb975jRylkHE0apKQQeRSo/s1600/Scarlett-Johansson-Under--011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3adHLGt3ip7wnZ4JT4V0BD8k5owthxjI7vZp0v2LvQ_qJLT2WgrO0hAnVMZzgEWGXpN1sqdclipuCuG-D4ajNRYL-epXhxU2IqF0nrGmm9IGcvk779W-4nyzb975jRylkHE0apKQQeRSo/s1600/Scarlett-Johansson-Under--011.jpg" height="240" width="400" /></a></div>
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Still kinda cool, although the effect clearly doesn't translate.<br />
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Instead, I chose a shot that, though perhaps not as meaningful as the rest of the film's loud composition, is subtle and fun while remaining expressive: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDuXEioR_MbdvJZyuS8GumYP7GBENvB7UhE2z1LHOJUbKhr5E5IGjj9ezs9wGIpH7Ua5gSaLZLiSQJyPlvdFrbX-87gu_Qy2nPXV1EWLE8pX53snAmVrkweBVBavsqhmQgUNsRpLONjETw/s1600/vlcsnap-555462.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDuXEioR_MbdvJZyuS8GumYP7GBENvB7UhE2z1LHOJUbKhr5E5IGjj9ezs9wGIpH7Ua5gSaLZLiSQJyPlvdFrbX-87gu_Qy2nPXV1EWLE8pX53snAmVrkweBVBavsqhmQgUNsRpLONjETw/s1600/vlcsnap-555462.png" height="215" width="400" /></a></div>
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What do I love about this shot? The cake ScarJo orders essentially matches her costume's color scheme.<br />
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The big cluster of red berries (shirt and lipstick), the single black one (eyes), and the creamy off-white frosting (that delicate complexion) are all garnishes to the dark chocolate filling, a choice with a meaning that shifts from metaphorical to literal as our understanding of this creature changes.<br />
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I love the way the diagonal lines of the napkin, offset at equilateral angles by the diagonal lines of the fork, point directly to that one fateful bite of cake. I love the three concentric circles that ensconce it. As if Jonathan Glazer was concerned that we might miss the significance of this scene, the moment at which ScarJo realizes that the pleasures of our species are unattainable for her, he uses every element of the mise-en-scene to put a laser focus on the subject of this long, deliberate close-up.<br />
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And I mean, it's cake. How can you not love it?<br />
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Oh. :(</div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-37947879256984149022014-07-07T14:03:00.000-07:002014-07-07T14:03:46.850-07:00The Good Wife Drinking Game<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Good Wife </i>is a show about a lot of things, but it is mostly about how much adult life sucks and how much adults need alcohol to deal with adult life. What better way to celebrate this than to drink along with them? You can make like Kalinda and play with milk, but it sort of defeats the purpose and this show is more fun after throwing back a few anyway.<br />
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<b>Take a drink...</b><br />
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1) Any time someone drinks. Obviously! <br />
2) Any time Alicia is a good wife.<br />
3) Any time Alicia is not a good wife.<br />
4) Any time someone begins a conversation with "I want you to work with me."<br />
5) Any time someone ends a conversation with "Think about it." <b>Take two extra drinks</b> if this conversation began with "I want you to work with me."<br />
6) Any time Kalinda says "I'm on it."<br />
7) Any time a character uses the phrase "fishing expedition." <b>Take an extra drink</b> if it's a judge. <br />
8) Any time a character uses VidTrope or VidLook. This will often be accompanied by an <b>extra drink </b>for rule 27.<br />
9) Any time a character uses FaceBranch or ChumHum.<br />
10) Any time a character buttons his suit jacket as he stands up.<br />
11) Any time an actor who appeared on <i>The Wire </i>shows up.<br />
12) Any time an actor who went on to appear in <i>The Walking Dead </i>shows up.<br />
13) <b>Take four drinks </b>if an actor who appeared on both <i>The Wire </i>AND <i>The Walking Dead </i>shows up, then ponder this show's amazing eye for acting talent.<br />
14) <b>Take three drinks </b>if an episode begins with a decontextualized image, followed by a cut to black, then another image, then black, then the rest of the episode.<br />
15) Any time the dubbing is bad. (In any over-the-shoulder dialogue shot, watch the mouth of the character with their back to the camera. TV production values ahoy!)<br />
16) Any time someone uses the word "cynic" or any derivative thereof. <br />
17) Any time two Lockhart-Gardner lawyers object at the same time. <b>Take an extra drink </b>for each lawyer past the second.<br />
18) Any time the prosecution and defense simultaneously attempt to talk over the other.<br />
19) Any time "in your opinion?"<br />
20) Any time Michael J. Fox launches into his tardive dyskinesia spiel and you start to feel a little weird because you don't know if the show is turning his Parkinson's into a convenient character trait/running joke or if he's totally cool with it???<br />
21) Any time the show takes a passive-aggressive shot at premium cable.<br />
22) Any time Diane says something in a foreign language.<br />
23) Any time the show demonstrates a questionable understanding of digital fiat currencies or the sites used to exchange them (MtGoX, Silkroad).<br />
24) Any time you can tell the writers desperately wanted to use the word "fuck" or any of its derivatives but were unable to.<br />
25) Any time there's a partner's meeting of paramount importance that doesn't actually resolve or accomplish anything.<br />
26) Any time Alicia is made out to be a racist and gets comically flustered over it.<br />
27) Any time Dave Buckley busts out some cheesy-ass original music. <b>Take an extra drink </b>for seminal hip-hop cut Thicky Trick.<br />
28) Any time you hear THIS song:<br />
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(Why did the uploader use a picture from a random anime? Who knows, but of course that's the one I'm going to pick.)<br />
29) Any time you feel a burning sense of injustice that <i>House of Cards</i> is one of the most popular programs on the air and <i>The Good Wife</i> is relegated to the CBS senior ghetto.<br />
30) Any time Elsbeth Tascioni waltzes in to wizard a character out of a seemingly insurmountable plot obstacle and then vanishes, presumably for the rest of the season.<br />
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<b>Finish your drink...</b><br />
31) Any time Will and Diane share a tender dance and your heart melts <3<br />
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32) Any time the show kills a major character.</div>
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33) Any time Cary uses Dana Lodge's relationship with Kalinda as a quasi-lesbian proxy fuck.</div>
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34) Any time Kalinda has a meaningful plotline after season 3. </div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-27405773759725035312014-06-17T15:29:00.001-07:002014-07-22T18:16:17.273-07:00Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Goldfinger (1964)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i>(Written for <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/">The Film Experience's</a> Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. Thanks, Nathaniel!)</i></div>
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At their best, the early Bond movies make exceptional use of vertical space. The franchise's most striking visual qualities - its lavish set design and architecture, its bombastic aerial shots, the frequent use of picturesque international geography - are highlighted by expansive multi-layered compositions, often swallowing Bond whole. Refer to the dizzying use of crane during a rooftop brawl in <i>You Only Live Twice </i>(which, despite a certain Soderbergh's <a href="http://extension765.com/sdr/2-most-irrelevant-no-1">insistence</a>, is easily the best Bond for my money), or <i>The Spy Who Loved Me</i>'s immediately iconic cold open, in which Roger Moore rides that Union Jack parachute all the way down a snowy mountain into white nothingness. Roger Deakins even gets at this pattern in <i>Skyfall, </i>shooting a brief but beautiful fight sequence amidst the skyscrapers of Shanghai where frame after frame is filled with callbacks to the series' vertiginous tendencies: glass panels with clear vertical edges but indefinite bodies, screen images of jellyfish drifting upwards, and of course a long drop for Bond's would-be assassin.<br />
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<i>Goldfinger </i>is no exception. It isn't my favorite Bond movie from this decade, but it's definitely the one that set the visual standard for future installations. The foundations of this house style are most apparent in the Switzerland chapter of the film, as demonstrated by <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2014/6/17/best-shot-deborahs-choice-from-goldfinger-1964.html">Deborah</a>; Ted Moore stuffs his characters into those rolling green hills as often as possible, even mirroring that iconic sniper shot not five minutes after we first see it.<br />
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But my favorite shot in <i>Goldfinger</i> employs these principles while at the same time inverting them, stuffing Bond's unconscious body into a cramped space that nonetheless is full of detail:</div>
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So many reflective surfaces! So much light! The little gold dots on that stove in the foreground are an especially charming touch. And the way Oddjob's shadow looms dead-center is so menacing. Considering this shot is meant to represent four or five feet of vertical space at most, the composition is unexpectedly busy. Bond occupies little of the frame here, a counterpoint to the equally robust but far more expansive frames he's typically placed in. He's absurdly prone, the first of numerous situations in <i>Goldfinger</i> where he's given the shitty end of the stick and asked to work his way out of bondage/imprisonment/ineffectuality. Perhaps his incompetence in this film is meant to foreshadow his fears of inadequacy in follow-up film <i>Thunderball</i>, expressed through this scene of him ambushed in a highly emasculatory way by recurring terrorist cell SPECTRE:</div>
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Nearly naked and being killed by what looks like an out-of-control buttsex machine? The worst possible way to go for a virile superspy. </div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-38950391889559522632014-04-13T19:05:00.001-07:002014-04-13T19:16:00.437-07:00My Ten Favorite Dance Dance Revolution Songs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was in the throes of a strange adolescence when I fell in love with these songs, and I do not have the musical vocabulary to reason through my choices with anything other than free association and reactionary sentimentality. Proceed with caution.<br />
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<b>10) Jenny - Do You Remember Me</b><br />
Original: Not sure - I read many years ago that this is a cover of a Japanese pop song from the 1970s, but I've since learned that the Internet isn't always a trustworthy place.<br />
First appeared in: DDR MAX (6th Mix)<br />
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My friend and I played this at our joint 16th birthday party and my mom told me that I should turn it off or people would start leaving. WHATEVER. For some reason, this song always stuck out amidst the deluge of generic Eurobeat that slammed DDR some time around 5th Mix. It may be Jenny's subtle ESL cadence ("I am gonna g'you a start"???), or that her vocals are tender in a way that the genre rarely manages, or its ridiculously fun Heavy stepcharts, but Do You Remember Me has a lot of personality. I think most people skipped over this song because it was super girly and <i>Dance Dance Revolution</i> is all about looking as cool as possible.<br />
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<b>9) Jennifer - If You Were Here</b><br />
Original:<b> </b>None<br />
First appeared in: 2nd Mix<br />
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<b> </b> For better or worse, this song screams DDR. Most people familiar with the game would probably cite smile.dk's Butterfly as the franchise's most notable contribution to popular music, but let's be real - Butterfly is annoying as hell. If You Were Here serves up twice the synthesized Italo Disco goodness with only half of the shrill vocalizations and none of the dubious Orientalism; it's a perfect little encapsulation of the cool-uncool divide that <i>Dance Dance Revolution </i>spent so long trying to navigate. Strange that (if you choose to believe the online whispers of yesterdecade) the opening 13 seconds of this song inspired Naoki Maeda to write MAX 300, the series' first definitive step away from its dance game pretensions.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><b>8) Anquette - My Baby Mama</b><br />
Original: None<br />
First appeared in: Solo 2000<br />
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As far as I can tell, this is the one instance of female rap in the pre-Supernova history of Dance Dance Revolution, and what a hilarious one it is! Solo 2000 had a pretty odd tracklist - lots of R&B, lots of pop, and a generous helping of rap, which reads as an effort to further inch in on the still-reluctant American arcade scene. This is the clear standout, though, a contemporary tale of infidelity that must have been a huge hit in Japan. I could understand playing through this song unperturbed if you didn't understand English, but performing DDR's bastardized shuffle-stomp dance to a woman angrily rapping about 2 Live Crew and sexually transmitted diseases was probably a bridge too far for players on these shores. It never crawled out of Solo 2000 hell when it clearly deserved to over Sexy Planet or any other mindless Konami original; it's the kind of idiosyncratic Dancemania selection that highlights the franchise at its best.</div>
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<b>7) Kate Project - If You Can Say Goodbye</b></div>
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Original: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLiKTN2yUt4">Barbie Young</a> (1991)</div>
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First appeared in: 3rd Mix</div>
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<i>If you can say goodbye,</i><br />
<i>Baby, tell me why.</i><br />
<i>You don't wanna love me</i><br />
<i>just like I do.</i><br />
<i>You can say goodbye.</i><br />
<i>Tell me what I've got to do.</i><br />
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</i> This isn't the last of the inane Dancemania Europop. But almost! If you can't bring yourself to tolerate tooth-rotting synths and garbled English, then why are you even reading about DDR in the first place? If You Can Say Goodbye sort of gets lost in the 3rd Mix shuffle, since this was when E-rotic showed up and got all the attention for doing essentially the same thing as every other SAIFAM artist except with tarty sex lyrics. E-rotic is fun, but Kate Project is earnest dance music, the sonic equivalent of a headbutt: lyrics simple (ridiculous) enough to stick with you, a stirring harmony in the chorus, and Kate's ability to rhyme "do" with itself without wavering add up to another song that deserved more attention than it got. I could see this being popular for a few weeks at the turn of the century, if only the club scene were so kind to all those anonymous Dancemania divas. </div>
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</b> <b> </b> <b>6) X-Treme - </b><b>A Minute</b><br />
Original: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J3U4Ke0SCY">Take That</a> (1992), by dint of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxtPbCYk-38">Tavares</a> (1975). The Take That cover and corresponding video are pretty amazing, by the way.<br />
First appeared in: DDRMAX2 (7th Mix)<br />
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Rap in DDR should be treated as a series of noises, meaningless syllables for you to hammer steps out over, except for Anquette's unimpeachable flow in My Baby Mama. Konami's music supervisors have a tin ear for rap, whether purloined from Dancemania or churned out in their own nightmarish studios. I've probably listened to this song seventy times in the 12 years since DDRMAX2 came out and I still have no idea what the hell this guy is talking about. Something maintaining the game the fame something something. But the chorus still soars, full of a verve that two passes through the dance music cover-industrial complex can't suppress, and the verses remain palatable despite the efforts of a man who got paid 200 bucks to poorly rap over some electro. It was also the first song on the selection wheel in DDRMAX2 so you could pick it really quickly to troll people.<br />
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</b> <b> </b> <b>5) </b><b>dj Nagureo - Patsenner</b><br />
Original: None<br />
First appeared in: DDR 2nd Mix Club Version<br />
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Club Version is a crazy-ass mess. If there's a club in the world that comes close to replicating this installment's melange of laughably cheesy R&B and techno so aimless that it practically feels improvised, I'd sure like to go there someday. That's not to say it's bad - it certainly has more character than many of the tracklists from DDR's twilight hours, and there are a few real standouts once you've sifted through the filler. I just doubt that anyone from Konami has actually been to a club. Patsenner may not seem like much at first blush, but there's a curious depth to its sound, one you wouldn't expect from a song that so shamelessly uses the woodblock. It's unfortunate that Konami forgot this song existed after Konamix in 2002, although a ninety-second long ambient electronica track called PATSENNER was probably doomed to become DDR apocrypha from the start. <b> </b><br />
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</b><b>4) Hi-Rise - </b><b>I Believe in Miracles</b><br />
Original: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MYdr8Fkah0">Jackson Sisters</a> (1973)<br />
First appeared in: DDR for Playstation as a preview for DDR 2nd Mix<br />
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</b> I only picked this song because the play button appears right where the guy's third eye is.<br />
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</b> <b> </b> <b>3) Mr. T with Motoaki.F - Burning Heat!</b><br />
Original: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhHwtJxHno">Gradius II</a> (1988) (the song repeats itself ad infinitum after about 25 seconds)<br />
First appeared in: DDRMAX2 (7th Mix)<br />
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Burning Heat stands tall as one of MAX2's centerpieces, a flashy ode to Konami's flagship franchise that has the effect of stressing the utter nerdiness that goes into playing, and surely creating, DDR. It's a video game...in which you can dance...to a video game song! Finally! Self-reference in the gaming medium tends to be a huge hit, since most gamers love when their obscure obsessions are validated, and Burning Heat's cumulative 100,000 views on Youtube indicate a legacy that few other songs from DDR enjoy. The song itself doesn't hurt, propelled by hotblooded space adventure synths at 166 BPM and featuring a perfect little 8-bit transition that probably blew a lot of teenage minds in 2002. Pretty embarrassing for Naoki to produce this kind of big-beat electronic synthrock four years running for DDR and then to get so soundly beaten at it by a relative newcomer.<br />
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<b>2) Wildside - My Sweet Darlin' </b><br />
Original: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIzxrBeKzLA">Yaida Hitomi</a> (2000)<br />
First appeared in: DDRMAX (6th Mix)<br />
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Here's an 100% nostalgia-driven selection - where songs like If You Can Say Goodbye and My Baby Mama stuck with me after playing them perhaps once or twice, My Sweet Darlin' became a fixture because I played and listened to it obsessively in my sophomore year of high school, when I still wasn't sure what music actually was. That swelling synth line combined with the brisk, bass-heavy production is like catnip to me. Wildside also achieves here the dubious distinction of being one of the few SAIFAM artists whose English diction actually improves on that of the original singer's. (This only makes their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLfeZA0_gSw">massacre</a> of Sylvie Vartan's Irresistiblement in Extreme that much funnier.) Yaida Hitomi was a great fit for this genre, since her fast-paced and terminally upbeat Engrishy J-pop takes kindly to the drum machine. The stepchart is also really fun and there's a super adorable freestyle to the song by a person who called himself Lil B. The only way it could be any better was if it was actually Lil B performing said freestyle. </div>
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<b>1) Togo Project feat. Sana - </b><b>Sana Mollete Ne Ente (BLT Style)</b><br />
Original: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuqP99H04F4">unremixed</a> version<br />
First appeared in: DDR Extreme 2<br />
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Sanae Shintani was with Konami for their very first Beatmania game, and from the radiator they chained her to she sang in over 80 more of their songs, 30 of which she wrote or co-wrote lyrics for. She has a mellow, distinct voice that isn't powerful or compelling enough to overpower her accompanying productions, granting her an anonymity vital for the massive range of genres she performs in: pop, house, trance, hard techno, bossa nova, ambient, folk, and if you subscribe to Konami's in-game genre labeling, "fever hero ending," "mandolin step," "lovely," and "quilt." (This song is "Mondo Cuban.") She turned in a few good performances throughout her 13-year Bemani gig, but the vast majority of her work is just that. Sana Mollete Ne Ente catches Shintani having an atypical amount of fun, considering Togo's embarrassing double-entendres about playing Bemani games and her boyfriend's "secret finger technique," not to mention the lethargy of the arrangement itself. The BLT Style remix doubles the speed and throws in a shitload of percussion, giving the melody an energy that complements her own. I'm sure this is pretty cheesy when placed alongside non-commercial samba music, but there's spirit to be found in the way Shintani rolls the r in <i>rumba </i>or the muted discordant horns, made twice as noticeable by the persistent rumbling of the drums. It's a shame that this song arrived to DDR during the franchise's death knell, likely unappreciated amidst the increasingly homogenized roster of Top 40 that Konami desperately tried to court audiences with. We'll always have IIDX, Sana.<br />
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<b>Other bops</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RClb9bVrU7Q">Look to the Sky</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFpZN5f9nlc">5.1.1</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OCarPH-mNc">www.blondegirl</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6fOcE5CZ2g">Macho Gang</a>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-50393140374759793102014-03-25T16:53:00.002-07:002014-06-28T19:32:52.334-07:00Profiting from the Revolution in 2013<div>
<i>This post contains spoilers for </i>The East<i>, </i>Closed Circuit<i>, and </i>The Fifth Estate<i>. Of the three, only one is actually worth the time, so if you have any intention of watching </i>The East<i> then read at your own risk!</i><br />
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When Occupy Wall Street burst into life on September 17th, 2011, there was a collective hesitation amongst mainstream media outlets to substantially cover the movement. Plenty of coverage on the lack of coverage, sure, but nothing that demanded any investigative clout. Nate Silver <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/police-clashes-spur-coverage-of-wall-street-protests/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0" target="_blank">estimates</a> that, between approximately four thousand American news outlets, an average of sixteen stories per day were produced about the movement. It wasn't until a certain act of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ05rWx1pig" target="_blank">police brutality</a> that major television and print news networks were spurred into action, at least temporarily - viewers may not always show up for stories of protest, but they sure love their institutional violence. Comparatively, social media mentions of Occupy Wall Street totaled at around fifty thousand as quickly as the first day of the movement, a figure that multiplied five-fold after the pepper spray incident and only increased in the following days.</div>
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These figures have been echoed by a persistent sentiment in the political discourse of the last two years: there can be no dependence on the systems of old to enact social change, whether those of the government or the media, and the burden of revolution must fall on the common man. The film industry, finger ever on the pulse of popular opinion, has hardly ignored this. Asking audiences to willingly involve themselves in a movie that demands serious systemic introspection, however, is growing increasingly more difficult. Consider the glut of War on Terror films that came out in the mid- to late-2000s, every one of them not named <i>The Hurt Locker </i>failing to make its budget back in America. Domestic film production companies have since been reticent to finance movies about hot issues, perhaps for good reason: <i>The East</i>, <i>Closed Circuit</i>, and <i>The Fifth Estate </i>were all box-office disasters in this vein, "thrillers" cleaving to contemporary questions that simply didn't sell tickets. Conversely, <i>The Dark Knight Rises </i>came out in 2012 spouting almost the exact opposite message, that an impoverished and angry proletariat should wait around for the billionaire heroes of old to bail them out of trouble, and it made 450 million dollars on our shores. Are these the failings of a populace increasingly tethered to escapist entertainment? Can you sneak pro-corporate imperialism into a movie as long as you put a mask or cape on it?<br />
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These questions must extend to the quality of the films at hand, of course. <i>The Dark Knight Rises </i>probably didn't succeed because of its politics, but because it's the third installment of Christopher Nolan's handsomely morbid powerhouse franchise. Likewise, yesteryear's aforementioned films are all bowdlerized to different degrees by financial compromise, their bets hedged through a variety of techniques and ideologies in an attempt to remain as palatable as possible. Compromise is part and parcel with the act of producing a film, especially when profits for any non-Marvel product are not guaranteed and, as demonstrated through 2013's offerings, convincing audiences that WikiLeaks or corporate corruption can be cinematically exciting is damn near impossible these days. It's hard to spite a director for trying to give his missive a pair of long, sexy, commercial legs, but in seeking both a mass audience and social upheaval, capitulating to the very <span style="background-color: white;">forces that he decries not only weakens his work but strengthens those forces. </span><br />
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In that regard, the greatest disappointment among these three films is Zal Batmanglij's <i>The East</i>, because its zealous commitment to exposing capitalist wrongdoing is defanged by its unsatisfying ending and questionable aesthetic. <i>The East </i>stars co-writer Brit Marling as Sarah, an ex-FBI operative freelancing for a private intelligence firm who infiltrates the titular ecoterrorist sect. She's a successful woman, driven and talented, one with a job to do; initially she carries it out with little thought toward The East's motives, playing into their demands of fealty while maintaining a safe personal distance. Eventually, however, she questions her value system while developing feelings for the group's de facto leader (meh), opting to betray her allegiance to corporate power and steal a roster of operatives from the organization that hired her. The East are hardly a group of Good Samaritans themselves, self-righteous trust fund babies with a penchant for reckless violence, so disenchanted Sarah ultimately keeps the roster for herself and embarks on an anonymous crusade for social justice, as revealed by a patchwork of inter-credit photographs. Through a minute's worth of still images, we are asked to believe that the power of conversations and handshakes persuade her fellow agents of their wrongdoing, inciting far more positive change than the concerted efforts of The East. She's able to beat the system, if you buy into it, but only with money, FBI training, access to secret information, and prior involvement with a dangerous anarchist collective for which she somehow eluded punishment. Not encouraging, not relatable, not particularly believable.<br />
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There's still a lot to admire in <i>The East</i>. Right from its opening collage of despoiled lakes and oil-drenched animals intercut with footage of an oil magnate's home being flooded with the nefarious black stuff, the film is a bracingly plotted and convincingly written (a bit overwritten, perhaps) examination of human selfishness, on both sides of the anarchy-order spectrum. As a call to action or a societal polemic, however, it never truly lands. Batmanglij is a talented filmmaker, but what he has assembled here bears the tone and appearance of a conventional Hollywood thriller, often playing to predictable executive decisions that have proven successful in movies past. <i>The East </i>is prone to prosaic excess, be it in an
embarrassingly rehearsed demonstration of group solidarity at mealtime, a softly lit
lakeside "cleansing," or a game of Consensual Spin the Bottle set to
Arvo Pärt's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegel_im_Spiegel#Film" target="_blank">now overused</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8qg_0P9L6c" target="_blank">Spiegel im Spiegel</a>. Its efforts to increase dramatic stakes are similarly heightened, peppered with loaded symbolism and including an attempted rape + stabbing that has no impact on the film as a whole.<br />
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Political art does not have to spurn entertainment value; the two are not mutually exclusive. The transformative nature of art nonetheless runs the risk of dilution by way of concessions made to support the entertainment-industrial complex, concessions typically made for an audience's aesthetic and structural expectations. If you're making a thriller, then thrilling things need to happen! Again, these strides toward immersion would not necessarily compromise <i>The East</i>'s message but for the magnanimity of distributor Fox Searchlight and product placements from McDonalds, Dunkin' Donuts, BlackBerry, and Facebook; here we have a movie that, as written, required $6.5 million to create, a movie released by Fox in 200 theaters after a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htExHNNyRH8" target="_blank">high-octane</a> marketing push, a subversive artifact railing against the inescapable grip of commerce that is itself bent to commerce's will. You could be charitable and call the use of these brands ironic, given the subject matter at hand, but most publicity is good publicity for a brand these days; look at Subway's ludicrous self-parody in <i>Community</i>, for instance. The paradox of this film's existence did not escape Batmanglij, who <a href="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/05/the-east-environmental-anarchist-film/" target="_blank">claimed</a> that "if you want to make an anarchist film, make it with a corporation...[if] you want to experience collectivism – go into the corporate system." In a sense, he's right, because to get six million dollars from Fox and associates to make a movie about tearing down corporations carries a fundamental satisfaction. This long-view idealism loses its luster when confronted with the realities of film business, as a profitable film would only have filled Fox et al.'s coffers and a non-profitable film, especially one with <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_east_2013/" target="_blank">lukewarm reviews</a>, could very well sink into obscurity. <i>The East</i>, incidentally,<i> </i>lost four million dollars, which is probably its greatest anarchic accomplishment. <br />
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<i>Closed Circuit</i>, which takes place in England despite being partially funded by American distributor Focus Features, suffers from similar miscarriages in execution. The movie is a romp through the British legal system, grim and wordy and fast-paced to a fault, not quite as sentimental as <i>The East</i> but lacking its character. Lawyers Martin (Eric Bana) and Claudia (Rebecca Hall) are assigned to defend Farroukh Erdogan, a man suspected of masterminding a terrorist bombing on a crowded market. Because of England's covert anti-terrorism operations, the trial will first be subject to a closed hearing, a private court session in which Claudia argues against British jurisprudence for the inclusion of sensitive evidence; afterwards Martin, who is not allowed to communicate with Claudia at any time during the trial, will defend their client in open court with any cleared evidence. Complications arise as the two learn that Farroukh was a double agent for MI5 and, in attempting to determine whether he was framed or turned, realize that they are being watched - suspicious taxis, imperceptibly disturbed homes, and the like. The duo come close to proving Farroukh's association with MI5 to the court, but during the trial another agent kills him in his cell and makes it look like a suicide, thereby closing the case. The heroes fail, the government wins, Farroukh's motives remain a mystery, and Martin quits his job having accomplished nothing.<br />
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That is, until the ending. Footage of the protagonists walking romantically down a pier is overlaid with audio of Attorney General Jim Broadbent (chewing scenery in a ridiculously over-the-top role) being confronted by "rumors" that his office covered up Farroukh's trial, which he indignantly denies on the basis of the court system's integrity. Cue the yelling of the enraged populace and roll credits. Where did these rumors come from? A whistleblower involved in the case? Farroukh's hacker son (sigh) leaking information on the Internet? We are never told, much like how we are never told Farroukh's role in the bombing, but are instead expected to accept this as a resolution for the questions the film presents. A quandary of upholding legal ethics under the oppression of an opaque
surveillance state, the film holds universal relevance as a political indictment so long as you change the agency from "MI5" and get Eric Bana out of
that adorable barrister's wig. But it doesn't say anything particularly insightful - how could it, when there's so many assassination attempts and bold escapes to attend to in the span of only 90 minutes? The film's resounding message, crowned by a third-act monologue about uncontrollable power by Broadbent, is that the government is bad and we can't really do anything about it. Much like Sarah in <i>The East</i>, Martin and Claudia are stand-ins for the "everyman" embroiled in these systems, only that they already hold jobs that
situate them close to the action as necessitated by the film's plot. These people, already more privileged than most audience members, are given the charge of fighting against whatever corrupt agency, and half the time they do not even succeed. And much like in <i>The East</i>, the ending of <i>Closed Circuit </i>is uneasy equivocation, sleight of hand meant to reinforce an audience's expectation of change while not actually substantiating it through the events of the film itself. The messages being sent here are incompatible, offering escapist idealism ("change is possible") while suppressing the moviegoer's own ideas of revolution ("we can't actually convince or show you that it is possible"). How do you parse these conflicting sentiments into a greater understanding of your role in this upside-down world? Fox Searchlight and Focus Features will gladly contemplate with you for the price of a ticket or a DVD.<br />
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DreamWorks, though, DreamWorks would just as quickly grab the cash out of your hand and whisper lies in your ear. Such is their treatment of revolutionary politics in notorious financial failure <i>The Fifth Estate</i>, directed with a lot of money and little vision by Oscar-winner-turned-schlock-purveyor Bill Condon (<i>Gods and Monsters</i>, <i>Breaking Dawn Part 1 </i>and<i> 2</i>). Glossy to the point of numbness, headed by international hot-ticket actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruhl, and centered around Julian Assange's 2006 founding of WikiLeaks, the film strives for <i>The Social Network</i>'s burning technological immediacy, likely in an attempt to replicate its impressive box office. The one commonality these films share is their willingness to round the contours of each subject to more closely depict a narrative truth, which is either dishonest storytelling or the prerogative of the Hollywood biopic depending on who you ask. But <i>The Fifth Estate </i>is not even half as good, which eradicates this question entirely since the movie cannot be interpreted as anything but a clumsy personal attack. Assange is an easy target, for one, as the litany of his trespasses is exhaustive: <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/03/is_julian_assange_an_anti-semi.html" target="_blank">anti-Semitism</a>, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/world/no-assange-dna-on-torn-condom--report-20120916-260vs.html" target="_blank">sexual assault</a>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1356330/Julian-Assange-book-Inside-WikiLeaks-Daniel-Domscheit-Berg.html#ixzz1DnpmuskP" target="_blank">sociopathy</a>, <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/julian-assange-believes-his-own-hype/story-fn775xjq-1226176671313" target="_blank">narcissism</a>, and <a href="http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/julian-assange-cat-hater/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0" target="_blank">being mean to cats</a>, to name a few. The veracity of most of these claims will likely remain unclear to us laymen for a very long time, but rather than approach them with a critical spirit, Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer (who produced the similarly politically dubious <i>Fringe</i>) assassinate Assange and the very idea of WikiLeaks on the basis of his personality alone. Condon attempts at first to maintain the illusion of bipartisanship, but the end of the film makes its position more than clear.<br />
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Our protagonist here is not Assange, but Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Bruhl), a journalist who also wrote the book this film was adapted from. Initially both Berg and the film gush over Assange and his dreams, dreams of a transparent government free of abuse, but before long Berg begins to chafe at his antisocial behaviors. Assange takes undue credit for WikiLeaks, storms out of family dinners without explanation, and treats cohort Berg as if he's just a hired underling. Their mounting disagreements reach critical mass with WikiLeaks' release of Collateral Murder, the highly publicized footage of a US Apache helicopter gunning down civilians in Baghdad. Instead of opening a dialogue about the ramifications of this leak, an even-handed examination of its positives versus negatives, Condon immediately cuts to imaginary politicians Sarah Shaw (Laura Linney) and James Boswell (Stanley Tucci) maneuvering through this freshly opened political crisis. This is the point where <i>The Fifth Estate </i>stops concerning itself with its revolutionary lip service, instead using these mouthpieces to offer a government-sanctioned view of Berg and Assange as "computer geeks looking at the war through a pinhole," men whose actions have done nothing but put Real Peoples' lives at stake. Indeed, within half an hour this event has driven the narrative to its climactic set piece, a panicked government extracting a compromised ambassador/Unimpeachable Family Man who nearly dies as a result of Assange's recklessness.<br />
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Despite its repetitive mantras about the transformative power of revolution, this film never actually depicts positive change as a result of revolutionary action. An earlier scene in the film would appear to celebrate WikiLeaks' uncovering of Kenyan extrajudicial "death squads", but bathes it in blood soon after when Kenyan human rights workers are gunned down in the street for investigating these abuses. The subplot dead-ends right at the cheap thrill of these unexpected gunshots. It is biased right down to its frequent talking head interviews: narration from Newt Gingrich and company alleging the damages of WikiLeaks are laid over silent shots of a brooding Berg, while the one journalist Condon includes to speak on the site's behalf is talked over almost entirely. By the end of the film, no one is willing to defend Assange's motives but Assange himself, who Condon takes great pains to depict as a vain, untrustworthy self-styled martyr. The rape allegation is not even addressed in the main body of the film - like the critical reveals in <i>The East </i>and <i>Closed Circuit</i>, it is saved for the epilogue as a stinger, a final nail drummed into the coffin of a man who has already been demonized for the preceding two hours. It is of no concern to <i>The Fifth Estate </i>because, as revolting as the possibility is, Assange has already been assigned a thematic arc. He is presented here as a lone visionary too scarred by his solitary childhood to relate to anyone, a quality that damns him and, by association, the film suggests, automatically disqualifies any ideas he may have about ironing out the abuses propagated by other damaged humans. Sending audiences out with the friendly reminder that he might also be a rapist is simply the cherry on top.<br />
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<i>The Fifth Estate </i>is at least different from <i>The East </i>and <i>Closed Circuit</i> because it takes a traceable, if not partially implicit, ideological stance. That goodwill doesn't extend too far, though, when the stance is deliberately biased and supported by a terrible movie. Condon, like many filmmakers before him, encounters difficulty bringing cinematic thrill to a story where computers are responsible for nearly all of the inciting incidents. Mostly he says what he needs to with bad visual metaphors, shots of glistening black-green computer interfaces straight out of <i>Hackers</i>, and long-winded expository monologues. An awful film with a heavy political subject that received poor marketing and was publicly <a href="https://wikileaks.org/First-Letter-from-Julian-Assange.html" target="_blank">blasted</a> by its subject? (This letter plays into the notion of Assange's monstrous arrogance, sure, but he is not wrong about the film's motives.) The <a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=fifthestate.htm" target="_blank">disastrous</a> box office hardly seems surprising at all. DreamWorks, trying to have their cake and smear it too, got exactly what they deserved.<br />
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Although filmmakers have no obligation to produce "unbiased" political art - in fact, many of the genre's finest examples are unmistakably partisan - cases like <i>The Fifth Estate </i>are indicative of a greater issue of film production in the studio system: ironing out real-world complexities in favor of trite entertainment technique so as to make a quick buck. For anyone familiar with the aims of any given blockbuster, this is no new tale to tell. As previously established, though, there is a significant difference in the motives of a flavor-of-the-week superhero movie and a movie billed on the existence of its real-world political referents. No one went to <i>The Fifth Estate </i>under the illusion that it was about anything other than WikiLeaks. Consider <a href="http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/closed-circuit-finds-parallels-edward-snowden-wikileaks-111531" target="_blank">this</a> quote about <i>Closed Circuit </i>made by Rebecca Hall:<br />
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<i>"I don’t think a film or any piece of art work is any good if it answers all the questions, because then it’s just propaganda...[it’s] didactic. Any relevant piece of art raises more questions and that’s what I think we’re doing with this film. I don’t think you come out of it with a message, per se, about 'This is what should or shouldn’t be happening.' It’s just raising the various issues."</i></blockquote>
As a statement intended to promote her film, this is pretty rich, because <i>Closed Circuit</i> answers no questions whatsoever. In a time where we are beset with doubts about an increasingly uncertain future, what's wrong with expecting some answers? People patronize films under the impression that they have some substance to offer for the price of the ticket. To simply "raise the issues" in service of plotting your thriller, especially when those issues are so pressing and concern so many of us, constitutes irresponsible commercialism. Taking our money, presenting us with heavy political quandaries in order to catalyze suspenseful escapism, and finally suggesting that there are no answers to them does nothing to change how we look at the world. It is a maddening paradox that mainstream film, which holds such influence over the zeitgeist (or at least it did), is too bound up in its own dizzying financial obligations to consistently offer insight on our world's precipitous political climate. Nonetheless, the imperfections of these films do not necessarily mean they are unable to stimulate ideas or action. <i>The East</i>, for its flaws, at least has one salient thing to say: abandon your selfishness and take action. <i>Closed Circuit </i>remains mum, aware but detached. <i>The Fifth Estate </i>is exactly the product of a system that movements like Occupy Wall Street sought to illuminate: a work of duplicitous opportunism designed by high-leveled financiers to pay lipservice to contemporary issues while explicitly preserving the status quo.Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-42124994779354119662014-03-05T13:24:00.003-08:002014-03-05T13:24:56.043-08:00The Disappointments of 2013<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtjQepPQNZHwaEWgSVVtI1IuF3wTGKVHBmmu6OH9ixH6PkGtGew9u-TqEXBFkT-Gnn6G7LXRCcllIWoIyyu6lmpR2rsjeYULHXLMGq4W_0mt7Nt8KD8rTqsIRqQheARlSuGT-WvjKx3oUk/s1600/rs_560x415-130710153606-1024.TheCanyons.Lohan4.mh.071013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtjQepPQNZHwaEWgSVVtI1IuF3wTGKVHBmmu6OH9ixH6PkGtGew9u-TqEXBFkT-Gnn6G7LXRCcllIWoIyyu6lmpR2rsjeYULHXLMGq4W_0mt7Nt8KD8rTqsIRqQheARlSuGT-WvjKx3oUk/s1600/rs_560x415-130710153606-1024.TheCanyons.Lohan4.mh.071013.jpg" height="237" width="320" /></a><b>10) <i>The Canyons </i></b><br />
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Blech. This movie is gross and dumb and not fun at all. Paul Schrader owes Stephen Rodrick a fruit basket for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/magazine/here-is-what-happens-when-you-cast-lindsay-lohan-in-your-movie.html" target="_blank">that</a> piece in the New York Times. Lindsay Lohan is one of entertainment's most tragic figures, painted in front of hundreds of millions of faces as a child star too weakened by her own vices to function, and Rodrick was wise enough to pour that narrative into a greater piece about failure in the film industry. Schrader, who once wrote with Scorsese, unable to get funding and forced to make micro-budget smut with Lohan and James Deen! It would be easier to feel sympathy for him if he hadn't chosen to film a Bret Easton Ellis script, or if the movie itself wasn't lit like a dive bar and completely lacking in even a single distinctive image. Ellis' script is overwrought hokum, as always, his gallery of drug-addled amoral nudes doing and saying nothing of interest. As for La Lohan herself, it's a bad performance, its marginal trainwreck appeal mostly drowned in mawkish amateurism, but it's fairly low on the list of things wrong with <i>The Canyons</i>. It would probably be easiest to list what's not wrong with it: it has boobs, and Deen's dead sociopath eyes are just right to play his menacing Hollywood wannabe role. And that's it. Any other compliments might cause you to actually watch the film, because admittedly it's quite a curiosity. I would recommend reading Rodrick's article, far more generous to the movie than it deserves, and then never thinking about this sorry black mark on the name of independent cinema again.<br />
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<b>9) <i>After Earth</i></b><br />
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No, I never expected <i>After Earth </i>to be good. I finally put Shyamalan on my shit list after <i>The Last Airbender</i>, a probable Worst Movie of All Time made even more awful because he followed it up with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYV_w5yZ_M" target="_blank">this</a> steaming load of self-delusion. I'm not sure what compelled me to watch this movie, other than irrational sci-fi lust; I'm not a Will Smith fan, I'm definitely not a Jaden Smith fan, and I knew that the two of them would be playing characters named CYPHER and KITAI RAIGE, yet there I sat, learning about <i>ghosting </i>and <i>Nova Prime </i>and watching $130 million slowly burn before my eyes. Why did Smith Sr. hire Shyamalan, whose inability to convey any tone other than melodramatic quiet let this movie down completely? He's apparently wanted to work with him for years, but Willie apparently hasn't been on IMDB in a while because the director's golden days are clearly behind him. <i>After Earth </i>isn't the execrable, whitewashed nonsense that <i>The Last Airbender </i>was, and its poorly written story actually has a decent father-son dynamic at its core. There are a couple of worthwhile action scenes and the special effects are good about as often as they're not. The brunt of the blame lies with Jaden Smith, an obnoxious young man who has no business in show business and who couldn't have given a good performance if John Cassavetes was directing him. Between his whiny, spit-filled line delivery and his total lack of facial control, Smith Jr.'s only discernible Hollywood analogue is Hayden Christensen, whose career consisted of five or six sub-par performances in annoying roles before it faded away. If Will had any good sense, he would gently remove Jaden from his preordained role in the Pinkett-Smith Media Empire v2.0 and enroll him in a non-Scientology school before he really humiliates himself.<br />
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<b>8) <i>Prisoners</i></b><br />
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It's always nice to see Roger Deakins get a little recognition for his consistently excellent work. Remember that time <i>Skyfall </i>lost Best Cinematography to <i>Life of Pi</i>, a movie that was 80% green screen? Give the poor bastard an Oscar already! This beautiful nonsense netted Deakins his 11th nomination, well-deserved but kind of a throwaway because a) <i>Gravity </i>had that shit in the bag and b) <i>Prisoners </i>is doomed for obscurity, a bloated diminuendo of a thriller that will only be remembered in the context of film's attempt to assert its dominance over television by becoming really long and expensive. It has a promising start, but writer Aaron Guzikowski's idea of plotting is simply to add a bunch of plot twists and then embellish each of those plot twists with a ton of symbols and use the symbols to springboard into new plot twists until he's written a film that is convoluted to the point of implausibility. Over 150 minutes, Guzikowski and Denis Villeneuve wander so far away from the film's initial concern, a question of suspending morality in the service of defending one's family, that the reveal of the kidnapper feels way too hard-fought for how utterly irrelevant it is. <i>Prisoners </i>might be a decent choice on a rainy day, but I would recommend sticking to all of the other movies that it<i> </i>rips off: <i>Se7en, Zodiac, Silence of the Lambs, Mystic River, Mother</i>...<br />
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<b>7) <i>Rush</i></b><br />
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Never has a car film managed to be so loud and so boring at the same time. It actually made me miss <i>Speed Racer</i>. Watch a Fast and Furious movie instead.<br />
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<b>6) <i>Furious 6/Fast and Furious 6/whatever</i></b><br />
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Just not this one. <i>Furious 6</i><i> </i>took the wrong approach after <i>Fast Five</i>, which, for those of you who haven't yet experienced it (and please do, because it is a really good movie), ends with the protagonists committing a brazen act of theft so destructive that it ostensibly causes dozens of casualties and billions of dollars in property damage. IT IS NUTS. Watching it happen, and watching the barely-restrained "ohshiiiiit" expressions on our heroes' faces after the fact, you can't help but feel a shift in your attitude toward them. These down-to-earth, family-centric Christians level Rio de Janeiro by attaching a ten-ton bank vault to two cars and dragging it through the city at top speed. It doesn't make any sense, naturally, but it is a breathtaking climax to the film, unfortunately short circuited by the reality of the carnage they wreak. <i>Furious 6</i>, curiously, does not acknowledge this heist at all. In fact, The Rock actually offers them amnesty for their past crimes if they agree to help him with one...last...job. No! These people have so much blood on their hands! I can accept cars flying through the air and inconceivably long tarmacs, but combining them with a rosy view of larcenous mass murderers is a bridge too far. If, for some reason, you're not watching these films as a carefully measured series of moral compasses, <i>Furious 6</i> still comes up short compared to most of the other Fasts and Furiouses. Even liberated from the pesky shackles of physics, the car stunts demonstrate a serious case of diminishing returns, as there's only so many ways for metal and plastic to drive past or into other metal and plastic before it starts to lose significance. 6 is also unexpectedly and unfortunately plot heavy, perhaps because of its status as an "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/keyword/inbetwequel/">inbetwequel</a>," and since the antagonist has to make our newly tarnished heroes look good by comparison, Luke Evans' character and performance coast past menace straight into embarrassing bombast. The martial arts are surprisingly good, mainly thanks to Gina Carano, and there are a few swerves into unintentional comedic weirdness that give the film some character, also thanks to Gina Carano. (She is an amazing fighter, but her acting choices are out of this world.) Otherwise, <i>Furious 6</i>'s excesses can't stave off the creep of franchise decay, rendering this entry in one of our most diverse and exciting blockbuster properties awfully tone deaf.</div>
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<b>5) <i>The To-Do List</i></b><br />
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The big problem with <i>The To-Do List</i> isn't its cast, despite Aubrey Plaza's disappointingly average performance. It isn't the script, mostly lame with a few cute laughs and a hearteningly sex-positive message. It is the editing, through which Paul Frank savages the contributions of a game, talented cast. Jokes and reaction shots are often lingered on for crucial seconds too long, sucking the air out of the comic timing (which needs all the air it can get) and giving the film a lurching quality that is exacerbated by Plaza's typically droll presence. Not every comedy needs to have a quick pace or rapid-fire line delivery, but those qualities might have gone a long way in glossing over Maggie Carey's inconsistent characterizations, namely Ultimate Virgin Brandy Klark, a straight-A student whose good ideas include asking her librarian what a rim job is and eating poop out of a public pool. Mediocre material can be elevated by a harmonized cast, but because the rhythms of each scene are so uneven, the interactions never feel natural. <i>The To-Do List </i>is also hampered by its placement in the 90s, which does nearly nothing to enrich the film and instead reads as a crass ploy to cash on millennial nostalgia. Carey acts as if the decade is itself the punchline, haplessly deploying Macintosh Classics and "Two Princes" and Scrunchies<i> </i>as if there's something inherently funny about seeing or hearing things that were popular twenty years ago. Her incorporation of women's lib gives the movie a little more meat, as Klark's quest for sexual freedom is set around the same time as third-wave feminism took form, but even that is given a few throwaway lines and never explored again. Plaza has some good work under her belt already, so her weak performance in this weak movie isn't the end of the world; nonetheless, no cumming-of-age comedy starring one of Hollywood's most sardonic young wits should ever have felt so tame.</div>
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<b>4) <i>Passion</i></b><br />
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Whoa. This cost thirty million dollars. It looks like it was shot on an iPhone. There's a tiny chance its ugly digital filming is intentional, because <i>Passion </i>is tangentially about innovation and the smart phone industry, but I'm more inclined to believe that Brian de Palma is on the Dario Argento track: both artists long past their prime, desperately throwing techniques and images that worked for them in the past at the wall without really comprehending why they worked. Consider the split screen, used to provocative effect in de Palma's films as early as <i>Sisters</i>, here slapped across the climax of <i>Passion </i>without any discernible purpose. One side of the screen is a performance of <i>Afternoon of a Faun</i>, the other a four-character stalking that flits in and out of an apartment building while failing to generate any suspense at all. Split screen is a striking technique that immediately invites its viewer to determine why it is necessary, but its use here hardly means anything worthwhile. There's no relationship between the ballet and the characters, unless you want to extrapolate your brains out and suggest that it's meant to delineate the choreography of humans in pursuit of one another. Most likely it is just simple contrast, a quiet night out at the ballet juxtaposed with a violent confrontation. This scene, as with most others in <i>Passion</i>, proves that de Palma's pretense far outreaches his execution, and although his talented actresses try to salvage what they can, this remake of 2010's <i>Love Crime</i> is unexceptional lesbian pulp dressed up like an art film that isn't actually artistic. Mistaken identity, psychosexual depravity, the disintegration of memory - de Palma's done it all before, twice as well, on nicer cameras, and without his regular composer Pino Donaggio shamelessly riffing on Bernard Herrmann in the process. Joyless nonsense.<br />
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<b>3) <i><a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/04/egress-from-winter-2013-graveyard-or.html">To the Wonder</a></i></b><br />
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I'm a pretty huge Terrence Malick fanboy. <i>Badlands </i>is riveting; <i>Days of Heaven </i>a warm dream; <i>The Tree of Life, </i>the most transformative moviegoing experience I've ever had. <i>To the Wonder </i>is gorgeous, as if it could be anything else, but it simply doesn't have the focus or resonance that Malick's other films have. Javier Bardem and his pious ruminations on the state of humanity are totally adrift, Rachel McAdams shows up for ten minutes only to disappear, and Olga Kurylenko twirls a lot and licks water off of trees like an idiot. Actors in his films rarely have any idea about the story they are participating in, or even if they will be in the finished product, and the scattershot approach he takes to editing and sequencing has never been more apparent. The images rarely cohere with the narrative, which is of paramount importance in a Malick film since they communicate so much more than the dialogue or narration, and most of the human figures here are bereft of expression. Ben Affleck certainly comes off the worst: never an actor known for his expressiveness (or, well, any kind of performative talent), he has no recourse but to hide his face from the light and hope Malick does the heavy lifting for him. There's no chemistry between him and Kurylenko, which makes the supposed dissolution of their marriage ring false, and Kurylenko's mumbled French voiceovers pondering "what is this love that loves us?" can't stoke a flame that's barely there. Malick apparently has three movies in post-production that are slated for release this year, news that would have thrilled me in 2012 but which now gives me pause. Perhaps, at the age of 70, he's realized that he doesn't have much time left to create art, but if these three films are anything like <i>To the Wonder</i>, then he should consider consolidating and focusing his efforts into a fully realized project like his earlier masterpieces.<br />
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<b>2) <i><a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-2013-horror-digest-part-1-id-sell.html">Evil Dead</a></i></b><br />
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I try not to watch trailers exactly because of movies like <i>Evil Dead</i>, marketed by a reel of their few highlights savvily enough to mask their deficiencies. Horror remakes are very rarely good, so I'm not sure why I let myself be fooled by all that nasty makeup and juicy prosthetics work. Those elements are at least strong enough to get you through the movie, if you're a real gorehound, but Fede Alvarez can't match them on a single other level. His writing is the worst offender, even after a Diablo Cody treatment, because it's way too serious to mimic Sam Raimi's patented horror-comedy style and yet its attempts at sinister obscenity are outright laughable. His direction is fair but with a surprising bent toward sloppiness, most egregious during a basement brawl in the film's final half hour. Unable to shoot a decent action scene in such a small space, Alvarez decides it is satisfactory to intercut closeups of Evil Dead Lady's flailing face with shots of her victim inexplicably being thrown into walls. Is she suddenly telekinetic? Many of <i>Evil Dead</i>'s scenes treat violence in this superficially brutal manner, explicit in its depictions of rent flesh and severed limbs but too afraid to commit to the visceral nature of these injuries for longer than a second or two. Alvarez claims that the film was given an NC-17 upon its first submission to the MPAA, and I imagine the resultant cuts have a lot to do with securing a wide R-rated release for the film, but after acclimating to what the makeup artists are capable of the violence starts to feel unusually tame. Just because you can afford to put 70,000 gallons of fake blood in your movie doesn't mean it belongs there!<br />
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<b>1) <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i></b><br />
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Joss Whedon's greatest gift as a director and showrunner is the ability to solicit unexpected, complex performances from actors that few others would ever give a chance. His exceptional eye for casting idiosyncratic roles has launched countless careers. Taking on Shakespeare, whose words have been tirelessly analyzed and reinterpreted for over five centuries, reads outwardly as an ambitious personal challenge; how will Whedon and his troupe fare when the words aren't his own? Instead of mounting a conventionally middle-budget production of <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>, Whedon instead adapted and shot the play quick'n'cheap as a sort of catharsis after completing <i>The Avengers</i>, a creative impulse that I can't fault him for but also one that does quite a disservice to The Bard. Using his own Santa Monica home was the first misstep, as its pleasantly furnished suburbia-plus charms are ill-suited to the needs of the players. Quite often they find themselves looming around one another at arbitrary distances, blocked in unappealing medium-close shots and unsure of what to do with their hands. Casting his friends was another, and watching a majority of them struggle to bring any deeper meaning or personality to their roles is a stark reminder that Whedon's benevolence as a writer didn't necessarily prepare them for Shakespeare. Amy Acker, as Beatrice, is passably charming, though her affect is way too airy for the venom she spits at Alexis Denisof's Benedick to have any impact. Denisof is a wash through and through, offering flat buffoonery and little else. Nathan Fillion comes out looking great as Dogberry and Sean Maher's John successfully evokes cold, sinister calculation, but nearly every other performance is either forgettable or shallow. Finally, aside from a lovely party scene in the first act of the film, <i>Much Ado About Nothing </i>lacks any visual or directorial distinction, as if Whedon thought it would be enough to simply point the camera at the actors and let them go to town. It might be unsporting to be so critical of a film that was shot in twelve days, but Joss should know best of all the value of observant casting, and <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>'s complete lack of it is its death knell.<br />
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<b><u>Other crap</u></b><br />
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<i>Man of Steel: </i>I hope whoever put together the trailer for this made bank, because that was the best this movie ever got. Loud, garish, insubstantial pap that nonetheless looks awesome, except for the sluggish hand-to-hand combat. Anyone not named Michael Shannon badly delivers bad dialogue. The sooner the world can finally come to the realization that Superman sucks, the better.<br />
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<i>The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: </i>Low dramatic stakes, and it ends just when it's beginning to get juicy. Katniss felt almost irrelevant. I guess it's all setup for <i>Mockingjay</i>, when all of this brouhaha about revolution will apparently come to pass, but I had a tough time separating this movie from the culture the series decries. <br />
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<i>Gravity: </i>Not for me. Film is a visual medium, of course, and I'm a sucker for a big pretty blowout. Beyond the cinematographic spectacle, I was left cold for a variety of reasons: Bullock's so-so performance, the absurdly over-the-top score, uninteresting characterizations, and an overall aesthetic failure to make space scary for the reasons the movie claims it's scary (aside from the enormously tense first act). Its popularity and success are understandable, even encouraging, but I needed some other kind of substance.<br />
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<i>Room 237: </i>It really made me want to watch <i>The Shining </i>again, so there's that. It also introduced me to this <a href="http://www.mstrmnd.com/log/802" target="_blank">delightful ridiculousness</a>, which I hope to read in full someday if it isn't a trap to steal souls and put them in phylacteries. Other than that, <i>Room 237</i> barely approaches the depth and craftsmanship of Kubrick's film, offering no point of view of its own other than a wobbly feint at the end about how unbalanced these people might be for - gasp! - deeply analyzing a film. Not that most of the analysis is particularly deep, primarily focused on minute visual details and expanded out through increasingly tangential evidence. But conflating cinephilia with mental illness, especially when director Rodney Ascher offers no other context for his subjects' lives, is troubling.Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-29390335027781740602014-02-28T13:20:00.000-08:002014-03-04T23:09:35.279-08:00My Favorite Films of 2013<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNh0kHHLyvIrukO0wM5YqZaRKXlygGVAeDnoSops3sULWxVuWgtFvBSxNlUYFkxtcfnhW_rOhZqE1RenBD_5PM9oaf1GeuDBx8oFpsYV5t5rJ88mz53Btdz0aD_9LLzFu-ZudXKNuSDqzw/s1600/computer-chess-1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNh0kHHLyvIrukO0wM5YqZaRKXlygGVAeDnoSops3sULWxVuWgtFvBSxNlUYFkxtcfnhW_rOhZqE1RenBD_5PM9oaf1GeuDBx8oFpsYV5t5rJ88mz53Btdz0aD_9LLzFu-ZudXKNuSDqzw/s1600/computer-chess-1024.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a><b>10) <i>Computer Chess</i></b><br />
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Period pieces have an unusual burden. They must present a series of values and customs that are antiquated enough to appeal to an audience's historical curiosity, but they also can't be completely unmoored from contemporary framework, for fear of alienation. In that regard, <i>Computer Chess </i>is an anomaly. Shot on analog video cameras and improvised from an eight-page treatment, the film is formally vexing. Dry as a bone, rhythmically uneven, and laced with complex computer jargon, Andrew Bujalski doesn't transport you to the 80s so much as strand you in it, shooting "actors" on obsolete technology as they interact with obsolete technology. To call this niche would be charitable. But Bujalski's fourth feature<i> </i>is more relevant than its creaky exterior lets on, and once this tournament of competing computer chess programs sneaks in plot threads about a budding romance and a government sponsor, you're suddenly smack in the middle of an allegorical story about the birth of a new technological era. The film's freewheeling structure and casual engagement with genre elements allows it to bounce between the intersection of scientific growth and militarization, the human urge to reject new experiences, and the first inkling of a computer's capacity for intelligence, chillingly rendered through a series of simple messages. And this is to say nothing of the fetus or the prostitute or the army of cats. Difficult to watch, not for everyone, but unique enough to really stick.<br />
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<b>9) <i><a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-2013-horror-digest-part-3-killer.html" target="_blank">All the Boys Love Mandy Lane</a></i></b><br />
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<i>Well, I keep on thinkin' 'bout you</i><br />
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<i>sister golden hair surprise</i></div>
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<i><br />And I just can't live without you</i></div>
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<i>can't you see it in my eyes?</i></div>
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<i><br />Now I been one poor correspondent</i></div>
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<i>and I been too, too hard to find</i></div>
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<i><br />but it doesn't mean you ain't been on my mind</i><br />
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<b>8) <i><a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/04/egress-from-winter-2013-graveyard-or.html" target="_blank">The Place Beyond the Pines</a></i></b><br />
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Ryan Gosling isn't in a lot of this movie. You wouldn't guess it from the promotional materials, plastered over with his Brando smolder and his awful peroxide dye job. But for an actor who is as bankable and immediately striking as he is, he's also extraordinarily unselfish. It's easy to watch this movie and imagine someone more self-involved (Edward Norton perhaps?) raising hell about his lack of screen time or trying to control the editing in a way that maximizes his contribution. That's the beauty of Gosling's Handsome Luke, though. Like the performer himself, Luke is an enigmatic charm factory, acting as a current of dark color that courses through <i>The Place Beyond the Pines</i> long after his contributions have ceased. For this massive family drama triptych to work, Luke/Gosling must be often felt but rarely seen so that his son can continue to chase his shadow. Given 30% of the movie in which to operate, Gosling is asked to craft a man working toward goodness, against his own faulty moral compass, for the sake of his newfound family. The script demands he fail, to be beastly and unsympathetic, but also to project the image of a man who might have been great had this life not dealt him such a terrible hand. Who else in Gosling's age bracket has that kind of emotional reserve? What other face can say so much with so little? The movie would never have worked without him, and some argue that it doesn't anyway, but for my money he's a perfect fit for what this Sins of the Father narrative needed: superficial stature that belies poisonous distance.<br />
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<b>7) <i>Before Midnight</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>Knowing what we know about Jesse and Celine's relationship, eighteen years in the making, even the title of this film invokes a certain melancholy. This third and final chapter is the midnight of their relationship, the point at which the luster of romantic idealism has faded completely. These people have spent nearly a decade together; they've had children; they are mutually aware of the other's every fault and neurosis and emotional pockmark, which turns even the smallest of conflicts into an emotional minefield. <i>Before Midnight </i>is Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's chance to really scorch the earth, challenge what we know about their characters and the sustainability of their bond in the absence of passion and novelty. In this regard the film could have used a little more fire; the editing is pokey, especially during a hotel room fight that lumbers along to no real effect, and Linklater's decision to frame them in the first act with two stories of love younger and older than theirs reads as an uneasy attempt to give their marriage outside perspective. Being in the bubble with Jesse and Celine is just more intoxicating, and I suppose that bubble would widen naturally throughout a long-term relationship, but these films are always at their best during the one-on-one walk-and-talks. There's a pleasure in the repeat opportunities to immerse ourselves in such intimate conversation, a voyeuristic one obviously, and the fact that the edges of this once easy candor are starting to fray is inevitably a bit of a disappointment. But that's life, right? The ending is ambiguous, like in <i>Sunrise </i>and <i>Sunset</i>, but with an extra dose of terminal bittersweetness. Jesse and Celine finally recognize their fundamental incompatibilities and in doing so weigh the responsibility of accepting them against the idea of an empty life alone. <i>Before Midnight </i>avoids the promise of blissful uncomplicated love foisted on us by most romance movies, but instead closes this series with the rationality we've come to expect from it. Human existence is uncertain, doubly so when entangled with another person.<br />
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<b>6) <i>Like Someone in Love</i></b><br />
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Fresh off the success of his delightful <i>Certified Copy</i>, Abbas Kiarostami took his brand of clinical intellectualism over to Japan, a country known for a culture of emotional repression, and decided to shoot a film about love. The oppositions in play here are obvious, limiting, but nonetheless intriguing, and Kiarostami's cast pull off their complex characters without a hitch. Rin Takanashi stars as Akiko, a smart young sociology student who moonlights as a prostitute. Her pimp sends her to visit retired professor Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), who is immediately taken with her bright demeanor, and although the two do not have sex a bond forms between them. Akiko, in true Kiarostami form, is opaque: on the car ride to Takashi's house she ignores a series of increasingly heartbroken voicemails from her grandmother, lonely and desperate to meet her; her natural rapport with Takashi calls her engagement to Noriaki (Ryo Kase), a brutish car mechanic, into question; she mentions that she is constantly compared to images of other women, mothers and portraits and call-girl cards tacked onto busy bar walls. Akiko's role as a fantasy is reflected in her quicksilver nature, as she means a great deal to the people who interact with her, and yet she never quite commits to any of them. Most of the credit for this illusory woman goes to Takanashi, fully convincing as a woman of curious social power while remaining enough of a blank slate for each character to project their burning loves onto - erotic, filial, intellectual, there's a part of her that might richly consummate these loves, if only she would. This film, like <i>Before Midnight</i>, closes on an insurmountable question about accepting love and the obstacles it brings, but much more abruptly, almost shockingly so. It demonstrates the inadequacy of love for all three main characters, paints it as a force that lets them down in the face of reality, and does it all in less than a second.<br />
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<b>5) <i>Frances Ha</i></b><br />
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Sacramento doesn't exactly produce a ton of top-shelf film talent. For every Jessica Chastain or Brie Larson, we turn out a Smosh or a Sasha Grey. (Grey has her own merits, naturally, but she ain't much of an actress.) Greta Gerwig, born and raised in my state's lovely capital, is probably my new favorite of the bunch. She is a bizarre woman, full of surprises, funny as hell and capable of tremendous intensity. It seems inconceivable that she could find any sort of success in Hollywood, but an early foot in the mumblecore mumbledoor was a big help, as it eventually led her to her splashy role in <i>House of the Devil </i>and an opportunity to act across Ben Stiller in <i>Greenberg</i>. If I've ranted too long about her qualifications, it's because her character in <i>Frances Ha </i>is a clear autobiographical image. Both Gerwig and Frances are native Sacramentans who left home early, aspiring to begin some kind of career in dance, and found themselves frustrated with the expensive elitist trappings of New York city life before eventually discovering a comfortable niche. Gerwig, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach, isn't on to anything particularly new here - if you have even a passing familiarity with <i>Girls</i>,<i> </i>the little-artist-in-the-big-city scenario may come off as played. But Frances Halladay is more mature than Hannah Horvath, and <i>Frances Ha </i>is definitely more mature than <i>Girls</i>, and although a little immaturity never hurt anyone, it's uplifting to see a film that addresses my own concerns as a semi-creative airhead in a levelheaded way. Instead of confronting her problems with complete buffoonery, Frances takes legitimate strides toward self-improvement, misguided and a bit pathetic though they often are. She powers through each of her numerous failures and continues to seek an opportunity that matches her ambition. She refuses to let her poverty or the fact that she's kind of an outcast get in the way. <i>Frances Ha </i>is diffuse, but that's because like Frances, it does not have one particular goal in mind. Her journey is about the revelation that pursuing a dream requires compromise, which is not an easy thing for the young and impatient to remind themselves of. To see a local woman tell this unconventional tale of success was a real inspiration. Viva Gerwig!<br />
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<b>4) <i><a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-2013-horror-digest-part-1-id-sell.html" target="_blank">Antiviral</a></i></b><br />
<b><br /></b><i>Antiviral</i> is a gaze into one potential future of celebrity culture, where the entertainment industry has become so powerful that the pretense of artistry is done away with completely. Fans pay to receive injections of a star's unique, home-grown disease, a pretty direct statement by Brandon Cronenberg about Internet virality's natural endpoint. Why bother trying to spread the mass hallucination that is celebrity worship with music or film when a virus, self-perpetuating and literally contagious, accomplishes the same thing? What sense does it make to pay vocal coaches or directors when you can spread a starlet through the populace with one carefully-timed GIF? Sounds like a perversion of vertical integration to me - an industry collapsing all of the ways its product can potentially fulfill a person into one easily controlled and distributed phenomenon. To hear <i>Antiviral </i>tell it, this method is astronomically successful to the point where it has overwritten society's every other concern. Do I think we'd ever reach this point? No, there's obviously an element of fantastical prognostication here, especially in its brief exploration of a celebrity meat business. (Though maybe this isn't so <a href="http://bitelabs.org/" target="_blank">far-fetched</a> after all.) It is still humbling to see the extent to which our obsession with celebrity can be exploited, however, a cold reminder of how easy it is for a person to fixate on a pretty face instead of a pressing issue.<br />
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<b>3) <i>Upstream Color</i></b><br />
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Those of us who waited nine FUCKING years for Shane Carruth's followup to <i>Primer</i> knew that it would be some kind of beautiful mess. Look at <a href="http://unrealitymag.bcmediagroup.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/primer-chart.jpg" target="_blank">this</a> thing! If your debut feature was the most labyrinthine time travel story ever committed to film, the weight of expectation would probably be too great for you to meet. Fortunately, Carruth rose to the challenge and put together this gnarly beast of a film. <i>Upstream Color </i>is stuffed full of vibrant colors when you least expect them, thanks largely to the efforts of its three "biological effects" artists, and has some of the most delicate sound design I've ever heard. The introduction to The Sampler is hypnotic. Its greatest deviation from traditional film technique, however, is in its editing. Most scenes are chopped up and resequenced, eschewing cinema's conventional observation of time in pursuit of creating a disoriented mood. Confounding the audience's understanding further, Carruth frequently shoots his subjects in close-up, denying us a greater perception of space that would otherwise help us to find a steady position in this narrative. If this doesn't sound like a fun time at the movies to you, it isn't trying to be. <i>Upstream Color </i>is a soft science fiction film about a worm that, when ingested, causes the consumer to lose all agency. A few enterprising scammers happen upon this and subject Kris (Amy Seimetz, fascinating) to the hypnobug treatment, camping out in her house for several days while liquidating her home equity and extorting her for every last dollar she has. After the fact, Kris is left with no memory of the event, no job, no money, and a pervasive sense of unease. The bare bones of this bizarre plot are intriguing enough, but <i>Upstream Color </i>isn't meant to be solved on the first run through. Rather than presenting an A-to-B montage of escalating events, Carruth focuses on generating an atmosphere of loss, where the viewer, like Kris, feels as though they are perpetually missing something. Kris' financial and mental security have been radically compromised to where she's hardly capable of human function, and it's only through a chance meeting with fellow worm-fraud victim Jeff (Carruth, unfortunately not an actor) that she - and we - can start working through this crippling depersonalization. If the above didn't tip you off, this can be frustrating to sit through at times, and unlike <i>Primer </i>there's not always a good reason why it's so goddamn confusing.<i> Upstream Color </i>is an experience to be surrendered to and immersed in, one that asks you to look and listen first before trying to lay it bare. It is a testament to the importance of working through insolvency, depression, and self-doubt toward the things that make our lives worth living. That Carruth was able to accomplish a film of such singular power on a budget of $300,000 should leave Hollywood feeling ashamed of themselves.<br />
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<b>2) <i>12 Years a Slave</i></b><br />
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Here is a list of notable films released in the last decade that deal explicitly with American slavery:<br />
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<i>Manderlay</i><br />
<i>Django Unchained</i><br />
<i>12 Years a Slave </i><br />
<i>Lincoln</i><br />
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Considering that slavery is the foul cornerstone upon which the American empire was established, and considering the inarguable importance of exhuming and reexamining our history, the cinema has come up awfully short lately. <i>Lincoln </i>is less about slavery as it is about political bloviation, and despite my love for Lars von Trier I'm not sure I trust him enough with the subject to watch <i>Manderlay</i>. The less said about <i>Django Unchained </i>the better. What <i>12 Years a Slave </i>gets to more than any recent populist film about black subjugation is the deep-seated psychology that motivates its propagators. Aggressive capitalism is the outward justification, but Steve McQueen enmeshes it with frustrated sexuality, religious guilt, jealousy, and inferiority complexes, an amalgam of bitter self-hatred displaced onto the suffering bodies of their "property." McQueen's approach is that of cold, Kubrickian analysis; the non-diegetic music is minimal (surprising from the recently unavoidable Hans Zimmer), his takes are long and often contain little movement, and his richly-lit compositions serve as a self-evident counterpoint to the violence depicted on screen. Some tumult has arisen about this film's supposed aesthetization of cruelty; the richest of these criticisms can be found <a href="http://www.reverseshot.com/article/12_years_slave" target="_blank">here</a> at Reverse Shot, where Adam Nayman accuses the film and McQueen of using slavery as a foundation for auteurial bravado. But Nayman also claims that <i>12 Years a Slave </i>is a conventionally attractive film because it needs to be for a mainstream audience, who are ideally left with indelible visual impressions created by the dialectic of natural beauty and horrific violence. Although he is right to decry Brad Pitt's awful role, surely a product of financial compromise, disqualifying the movie based on perceived motive and audience reaction is unfair. McQueen's vision is clear, and his dissection of this moment in history extends past surface depictions of its brutality. Solomon and Patsey are tortured because they resemble their white captors enough to be used as sites for excising self-motivated aggression, but also because they are different enough that these captors do not have to reflect on what this torture says about their own humanity. Patsey is the key: a woman of transcendent power (500 pounds of cotton picked a day, twice as much as anyone else) and undeniable magnetism (even her owner tells his wife that he would pick Patsey over her), the white world around her is nevertheless unable to reconcile her exceptional personhood with the color of her skin. These conflicting impulses are thereby manifested upon her flesh, in claw-marks and deep whip welts, each wound an index meant to call associations of its inflictor's faulty logic. If people leave the movie simply feeling ingratiated that they had no hand in these atrocities, that's hardly McQueen's fault. If they leave with a clearer picture of how such abuses are born of projecting their anger onto the "other," a lesson that still holds and will continue to hold relevance, then <i>12 Years a Slave </i>will have done its job in splendid fashion.<br />
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<b>1) <i>Laurence Anyways</i></b><br />
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Buoyant, celebratory, dramatic but rarely miserablist, <i>Laurence Anyways </i>is a visual artifact deliberately designed to be huge. It's nearly three hours long and stuffed to the rafters with daffy visual devices, put there because Xavier Dolan wanted them there. Here be filters on filters, rococo fashion and set design, unlikely and unexpected long shots cut into intimate conversations, slowdowns, Tumblr-ready text cards splashed across the film's climax, unexpected autumn storms, and dreams where clothing falls from the sky. This movie strives to be the exact opposite of the marginalization that transmen and transwomen encounter: a film full of outlandish, unashamed expression, most of which works but some of which doesn't, a distinction that ultimately hardly matters because the whole coheres into a controlled mess. Dolan, LGBT cinema's new wunderkind, has spent the last four years sculpting "ordinary" queer narratives into sprawling films that are rarely perfect, less concerned with conventional dramatic structure than imitating and embellishing on life's unexpected chaos. On the surface, there isn't a lot that distinguishes Laurence's transition from male to female as particularly different from any other story in its vein. It costs him his job, troubles his long-term relationship, and alienates his family, the sort of occurrences you might expect to accompany any coming out. <i>Laurence Anyways </i>matters because it rolls over each of these beats with panache, liberating them from the expectations of the audience by filling them with sensory surprises. Telling these stories in any capacity is important, but recently visible LGBT cinema has often equated importance with sobriety; recall 2011's <i>Weekend</i>, a lovely movie but a hell of a downer, or <i>Milk</i>, which was obviously never going to end well for anyone involved. The consequences of being placed in such a complex situation can be undeniably grim, but Dolan counterbalances the realities of queer life with reminders of life's unexpected splendor. Once you've finally accepted who you are, everything becomes brighter, more colorful, more beautiful. Laurence's reclamation of his identity is his first step toward acknowledging that he belongs in this world, on no one else's terms, and deserves to experience it to the fullest. To contemplate his story is to realize the depth of human experience, how immensely complicated every life is, and how the effort of being yourself in uncharitable circumstances is in itself cause for celebration. <i>Laurence Anyways </i>is a must for anyone who has ever felt that they do not fit in, queer or otherwise.<br />
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<b><u>Almost there!</u></b><br />
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<i>Only God Forgives: </i>A vastly misunderstood Freudian nightmare, <i>Only God Forgives </i>was bound to be savaged by critics, especially as Refn and Gosling's follow-up to the easily lovable <i>Drive</i>. And to be fair, any viewer expecting a conventional narrative or any trace of humanity will be sorely disappointed. But as a formalist exercise, this film is aces, a gorgeous examination/parody of action exploitation in the vein of Tarantino. Don't take it too seriously; steer clear if you are allergic to hyperviolence or melodramatic posturing.<br />
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<i>The Bling Ring:</i><b style="font-style: italic;"> </b>Sofia Coppola's finest film since <i>Lost in Translation</i>. A clever deconstruction of growing up in the social cesspool that is Hollywood, where having more stylish clothes and cool friends and wild experiences than everybody else is <i>de rigueur. </i>It is only a natural extension of this principle that younger and younger people are strong-armed into fitting in by doing crazier and crazier shit, so hellbent on elevating their social status that they lose all sight of what socialization is actually meant to accomplish. Carefully lit and edited, <i>The Bling Ring </i>is quite thin, but it says what it needs to in 90 minutes.<br />
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<i>You're Next: </i>Peppered with sneaky, misanthropic humor, and piloted by a new classic Final Girl. Sharni Vinson, a Rashida Jones lookalike except with actual charisma, stabs and hammers and blends her way with aplomb through a cast of villains slightly less cartoonish than a <i>Scooby-Doo </i>episode. Some of the performances are questionable, and the script occasionally sacrifices plausibility for flow, but <i>You're Next </i>is curiously skilled at setting up emotionally charged moments only to undermine them for an unexpected laugh. Fun stuff.<br />
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<i>Ginger and Rosa: </i>Elle Fanning is amazing! What a performance. The first hour of this film is an embarrassment of riches as she navigates the marital struggles of her highly neurotic parents, too smitten with her father's effortless intellect to empathize with her suffering mother. Adding to her inevitable teenage breakdown is the shadow of the atomic bomb, an admittedly obvious metaphor looming over Cold War England. It gets a little too heightened, clutches too many pearls, by its last half hour, but its dissection of an abusive marriage and a teenager's search for truth is fantastic.<br />
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<b>Regrettably unseen: </b><i>Inside Llewyn Davis, Blue is the Warmest Color, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, Short Term 12, Captain Phillips, Her, The Act of Killing, basically everything sorry</i></div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-25814710131166125122013-12-18T14:39:00.000-08:002014-01-16T14:09:34.832-08:00La residencia (or The House That Screamed): Quasi-Lesbian Fascist Hijinks<i>This entry comes to you courtesy of <a href="http://finalgirl.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Final Girl's</a> December Film Club. Viva Ponder! Spoilers for the whole movie.</i><br />
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Yesterday I was given the opportunity to watch <i>La residencia</i>, a slice of late-60s Spanish-produced horror that has exerted considerable influence on the genre despite its cult status. The film is excellent, calling on antecedents from earlier in the decade such as <i>The Innocents </i>and <i>Psycho;</i> it is a delicate (if not soapier) depiction of the madness that germinates in isolated, sexually repressed minds. Its brutality is minimal but perversely poetic, and although its unconventional structure owes a debt to Hitchcock's earlier masterpiece, writer-director Narciso Ibanez Serrador's invocation of Fascist imagery and methodology gives his work a critical charge all its own. Produced and released during the twilight hours of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Serrador's flirtation with strategically deployed nipples and incestuous kissing speaks to the crumbling of Spain's heavy cultural censorship, a product of an authoritarian environment quite like <i>La residencia's </i>titular boarding school. The moral is universal, though: save for its noticeably vintage fashions, <i>La residencia </i>is atemporal, and thanks to its spirited English dub and multicultural cast, the movie, although it takes place in France, could ostensibly be staged anywhere. <br />
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<a name='more'></a><i>La residencia </i>has no real protagonist, especially not after the unexpected death of fake final girl Teresa an hour in, but it does have an inarguable central figure in headmistress Madame Fourneau. Fourneau runs her <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7pvHe3a_LNtlRJkYhSJhydr6x9JDbZTZmrJPJZfIg4r0ZF0bCqy0D1JniHB0lPdvvj62yW2PzaTRTnVSMyuq7WQUgkdde7o7Oi_E-paDDECdshZ8_8jAQFgxSUmldtXdxHLWIxjRAkRp8/s1600/la+residencia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7pvHe3a_LNtlRJkYhSJhydr6x9JDbZTZmrJPJZfIg4r0ZF0bCqy0D1JniHB0lPdvvj62yW2PzaTRTnVSMyuq7WQUgkdde7o7Oi_E-paDDECdshZ8_8jAQFgxSUmldtXdxHLWIxjRAkRp8/s320/la+residencia.jpg" height="244" width="320" /></a>boarding school, an institute for difficult or unwanted young women, with an iron fist. For 300 francs a term, Fourneau submits the girls to a rigorous curriculum of writing, speech, art, gardening, music, and the like. They are guided through the halls from class to class in two straight, silent lines, as if marching. Insubordination is mercilessly punished. Early in the film, the defiant Catherine refuses to do her writing, an act for which she is secluded for a day and, after refusing to apologize, stripped and savagely whipped by three of Fourneau's most trusted students. Fourneau views her discipline as a necessary evil, telling Catherine that her rebellion "made her" issue the whipping, and after the deed she instructs her particularly heinous flunkie Irene to say her prayers as a means of reflecting on what she's done. They are insignificant gestures, of course, feints contrived by Fourneau to turn a blind eye to the atrocities she inflicts upon these girls. They indicate a greater decrepitude spreading through the school that Fourneau is actually powerless to stop: three students have disappeared in mere months, Irene is covertly abusing her power to bully and control the other girls, and Fourneau's own son Louis is a habitual voyeur in a building packed to the rafters with sex-starved teenagers.<br />
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The latter issue, as it turns out, is not only Fourneau's greatest vexation but the source of her most severe problems. The boarding school is already a hothouse for desperate feminine libido, so much so that the girls draw lots to see who gets to fuck the homely woodman when he arrives at the school for his weekly delivery. There's an exceptional scene halfway into the film where one steals away for a rendezvous during a sewing lesson, her giggling and coital moans intercut with shots of needles being threaded and lips being bitten. Fourneau, of course, wants her precious Louis to steer clear of these lustful young transgressors, keeping him separated from them and telling him that he'll soon have a chance to meet a "nice girl, just like your mother" once he leaves the school. The bad-touch element is impossible to miss, especially when she plants a kiss on his lips that sears the frame into a white dissolve. This, of course, explodes in her face when she discovers that Louis has been killing these missing girls and collecting their body parts to make a woman for himself in the perfect image of his mother. <br />
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Sexual neurosis hangs heavy on every major character in <i>La residencia</i>. Madame Fourneau, the consummate Christian reformist, is a portrait of unrealized sexuality. The tender kiss she plants on Catherine's bloodied back after her whipping, paired with the uneasy standoff she has with her after she strips nude in the shower, speak to latent lesbian desires that manifest themselves in cruel authoritarianism. There is also, of course, her stringent dictation of Louis' sexual habits, a delusional assumption that she can control the post-pubertal wiles of a sixteen-year-old boy by forbidding him to look at or even think of the girls. Irene fulfills herself and her urges by observing this model, though quite more overtly; she plays unabashed control games with the other students, dictating the frequency with which they are allowed to see the woodman while caressing their hands and reminding them regularly of her power. The most menacing flex of this power is when she forces Teresa, as a punishment for meeting in secret with Louis, to dress up in her prostitute mother's clothing and sing as she might at a cabaret. (This incident causes Teresa to attempt an escape, during which she is killed by Louis.) And naturally, there is Louis himself, who is able to cut up these girls time and again as his mother desperately tries to stop them from "escaping." Her efforts to repress the girls by changing the locks and boarding up the windows, ironically, make it all the easier for him to fulfill his warped fantasy. Sexuality in the boarding school is a cyclical game: buttoned-up Madame Fourneau imposes authoritarian rule on the girls, a philosophy that Irene channels into sadomasochistic perversion, which ultimately drives at least one girl into Louis' grasp. It is no wonder that when Louis kills Irene, the heir apparent to Fourneau's style of psychosexual dominance, he takes her hands because they are "slim but strong" like his mother's. The regime thus devours itself, demonstrating that, in the words of <a href="http://www.communistvampires.com/horror/House%20That%20Screamed.htm" target="_blank">Thomas Sipos</a>, "authoritarianism carries the seeds of its own destruction, in the end destroying even those who serve it." More specifically, it seems to posit sexual repression as both a tool of and a conduit for cruel dictatorship, as the denial of sexual agency by an authority figure generates exactly the kind of imbalanced power relationship that movements like Fascism take psychological root in. Between this thoughtful, robust premise and the film's many other virtues (kills that are stunning for the genre even today and that must have been sensational in 1969; Lilli Palmer's magnificent performance as Fourneau), <i>La residencia </i>is an underseen horror classic, one I am thankful to have been introduced to.Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-54825569078274370732013-10-31T15:07:00.000-07:002014-02-16T00:26:41.311-08:00The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 3: The Killer Inside MeI was really busy this week and I only wrote four entries instead of the typical five. I'm sure you are all beside yourselves about it. If you're curious, the omitted film was <i>World War Z</i>, which is probably my favorite blockbuster of the year. Who would have thought?<br />
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<b>All the Boys Love Mandy Lane</b><br />
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<i>All the Boys Love Mandy Lane </i>will probably be remembered more for its nightmarish release history than its content, a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324747104579022770929528870" target="_blank">seven-year cautionary tale</a> that catches Bob Weinstein in one of his more tone-deaf moments. Unshackled from the horror trends of 2006, a year glutted with remakes, sequels, and cheap torture flicks, <i>Mandy Lane</i> was cursed with a negative box office prognosis and bounced from studio to studio until the Weinsteins inexplicably purchased it again in 2013. That the film went on to double its budget in a limited international release may be a result of this sensationalized hype, but wouldn't it be nice if we could shelve the drama and give credit where credit is due? <i>Mandy Lane</i>, directed by the same Jonathan Levine behind this year's <i><a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-2013-horror-digest-part-2.html" target="_blank">Warm Bodies</a></i>, is a stylish and intelligent teen slasher sensibly rooted in the insecurities of its youthful cast. Mandy Lane (Amber Heard, better here than ever) is a stunning high schooler routinely hounded by boys, one of whom dies trying to impress her. Her enigmatic charm tarnished, she becomes something of a recluse, breaking out of her shell only long enough to attend a remote countryside party with a few acquaintances. As horror dictates, most of these teenagers are raging assholes, but <i>Mandy Lane </i>is sensitive enough not to fully place the blame on them. Their maladaptive behavior is instead shown as an extension of their self-hatred, manifested through body image issues and challenged masculinity; the film at large is a treatise on the corruptive influence of sexuality, and how complex the lives of the young grow when conscious attraction is introduced to them. Levine's emphasis on failed flirtation and body-shaming creates an embarrassed, uncomfortable atmosphere, one that the film only escapes during the moments where the gang forgets their sexual agendas and just has fun. The script is pitched a bit feverishly so as to facilitate the horror elements, which has led to reviews decrying its generic nature, most of them ignorant of the fact that this is a <i>genre film </i>and thus created in service of the aforementioned elements. It would be a different story if the ideas were stale (which they're not, as few teen horrors have such capably explored empathy for their victims) or if the execution was botched (which it wasn't - the movie looks gorgeous and the kills are solid). In their defense, <i>Mandy Lane's </i>greatest failing is that it can't fully reconcile the medium and the message, most noticeable in its clever but wobbly ending. Levine more than acquits himself with excellent craftsmanship, a talented cast, and the best damn soundtrack I've heard from the genre in years. Where else are you going to get a spread like Peaches, Beethoven, "Sister Golden Hair," and this lovely <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKE4MAblTPs" target="_blank">Bobby Vinton</a> cut? Cool in 2006, cool in 2013. <b>B+</b><br />
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<b>Maniac</b><br />
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Oh, Elijah. On the list of Hollywood actors I'd choose to play an Oedipally motivated lady-scalper, he wouldn't even make the top hundred. His one tool for conveying serial killer intensity - those beautiful, piercing baby blues - are nullified by both <i>Maniac's </i>POV filming approach and his fey, unthreatening voice. We hear from Wood much more often than we see him, and though he attempts a sinister affect through low volume and minimal dialogue, the illusion ranges from "halfway convincing" to, in a few shrieking melodramatic moments, "nonexistent." Director Franck Khalfoun's decision to lock us into his perspective, likewise, has its occasional successes. As far as unflinching brutality goes, being forced to watch someone have their skin peeled from their skull or be stabbed repeatedly is hard to beat. But again, the technique is confounded by a lack of consistency, since any scene where a pretty lady isn't being mutilated is edited haphazardly. Despite assuming his point of view, we jump around through time and space with him as if trapped in a conventionally filmed movie, which causes much of the tension to dissipate. This is probably an intentional effort toward disguising how lifeless and empty the setpieces are; simulating the effect of Wood strolling through them at a murderous trot would result in some boring sustained shots. Unfortunately, you can't miss the improbably deserted streets of what is supposed to be Los Angeles, nor can you ignore each victim's unsettling tendency to make the worst choices possible for themselves (leave populated areas while fleeing their assailant, run into enclosed spaces, and so on). <i>Maniac </i>is just sloppy, and it's not even an appealing kind of sloppy, the kind you can find in spades in the original 1980 <i>Maniac</i>. Joe Spinell, as the titular scalper, gave one of the most stomach-turning performances of the decade in a movie that is so unrelentingly grimy that you feel guilty for watching it. There's no such mania to be found in the casting of a handsome little creampuff like Wood, or the fastidiously arranged settings, or even the repeated flashbacks to Wood's naughty mommy as an (over)explanation for his behavior. Controlled to a fault, <i>Maniac </i>offers a few squeamish thrills, but fails to really disturb. (Also: "Goodbye Horses"? Really? It's only been two decades, you can't steal another film's thunder like that.) <b>C</b><br />
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<b><b>V/H/S/2</b></b><br />
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Hot on the heels of 2012's underground hit <i>V/H/S</i>, <i>V/H/S/2 </i>doesn't explore any particularly new ground. It's a found-footage horror anthology bound together by a cryptic frame story. The talent is mostly new, save for series mainstay Adam Wingard, and their credentials are impressive: Gareth Evans directed last year's excellent <i>The Raid: Redemption</i>, Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale brought us <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>, and Jason Eisener was responsible for well-loved cult grindhouse flick <i>Hobo with a Shotgun</i>. Unlike <i>V/H/S</i>, each entry here is worth watching, with even the shakiest of the shorts holding up well (Wingard's <i>Phase 1 Clinical Trials</i>), and the strongest hitting nightmarish highs that its predecessor never quite managed to (Evans' <i>Safe Haven</i>, pictured above). The filmmakers also deserve commendation for improving the roles for and treatment of women compared to the franchise's last iteration, although the tits-to-abs ratio still doesn't quite even out. Unfortunately, the big problem with <i>V/H/S/2 </i>rests in its lack of novelty. <i>V/H/S </i>was singularly illicit, a series of semi-coherent horror stories filmed with obsolete equipment and slapped together on a tape that actually feels like it was never meant to be seen. It did a phenomenal job of matching the subject matter to its presentation, positioning itself as a mysterious artifact that you could very well find in your own basement. <i>V/H/S/2 </i>focuses less on the experience and more on the actual shorts, which is satisfying in the moment, but the sensation of discovery fades away almost completely. These four stories do away with the original's conceit of being filmed on subpar technologies, so what you're seeing doesn't actually convince as a VHS recording; the films look better than they're supposed to, which is an odd thing to complain about, but there it is. There's an attempt to mythologize the tapes, as presented through a poorly-acted and frankly lame connective tissue, and though it flamed out toward the end of the first film, it plays like filler all the way through here. It may be that <i>V/H/S </i>captured lightning in a bottle and any future entries in this franchise will be met with diminishing returns, or it may be that the creative talent here simply lost sight of what made the first film so special. Still worth watching, in any event. <b>B-/C+</b><br />
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<b>Dracula 3D</b><br />
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Dario Argento, number 1 horror heartbreaker. Whether he lost his gift or never really had it is a debate for another day, but there's a universal consensus that the man making films for the last twenty years couldn't dream of recreating what we saw from him in the 70s and 80s. <i>Dracula 3D </i>is a step in an unprecedented direction for Argento, though: at the age of 73, he seems to have finally accepted his myriad failures and advanced toward the hazardous terrain of self-parody. This pan-European production, an "adaptation" of Bram Stoker's novel, is cheap garbage from start to finish, featuring terrible sound mixing and a reliance on CGI that's unusual for a director that has typically avoided it. And when it looks as unconvincing as it does here, the unusual circumstances under which it's used - simple moments like a cut on a man's arm, or a fly buzzing across the screen for no reason - urge the question of why he needed it so frequently in the first place. Overworked prosthetics artists? Post-production woes? It probably just comes down to the simple fact that Argento has completely forgotten how to direct. The same atrocious blocking and actor direction that plagued <i>Mother of Tears</i> has returned in full force here, and combined with hideous lighting and a plot done no favors by graceless editing, the production values make this a frequently difficult watch. The one check in <i>Dracula 3D's </i>column, and a pretty big one at that, is that in flickering moments it is FUN. This is something that Argento hasn't been able to claim with any of this century's efforts, and much more than <i>Mother of Tears </i>or especially <i>Giallo</i>, <i>Dracula 3D</i> is a heaping helping of Italian horror for better or worse. From the goofy, bizarrely inflected English dialogue to the inexplicably broad and seemingly random range of magic at play, this at least bears his auteurial stamp if not his increasingly distant talent. There are even some images here that, in a better-looking movie, would have been quite striking (among them the much-maligned killer praying mantis). Asia Argento, herself a waning force as of late, has a short-lived but delicious turn as a vampire that personifies the movie at its best: still totally crappy, but at least able to let its hair down and invite laughter. It's probably overlong and too slow in passages for bad movie sanctification, but this goofy take on vampire eroticism and spontaneous decapitation is bound to tickle some funnybones. <b>C</b></div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-8290521887202599052013-10-02T19:10:00.001-07:002013-10-02T19:12:10.248-07:00The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 2: Beasties/Boys<b>Berberian Sound Studio</b><br />
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Since horror is so dependent on culturally recursive imagery, often scaring us with things that we know we'll be scared of, it proves itself a fertile ground for namechecking, parody, and homage. None of these intrigue me more than the giallo homage. Despite the fact that Italy's wackiest subgenre is characterized by arrhythmic narrative structure, unpredictable editing, and shot after non-sequitur shot, films attempting to pay their dues to such a singular cinematic phenomenon often employ these techniques too academically. <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i>, arriving three years after staid but enjoyable <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1426352" target="_blank">Amer</a> </i>or Dario Argento's God-awful <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1107816" target="_blank"><i>Giallo</i></a>, mostly manages to avoid this. Toby Jones plays a sensitive introvert who, having only designed sound for nature documentaries, finds that his new overseas gig producing gory sound effects for an Italian horror movie exacts a high emotional and mental toll. This movie has no aspirations toward true giallodom, instead borrowing giallo's delightfully squishy sound design (what do you think that produce is for?) and baroque low-key lighting to grant style to a mostly conventional narrative. <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> is a far cry from generic shock horror, though, instead a sinister character piece as portrayed masterfully by Jones and facilitated through a series of increasingly oppressive interpersonal encounters. The problems set in during the final fifteen minutes, when the house of cards finally collapses and our protagonist finds himself in a set of alien circumstances that do little to illuminate what we've already seen of him. Far from the <i>Berberian Sound Studio </i>that wet its hands playing in the blood of giallos past, the ending swings wide and fails both in the typical and atypical realms the rest of the movie bounces between. It has its own intrigue if you're into random things (see also <a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-2013-horror-digest-part-1-id-sell.html" target="_blank"><i>The Lords of Salem</i></a>), but thrust like a knife into a carefully written screenplay, it makes sadly little sense. <b>B </b></div>
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<b>Kiss of the Damned </b>[<a href="http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70257839&trkid=2361637&tctx=-99%2C-99%2C89048f2e-fb61-4f74-ae2e-e9bd203f5f31-5970771" target="_blank">Netflix</a>]<br />
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And while we're on the topic of homage, let's hop on over to 70s vampire horror, long the province of House Hammer and Sir Christopher Lee and Count Dracula himself. Campy and a bit smutty, six of Hammer's eight takes on Dracula nonetheless retained the distinguished sheen of a Lee performance, giving them a character beyond the workmanlike cheese they usually feel like. This century's non-<i>Twilight</i> vampire movies have rarely achieved the same distinction or success, peaking with <i>Shadow of the Vampire </i>or <i>Let the Right One In</i>; 2013 was as good a year as any for writer/director Xan Cassavetes to breathe life into the floundering bloodsucker. But although she's definitely in the right place at the right time, <i>Kiss of the Damned </i>is blown by a bad lead performance and some shaky writing. Actresses Josephine de la Baume and Roxane Mesquida are exciting, in that it is exciting to watch savagely beautiful women act bitchy toward each other, but protagonist Milo Ventimiglia is blank from start to finish. He exudes zero allure through his striking physical beauty, locked into a flat voice and an inexpressive face no matter the circumstances. In nearly all of its depictions, and especially here, a vampire is a potent erotic and charismatic force, and although Cassavetes lands the eroticism ably neither Ventimiglia nor his more compelling costars have much interesting to say. This threesome flits through beautiful mansions and hobnobs with their vampire brethren, a cadre of elites with unique ideologies and desires, yet they themselves rarely find time for anything meaningful except fucking and fighting and occasionally murdering an innocent. <i>Kiss of the Damned </i>does manage a handful of intrigue with Mesquida's psychotic Mimi. She rails against the boring lives these upper-crust vampires have created for themselves, likening their cloistered blood chastity to "rehab," and kills and exsanguinates humans because that's what vamps were made to do. This deviance corrupts those around her in intriguing ways, and its impact on the main love story adds a bit of dimension to an otherwise uninteresting ending. Unfortunately, these ideas on deviance and forced normalcy are too thin to support a movie with weak dramatic energy, charged only by the intermittently successful yet constant use of overbearing music. Questionable style over disappointing, albeit sexy, substance. <b>C</b><br />
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<b>Warm Bodies</b><br />
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Quite like how<i> Twilight </i>had little to say except "vampires and werewolves are cute and both can be your boyfriends," <i>Warm Bodies </i>is similarly desperate for tweens to contract a case of the young-adult zombie swoons, except in a FUNNY way. This film applies a gloss of self-parody that is meant to justify the uncreative ways it unfurls its gimmick (the above picture, for instance, though partial credit is given for using someone kind of obvious like Fulci instead of someone totally obvious like Romero). Most of the jokes are stale, though, zombies and humans both uttering "bitches, man" and "fuck yeah" and whatever other conversation enders count as punchlines these days. The zombie stuff is even more dire, filled with poorly directed action sequences and ugly CGI. And in an age where undead brutality is a simple change of the channel away for many people, I can't imagine <i>Warm Bodies</i>' PG-13 blood splatters<i> </i>raising too many pulses. The rating spells disaster for a zombie movie, as zombies are monsters that must be presented as both analogue and anathema to humans in order to explore why they are so scary. The best way to do that is to strip them of their humanity and have them inflict grisly violence on their living, screaming counterparts, and this movie doesn't bother with either task. The zombies here, like the vampires and werewolves of <i>Twilight</i>, retain none of the characteristics that made this creature interesting or frightening or worth exploring in the first place. There's at least some acting talent here, though you wouldn't guess it from John Malkovich, who looks embarrassed to even be there and phones it in hard. The young players are earnest and believe wholeheartedly in their material: Nicholas Hoult is cute enough that I almost understand why Teresa Palmer wanted to fuck his shambling corpse, and I'm curiously into Analeigh Tipton (is it the <i>America's Next Top Model </i>association? it must be). I've championed the value of teen-oriented horror before, but <i>Warm Bodies </i>is so tame and so genuflected to YA market trends that it basically washes the whole movie out. If you're in the mood for a supernatural teen romance full of laughs, <i>Twilight </i>schadenfreude remains the place to go, as this horror comedy never manages to become scary or funny. <b>D+</b><br />
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<b>Black Rock</b><br />
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I'm sure that most of you are sick of reading about Kickstarter by now, but I think it's important to keep tabs on this first wave of crowd-sourced film productions, since these things are propped up on our livelihoods. Katie Aselton, she of humblecore mumblecore beginnings, put <i>Black Rock</i> together on <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1756210031/black-rock-written-by-mark-duplass-directed-by-kat" target="_blank">33000 public dollars</a>, and though it isn't the gamechanger that publicly-funded cinema really needs, her training has obviously prepared her for the lean business of making an indie in 2013. You could write it<i> </i>off as an insubstantial thriller, but that isn't entirely fair, as the movie's got a pretty unique stance on female camaraderie. All-female horror tends to divide the base, most famously demonstrated in <i>The Descent</i>, which is an understandable consequence of a psychologically trying situation. Living in a culture that routinely pits women against one another rarely allows us the perspective on extreme adversity that <i>Black Rock</i> offers, though, and that in itself gives Aselton's script value. Plus, having three dishonorably discharged Iraqi War vets as rapin' killin' <i>Deliverance</i>-style antagonists pissed off the fine folks at <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/06/25/black-rock-movie-slams-veterans" target="_blank">Breitbart</a>, who are unwilling to content themselves with any less-than-glowing representation of the military, so that's an A-OK in my book. As an actual thriller, this is marginally successful, which is a disappointment. The narrative is catalyzed by an attempted rape and its victim Abby's self-defense, but for whatever reason Abby never gets around to tell her assailant's friends that he, you know, tried to rape her. It may not have done much good, as these men are clearly unhinged; nonetheless, this is the kind of spare character piece where every line counts, and the escalation of the conflict becomes a little difficult to swallow. The dialogue and acting are generally solid, not too sensationalized and essayed through believable characters, but there's a chronic lack of directness to the movie's exposition that frustrates even at 80 minutes. Even the violent conflicts take their time. There are better ways to spend an hour and a half than <i>Black Rock</i>, sure, but it's not bad. It might be a worthy investment if you're curious about rising talents Aselton or Lake Bell (or if you've been wondering where the hell Kate Bosworth is these days, which is all zero of you). Recommended if woman-dominated island cat-and-mouse games appeal to you. <b>C+</b><br />
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<b>Mama</b><br />
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What's gotten into Guillermo? His directorial efforts trend toward quality, but as a producer he involves himself with projects that usually don't add up. I can't begrudge him his attempts at keeping horror alive and healthy in the mainstream; there aren't a lot of prominent creative figures in the genre's corner these days. Seeing his name in credits is starting to become a turnoff, though, as in the past five years he's presided over the self-serious <i>The Orphanage</i>, Vincenzo Natali's decent but clumsy <i>Splice</i>, and 2011's beautiful braindead <a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2012/02/disappointments-of-2011.html" target="_blank"><i>Don't Be Afraid of the Dark</i></a>. I am starting to wonder when I'll see him attached to something as powerful and complex as <i>The Devil's Backbone </i>again. <i>Mama </i>is simply another check written into the dark, a golden ticket for short film director Andres Muschetti, that never pays for much more than superficial handsomeness. It appears to me that del Toro is easily persuaded by potentially appealing visuals, the unifying thread in each of these horrors, and the first hour of <i>Mama </i>provides in full. There's one early scene in a long, shadowy hall that is exceptional, preying on our unformed knowledge of this lurking ghost and its motives. Between that and a quality performance from Jessica Chastain, the movie had me pretty absorbed and a little frightened for the first hour, but when Mama gets bored of surreptitious prowling and bursts out of the wardrobe with daughter-stealing abandon, I snapped right out of it. Mama looks lame as hell. The IMDB page for the film insists that she's not CGI, just a heavily made-up man with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfan_syndrome" target="_blank">Marfan syndrome</a>, but a) I'm not sure I buy it alongside the film's other egregious uses of CGI and b) computerized or not, a ghost that bends into a croquet-wicket arch and charges at you like an angry toddler is <b>not scary</b>. The friend I was watching with said it best: it's so much easier to induce fear when your audience doesn't know exactly what they're afraid of yet. <i>Mama</i> never recovers from the sham that is its eponymous demon, culminating in a melodramatic mountaintop showdown that is almost embarrassing to watch. I keep thinking of that episode of <i>Doug </i>where Doug runs out of a
horror movie screaming before anything actually shows up, and when he
finally knuckles down and tries to watch it again, the zipper on the
monster's costume is visible.<b> </b>That night I became Doug, slowly wearying of Guillermo del Toro failing to hide the zipper one too many times. Perhaps we are all Doug.<b> C+</b>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-63365943473964829102013-09-13T17:38:00.002-07:002016-10-26T13:21:58.744-07:00A Friday the 13th of Friday the 13ths <i>Friday the 13th </i>has a well-earned reputation as one of the most venerable horror franchises in history, but despite its formidable box-office success, its entries were mostly derided by critics and treated as slasher movie junk food. That junk-foodiness is so much of the appeal, though: this is a series of incredibly low density, even less than contemporaries <i>Halloween </i>or <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i>. They are intellectually disengaged, basally pleasing movies, providing all of the notorious bottom-of-the-barrel thrills that the genre trafficks in. They're always short, always ridiculous, and typically entertaining on at least one level, with some really unfortunate exceptions. Ascending from "fucking dreadful":<br />
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<b>Jason Goes to Hell (1993)</b></div>
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This is how <i>Jason Goes to Hell </i>makes me feel. It is pure profiteering garbage, a desperate bid from New Line to wring a few more dollars from <i>Friday the 13th</i>'s corpse after acquiring it from Paramount. Not a drop of passion or talent went into crafting this cheap, muddy, incomprehensible mess, a movie that is often so poorly lit that you can't even see who's getting killed or how Jason's doing it. Aside from one technically impressive but overlong scene of a face randomly melting, this is 100% skippable. The theme song is hilarious, though, a sure sign of Harry Manfredini's complete disinterest in the franchise:<br />
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<b>Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)</b></div>
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<i>Jason Goes to Hell </i>has the dubious distinction of being "non-canon," which means the fans hated it so much that they pretended it never actually happened. <i>A New Beginning </i>was in perhaps an even more awkward spot: it came hot on the heels of the immensely popular <i>The Final Chapter</i>, which had promised the ultimate and irreversible death of Jason Voorhees. Not wanting to defy continuity, director Danny Steinman and his three screenwriters (?!) concocted a workaround that involved not-really-Jason running around and killing the most annoying people on the planet. If the Mean Aggravation Quotient of a typical horror movie cast is 5, it's about 700 in <i>A New Beginning</i>. Lots of screaming, shrieking, hooting, hollering, and kill setups that are so protracted that you have to spend more time than you'd ever want with these banshees. Far from wanting these people to die, which was surely the movie's goal, you only want <i>A New Beginning</i> to be over as quickly as possible.<br />
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<b>Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)</b><br />
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Though more proficient technically than <i>Jason Goes to Hell </i>or <i>A New Beginning</i>, <i>Jason Takes Manhattan </i>is too mean-spirited to really enjoy. The camera relishes Jason's ascent to apparent godhood, looming like an accomplice as he sloooooowly bears down on each of his trembling victims. The kills themselves are standard Friday fare, lingered on to a voyeuristic degree; this combined with the highest kill count in the series grants a quality of self-aware delight to the film's cruelty that leaves the viewer feeling kind of dirty. Having a final girl with a psychic link to seaweed-covered Baby Jason was a stupid choice, too. Nothing kills tension faster than an eight-year-old who looks like he wandered off the set of <i>Double Dare</i>.<br />
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<b>Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)</b></div>
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<i>Friday the 13th Part 3 </i>was the franchise's solitary foray into the third dimension, and it was exactly as cheesy as you'd suspect 1980s 3D might be. Lots of first person camera perspectives of characters getting their eyeballs poked out and being offered joints. It's a pretty fun flourish, even though I didn't actually watch the movie in 3D because I am not a fan of headaches. I just enjoy bad attempts to shoehorn 3D-friendly shots into a movie. Equally fun is Manfredini's balls-to-the-wall <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODm01T3zY-w" target="_blank">disco rendition</a> of the <i>Friday the 13th </i>theme song, coupling handsomely with the visual gimmickry to create an entertaining portrait of horror in the early 80s. How's the movie, though? Boring as hell. The least distinguished final girl in the franchise, a limp plot, and only a handful of memorable kills leave this installment feeling surprisingly forgettable. <br />
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<b>Friday the 13th: Jason Lives (1986)</b><br />
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This is apparently popular with the fanbase for its "sense of humor," but I'll be damned if I can remember a single joke from it, except for the guy who gets impaled on a tree with a smiley face carved onto it. Kind of funny, I suppose. Like <i>Part 3</i>, though, <i>Jason Lives</i> doesn't have a whole lot going for it. The deaths are the tamest in the series and none of the characters are memorable. It's one of the more competently made entries in the franchise, but by this point these films required a more excessive approach. <i>Jason Lives </i>is too restrained for its own good. <br />
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<b>Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988)</b></div>
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Make no mistake, <i>The New Blood </i>is abysmal. It's a poorly paced mess with no sense of threat whatsoever, mostly because final girl Tina has ASS-KICKING PSYCHIC POWERS! She is seriously scarier than Jason, slinging sharp objects and lighting him on fire with the power of her nonplussed glares alone. Lar Park Lincoln's full throttle performance doubles down the hilarity; watching this mousy basket case administer a telekinetic beatdown on one of the greatest horror villains of all time is too surreal to be ignored. Kane Hodder's debut as Jason is another unexpected bright spot in the film, as his impressive stunt work and sheer physical presence liven the proceedings when there's not much else to look toward. Not good, but definitely not boring. <br />
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<b>Jason X (2001)</b></div>
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New Line took eight years to lick their wounds after <i>Jason Goes to Hell </i>was publicly and critically savaged. Then they released this. Gluttons for punishment, I suppose...BUT. <i>Jason X </i>is pretty funny and totally watchable, an absolute load of lovingly made dog crap. The films in the tail end of this franchise are best served by unabashed gory camp carnage, and though the kills here vary in quality, no movie that stars a kung-fu android with a raging case of nipple jealousy can truly be bad in my book. This was a substantial box office disappointment, unfortunately, which led to the series excreting one more ludicrous offering (<i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>, a waste of anyone's time) before receding into remake hell. This will not be to everyone's taste, but if you're in the market for absurd sci-fi horror, <i>Jason X </i>is worth a try.<br />
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<b>Friday the 13th (1980)</b><br />
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The one that started it all! From the blood-soaked prologue to the protagonist fakeout to a villain reveal that no one could ever have seen coming, much of <i>Friday the 13th</i>'s success was pinned to its novelty. As an exercise in craftsmanship, it is simple and watertight, and there are surprisingly fewer kills than most people automatically assume. Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller devised a tale that wasn't fundamentally different from the slashers that preceded it, but instead peppered it with enough crazy plot twists and raunchiness to color the slasher subgenre for years to come. Its violence is dated, an inevitability for horror, which can make it easy to lose track of its influential standing. As a sustainable template for a franchise, though, <i>Friday the 13th </i>is unbeatable.<br />
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<b>Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)</b></div>
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By all accounts, this should have been a studio rush job, hitting theaters less than a year after its massively successful predecessor. <i>Friday the 13th Part 2 </i>actually ended up better than the first, however, souping up the atmosphere while excising the occasional murkiness that dogged the original. Credit is also due to Amy Steel, who gives easily the most compelling performance in the franchise and is a final girl for the ages. Intelligent, proactive, a bit edgy and a bit sexual, Ginny is a character you can really root for, which is something of a rare commodity amongst the <i>Friday the 13th</i>s. The energy and craftsmanship on display in <i>Part 2 </i>elevate it past its unambitious conception; this is fine work overall.<i> </i>(Also features the hottest disabled character in cinema history.)<br />
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<b>Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)</b></div>
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Meant to send Jason out with a bang (it didn't, of course, since this made so much goddamn bank), <i>Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter </i>would have ended the franchise on its highest note. For my money, this is the closest the series ever came to having a cohesive artistic vision, sporting the best camerawork of the bunch, courtesy of unknown director Joseph Zito and unknown director of photography Joao Fernandes. The way this movie plays with light and shadow is exceptional. It features the above insanity from Crispin Glover, bespeaking the movie's unashamed embrace of absurd comedy in absurd circumstances. The kills are great, buoyed by the clear and thoughtful geography of the two main locations, and the acting is the most consistent you'll see in the series. There are even two defenestrations, one of which involves a cool dog.<i> The Final Chapter </i>is way better than it had any right to be, and in my eyes remains <i>Friday the 13th</i>'s high point...if you can get past Corey Feldman's ridiculous role in the ending, which comes thiiiiiisclose to ruining the film's impressive tension. Why Paramount decided to follow this underrated gem with <i>A New Beginning </i>is incomprehensible. </div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-27142317725250338012013-09-12T14:15:00.002-07:002013-09-12T14:16:48.340-07:00The David Cronenberg Sinister Beauty ParadeDavid Cronenberg films are led by men almost universally, but nearly every one of them features at least one compelling female role as well. Often these roles are enhanced by his eye for women who are darkly alluring, polished surfaces that give way to warped thoughts (much like the movies themselves). A few I've noticed lately:<br />
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<b>Lynn Lowry, </b><i>Shivers</i>: The prototype, if you will; a blueprint for a newborn artist. Lovingly filmed right in the middle of an expository dialogue about "a parasite that's a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that
will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy." Lowry is a commanding presence in a movie that often finds its time divided amongst a bloated cast, but her lilting, eerie final monologue puts her above and beyond the rest.</div>
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<b>Genevieve Bujold, </b><i>Dead Ringers</i>: Probably a top 5 performance for Cronenberg's oeuvre, Bujold's turn as an over-the-hill actress with a Master's in sexual depravity is both perverted enough to enliven the obsessive, sociopathic Mantle twins (Jeremy Irons, also top 5), and human enough to challenge them. Her face and voice and body leave her unable to deny this intense dysfunctional connection, no matter what words come out of her mouth. </div>
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<b>Judy Davis</b>, <i>Naked Lunch</i>: Small picture, but you get the idea. For a while in the early 90s, Judy Davis was the go-to gal for auteurs looking to cast a cold, vastly intelligent woman. <i>Naked Lunch </i>is convoluted and sort of exhausting, but Cronenberg at least has his gift for prosthetics to give visual life to an inscrutable story, and the good sense to frame it autobiographically by dragging elements of crazy-ass William S. Burroughs' life into the narrative. Davis, despite a limited role, serves as both the catalyst for Peter Weller's delusion and his singular erotic obsession, the remaining vestige of an increasingly foreign life left behind.<br />
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<b>Sarah Gadon, </b><i>A Dangerous Method + Cosmopolis + Maps to the Stars</i>: Cronenberg's newest muse and the only woman with whom he has collaborated repeatedly, Sarah Gadon's conventional beauty exudes more than a fair share of menace. There's an air of inaccessible power to her, something that both Cronenberg (frigid heiress in <i>Cosmopolis</i>, Hollywood matriarch of old in <i>Maps to the Stars</i>) and his son Brandon (<i>Antiviral</i>'s celebrity to end all celebrities) have employed with considerable results in the last few years. Her career is young yet, but she's an intelligent woman with excellent taste in auteurs, so the prognosis for a rich filmography is promising.</div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-30445073100708863792013-09-07T13:46:00.000-07:002013-09-07T13:47:07.307-07:00The Trouble With Harry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At the peak of his popularity in the mid-2000s, Harry Knowles was making <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/aint-cools-harry-knowles-cash-430734" target="_blank">$700,000 a year</a> through his self-proclaimed <i>film nerd sanctuary </i>Ain't it Cool News. No critic from now until the end of time will dream of collecting that sort of cash ever again. This astronomical success is, much more than any virtues of his own, a testament to the inestimable value of being in the right place at the right time. When Knowles founded Ain't it Cool in 1996, there was simply no competition; not even fellow early tech adopter Roger Ebert had the same magnitude of online presence that The King of Filmgeekdom commanded. Studios trembled in his shadow - a Knowles pan spelled certain devastation for a film, and his word is credited with the financial failure of such classics as <i>Batman and Robin </i>and <i>Rollerball</i>.<br />
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Here's the rub, though: Harry Knowles is a sexist manchild who, even at the height of his powers, was only able to generate dialogue amongst readers half his age. His "films are awesome!" credo holds its own valuable optimistic appeal, but in Knowles' case the awesomeness of a film is generally correlated to how much the studio heads kiss his ass at the junket before he watches it. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I believe that people of dubious principle can mature with time and reflection. But what happens when you don't develop? What happens when those studios you once cowed grow savvy to how easily bought you are, how derelict your journalistic integrity is? What happens if you've been writing the same crass, nonsensical bullshit for the last seventeen years of your life? Feast upon this juicy morsel from his <i>Blade 2 </i>review, all the while remembering that this is how an actual person felt about <i>Blade 2 <b>(NSFW!)</b></i>:<br />
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<i>BLADE 2 is the tongue, mouth, fingers and lips of a lover. The Audience is the clit. Watch your audience. This is where Guillermo Del Toro goes down on the audience. It starts with long licks with a nose bump on the joy button slowly. He smiles as he does this… Watching the audience begin to squirm, then he takes the audiences’ clit in his mouth and just licks it like crazy, the audience is ready, on that precipice, then calm. He backs off… long licks again, brings in a finger to massage a bit, licks from the bottom to the top… The audience is cooing… He has them, they want release. He acts like he’s going to give it to you, takes you right to the edge, the audiences’ backs arched, ready to cum….</i></blockquote>
(If you'd like to further subject yourself to the erotic imaginings of a delusional "big kid at heart," then grab your dick and <a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/11793" target="_blank">double click</a>!)<br />
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And now, the opening paragraph of his review of <i><a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63317" target="_blank">The Conjuring</a></i>, eleven years later:<br />
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<i>Paranormal Investigation has been around for a very long time. Ghost stories told that span centuries. As a boy, I was absolutely certain that the house I grew up in was haunted. Things were seen, not only by me, but with witnesses – and even now as a grown up, I can see those events in my life with crystal clarity. Bad things had happened in that house. My mother felt it, Dad thought it was funny. There were also a lot of articles and tv shows talking about paranormal things. The popularity of EXORCIST and AMITYVILLE HORROR – all while Stephen King was publishing THE SHINING, and Kubrick made a film. But through the publicity of things that were being sold to us… there were the stories about Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Vatican backed them.</i></blockquote>
Eleven years. Come on, dude. Surely you must have been reading the work of your colleagues and had the self-awareness to recognize the disparities. To call him a hack is a waste of breath; of course he has nothing valuable to say, but in some ways the man is savvy, at least enough to garner a readership of prepubescent boys whose advertising revenue he could coast on well into the 21st century.<br />
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Things don't work like that on the World Wide Web anymore, though. Media monkeys must now dance in perpetuity, providing a litany of fresh and continual and innovative content, to keep their charges entertained and their clickthroughs flowing. Knowles' one bid at brand expansion was a web show under Chris Hardwick's esteemed Nerdist banner which, given his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA-NRx-hXh4&t=1m39s" target="_blank">complete lack of charisma</a>, flopped and was cancelled. The King's stunted growth resulted in dwindling traffic and increasingly negative press and, for whatever reason, he didn't have the money saved to cover whatever massive expenditures he was incurring. There's no way to determine where he squandered all of his ill-gotten lucre, but considering that this is a man who felt it necessary to have <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLBwr_533XA&t=0m45s" target="_blank">76 people</a> covering an exploding gas station on the set of <i>Lethal Weapon 4</i>, bad business decisions would be my guess. Bad enough, in fact, to land him in trouble with the IRS to the tune of $300,000.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paisley fedora, rainbow peace sign shirt</td></tr>
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What's a hack to do when the Fed's breathing down his neck and everyone on his site hates him? Why, launch a <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/385528808/future-filmgeekdom-aint-it-cool-with-harry-knowles" target="_blank">Kickstarter</a>, of course! Unable to take responsibility for his show's cancellation and instead <a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63591" target="_blank">blaming</a> it on Nerdist's "direction shift from show creation to a more viral video focused mindset," Harry Knowles thought it wise to ask his fan-hater commentariat for $100,000 in order to produce a second season. Requesting such a handsome fee from a group of people who frequent your site primarily out of schadenfreude is unwise; doing so under full public knowledge of your financial struggles, without any visible business plan, and lacking any ideas for expansion besides a "live studio audience" is tantamount to larceny. Unsurprisingly, the uproar was devastating, with well over <a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63591" target="_blank">15000</a> comments lining Knowles up against the wall. The comments on the actual Kickstarter - and keep in mind that you can only comment if you've donated to the project in question - are a mix of concern trolling, straight-up trolling, and a few cherry-picked bon mots about how exciting this whole enterprise is. Harry typically only responds to the latter.<br />
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My <a href="http://russellbulletin.com/2013/04/24/zach-braff-mines-kickstarter-adoring-public-for-risk-free-movie-funding/" target="_blank">hesitations about Kickstarter</a> are only magnified by farragoes like this. The project, perhaps unsurprisingly, reached its funding goal on Thursday, after an inexplicable upswell to the tune of nearly $60,000. Deadline's Jen Yamato <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2013/09/peter-jackson-guillermo-del-toro-aicn-harry-knowles-kickstarter/" target="_blank">wrote</a> that Eli Roth, Rian Johnson, and Guillermo del Toro (yes, even after that <i>Blade 2 </i>review!) all contributed to the Kickstarter in its twilight hours; judging by the staggering average pledge of <a href="https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/385528808/future-filmgeekdom-aint-it-cool-with-harry-knowles/" target="_blank">$179 per backer</a>, it's clear that Knowles called in a bevy of last-minute favors. How is this otherwise failed attempt at crowdsourcing an accurate reflection of what the public actually wants? Why couldn't Knowles get all of his wealthy friends to bankroll the project in the first place? How desperate do you think those phone calls were? Or maybe I just envy those fourteen people who spent $200 to be crew for a day on the show. PEOPLE ACTUALLY SPENT MONEY TO FLY OUT TO AUSTIN AND DO WORK THAT MOST PROFESSIONALS ARE PAID FOR. Knowles' busted-ass rewards are all insulting, but this is a two hundred dollar slap to the face.<br />
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To some degree I feel sorry for him. He has clearly led a difficult life, at least in certain regards. But my sympathies only extend so far for someone who has written at length of Hayden Panettiere's "deviantly awesome" <a href="http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30606" target="_blank">regenerating, underaged hymen</a>. Further, all evidence points to Knowles being a self-interested egomaniac, demonstrating little interest in the successes of his peers on the lower rungs of the industry. In fact, in instances such as this interview with the screenwriter of last year's <i>Sinister</i>, himself a longtime Ain't it Cool News contributor, he reveals himself as downright hostile and jealous.<br />
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I know that shit is ten minutes long and y'all aren't going to watch it (though you'd be missing out on some truly stunning second-hand embarrassment), so I assembled a soundboard! Appreciate all the while that this is how Harry talks to someone he considers a "friend."<br />
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What I love most about this interview is how C. Robert Cargill remains completely tactful and even charming while being passive-aggressively berated by this awful man. Pay attention, Harry, those are the kinds of skills that help you get jobs! It's almost enough to make me like <i>Sinister.</i><br />
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On the surface, there's not much to distinguish this sad new chapter in Harry Knowles' life from any other show of entertainer entitlement and delusion. Elementally, though, this saga acts as a revealing window to how broken the film and film criticism industries remain today. Innovation and merit are superseded every single time by connection, even if those connections are just donating out of a sense of protracted pity. The truly galling thing is Knowles' employment of Kickstarter for a web series that, by all accounts, will not need $100,000. The clueless people who donated $40,000 to his campaign, somehow unaware of his history of financial mismanagement, were essentially suckered out of their money by a group of wealthy last-minute benefactors stacking the deck. Watch a few seconds of that interview again and tell me what on that set could conceivably demand such a high price. (If you answered "Knowles' massive memorabilia collection," you're sadly correct!) Herein lies the shady side of crowdfunding: it isn't always funded by a crowd, but by a mixed group of impressionable people who don't necessarily represent their constituency and wealthy friends who don't necessarily have actual interest in the project. del Toro donated five thousand dollars to Knowles but I'll be damned if he spends a second of his life watching this dreck. In all likelihood, the second season of Ain't it Cool will accrue about 8,000 hits per video, accompanied by a swarm of thumbs-downs and a comment section vacillating between fat jokes and vicious criticism. He'll just continue to cluelessly anthropomorphize the angry voices of the majority until his second chances run out. Sad? Of course. But you reap what you sow.Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-41946292685643628562013-08-30T16:24:00.002-07:002013-09-15T16:02:27.573-07:00The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 1: I'd Sell My Soul for a Good Opening WeekendI don't know if you guys have noticed, but 2013 has been pretty good to horror so far! At least to its box office - the quality of this year's offerings have been a mixed platter, typical of any studio slate, but the real revelation is the genre's renewed, almost instantaneous bankability. <i>The Conjuring </i>had one of the highest opening weekends for an R-rated film <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/mpaa.htm?page=R&p=.htm" target="_blank">of all time</a>; the only other R-rated horror film to make so much money so quickly was <i>Paranormal Activity 3</i>. <i>The Purge </i>multiplied its budget <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=purge.htm" target="_blank">by thirty</a>. <i>Evil Dead </i>nearly broke $100 million.<b> </b>And those are just the R-rated flicks alone - <i>World War Z </i>took in major bank overseas, for instance. <i>Mama </i>did well, <i>Dark Skies </i>did well, <i>Warm Bodies </i>did well even though it shouldn't have. Maybe my 2011/2012 prognostications about the future of adult horror were preemptive, or maybe there's been some kind of worldwide attitudinal shift that's gotten mainstream audiences so interested in all this depravity. Could it be a growing notion that our world is falling apart?<br />
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There's been a noticeable preoccupation with economic decay in many of the movies released this year, almost certainly a reflection of our nation's dire straits. This isn't a new trend to film, cropping up as early as Great Depression musicals in order to pair common audience anxieties with a gleeful, utopian worldview. To see these fears interlaced with the horror genre, however, is particularly exceptional. Three of the films below deal with financial crises, at least in passing, and the other two feature protagonists overcoming major drug addictions. The prevalence of such heavy subject matter in a genre with few escapist tendencies is strange, but as with any regularly employed cultural trend, its incorporation is livened or worsened by the skill of its creative team. The movies below, for the most part, depict these issues thoughtfully enough to merit their inclusion. Except for <i>Evil Dead</i>. Fuck that shit.<br />
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<b>Antiviral </b>[<a href="http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70243026&trkid=2450709" target="_blank">Netflix</a>]<br />
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You would have to be a lunatic to desire fame in the 21st century. Paparazzi may seem intrusive enough as it is, but images of an otherwise average person going about her routine don't cut it anymore. Social technologies like Twitter have entitled millions of people to a feeling of constant connectivity to their idols; such an increased degree of exposure is a double-edged sword, because now any teenage shitheel can anonymously slander or threaten you whenever his shriveled heart desires. The Internet has left us all living in public, but to many, the life of a celebrity is hardly a life at all. <i>Antiviral </i>ups the ante on these already sad circumstances by depicting a near future where celebrity culture is the only kind of culture, a world in which the ultimate expression of adoration is paying hand-over-fist to be injected with the viruses of these beautiful people. These "celebrities" don't even sing or act, simply serving as proprietary pathogenic vessels for corporations to make money off the unwitting. Huckster Syd March (Caleb Landry-Jones of <i>X-Men First Class</i>, deliciously cold) peddles these germs for the omnipotent Lucas Clinic, but unsurprisingly the big guys aren't paying their workers too much in times like these, so occasionally he'll steal viruses and sell them on the black market. Unfortunately, Syd never accounted for this society's insidious idea of copyright protection, and so begins his great adventure. Brandon Cronenberg, inspired by an offhand remark in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTfIf1xUfKc&t=1m49s" target="_blank">Sarah Michelle Gellar interview</a>, has created a world in the image of his father's work that is populated by obsessions entirely his own. This fame-forged dystopia is brimming with hardship, but its citizens are too doped up on entertainment to understand what a hard life entails except by relating to celebrity "Ordeals," manufactured traumas like having a camera zoom up your rectum (broadcast on the news as, of course, the Aria Noble Anus Ordeal). Beautifully shot and conceived, <i>Antiviral </i>nonetheless betrays its director's inexperienced hand, as the clever concepts and shifts in understanding are occasionally explained more closely than they need to be. Nonetheless, Cronenberg delivers a portrait of manic devotion that is not only contemporary (Miley, One Direction, Lady Gaga, et al.), but indicative of a society suffering a much greater structural disease than any one human might carry. <b>B+</b><br />
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<a name='more'></a><b>The Conjuring</b><br />
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Vera Farmiga has become one of my new favorite actresses, not only for her her rough-hewn expressive power and dextrous voice, but also because she's getting the juicy genre career that Jamie Lee Curtis deserved when she was this age. Her unpretentious commitment to every role, whether a mother with a questionable past in <i>Orphan </i>or a tragicomic lunatic in <i>Bates Motel</i>, pays off unfailingly, even when the script doesn't necessarily deserve her. This is the case in <i>The Conjuring</i>, a haunted house yarn that surprises by caulking over its corny dialogue with excellent craftsmanship and legitimate scares. Chad and Carey Hayes, who have been writing a lot of crap for a long time, maintain their own special brand of commitment with exchanges like these: <br />
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"Do you remember the thing you said on our wedding night?"<br />
"Can we do it again?" <br />
"No! The other thing, that God brought us together for a reason."<br />
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EHHHH. The thing? The one thing you said? No, not the thing about sex, the other thing about God. Not promising, I know, but director James Wan tempers this hokum with overall strong performances (standouts include Farmiga, Lili Taylor, and Joey King, giving one of the best portrayals of fear I've ever seen from a young actor) and a continued emphasis on set design and sound. Farmiga plays one half of husband-and-wife exorcism team The Warrens,
tasked with expelling an especially malevolent spirit from a family's
new home. <i>The Conjuring </i>is never stronger than when Wan prowls the halls of this house, all creaky basements and flickering lightbulbs and unexpected corridors. He has a solid command over pacing, allowing suspense to build naturally and avoiding cheap jump scares. Nothing on display in the film is particularly original, but its treatment of haunted house tropes is informed and proficient, arranged by his deft balance of a surprising number of narrative elements. This raises some concerns about the future of the film, as horror's graceful aging in the public conscious often relies on theme and character rather than technique. For now, though, <i>The Conjuring </i>is a well-made, scary, enjoyable movie, a success story that earns it. <b>B</b><b> </b><br />
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<b>Dark Skies</b><br />
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Thumbs way down for the genius who edited the <i>Dark Skies </i>trailer to include the above shot. I can't imagine how many tickets the inclusion of this scene, no less hilarious in context, cost the film. But in a way, its presence also suggests a certain honesty about what's in store for the viewer, a competent experience that can't always escape these silly images or a few dud lines. In an R-rated horror movie, your target demographic is likely to have a better understanding of how comedy and horror intersect and can shrug oddities like this off, or even embrace them. PG-13, however, bears the added burden of a primarily teenage audience, who probably walked out of the theater laughing at how goddamn stupid Josh Hamilton looked with his mouth hanging open. A shame, because as PG-13 horror comes, <i>Dark Skies </i>is some of the best you're going to get, an insightful hash of contemporary anxieties designed specifically to tap into what young audiences understand about themselves and are beginning to learn about their parents. Despite ostensibly being about Keri Russell, real estate agent on the edge, the focal point for the majority of the film's drama is her 13-year-old son Jesse (Dakota Goyo). His best friend is aggressive and oversexualized, he's got a crush and has no idea how to talk to her, his parents are struggling to make ends meet and fighting all the while, and there's no one to talk his younger brother through their marital spats but him. Also, aliens are fucking with them. The sci-fi horror elements, at least to someone who's a square decade older than <i>Dark Skies</i>' projected viewer, are sort of repetitive and not all that scary. There's only so many times Russell can wander around her gloomy house in a tank top and stumble upon something sinister before the affair starts to become predictable. The integration of alien hijinks into this grim facade of middle-class life is surprisingly natural, however, and eventually the movie tips its hand to invoke a potent ending about a young person's concept of the unknown. Good acting from Russell and Goyo, playing the two characters who really need it, gives this movie just the heft it needs to overcome its sporadic silliness. <b>B- </b><br />
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<b>The Lords of Salem</b><br />
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My experience with Rob Zombie is minimal, stopping short at his vile yet inexplicably loved <i>The Devil's Rejects</i>. Knowing that this purveyor of thoughtless, ugly violence got his hands on <i>Halloween </i>(and trashed it, by all accounts)<i> </i>left me never wanting to watch another of his movies again. But I'm easy, and <i>The Lords of Salem </i>had a cool poster and an intriguing premise, so I reneged on my vow immediately and gave it a shot. To give credit where credit is due, Zombie has improved significantly as a filmmaker; his use of color is superb, alternating overblown reds with foggy washed-out greens and shading the movie with skillfully employed frigid light. Some of the compositions on display here are truly vivid, a far cry from the blood-stained brown malaise of <i>Rejects</i>. He's even better with sound, creating a Salem that rumbles with subsonic unease and briefly punctuating it with snarling music or the shrieks of witches. As a writer, unfortunately, he still has a long way to go. Its ambition at least deserves note, as Zombie's ideas about horror as a local phenomenon that gets passed through the generations by blood and rumor grant the movie a strong start. The message is made doubly intriguing through his mass casting of horror icons such as Ken Foree, Dee Wallace, and Meg Foster, themselves the loci of their own grisly stories. This seed gradually loses more and more time to tedious exposition and a go-nowhere subplot about Sheri Moon Zombie's heroin addiction and, with the film's arbitrary ending, it becomes clear that Zombie had no conclusion to the point he built his narrative around. He gives a lot of deference to character development, which demonstrates a newfound understanding of how to create a sustainable horror piece, and Moon Zombie (!) is actually fairly effective as an oddball shock jock. Her limitations remain apparent, however, and despite support from shy coworker Jeff Daniel Phillips' impressively tender performance, any scene where she is asked to convey fear or desperation is something of a wash. The strengths of the film, combined with Zombie's maturing sensibilities as an artist, are ultimately unable to rescue <i>The Lords of Salem </i>from feeling like a noble failure. Recommended with hesitations; it could be a fun movie to blaze to, or simply to appreciate as a series of surreal images. <b>C+</b><br />
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<b>Evil Dead </b><br />
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I was incredibly excited for <i>Evil Dead</i>, even after its lukewarm positive reviews, simply on the basis of its trailer alone. The music was insane, it featured a wealth of monstrous practical effects, and its outlandish gore left me with hope for a resurrection of Sam Raimi's gleeful splatterfest excess. Even the presence of Diablo Cody was a major plus for me, as she is one of the few writers working today who I feel could have adequately captured the morbid comedy of my beloved original. My first disappointment came as I started the movie, when I learned that she only doctored the script because the original writers knew little English. And, uh, she didn't do a very good job. The movie is absolutely senseless, propped up with a paper thin backstory and some of the dumbest characters I've seen in a long time. The issue isn't that Lou Taylor Pucci Had to Read the Latin, because invariably Someone Has to Read the Latin. It's that he Read the Latin despite the portentous yet oddly juvenile scribblings in the margins of the Necronomicon, despite the fact that the Necronomicon was wrapped in leather and barbed wire, despite the finding of the Necronomicon in a basement full of dead cats on hooks and witchcraft implements and demarcated by a conspicuous blood trail. Even though any person with half a brain in their skull would leave this hellhole right away, these bozos decide not only to stay, but to perform a forced rehabilitation on their friend Mia (Jane Levy) as she vows sobriety and throws the last of her heroin away. ("We're giving her the same treatment she'd get at a hospital!" says the nursefriend, thinking nothing of her complete lack of training or the two cars accessible to Mia at any time.) Cold sweats and tremors are the least of her problems as, in grand horror tradition, Satan comes knocking to ruin their fun. <i>Evil Dead </i>is logically defunct down to the very last minute, culminating in an orgy of blood and fire that nonetheless manages to completely lack scares, weight, or originality. And though I was able to sporadically lose myself in the gore and carnage, done with incredible skill by a team of gifted prosthetics and makeup artists, more often than not I found myself disappointed by the soullessness of the whole affair. It's loud and crude, peppered with profane utterances that would at worst have landed you a lunchtime detention in 8th grade, and its complete lack of personality leaves its over-the-top approach to the violence feeling awfully gratuitous. As a calculated crowd-pleaser, <i>Evil Dead </i>is capable, but it's a pretty reprehensible movie that completely betrays the spirit of its forefather. <b>C- </b>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-6319781387127586062013-08-14T19:18:00.003-07:002013-08-15T02:15:32.153-07:00Elysium, Technocracy, and a Curious Case of "Heavy-Handedness"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Minor spoilers follow. </i><br />
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<i>Elysium, </i>the sophomore effort of South African writer-director Neill Blomkamp, continues a tradition of socially conscious action film established by his previous critical darling <i>District 9</i>. Moving away from <i>D9</i>'s apartheid allegory into questions of class and privilege in the year 2154, Blomkamp can't be faulted for his ambition: how many blockbuster filmmakers are this invested in delivering a product with a substantial message? Most critics haven't seen it so reasonably, and although the response to the film has been one of lukewarm enthusiasm, many of its champions qualify it as well-made action (and it really is!) that is "<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/-i-elysium-i-cant-stay-aloft/278525/" target="_blank">hazy</a>" and "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/in-elysium-matt-damon-storms-the-ultimate-gated-community/2013/08/07/539e5910-ff66-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html" target="_blank">on-the-nose</a>" while detractors write it off as having a substantial base for an insubstantial result, as if one of the goals of an action film should not be to provide action. There's a vocal dissatisfaction with the movie's supposed unsubtlety in mirroring the American healthcare system, which is perhaps a result of critics' zeal to prove their understanding, but the multiple subterranean issues of technological superiority that inform the whole movie are completely ignored. Without understanding the face of a world shaped by technology's ubiquitous hand, <i>Elysium </i>might seem "hazy" or "<a href="http://io9.com/heres-what-elysium-did-wrong-and-what-it-did-right-1125073263" target="_blank">blank</a>," but Blomkamp demonstrates a sophisticated (if unevenly expressed) understanding of the forces that guide our economic and cultural development in an increasingly unstable time.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The key to decoding <i>Elysium </i>rests with the Med-Pod, a scientific innovation that is capable of curing any ailment within seconds. Med-Pods are usable exclusively by citizens of Elysium, a space paradise exclusive to the fabulously wealthy; everyone else rots away on an decaying, overpopulated, nightmarish Earth. But that's not all - the Med-Pods are capable of extending user lifespans, up to <a href="http://www.armadyne.net/care.php" target="_blank">three times</a> that of a typical Earth dweller. Imagine what accomplishments you might be capable of if your life was three times longer than that of your peers, and then imagine the same but you're also one of the wealthiest people alive. Elysium secretary Jessica Delacourt's (Jodie Foster) unctuous promises to another Elysian politician about his development contracts being maintained "for the next two hundred years" indicate a standard of systemic abuse that now even death has a hard time stopping. Earth still has medical care, but its facilities are desperately overcrowded and unable to provide comprehensive care to patients. Max Da Costa (Matt Damon), <i>Elysium's</i> unwitting proletariat hero, suffers a severe arm break early in the film after being wrongfully detained by a police robot, and the best his local hospital can do for him is to slip on a crappy cast. Likewise, his childhood sweetheart Frey works at the same hospital but can't even convince her boss to let her dying daughter stay there. And when Max is exposed to a dose of radiation that will kill him within the week, his only hope for treatment rests on Elysium, a million miles away. Survival for Earth's citizenry is left in their own hands, governed by a magnified version of the roll-the-dice logic that American healthcare dangles above the heads of the uninsured. Med-Pods thus ensure that power and privilege remain insular, once and for all, in an economy where the middle class has been stamped out. Advancement is impossible.<br />
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<i>Elysium</i>'s intertwining of the broadening divide between rich and poor and the growth of technology, which has long been considered an exponential process, speaks to greater anxieties about the mechanization of our species. If humanity in this narrative has reached a point of scientific advancement that allows us to cure all disease with impunity, it can be reasonably understood that our capacity for other tremendous inventions would create a financial bottleneck. Concurrent with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law" target="_blank">Moore's law</a>, which posits technology as a self-perpetuating development, is Moore's second law, where the costs of said development grow with each new innovation. Tech under this schema is produced by the wealthy for the wealthy, and the few bits of salvage that find their way into the hands of Earth's insurgency are obsolete or prone to dysfunction. Machinery represents a constant assertion of the power of the upper class, designed specifically to oppress Earthling scum: the aforementioned policebot that fucks Max up, the automated parole officer that he unsuccessfully takes his grievances to, and Sharlto Copley's role as a maniacal cyborg mercenary retained by Delacourt to keep Elysium immigrant-free. Factories are still populated by humans, sure, but they're probably paid less than it would cost to manufacture and maintain a machine of similar purpose. A world built on cybercapital is unsustainable, depersonalized, unpredictable; technology is not to be trusted, and railing against it takes an incalculable physical and mental toll on the challenger. Max is beaten down by the robot puppets of Elysium time after time throughout the movie, sometimes for no reason at all. But in order to subvert the machine, the citizens of Earth must paradoxically employ it, as when Max has a superstrong metallic exoskeleton surgically grafted to him, or when bandit king Spider acquires an important bit of code that allows him to hack into Elysium's systems. The most valuable distinction in <i>Elysium</i>'s toolkit, the thematic point that distinguishes each party's use of the machine, is the element of humanity and community. Like Max, our actions may initially be motivated by self-interest, but as they pave the way toward opportunity for greater social change, it is compassion for and understanding of our fellow man that ennobles us enough to do the right thing. (It's hard to discuss this aspect of the film, conceived with admirable "subtlety" and yet undiscussed by the critical canon, without spoiling the movie. See it!) <br />
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There are some rickety sections in the storytelling, to be sure. The Med-Pod is an admittedly underdeveloped symbol, which can make an authoritative argument for <i>Elysium</i>'s merits difficult from either side, and a little more clarity about the systematic structure of both Earth and Elysium would have gone a long way. This is a necessary evil in the development of a movie, which as I've said before, is unable to provide the expository depth that we have come to expect from more comprehensive visual media such as serialized television. It is unfair of the critical pulse to dismiss <i>Elysium </i>as a brainless, heavy-handed action flick, when its politics are outwardly transparent but motivated by forces and ideas that are actually quite incisive. Science without soul will be the death of us all.<br />
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<b>B</b>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-65860157023045703252013-07-30T13:26:00.001-07:002013-08-09T00:43:43.992-07:00Fear is Fascinating: Clock Tower and the Gnarled Evolution of Survival Horror<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A work of horror art most always calls upon a collection of familiar, archetypal anxieties, sculpted into worst-case scenarios with sinister faces. <i>Cabin in the Woods </i>says it best when it labels its retinue of monsters as "remnant of the Old World," all of them nightmare visions continually filtered through the collective conscious. The ingredients remain the same; the alchemy is volatile, subordinate to the aesthetic and cultural trends of the time, the artist's command of his or her subject, and perhaps most critically, the medium in which it is presented. Video games have had an exceptionally difficult time nailing down the formula for a variety of reasons that only seems to multiply as their technology develops. <br />
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Horror in gaming is often described as "survival horror" because, well, it falls on You the Player to survive. Easier said than done when the games of this genre deliberately leave you understocked and unprepared for whatever threats are waiting to bury you. Combat and restorative items are either nonexistent or in short supply, an emphasis is placed on spatial awareness and puzzle solving, and danger lurks unrepentant at every turn. These design principles can be found in games as early as the NES's 1989 <i>Sweet Home</i>, a tale of madness and infanticide Nintendo found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMcxSasGAM0" target="_blank">too gruesome</a> for their delicate American players, and were popularized by Capcom's 1996 Playstation hit <i>Resident Evil</i>. The problem is that the ludic cornerstones of the genre - deprivation, helplessness, resource conservation - run counter to what a vast majority of contemporary gamers now find satisfying in their virtual experience, and as such survival horror has significantly dwindled in popularity. There have been a few attempts to resurrect it, such as breakout hit <i>Amnesia: The Dark Descent</i>, but recent entries in old-guard franchises <i>Resident Evil </i>and <i>Silent Hill </i>have been met with disdain or disinterest.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMrFp_mADHR4cs5vRKGv1dUuv-deD4HlLxM7U30DiPiDyGPtBrQxNAxOn71UW8HeU6YyjVJLjjgRv2EFCptYg_rv39vWK76_5ftqJUxaKjOG9uM510GyQ05qBhSh5090AzVTRACuLorgzr/s1600/tumblr_m8ct6kiGLp1qfa1jdo1_500.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMrFp_mADHR4cs5vRKGv1dUuv-deD4HlLxM7U30DiPiDyGPtBrQxNAxOn71UW8HeU6YyjVJLjjgRv2EFCptYg_rv39vWK76_5ftqJUxaKjOG9uM510GyQ05qBhSh5090AzVTRACuLorgzr/s320/tumblr_m8ct6kiGLp1qfa1jdo1_500.gif" width="320" /></a>One series in particular that exemplifies the struggles of the genre is Human Entertainment's <i>Clock Tower</i>, four titles strong and largely forgotten in the annals of video game history. <i>Clock Tower</i>'s genesis was on the Super Nintendo in 1995; it is generally considered the only survival horror game for the platform, and its moderate success in Japan led to three sequels and a slew of ports. (As with <i>Sweet Home, </i>Nintendo of America balked at its violent content and refused to localize it.) <i>Clock Tower</i> concerns recent adoptee Jennifer Simpson, her sinister new home, and the Barrows clan that resides there. When her fellow Granite Orphanage strays go missing, Jennifer takes it upon herself to find her friends and escape the mansion...but an unarmed adolescent girl stands little chance against a scissor-wielding mutant, as she soon comes to learn. Jennifer cannot pick up or use any weapons, and her sole means of self-preservation are to hide or to use a few items scattered throughout her surroundings to temporarily stop Scissorman in his tracks. In keeping with horror's storied "final girl," the point of agency for the audience is physically outclassed by her assailant and must instead rely on her wits and intuition to defeat him. <i>Clock Tower </i>borrows extensively from film; its reference points are numerous and unsubtle, but highly appealing. The most obvious one is Dario Argento's 1985 film <i>Phenomena</i>, from which it lifts the likeness of its main character and a couple of baddies (though the razor-wielding monkey, sadly, is nowhere to be seen). There are nods to other horror works as well, including <i>Deep Red </i>and this wild <i>Suspiria</i>-esque interlude:<br />
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<i>Clock Tower </i>is bloodless and not incredibly graphic, but it is quite harrowing for a 1995 SNES title. Carefully animated and featuring remarkable sound design, its suggestive potency is underrepresented by mere GIFs. Part of the game's power comes from the ambiguity of primitive technology; when you consider horror's reliance on the constant sensation of not knowing, the employment of imagination to fill in the gaps, it becomes far more plausible that a sprite-based point-and-click adventure from two decades ago could hold its share of scares. Sadly, the series' move to polygons, Playstation, and the third dimension failed to capture that lightning in a bottle. <i>Clock Tower II</i>, referred to as <i>Clock Tower </i>in America, is a very different beast from its predecessor. Trading in the somber palette of the Barrows mansion for garishly lit spaces and expressive sprites for graceless 3D character models, the game's advance toward "realistic" aesthetics cannot maintain the delicate atmosphere of the original.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtHF_xSA1e3Iy_SgvQKAdGJqv0NU1n-cke4rtEaKLWxjaWLSAjlN-Fs4IbciTdVt5AUQMXsMhHNsKft0FQN8UNeVOJCaanZweQLmXV0rrSY1QNlwu7T89Y9jHlk8Z7facpr0bo80XmqT1V/s1600/playstation-42781-41333137863.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtHF_xSA1e3Iy_SgvQKAdGJqv0NU1n-cke4rtEaKLWxjaWLSAjlN-Fs4IbciTdVt5AUQMXsMhHNsKft0FQN8UNeVOJCaanZweQLmXV0rrSY1QNlwu7T89Y9jHlk8Z7facpr0bo80XmqT1V/s320/playstation-42781-41333137863.png" width="320" /></a>No longer able to accommodate the menacing hallucinatory qualities of the original <i>Clock Tower</i>, <i>Clock Tower II </i>takes a different narrative tack, adopting the guise of a broad, somewhat campy slasher. The plot deals with Jennifer's escape from her evil host family and the subsequent media blitz that surrounds both her and Scissorman, sort of a <i>Scream </i>before <i>Scream</i>. Its initial promise dulls as the writers quickly lose focus, eschewing any themes interesting enough to sustain its oddly enormous script and instead shoveling in as many gruesome kills as possible. This approach is enjoyable in its own right, as the game has a few cool set pieces and over a dozen moderately interesting characters, all of them waiting to die in highly entertaining ways. Quite like the miscarriages in the series' transition from 2D to 3D, though, a lot is lost by sticking these characters with poorly-acted dialogue, and way too much of it. The obvious pressure placed on <i>Clock Tower II </i>by technological advancement - be bigger, voice the script, employ polygonal rendering, etc. - ultimately scuttles its worth as a horror object, though it remains an enjoyable and fitfully clever entry in its genre.<br />
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Human Entertainment's tentative first step into the third dimension was critically divisive but marginally successful, enough for them to roll the dice again on a spinoff title. Nine months previous, however, <i>Resident Evil </i>had come out and, with its combat system and three-dimensional environments, made adventure games in <i>Clock Tower</i>'s image<i> </i>look sort of outmoded. 1998's <i>Clock Tower: Ghost Head</i>, localized as <i>Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within</i>, retains nothing from the first two games in the franchise except for its fundamental point-and-click mechanics, which it then splices with a rudimentary firearms system for deterring your stalkers. Human failed on both counts: <i>Ghost Head </i>is a wretched piece of shit, probably the worst video game I've ever played. I've owned it for a decade and still haven't managed to beat it, let alone unlock its THIRTEEN alternate endings.<br />
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There isn't enough room in one blog post alone to address what's wrong with <i>Ghost Head</i>; the game feels like it wasn't even submitted to quality control. There's an admirable return to the dialogue-light approach of the original <i>Clock Tower</i>, but when your game features a schizophrenic heroine, a six-year-old girl with a knife, a possessed statue, zombies, a machete-toting killer in a Hannya mask, and evil armor, players stranded in the narrative deep end will be left wondering why they should care. The game tirelessly throws assailant after assailant in your path, many of which can be temporarily subdued with a pistol - except you can only fire it if you're Bates, gravel-voiced alter of protagonist Alyssa Hale. To enact this transformation, you first have to put Alyssa's protective amulet down in one of several preordained locations, then get attacked by an enemy, take at least one point of panic damage, run away to another room, and orient the painfully awkward crosshair onto the enemy as they approach you. All this instead of, you know, allowing the teenage girl to use the gun. These combat sequences, a horrible attempt to copy <i>Resident Evil</i>'s third-person action, contribute nothing to the game except to further muddy its excruciating pace. Environments already unfold haphazardly and without explanation; there are nearly ten doors in the first act of the game that cannot even be examined until you complete such apocryphal objectives as looking at a suit of armor or finding your best friend's leg in a toilet. Throw in all this repetitive, disorienting combat, and the game's exploration turns from a chore to a Sisyphean trial. And for what? A senseless plot? Uglier graphics than <i>Clock Tower II? </i>Some of the worst voice acting of all time? All that said, <i>Ghost Head</i> is actually pretty funny, if you can stand playing the thing. I love the indecipherable-cum-inept <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN11FyTBw9s&t=0m28s" target="_blank">opening cinematic</a>, an inadvertent metaphor for the game itself, and Bates' insults are <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l52zDGv1tK4&t=2m34s" target="_blank">particularly innovative</a>.<br />
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<i>Clock Tower: Ghost Head </i>stands as a complete disaster that at least had the spine to try and reconcile its progenitor's unique adventuring mechanics with the demands of a market increasingly fatted by powerful horror heroes. Hell, earlier in the year <i>Resident Evil 2 </i>gave players shotguns and a rocket launcher to play around with, leaving <i>Ghost Head</i>'s three weapons looking awfully paltry. Derided by critic and customer alike, Human Entertainment produced a few obscure Japan-only puzzle and wrestling games before folding one year later. In 2002 Capcom, ever the enterprising lot, picked up the <i>Clock Tower </i>license and once again attempted to cross the widening survival horror gap with <i>Clock Tower 3</i>. Their own horror series clearly hitting its stride, Capcom was obviously going to mold this new acquisition into something more commercially viable, but how best to do so while appeasing <i>Clock Tower</i>'s cult fanbase? The answer is simple, and strong in concept, but grafted to the plot in embarrassing ways. <i>Clock Tower 3 </i>is broken up into four chapters, each one unified by some nonsense about Alyssa Hamilton, a fourteen-year-old girl who travels through time and space (!) to find her mother and discover the secrets behind her matriarchal destiny as a Rooder (!!). Rooders, if the game is to be believed, spend 95% of each chapter solving murder mysteries and hiding from inhuman serial killers, only to suddenly fulfill their inner potential and transform into Magical Archer Angels.<br />
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Repeated four times over, this sequence is always followed by a tedious boss fight where you run to one end of a small battlefield and hope the AI is dumb enough to let you toss off a few fully charged arrows. It looks bad, plays bad, is bad. This is really a shame, because <i>Clock Tower 3 </i>lands the exploration segments more often than not, and I like the idea of a recurrent narrative turnabout where solving each mystery allows Alyssa to defeat her foes once and for all. But why the outlandish, flow-destroying, tonally inappropriate Sailor Moon stuff? It doesn't jell with the game's atmosphere, which occasionally wavers toward a similar goofiness but is effectively grim for the most part. A much more thematically appropriate way to empower the player and still maintain the rush of being pursued would turn each chapter's "sentimental item" (McGuffin) into the final cog of a trap or system designed to fell the assailant once and for all. Lazy bow combat can't be the kind of compromise anyone was looking for. <br />
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(Gotta admit though, determining the length of a boss' life bar through the amount of victims they claimed is pretty clever stuff.)<br />
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<i>Clock Tower 3 </i>is about as cheesy as you'd expect it to be, but that doesn't discount the game's merits: great voice work, excellent cutscene direction (brought to you by <i>Battle Royale </i>director Kinji Fukasaku), a mostly smooth transition away from the series' point-and-click roots, and a few truly effective scares early on. Unfortunately, the cumulative disenchantment brought about by its boss fights and plot left the game unpopular in the cold light of day, so Capcom quietly shelved the <i>Clock Tower </i>license, presumably for all time. It is an ignoble end for a franchise once ahead of its time, unable to keep up with the demands of technology and the market. <i>Clock Tower</i>'s failure predicted survival horror's universal inability to meet its audience halfway - <i>Resident Evil 6</i>, such a departure from its predecessors that Capcom rebranded it as "dramatic horror," was critically panned and sold short of Capcom's expectations. <i>Silent Hill: Downpour </i>barely moved half a million copies, and <i>Fatal Frame 4 </i>wasn't even released outside of Japan. It would seem that the console market, a ratrace to reach the greatest level of uncanny valley "realism," simply can't support the strict aesthetic demands of horror. Imagination is less and less the province of these hyper-powered machines, hellbent on showing us every shadow, every texture. This, of course, urges the resounding question of gamers brought up by the school of first-person shooter philosophy: if we can see it, why can't we kill it? It is unfortunate that such a school of thought will keep a whole generation of gamers from recognizing this genre's true capacity for fear.<br />
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<b>BONUS! </b>Here's some <i>Clock Tower </i>fanart I put on DeviantArt (where else?) when I was 15. Warning: major talent ahead. I didn't draw an elbow for Laura in the first picture because I thought it would be artistic...seriously.<br />
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Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-77969901026819579032013-07-14T15:16:00.000-07:002013-07-14T18:08:34.851-07:00Sharknado and Pacific Rim: 21st Century Living for Monsters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFcrV6-3zfWlbhTl7RM_sy1MdPML74vJJbmVqVM1ytkhZ6nbcjniGstgq5TsCEdhFQLPzw8ABvcNu7IGqWXdjMTYLSR2sypV1iZVI7s9ZEvlrmvljmPpuCxaM66bytQ_-waIotc2eVB713/s1600/nup-156643-0042-jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFcrV6-3zfWlbhTl7RM_sy1MdPML74vJJbmVqVM1ytkhZ6nbcjniGstgq5TsCEdhFQLPzw8ABvcNu7IGqWXdjMTYLSR2sypV1iZVI7s9ZEvlrmvljmPpuCxaM66bytQ_-waIotc2eVB713/s320/nup-156643-0042-jpg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Sharknado</i>, SyFy's newest media Hail Mary, premiered on Thursday to <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-sharknado-twitter-bait-061313,0,5016298.story" target="_blank">squarely average ratings</a> and a deluge of Twitter lurkers desperate for attention. I've already touched on <a href="http://drewbyrd.blogspot.com/2013/01/you-wanna-suck-brontosaurus-dick-or-how.html" target="_blank">the caveats of intentional camp programming</a>, and this soulless nonsense doesn't deserve many more words than that. Bad movies are typically funny if they're unexpected and unintentional; when you have studios like The Asylum churning out mirror-image screenplays differentiated only by beastie, the thrill of discovery is gone. All you're watching is a movie that has successfully managed to be bad, a workmanlike mimicry of incompetence that begs for ridicule at every turn. Laugh at the man cutting an airborne shark in half with a chainsaw! Mock the newscaster's awkward voice! Groan at "We're gonna need a bigger chopper," just to show your friends that you understand the reference! <i>Sharknado </i>and its ilk are films forged in pure cynicism, the antithesis of what makes a work of art into camp.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijw6Lf0Cy4LVJv6Y2LwedCKhhUWSMihvnFJ29X4Rs6dnsJQNKEpjWml9vpzFala1UDOZfL1hszQ3nNEXCVqj_5Eow-nlkUEmTOKLnGNTHzm0sw4Ec93ZhcWzEDCV8xKfecLTYaDlAw25tF/s1600/pacific-rim-from-the-sky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijw6Lf0Cy4LVJv6Y2LwedCKhhUWSMihvnFJ29X4Rs6dnsJQNKEpjWml9vpzFala1UDOZfL1hszQ3nNEXCVqj_5Eow-nlkUEmTOKLnGNTHzm0sw4Ec93ZhcWzEDCV8xKfecLTYaDlAw25tF/s320/pacific-rim-from-the-sky.jpg" width="320" /></a>Meanwhile, fellow creature feature <i>Pacific Rim </i>took in only $38 million domestically this weekend. Its grosses will likely be satisfactory, but on a $190 million investment, "satisfactory" probably ain't what Warner Bros. is looking for...especially when they only have one active franchise to their name (<i>The Hobbit</i>). The film has been successful critically and <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-report-pacific-rim-584939" target="_blank">received an A- CinemaScore</a>, so one can only hope that word of mouth will bolster its weak box office. This is mostly because the movie deserves it but also because I want it to <b>CRUSH </b><i>Grown Ups 2</i>. <i>Pacific Rim </i>is by no means perfect - the dialogue is bad, the pace and story setup are rushed to occasional unpleasantness, Charlie Hunnam is a nonstarter as hotblooded hero Raleigh Becket, and Guillermo del Toro seriously needs to work on directing and editing comic relief. But it's also got a great heart, supported by its optimism about human potential and unity, and the action is just beautiful. Comparisons to <i>Transformers </i>aren't totally inaccurate, especially when the marketing is working overtime to court its fans, but a director at the helm who understands the importance of color and space in action choreography makes a monumental difference. The fights here are far more than interchangeable metal husks running into each other at mach speed, in no small part because the characters have an active stake in the outcomes of these fights. If you prefer your action delivered entirely by 'bots while the useless meatsacks run through the streets and scream, then God be with you, but I'd sooner die. <br />
<br />
So what is it about the monster movie, anyway? Names like <i>Alien, Predator, </i>and <i>King Kong </i>can still get asses in seats, but they have decades of celebrated history. The only original films in the genre to turn a profit in the last ten years are <i>Super 8</i>, <i>Cloverfield</i>, <i>The Host, </i>and, uh, <i>Shark Night 3D. </i>(Box Office Mojo's <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=creaturefeature.htm" target="_blank">categorization</a> would also place <i>The Grey </i>and <i>The Descent </i>in this bracket, but I'm not sure I'd call them "creature features.") That's it? About one successful monster action movie every two years? What happened to the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082186/reference" target="_blank">Harryhausen</a> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057197/reference" target="_blank">hits</a>, or the piles of mid-50s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/reference" target="_blank">radiation</a> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/reference" target="_blank">freakout</a> movies? I suppose no one wants to brave the dinosaur well when <i>Jurassic Park </i>has so absolutely cornered it; alligator movies are rarely satisfying; spiders are passe and sharks cartoonish. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqNMvUWxLud07BNDNp7oslhUPMfGCOYAoeCKzWTQt9Va9ViXyqnrl5Whi0NfjYARP3pAuQmPDceTSq1TYMnB6HoW9lU5PW7XaMLrujPdAXaNV3scg1RUbFtjvoGkwJLMAqIh0c587U3fqZ/s1600/Pacific-Rim_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqNMvUWxLud07BNDNp7oslhUPMfGCOYAoeCKzWTQt9Va9ViXyqnrl5Whi0NfjYARP3pAuQmPDceTSq1TYMnB6HoW9lU5PW7XaMLrujPdAXaNV3scg1RUbFtjvoGkwJLMAqIh0c587U3fqZ/s320/Pacific-Rim_0.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Perhaps there just isn't much of a role for the creature feature in contemporary cinema, short of as a site for derision and occasional blockbuster risk-taking. This is doubly unfortunate when you consider the role that this genre has traditionally played in the cinematic canon: directors and writers have long used inhuman threats allegorically to address the pervasive scientific anxieties of the time. Viewers can find it as early as 1910's <i>Frankenstein</i>, a treatise on pseudosciences like galvanism and the ethical quandaries present in playing God. Also significant are 1953's <i>The War of the Worlds</i>, a treatment of H.G. Wells' scientific revision of invasion literature, and 1954's atomic testing cautionary tales <i>Them! </i>and <i>Godzilla</i>. (The glut of films in the latter subdivision coming from post-bomb Japan is particularly difficult to ignore.) The prominence of creature films in this era can also be ascribed to <a href="http://web.nmsu.edu/~susanbro/eced440/docs/scientific_literacy_another_look.pdf" target="_blank">a groundswell of interest in scientific education</a> after World War II, just as the modern waning of the genre runs parallel to our <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218134322.htm" target="_blank">strikingly low scientific literacy</a>. With such precedents in mind, I don't think it's any coincidence that <i>Sharknado </i>and <i>Pacific Rim </i>both trace the origins of their respective monsters to climate change. Granted, their explanations are little more than throwaway lines, but these are still two of the most visible creature films of the last couple of years catalyzed by the most visible scientific concern of the last couple of years. Neither film benefits from paying too much lipservice to the issue, since both are continually hurrying to get to the good stuff; a more salient example might be last year's <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i>, which closely ties both its ravaging aurochs and its barely-restrained class warfare to global warming. It is difficult to say if the environmental message of <i>Pacific Rim </i>will make any sort of impression - it certainly won't come from <i>Sharknado</i>, and fifteen seconds of Charlie Day's whiny monologuing is far down the list of memorable qualities in del Toro's film. More mainstream consciousness of this continually ignored problem can't possibly be a bad thing, though, and the creature feature subgenre has proven itself a compelling polemic vessel for over a century. Take what you can get from your Hollywood megaproducts, I suppose, be that big stompy monsters or environmental responsibility. Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-32844340591319609162013-05-30T18:59:00.001-07:002013-05-30T19:14:12.545-07:00Top of the Lake: A Devil's Heart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuuOEoI-_GmKzA33OascLsncM9KK1Vc0Q3-4upmRkD55NIE-H7LzoucIdOvanfWGnYKy_7yhaxmpZjsVoLnbTDqyOOsMOfczjZc26e5gWFLhZAT51JIgbg0CagyYC49BiMvyA5pWkEB5xr/s1600/NY-CF863_SPEAKE_G_20130318145332.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuuOEoI-_GmKzA33OascLsncM9KK1Vc0Q3-4upmRkD55NIE-H7LzoucIdOvanfWGnYKy_7yhaxmpZjsVoLnbTDqyOOsMOfczjZc26e5gWFLhZAT51JIgbg0CagyYC49BiMvyA5pWkEB5xr/s400/NY-CF863_SPEAKE_G_20130318145332.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Top of the Lake </i>is a mystery, in case you couldn't tell by that picture of Elisabeth Moss peering at some foul secret or something through the trees. Not that "mystery" tells us much anymore about narrative art, since any plot line by nature must have some mysterious elements in order to keep it compelling, but typically we associate it with a crime, suspects, motives, alibis...the whole collection of modular pieces that suit the needs of its storyteller's message. All of these elements are necessarily
in service to unraveling or shading the central mystery, though a skilled craftsman can distract from this mechanical approach. <span style="font-style: normal;">Jane
Campion's deft creative hand guarantees that </span><i>Top of the
Lake –</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> equal parts rape-murder
riddle, gender polemic, socioeconomic dissection, and character study
– wobbles only minimally, despite the wealth of content on hand. A
densely plotted six-hour miniseries brings outstanding attention to
its swerves in storytelling, especially when they're as portentous as
a bottle labeled “ROOFIES” or as inexplicable as a character
being pardoned almost immediately for stabbing someone in a bar.
Though consistently compelling, </span><i>Top of the Lake </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is
also noticeably sloppy, which ultimately diminishes the genre
framework that Campion chooses to work in.</span></div>
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Instead, she
applies her laser focus to creating the town of Lake Top and the
community that has coalesced around it. Lake Top is impoverished,
grimy, and hard, a town suspended in urban decay and technological
obsolescence. It's the kind of backwater hamlet where a 12-year-old
like Tui Mitcham is raped and impregnated and everyone turns their
head out of fear. When she subsequently vanishes into the woods, Lake
Top's police write her off as dead to spare themselves the trouble,
leaving detective Robin Griffin to step in where no others will. The
sole woman on the local police force, Griffin soon finds herself a
ridiculed pariah, every aspect of her personal history made public to
her peers and coarsely paralleled with Tui's so that she might see her
feminine irrationality and forfeit this “lost cause.” Even the
most resilient of women are marginalized and disrespected wholesale
in Lake Top; they fade into obscure housewifery, scramble for illegal
gruntwork under local magnate/shark Matt Mitcham, or if they're
especially noncompliant (or “unfuckable,” in his acid phrasing)
they find themselves ghettoized in shipping container colony
Paradise.
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Fortunately,
</span><i>Top of the Lake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s
discussion of gender retains nuance beyond awful men and saintly
women. Lake Top is ruled by a crushing patriarchy; Campion has no
pretense in depicting this structure as anything but what it is, an
ideological spearhead led by walking mommy issue Matt Mitcham and
enforced by his cadre of dim flunkies. The women, however, are
completely at a loss for power or structure of their own. The closest
they have to a leader is GJ (Holly Hunter chewing mad scenery),
reluctant oracle of Paradise, who doles out cryptic advice with
minimal surface usefulness. They have little to offer Griffin but
empathy, as brokedown disempowered refugees in a town that allows
them no escape or reform. The long and short of this gender dynamic
is that </span><i>no one </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is
willing or able to help Robin Griffin except her on-and-off boyfriend Johnno,
black sheep of the Mitcham clan who harbors secrets of his own.
Elisabeth Moss displays a tremendous range of expression as Griffin,
her face signposting every turn and slight the citizens of Lake Top
heap upon her. Despite a dodgy accent (in line with </span><i>Top
of the Lake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s established
discomfort with its mechanics), she taps completely into both the
cruelty of her surroundings and the turbulence that courses beneath
her character. Noble, thorny, and real to the point of unease, Robin
is exactly the protagonist this miniseries needs to give its
arguments human context. </span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSwJH2wJLsUegOYvD_IhboP1TsgIzle8aba7eRd-b7ObsQCUWVKoJC9H1uVGBqNciGlBd3ZF3ohOjbsyFidUJkp4VuHDph6q65hs6iiDwKOXf6m_TMHMU_5cGPU2ZSXDuEmJrJVj-ymR0h/s1600/totl_ep1_25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSwJH2wJLsUegOYvD_IhboP1TsgIzle8aba7eRd-b7ObsQCUWVKoJC9H1uVGBqNciGlBd3ZF3ohOjbsyFidUJkp4VuHDph6q65hs6iiDwKOXf6m_TMHMU_5cGPU2ZSXDuEmJrJVj-ymR0h/s320/totl_ep1_25.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">What
makes </span><i>Top of the Lake</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s
examination of class and gender issues so resonant is its fully
realized environment. Sexism, corruption and economic struggle don't
simply exist in a bubble, visited on the Robins of the world by
faceless oppressors. They stem from systemic reinforcement, enkindled
by a community where behaviors that beget said moral ills are
expected and encouraged. Campion's cinematographic preoccupation with her strikingly stark New Zealand setting leaves an even greater ache, as if
to say how unfair it is that such a beautiful world should develop in
such an awful manner. Even Lake Top's namesake, the centerpiece of this splendor, is subject to a Maori fable claiming that a "devil's heart" beats at the bottom. The place runs overgrown with secrets, thicket upon
unnavigable thicket like the one Robin's crawling through in that
picture – nature, human or otherwise, can be enormously destructive
when left unchecked. </span>
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<b>B+</b></div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-141812319634485922013-05-07T19:43:00.001-07:002013-09-13T01:46:52.910-07:00Deadly Premonition, Mass Effect 3, Bioshock Infinite: Three Choices, No Choice?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqNZfG50GTcWscVKWhU0JPHfj9HJ2_H82-QwSRpg3V21bJJFpRQSJ33WZ-hNaKY5ndBgtd4OVg3Is-YdIAzLt-IvERG_mci-nhqvGgF5nzpiK4gg1MSeFnMZ9OAXLPrtZqIT7OF3QbXG8T/s1600/BioshockInfinite1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqNZfG50GTcWscVKWhU0JPHfj9HJ2_H82-QwSRpg3V21bJJFpRQSJ33WZ-hNaKY5ndBgtd4OVg3Is-YdIAzLt-IvERG_mci-nhqvGgF5nzpiK4gg1MSeFnMZ9OAXLPrtZqIT7OF3QbXG8T/s320/BioshockInfinite1.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></div>
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<i><i>Bioshock Infinite</i>, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Ken
Levine's newest stab at bringing some life to the AAA gaming
landscape, has spent the last month enjoying impressive <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/bioshock-infinite" target="_blank">critical
and public acclaim</a></span>.
<span style="font-style: normal;">As a game, it is a machine as
well-oiled as you could hope to ask for, a first-person shooter
etched from thoughtful gun combat and a Vigor system that complements
it stylistically and ludically in equal portions. There has been some
streamlining, but we're in a gaming climate that streamlines as a
matter of course, especially by a franchise's third iteration.
Narratively, </span><i>Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">hosts
a plague of discontents, ameliorated partially by the game's
insistence on exploring them through the story's subtext. To simplify
drastically, Levine claims through </span><i>Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">that
narrative video gaming will always be subject to a series of
technological restrictions. It's a wonderful idea for a game to
grapple with, but it doesn't always work out. Leigh Alexander has
done <a href="http://kotaku.com/now-is-the-best-time-a-critique-of-bioshock-infinite-472517493" target="_blank">an excellent job</a> at delineating some of the friction that
</span><i>Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">encounters as
a narrative-based game</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
but some of her arguments are predicated on the notion that the
original </span><i>Bioshock </i>unified
narrative and gameplay seamlessly. It is unrealistic to expect every
act of brutality in a game of this genre to maintain a sense of
commodified mortality; for all that atmosphere and all those piquant
Objectivist flourishes and all the hullabaloo about “Would you
kindly?”, the first iteration is still a game where you mow down
underwater zombies in the hundreds. </div>
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<a name='more'></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEefsZPYTUh6nrc_wnXMmL0Iy2vQmr6RJ6DtDsEXsM3Pt9AEu9zdlq1DKNPKaaHS1Ko1izNM8mW7jDdm550MczFbl11HvuMv4dZLFJZd0sULuqnrzExPFRv9E6uHejwQUmUMBFzZ1N8RYm/s1600/bioshock-infinite-coin-toss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEefsZPYTUh6nrc_wnXMmL0Iy2vQmr6RJ6DtDsEXsM3Pt9AEu9zdlq1DKNPKaaHS1Ko1izNM8mW7jDdm550MczFbl11HvuMv4dZLFJZd0sULuqnrzExPFRv9E6uHejwQUmUMBFzZ1N8RYm/s320/bioshock-infinite-coin-toss.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>Bioshock Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">takes
on the enormously ambitious task of taking a diegetic stance on one
of the greatest challenges a game developer faces today. The mantle
fell on the series almost by default, as it has never been shy about
accepting and exploring its status as a video game. </span><i>Bioshock
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">examined the business of being a
man without a choice, much like a player confronted with a static set
of outcomes, and </span><i>Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">further
posited choice as a universal mutation that nonetheless results in
one fixed point. The fixity in </span><i>Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">means
that Booker can't advance toward his fate until you accept that
baptism, rescue that girl, walk through that tear – Levine argues
that the meat in between is where we gamers are expected to get our
fill of “choice.” His viewpoint is not strictly compromised by
its adherence to standard video game mechanics, and though the
integrity of his thesis is occasionally undermined by frayed threads
(uncomfortable cinematic glitches, the incorporation of the Vigors,
the game's struggle to unify Columbia's political climate with its
subtextual commentary), Levine still accepts and essays his
limitations through a medium and genre that aren't exactly ideal for
hosting them. </span><i>Bioshock </i><span style="font-style: normal;">titles
may have important things to say, but they're still games, something
that Levine makes no apologies for. </span> <br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Assessing
the technical boundaries present in a creative mode calls to mind
1895's cinematic keystone </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk" target="_blank"><i>Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat</i></a><i>,
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">a movie that historians claimed
caused audiences to “leap out of their seats in horror” as they
saw a train barreling toward them in robust 16 FPS motion. We have
the blessing of retrospection, and it seems much more likely that
these reactions were reflexes to the excitement of watching. No one
went to this movie thinking that a train was actually going to hit
them. With video gaming, we have yet to reach such a common point of
understanding; indeed, the promise of virtual interactivity has
apparently short-circuited the notion that this medium also has its
limits. </span>
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">But
</span><i>Bioshock Infinite, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">for
whatever reason, eludes the hatred that </span><i>Mass Effect 3
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">received for its supposedly
choiceless ending. The </span><i>Mass Effect </i><span style="font-style: normal;">saga
was a fully serialized collection narrative released in three
installments over the course of five years and scaffolded by DLC,
books, comics, and an animated film. Expectations quickly coalesced
around the release of the third and final title, and players were
disappointed to learn that apparently pivotal decisions made in the
first two games had a minimal impact on the third. Oftentimes these
decisions were translated into either War Assets, an abstract number
determining your success in the unplayable final battle, or
sidequests, which typically just gave you more War Assets.
Disappointing, to be sure, but it pales in comparison to how the game
handles its actual ending – three choices, marginally informed by
your moral standing but remaining the same except for a few extra
cinematic seconds. To many outraged fans, it became less about the
content (mostly satisfactory, though rushed), but rather a concrete
sense of entitlement to three vastly different endings based on
careful calculations of how they played through an 100-hour epic.
This is untenable for a multitude of reasons: budget, plot and story
consistency, perceived differences in ending quality, and so on. And
thus, as in </span><i>Bioshock Infinite,</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
the pervasive specter of “choice” ultimately proves itself as a
means to an end rather than an end itself. I think </span><i>Mass
Effect 3</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s ending is the closest
thing a widespread gaming audience has had to its </span><i>Arrival
of a Train </i><span style="font-style: normal;">moment</span><i>,
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">where the shortcomings of a new
mode of experience finally became apparent; the game</span><i>
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">thereby fell on the sword for
the likes of </span><i>Infinite</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
an entry in a series similarly preoccupied with man's many paths but
offering even less conclusive variation.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWedybdj4Vj0FcQ-dD0wemHiDVpf4YwTyfa-RAcr8G_XYPeXXK4tQ3r_3iMgXZ7ujUdps4LKCnLjm5yvJ_iDzrv5FgSpuPf1xtYfMCiUFL5FsfRv0UqoabDNgMAwHCd0-UZgPMvZhziZ0w/s1600/deadly-premonition-zombie2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWedybdj4Vj0FcQ-dD0wemHiDVpf4YwTyfa-RAcr8G_XYPeXXK4tQ3r_3iMgXZ7ujUdps4LKCnLjm5yvJ_iDzrv5FgSpuPf1xtYfMCiUFL5FsfRv0UqoabDNgMAwHCd0-UZgPMvZhziZ0w/s320/deadly-premonition-zombie2.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-style: normal;">Evaluated
through audience reaction or objective criticism, neither of these
games was entirely successful in reaching its goal. And because of
the myriad complications present in programming a game, let alone a
hundred-million dollar game, it's not likely in this generation that
developers will be able to bridge gamers' notions of agency with a
multi-forked preprogrammed narrative that molds itself to their
decisions. I have never been bothered by video games with only one
ending, as I feel this approach gives scenarists the greatest degree
of freedom to design the story they want to tell. In this regard I
think </span><i>Deadly Premonition</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
though certainly rife with flaws, offers a satisfying middle ground
between choice-driven story development and a focused creative
vision. </span><i>Deadly Premonition</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
is essentially a </span><i>Twin Peaks </i><span style="font-style: normal;">ripoff,
isolating one schizophrenic FBI agent in a town full of eccentrics
against the backdrop of a recent murder. But its scope is huge, much
more than </span><i>Bioshock Infinite </i><span style="font-style: normal;">or
</span><i>Mass Effect 3</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and
nearly all of the content offers a fuller picture of the town of
Greenvale. Interacting with your surroundings beyond the most basic
parameters of the plot is typically left to sidequests, fifty in
number, generous in length, and every one offering some fragment of
insight about the game's fascinating universe. </span><i>Deadly
Premonition </i><span style="font-style: normal;">encourages you to
take time and dig deep into this town's network of secrets not only
through world building, but also in-game rewards and explicit player
encouragement. Agent Francis York Morgan, in dialogue with his
alternate personality Zach (you), repeatedly stresses that you should
take as much time as you need to uncover the secrets of Greenvale and
its residents. </span><i>Mass Effect 3 </i><span style="font-style: normal;">attempts
a similar system that is rendered less effective by sloppy
timekeeping (of course I'll retrieve your data disks from the cold
recesses of space! What are Reapers?), homogenized quest structure,
and that aforementioned sense of irrelevance when it all boils down
to the one number that determines your sort-of-ending. </span><i>Deadly
Premonition</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s choices feel
vital, especially because it's next to impossible for a first time
player to discover them all; </span><i>ME3</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s,
though livened by the water-tight gameplay, are an obligatory
vestige. </span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Stellar
scenario design scaffolds </span><i>Deadly Premonition</i><span style="font-style: normal;">'s
conceits about choice and the player, perhaps not as gracefully as
</span><i>Bioshock Infinite</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, but
with a much more cohesive presentation of its ideas. Game designer
SWERY</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is not shy about
assigning you a role in the incipient events, assimilating you with
Zach as soon as the game starts. The first scene is a black
screen, York's voice calling out for Zach to wake him up. You do this
by pressing the A button; York thanks you. From literally the first
action you take, an actor-avatar relationship is established, one
that progressively deepens with a series of insane one-sided
conversations between York and “you.” To say much more would
spoil the game, but SWERY has an equally salient point about player
control as Ken Levine without such a defeatist prognosis. </span><i>Infinite</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
is birthed from a gallery of motifs, but one of its most prominent is
the cage, Levine's concession that the video game medium is finite.
SWERY views gaming as sprawling, sinister terrain, not without its
boundaries but confident enough to operate comfortably inside them. </span>
</div>
Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-32879227386246824292013-04-19T20:12:00.003-07:002013-04-21T12:34:38.883-07:00Egress from the Winter 2013 Graveyard, or Finally Some Interesting Movies Come Out<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC7iK-Efe-rupRFwx5Zf1QDcdy2GCVDMVEBl9VH3669ZEyChfVFzofS8J4es4uISK4gb98nKtQxxYPO7xAo5cSSCMgSEzxHmMJPjjYumjrdSkuo_Dv3OzaEfBUyasLn6JLvJs0CeuyGDtL/s1600/trance-movie-review-0442013-193804.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh6nM-54gomvi4RNd7sStX2PDWdwF3bDAlzc7tm0mcCDrhU_buFq1HNP6gObdzjrWqr8tOlpLhv3cKltmwkh7ZZncNnkpdS1Zzpib6psHiVPeKPXJkuWLq2kq7UH5fYjnon-EXaz915q5o/s1600/breakers15f-2-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh6nM-54gomvi4RNd7sStX2PDWdwF3bDAlzc7tm0mcCDrhU_buFq1HNP6gObdzjrWqr8tOlpLhv3cKltmwkh7ZZncNnkpdS1Zzpib6psHiVPeKPXJkuWLq2kq7UH5fYjnon-EXaz915q5o/s320/breakers15f-2-web.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<i><b>Spring Breakers</b></i><br />
Try as you might to disassociate yourself from the parts of <i>Spring Breakers </i>that have already entered our cultural consciousness - Disney bikini ass boobs murder gun fellatio piano James Franco??? - there's really not much else to the movie, so you kind of have to accept its lack of substance out of the gate. It is almost totally repetitive, probably a deliberate decision when you take Harmony Korine's enfant terrible status into consideration, but there's a method to this droning madness. Korine's subjects are four girls who flee college toward this soulless liturgy of party-party-party-party-party, under the pretense of "finding themselves" and "changing their boring lives." That this is achieved through scene after scene of constant drinking and carnage, all set to a Skrillex soundtrack, is a fairly transparent irony. But <i>Spring Breakers </i>has a sneaky streak, realized primarily through the fates of these young women. These supposed heroines are delinquents in training, securing their travel funds by robbing a Chicken Shack with sick ferocity. They knowingly exert seductive power over local crime lord/hip-hop demicelebrity Alien, played by James Franco with a degree of conviction that suggests actual interest in this project. And if Franco is involved and intrigued, you can only imagine what kind of raunchy, dopey, entry-level Social Welfare 101 nonsense this unholy alliance will birth.<b> </b>He and his cohort stumble through a series of bizarre events, all linked by the connective tissue of booze and tits on the beach of St. Petersburg and all ending in totally unexpected ways. When the end finally arrives, seemingly half an hour too late, he and the girls splinter from each other in unexpected ways in a climax designed for neither a vindictive nor a sympathetic audience. Selves are found, lives are changed, but these inevitabilities are livened by the details. Harmony Korine's message may be somewhat obvious, but his delivery is not, and the thumping machine that is <i>Spring Breakers </i>chugs on regardless of what anyone thinks of or expects from it.<b> B- </b><br />
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<br />
<b><i>The Place Beyond the Pines</i></b><br />
"Ambitious" is a loaded word in criticism. Are the failings of a work of art excused, at least in part, by the force of the ideas behind it? I don't believe that any positive step toward development, whether technical or didactic, should be immediately dismissed on the basis of being part of a flawed product. A viewer simply has to cope with the disappointment of potential tarnished by execution. For some, <i>The Place Beyond the Pines</i> might carry the hallmarks of a film that attempts too much and accomplishes not enough. It's a crime drama divided into three parts, each focused on a different central figure: the criminal (Gosling), the lawman (Cooper), and their sons (<i>Chronicle</i>'s excellent Dane DeHaan and <i>Smash</i>'s not excellent Emory Cohen) 17 years later. Over the course of this 140-minute triptych, director Derek Cianfrance piles issue after issue onto his plate, lifted from realms legal, ethical, fiscal, genealogical. It has become increasingly apparent after last year's cinematic glut of overlong, tedious drama that film may no longer be the best medium to attempt such complex realist narratives, and <i>The Place Beyond the Pines</i>' inability to sustain all its ideas into and through the third chapter keeps it from true greatness. It is by this point, though, that we are expected to shift our focus alongside the film. Its final act is mediated by teenagers, totally unaware of the sins of their fathers. Why would all of these societal ills matter to two clueless youths, trying only to survive? Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the movie is how its panoply of moral ambiguities are passed down in the form of simple rage over the course of seventeen years. To most viewers, this distillation will be a loss, as a series of intelligently explored themes (and some pretty sick motorcycle stunts) falls by the wayside in favor of their aftershocks. But there are rarely clean, satisfying conclusions in real life, and <i>The Place Beyond the Pines</i> is bold enough to align us with the two characters that come to realize this the most. <b>B+</b><br />
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<br />
<b><i>To the Wonder</i></b><br />
Terrence Malick's trilingual dissection of romantic and sociological strife, his first attempt at tackling contemporary existence since <i>Badlands</i>, doesn't necessarily deserve the critical scorn that it's attracted since its debut at the Venice Film Festival. Malick's intuition for the filmed image makes it impossible for him to produce something truly bad, because even in the face of complete thematic and executive collapse, the man can still produce a hundred reminders of why we watch movies in the first place. <i>To the Wonder </i>does a disservice to his virtuous grasp of light and framing by putting Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko in the lead roles. Kurylenko is fine, but she's less of a Jessica Chastain or a Sissy Spacek and more of a Brooke Adams, an adequate muse for her director that doesn't bring a lot to the table. Affleck is the real speed bump here. It's not that he's a terrible actor, but he is generally an inexpressive one, and a lead man who can't quietly communicate Malick's intangible notions of ecstasy and torment is a death knell both to himself and his film. Admittedly, this is a tall order, but Brad Pitt rose to it despite a similar set of skills and limitations. Affleck looms and glowers and hopes that it can all be cobbled into a watchable performance in the editing room, which it was not. Because Malick refuses to delineate his concerns in conventional narrative terms, instead tethering them to a complex aesthetic treatment and observing the way people react to them fly-on-the-wall style, the lack of reliable human avatars leaves all of this bombast unable to find a sufficient release mechanism. <i>To the Wonder </i>isn't inscrutable, but it is definitely unfocused and hazy, a dubious follow-up to <i>The Tree of Life </i>that only seems to further arm Malick's recent detractors. <b>C</b><br />
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<br />
<b><i>Trance</i></b><br />
Danny Boyle's newest effort is fun, silly stuff, a Day-Glo take on <i>Inception</i> where people are hypnotized by the word "strawberry" and a shaved pubic mound is a major plot point. Flitting in and out of induced daydreams, this narrative lacks the temporal and spatial clarity that kept some semblance of order to <i>Inception</i>'s top-heavy universe. It's easier to forget that <i>Trance </i>is a fairly ordinary heist flick when you're busy sorting out Boyle's willful obfuscations, and eventually it feels as if the film's submersion into metaphysical psychological architecture is simply a way to shuffle a familiar deck. But the energy is high and the actors are game (especially Rosario Dawson, excellent as a implausibly superpowered hypnotherapist), so the loftiness has a positive charge to it. One could never accuse Boyle of wanting to be inert, and he has a talent for maintaining rhythm even in technical or expository speech, so he never lets the heaviness of the story get away from him for too long. Still, <i>Trance </i>is disappointingly safe, even within a series of greater possibilites. <b>B-</b>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-20489257475824017652013-03-24T15:24:00.003-07:002013-03-24T15:33:38.106-07:00Ni no Kuni: lemme get those digits<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The JRPG is a troubled genre in a wild and unpredictable medium. Not one generation ago, the PlayStation 2 was host to everything from obscure one-shots (<i>Ephemeral Fantasia, Tsugunai: Atonement) </i>to celebrated series (<i>Suikoden, Final Fantasy) </i>and just about everything in between. Looking over <a href="http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/list-48" target="_blank">Sony's RPG offerings</a> for PS3 is a much more dismal enterprise. Most of the notable titles seem to be American-developed actioners with RPG elements, while the Japanese games are uninspired, halfhearted, or DLC packs for <i>Hyperdimension Neptunia</i>. Nearly every new IP released this generation was met with relative indifference, but the franchises have been hit just as hard. <i>Suikoden </i>is MIA, <i>Tales </i>has never been worse than the dismal <i>Graces f</i>, <i>Star Ocean </i>has lost its way completely, and <i>Final Fantasy XIII </i>is Square-Enix's signed confession that they've forgotten what made the series so great.<i> </i><br />
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When <i>Mass Effect 3 </i>came out, I took the successes of the game to mean that the JRPG was obsolete. The genre was born with <i>Dragon Quest</i> to textually represent concepts that were too graphically complicated for the NES's eight bits, but twenty-seven years later we don't exactly have that problem anymore. (On that note, menu-based RPGs are still finding some popularity on handheld devices, which remain partially bound by these limitations.) <i>ME3 </i>revises the systems of its Japanese antecedents with a highly effective show-don't-tell attitude, streamlining combat and character development elegantly. Do you miss combat menus? They're there, but only when you need them to be. Bummed at the presence of skill trees instead of vital statistics? They fulfill very similar functions when you think about it. This quickened approach is in line with what the populace has come to expect from video gaming, but there are few titles that have managed to combine this satisfying sense of speed and immersion with the robust micromanagement that made these games so appealing in the first place. That's the sweet spot <i>Ni no Kuni </i>hits.<br />
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<i>Ni no Kuni</i>, the heir apparent to <i>Pokemon</i>'s stale grasp on the creature collection throne, gives you 308 total "familiars" and their evolutions to play with. They each have six battle statistics, which you can enhance through individualized equipment sets and treats. Familiars also have unique movesets which can be modified through the use of gems. The potential for variable manipulation is staggering; gameplay systems are far more flexible and rich than <i>Pokemon</i>, encouraging the sort of maximization that made the JRPG distinct in the first place. The fruits of your labor are tested in fast-paced menu combat that also includes free movement, representing the finest convergence yet of unrestricted gameplay and JRPG mechanics. The lack of a multiplayer in which to enjoy this battle system is a shame, surely a casualty to contemporary developers' "wait for the sequel/DLC!" attitudes.<br />
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Sweetening the deal further is the remarkable aesthetic of the game. Much mention was made of Studio Ghibli's involvement with <i>Ni no Kuni</i>, and the results bleed into just about every moment of the game. Joe Hisaishi's score is phenomenal if a bit limited, and the titular other world is bursting with lushly realized personality. What can I say about it that a trailer for the game can't?<br />
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(PORNSTAR!)<br />
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Unfortunately, all of this splendor comes with its share of caveats. If you've taken the time to play a creature collection game, chances are that you'll want to collect a majority of the creatures. Because the process of actually acquiring a familiar is totally random, it can often be both time-consuming and very grindy. I completed <i>Ni no Kuni </i>with about 3/4ths of the familiars, a sixty hour playtime, and characters at level 70+. Fairly early into the game, my compulsion to raise an army of funky beasties caused me to become way overleveled, which renders the game a cakewalk. Though this game's demographic skews young, the developers should have nonetheless anticipated that fans of the genre often have a compulsion toward completism, the end results of which should not detract from the difficulty curve this severely. Also: <b>sixty hours! </b>I'm not even sure where I found all that couch time. It's a pretty standard number for a JRPG, but there's a degree of challenge in sustaining a compelling universe for that long. About forty-five hours in, I found myself checked out of both the world of <i>Ni no Kuni </i>and its admittedly simplistic story, which is seriously disappointing. Part of this comes from the game's propensity toward fetch quests and flabbiness, a result of keeping the affair simple enough for a younger audience, but the importance of your presence diminishes after the fiftieth person whose enthusiasm you're tasked to restore by opening three different menus. There comes a time in any game of this length, no matter how compelling, where you're reminded that the universe thus created is merely there to sustain the gameplay. If the gameplay is repetitive, then by extension the universe grows repetitive as well. I had to remind myself not to be so jaded about something so gorgeous, and to its credit, it reeled me back in during the last couple of hours. (Props for an ending that, though truncated, is sweet and simple and avoids cliche.) It's still a disappointing plateau to reach for a title that is marketed so heavily around its beauty. <br />
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The aesthetic decay pales in comparison, however, to the bevy of mechanical problems plaguing <i>Ni no Kuni</i>. These issues are often minor, but even the slightest of problems recur innumerably over the course of sixty hours, compounding the frustrations to the point where they actually matter. By far the worst is the dismal AI. Each battle gives you three human characters with three familiars each, but you can only assume control of one at a time. The computer takes the reins for the remaining two and, despite the presence of a very spare Tactics menu, they typically do their own thing. Allowing these fools their own agency means that they'll gleefully blow 70% of their MP during random encounters, or refuse to heal you when you ask them, or fail to defend against an oncoming haymaker, or force useless Esther to attack with her harp for a meaty 2 damage, or completely ignore elemental strengths and weaknesses, and so on. Worse yet, the pathfinding is dismal - watching a computer-controlled Tin Man walking in place against a boss for three seconds before deciding to attack is likely one of the most heartbreaking moments I played through. Possible solutions: a greater degree of human control over your allies, or a highly specified means of programming their actions, akin to the Gambit system of <i>Final Fantasy XII</i>. Other problems during battle include its penchant for stopping in its tracks whenever someone uses an ability that targets an entire party, an inexplicable creative choice that kills the impressive momentum of the battles. It's not merely an annoying delay, but a way of giving your enemies artificial leverage, since your oncoming attacks are interrupted by these cutscenes but theirs are not. When a bulk of a game is its combat, it seems a shame that there are such easily remedied problems with it. One pass through playtesting would have been enough to tell that no, it's not a good idea to stop combat for ten seconds to inform us that our Evasion has been lowered. <br />
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Picking at every flaw I can find<i> </i>in this capacity may seem petty, but the JRPG has become emblematic of Japanese gaming's inability/unwillingness to innovate itself in today's culture. You can only suck yen out of otaku with lazy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_%28slang%29" target="_blank">moe</a> for so long. I'm only as harsh as I am on <i>Ni no Kuni </i>because I think it's the best representation of its genre in a long time, and its issues may be multifarious but they aren't coded into the fundamentals of the gameplay. There is potential for greatness in this lineage, especially if the narrative matures alongside the young audience that Level-5 is so obviously trying to court. Consider this a recommendation to disenfranchised <i>Pokemon </i>fans, weary JRPG veterans, or anyone with several dozen hours to burn on a spectacular display of sight and sound. <br />
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<b>B</b>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-91461812143357940772013-03-12T20:07:00.003-07:002013-03-16T11:54:39.223-07:00No Kingdom Lasts Forever: Enlightened<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This kingdom. This amazing kingdom we have made. This monstrous kingdom.
Its castles are magic. They are beautiful. They are built on dreams and
iron and greed. They are inorganic and cannot sustain. No kingdom lasts
forever. Even this will end. And life and Earth will reign again.</i><br />
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I try to avoid talking about myself when I write these posts, primarily because I'm here to highlight media that catches my attention, not the toiling of a disenfranchised quarter-lifer. Most of you are probably within a year's distance of completing college, one direction or the other, and you already know what our lives are like.<br />
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But <i>Enlightened </i>resonates with me. So much of the show's appeal to me is a byproduct of how frankly it addresses some serious issues with our world, on both interpersonal and international levels. For those unfamiliar with <i>Enlightened</i>, which is likely most of you given the show's <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/hbos-girls-dips-in-season-two-premiere-enlightened-up-in-new-night-return/" target="_blank">criminally low</a> viewership, it tells the story of disgraced corporate drone Amy Jellicoe. After a manic breakdown and a revelatory stint in a new-age rehab center, she attempts to enter the world once again, her rage and confusion layered over with a new insurmountable optimism. Goal Number One: overnight reform of her previous employers, rapacious megacorpoation Abaddon. Abaddon, we come to learn, is Evil Capitalism incarnate, destroying the environment and inciting violent civil unrest and producing toxic products with no concerns but for the bottom line. They take delight in crushing the little guys and buy off politicians. Anyone who isn't Amy can infer the tremendous challenge present in realizing this degree of change. <br />
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Amy's a ball of inchoate philosophy, recently blessed with the absolute knowledge that our world is fucked up. She wants only to do good, but her more base desires are so deeply ingrained in her that her impulses typically sabotage her intentions. If the aforementioned breakdown wasn't a tipoff, this woman is a persistently uneasy presence. One episode early in the first season sees Amy desperately trying to find help for a mother threatened by deportation; her lack of social grace, unfortunately, brings her to reappropriate her ex-best friend's baby shower as a platform to generate support. The effort is obviously unsuccessful, and Amy is left wondering once again why people no longer want to communicate with her crazy ass. "Why are we so fortunate when others are not, and what can we do to help them?" is a refrain for Amy, delivered with the utmost sincerity in the worst possible contexts. We understand that she is frequently misguided in her quest, and her clumsiness acts as a conduit for the show's masterful cringe humor, but after the uncomfortable laughter the salience of her point stands. <i>Enlightened</i>, generously assuming that we are all viewers of sound conscience, uses Amy's forthcoming nature in tandem with her demagogic incompetence to hold up a mirror to our own potential philanthropy in a way that captivates without preaching. Do we do so little because we are afraid of seeming like Amy? Caring leaves us socially and emotionally vulnerable, but if we're doing the right thing then why should that matter? <br />
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It matters because, just like Amy, we are humans and not mouthpieces. The business of looking out for ourselves is becoming increasingly complicated, and I know that the last thing I want to do when the world bombards me is to turn inward toward more atrocity. It is hard and costly to devote oneself to a cause, especially to the extent Amy strives for. Becoming conscientious is different for everybody - hell, it took Amy fifteen years at Abaddon, combined with a hysterical workplace meltdown, for her to realize what kind of soulless ladder-climbers she's given her life to. She's condescending, officious, and tends to be straight out unlikeable, all of which trickle into her soapboxing. But personal demons be damned, she makes the change. She reorients her goals to repair the people and the systems around her, gradually learning that such aspirations come at profound personal and professional costs. <br />
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I can't be like Amy, not yet. I would like to think that if I turned my back on this rat race and poured myself into doing legitimate good, then it would happen for me. Right now I'm not brave enough to do anything but try and survive (barely, begrudgingly) and to do well by the people around me (annoyingly, with questionable results). Immediate and drastic social upheaval isn't what <i>Enlightened </i>is championing, though. Amy's all about this approach and it hardly ever works out for her. The show sympathizes with the middle ground between inaction and fervor, and that's why we have Tyler. <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/03/04/173059338/mike-white-on-creating-hbos-enlightened-whistle-blower" target="_blank">Characterized by series creator Mike White</a> as the feminine, supportive energy to Amy's unconventional masculine dynamism, this self-described "ghost" assumes the role of the noble observer. His intentions are true, but for fear of rocking the boat, he struggles to brand himself the revolutionary that Amy so desperately wants him to be. Whether or not he actually joins her quest to transform Abaddon is a question for potential viewers to uncover (subliminally: watch the show!), but Amy is there to spur him toward her cause. The good ghosts of the world, White would suggest, need a simple push in the right direction when they're ready.<br />
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<i>Enlightened </i>is supremely forgiving of goodness, which it teases out of just about every character. Amy Jellicoe is occasionally dim and borderline psychotic, but every episode begins and ends with brief prayer-like narrations from the inside of her mind. Her external actions may be inscrutable to the characters around her, but these ruminations allow us subtle insight into her thought process. Without the benefit of this frame, many of us would likely not befriend Amy if we knew her in real life. I imagine myself politely tolerating her ranting about Abaddon for a couple of weeks at most. But she's right. And she's unafraid. And I may still be, but <i>Enlightened </i>is patient and encouraging. It reminds me that it doesn't have to be like that forever. Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-58941978265919431802013-02-24T14:51:00.002-08:002013-04-21T11:11:53.797-07:002013 Oscar Extravaganza - Seth MacFarlane Presents Three Hours of My Most Flamboyant Nightmares<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
A big question for the cinema this year, presumably ignited <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2F2012%2F09%2F28%2Fis_movie_culture_dead%2F&ei=S5AqUfa2MeLIigLZ_YGIBw&usg=AFQjCNFaf45McsMyRtVMEuIdKBwaQ38fLA&bvm=bv.42768644,d.cGE" target="_blank">here</a> by Andrew O'Hehir, was whether or not it was dead. I say it is not. At this point in our lives, it is likely that our discussion of contemporary film has slowed, yes. This is all part of the simplification of the form: movies are, as capitalism demands, increasingly industrialized and thus visibly homogenized, but that didn't stop studios from releasing some surprisingly satisfying fare. It's just that most of it is juvenile and we aren't juvenile anymore. Between a spate of typically strong indie efforts, as well as numerous underrepresented and mostly unseen genre flicks, this was actually a decent year. Certainly nothing that merits the apocalyptic cries of Internet culture journalists.</div>
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Something that does not help this argument is the Oscars. In the last decade they have fallen somewhat out of vogue, their ratings considerable but still falling from previous peaks. They are routinely mocked by just about everyone watching, be they notable pundits and Twitter laymen. Once the most visible accumulation of notable events in the preceding year's film output, the glitziness of the Oscars has never felt less like a way to celebrate movies, but rather the increasingly burgeoning mantle of celebrity culture. Oscar has never been about the films, of course, nor the performances therein. The problem is that even in a year where the categories are relatively strong, the illusion doesn't hold up anymore - the ceremony is often too frothy and hokey and out-of-touch to accurately represent the championing of some Very Serious Drama. At a point in our lives where most of us are probably too grown up to derive much enjoyment from the Academy's three hour barrage of in-jokes and lame skits, it is increasingly up to us to develop our own film culture, which some simply don't have the time to do without the Oscars' guiding hand. No shame in that. I will probably always watch these goddamn things, because I love the formulas and analysis that go into championing a Best Screenplay, Actress, Picture. I just don't place much faith in them, regardless of the quality of their selections.<br />
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GOOD WORK IS ITS OWN REWARD.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNHkYkys5nYRlPmNcugOOcMT5oZPzesais4XXwQDvZx3QE9jVLqMgYEZLv0NXnAgfCFq50Ku_dQmB3RnsQI1Jdm0tmfErdp2xB3VaRMErKL1cFgFEgLSRg0j4G-Xb24jqC0YNztJ64riDi/s1600/life-of-pi02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNHkYkys5nYRlPmNcugOOcMT5oZPzesais4XXwQDvZx3QE9jVLqMgYEZLv0NXnAgfCFq50Ku_dQmB3RnsQI1Jdm0tmfErdp2xB3VaRMErKL1cFgFEgLSRg0j4G-Xb24jqC0YNztJ64riDi/s400/life-of-pi02.jpg" width="400" /></a><b>BEST PICTURE</b><br />
( ) <i>Amour</i><br />
(x) <i>Argo</i><br />
(x) <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i><br />
(x) <i>Django Unchained</i><br />
(x) <i>Life of Pi</i><br />
(x) <i>Lincoln</i><br />
( ) <i>Les Miserables</i><br />
(x) <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i><br />
(x) <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i><br />
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<b>What's What?: </b>Not a whole lot of surprises here, short of <i>Amour</i>. Good to see that <i>Beasts </i>rode that wave of early-release goodwill. <i>Argo </i>is surely the final step in Ben Affleck's ascension to Hollywood omnipresence and a clear favorite; it's easily accessible (much more so than cerebral but occasionally bulky <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>), politically relevant, and partially about the film making process. <i>Silver Linings Playbook </i>has been the beneficiary of a savvy, extremely slow rollout c/o the Weinsteins, playing on the synergy between word of mouth and eventual expansion. <i>Django </i>is simply proof that Tarantino is too big for Oscar to ignore anymore, even at the lower point of his powers. <i>Life of Pi </i>is mostly a technical cause celebre, but never ignore the allure of a simple feel-good message. I'm done talking about <i>Lincoln</i>, but never started with <i>Les Miserables</i>, which is loved publicly but has also left a lot of people feeling exhausted and shouted at. I wanted to catch it, but I felt like I spent my entire year watching movies that were 150+ minutes, and my interest was not great enough for what I hear is an exceptionally loud two-point-fiver. Sorry, Anne.<br />
<b>What's Missing?: </b>I feel that most of 2012's best fare is non-Oscar material: genre films, technological treatises too avant-garde for AMPAS, honest romances. They've managed to honor some pretty solid picks this year, a much more consistent bunch than last year's collection at least. Nearly all of them are predictably large, with <i>Amour </i>and <i>Beasts </i>representing the only efforts under twenty million dollars, but what else would you expect from a film industry ceremony designed to lavishly celebrate how great the film industry is? That said, I can think of few other films I saw this year that are reasonable Best Picture fodder. It might have been nice to see some recognition for <i>Killing Me Softly</i>, which is only as unsubtle as some of its potential competitors and about twice as audacious. So - congratulations to this year's voters for striking a handsome balance between "quality" and "not weird" for this year's nominees.<br />
<b>What's Winning?: </b>As before, probably <i>Argo</i>. Ben Affleck has been picking up awards effortlessly. One must never doubt Spielberg throwing his heft around, however. <i>Lincoln </i>is the most nominated film of the year and its backers, though waning in enthusiasm, are numerous. <i>Silver Linings Playbook </i>is circling these two, however, given its current reign as the crowd pleaser of the field. <i>Zero Dark Thirty </i>was looking pretty good up until that "does this support torture?" debate. Everything else is way back in the dust, even though the Weinsteins are campaigning the shit out of <i>Django Unchained</i>. Tarantino is just too polarizing for the Academy - they need them mostly safe, and though <i>Django </i>is his least incendiary picture, it's still way too much for that gaggle of doddering old farts.<br />
<b>What Should Win?: </b>My enduring passion for Haneke tells me that <i>Amour </i>would probably be my choice, even though I haven't seen it. <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild </i>is my favorite of this crop, probably, a film that continually increases in my estimation when others (<i>ZDT</i>, <i>Playbook</i>) have shown a bit of wear and tear. <br />
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<b>BEST ACTOR</b><br />
(x) Bradley Cooper, <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i><br />
(x) Joaquin Phoenix, <i>The Master</i><br />
(x) Daniel Day-Lewis, <i>Lincoln</i><br />
( ) Hugh Jackman, <i>Les Miserables</i><br />
(x) Denzel Washington, <i>Flight </i><br />
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<b>What's What?: </b>These five were locked up pretty early on, with only Denzel Washington's spot threatened by John Hawkes' excellent performance in <i>The Sessions</i>. Without commenting on Jackman's committed transformation for <i>Les Miserables</i>, this is a strong selection of competitors. Most of them are unfortunately betrayed by the shortfalls of their vehicles, but their own strengths remain evident. Bradley Cooper embodies the character, appearing at all times as if there's a nervous itching under his skin; you can feel the manic energy mounting, Cooper (and his character) entirely aware of how unstable it makes him. Joaquin Phoenix throws up an actorly bag of tricks on the screen, gnarled angles and cryptic haunted glances galore. He's a bit ridiculous, but totally indelible. In contrast, Washington epitomizes the natural, tapping into the simultaneous swagger and devouring self-hatred that a life led under the influence brings about; like Daniel Day-Lewis, he never appears if he is acting. And DDL...well, come on. The man is not immune to missteps (<i>Nine</i>) but his successes are so towering and complete that they are immediately forgiven. What human is perfect, anyway?<br />
<b>Who's Missing?: </b>I wasn't expecting many strays to bust up this group, a carefully selected blend of eager golden boys and venerable favorites. Hawkes is a sad omission, but where is there room for him? Two of my favorite performances this year were Logan Lerman's beleaguered, bright Charlie in <i>Perks of Being a Wallflower</i> and the pained adolescent narcissism Dane DeHaan anchors <i>Chronicle </i>with, but men that young are rarely recognized in this category. Around 40 is when actors really hit their stride, taking plum parts in important dramas that will surely earn them Oscar attention. (Bradley, Joaquin, Hugh.)<br />
<b>Who's Winning?: </b>DDL. Give him a manly hat from days gone by and he'll pull a statue out of it, no questions asked. He makes it all look so easy.<br />
<b>Who Should Win?: </b>As a feat of decontextualized acting prowess, DDL. In terms of acting as a functional asset to the film in which the performance is contained, Bradley Cooper. Day-Lewis, Washington, and Phoenix all brought their A-game to films that couldn't fully support or showcase them. Day-Lewis is stuck in permanent monologue, Washington is scuttled by odd bouts of script cheesiness, and Phoenix could have played the character any way he wanted for <i>The Master</i>'s depth of thematic investment in him.<br />
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<b>BEST ACTRESS</b><br />
(x) Jessica Chastain, <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i><br />
(x) Jennifer Lawrence, <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i><br />
( ) Emmanuelle Riva, <i>Amour</i><br />
(x) Quvenzhane Wallis, <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i><br />
( ) Naomi Watts, <i>The Impossible </i><b> </b><br />
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<b>What's What?: </b>This category is basically The Jennifer Lawrence Show, with Jessica Chastain angrily glaring at her from the third row. To be honest, I don't think either of them are being rewarded for their best work. Lawrence is an impressive figure, but she could use a little more experience, especially in timing and voice. The magnetism of her performance in <i>Silver Linings Playbook </i>is occasionally compromised by some bum notes. Chastain's problem is that <i>Homeland </i>and Claire Danes are doing this character so, so much better, more clearly delineating the manias that keep its central figure in constant pursuit. Her affect is too airy, not fierce enough, and her grasp on the character occasionally feels tenuous and uninformed by the narrative chronology. Quvenzhane Wallis is expressive and a perfect fit for <i>Beasts' </i>delicate tone, and her contributions to the film are much more deliberate and valuable than <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/sorry-quvenzhan-wallis-but-best-actress-oscar-nods-are-for-big-kids/266153/" target="_blank">this dumb</a> article might suggest, in case you are unaware of the importance of play-acting for children in her age group. She is obviously not aware of all of the film's subtext, but grown actors aren't always either. Didn't catch <i>The Impossible</i>, primarily on the basis that centering a story about the Indonesian tsunami around a well-off white family seems both limiting in scope and insulting to the 170,000 people who died there. I'm not a huge Naomi Watts fan, anyway.<br />
<b>Who's Missing?: </b>Meryl Streep! Just kidding. <i>Hope Springs </i>was cute and all, but it would have been a joke to nominate her for it. And The Streep is no joke! I didn't see a lot of memorable female roles this year, sadly. A few that I might have missed out on include <i>Rust and Bone</i>, <i>Anna Karenina, Middle of Nowhere, </i>and <i>Celeste and Jesse Forever</i>. Can I write in Anna Paquin for <i>Margaret</i>?<br />
<b>Who's Winning?: </b>Jennifer Lawrence has brought unstoppable charm to all of her public appearances and her star has risen even faster than Chastain's; <i>The Hunger Games </i>and a well-loved, financially successful romcom in one year is the best a 22-year-old actress could hope for. Unfortunate for Chastain, because at 35, she's getting ready to leave the age range where women are typically rewarded a Best Actress trophy. And she deserves one, if not for this performance. Riva is kind of a dark horse here - she won a BAFTA, the movie has a surprising amount of heat (five nominations for a foreign film is extremely rare), and most people feel that her performance is head and shoulders above the rest. She may be a spoiler.<br />
<b>Who Should Win?: </b>Oh, gosh. Emmanuelle Riva? Why didn't I watch <i>Amour</i>?! Because Berkeley didn't get it? Must be. Among the three performances I saw in this category, Wallis' is my favorite, but I do agree that there's an aspect of frivolity to awarding a nine-year-old an award that could significantly boost the career prospects of an older performer. Then again, what is this ceremony honoring but frivolity?<b></b><br />
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<br />
<b>BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS</b><br />
(x) Amy Adams, <i>The Master</i><br />
(x) Sally Field, <i>Lincoln</i><br />
( ) Anne Hathaway, <i>Les Miserables</i><br />
(x) Helen Hunt, <i>The Sessions</i><br />
(x) Jacki Weaver, <i>Silver Linings Playbook </i><br />
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<b>What's What?: </b>Jacki Weaver??? She cries once in the first five minutes of the movie, spits out about a dozen dull lines, and then looms in the background for the rest of the movie. Her abilities, so readily demonstrated in <i>Animal Kingdom</i>, are done no favors by this shallow role, and the nomination is a greater indication of AMPAS's love of <i>Silver Linings Playbook </i>than any acting aplomb on her part. Amy Adams, like everyone in <i>The Master</i>, has crafted a well-observed and channeled character that surely crackles with subterranean depth, if the film would only let us get to it! (I sort of wish she and Laura Dern had traded roles, but that's neither here nor there.) Helen Hunt is great, evincing just enough emotion without betraying the importance of her businesswoman persona. Sally Field kind of <a href="http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/716060971.gif?key=300225&Expires=1361582723&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=TlZUcs03oxqOrI384HbhFKwVdKfVEjeOSrVKexKWaNiBkFbNNJ8E3mEtf58vmWXEbotrUa5en1Bb0WO1~FphOSEa8pM6jNjuoKW0EKr5dgaJFcH7k1iWZ-okA4sNWxxDScL40O7fRchdoT6oLS6q9AsoTD9RJRHLgMWUZQOQg90_" target="_blank">overdoes</a> it. But all of this is irrelevant because Anne Hathaway's going to win!<br />
<b>Who's Missing?: </b>The movie is an unqualified disaster, but <i>The Paperboy </i>gave us some of Nicole Kidman's most vibrant work in a long time. She's a burst of color and heat, always in sync with the tone of the movie, even when the tone is muddled by its own incoherence. Jessica Chastain, like last year, was nominated for her lesser effort; she's a perfect aesthetic fit for <i>Lawless</i>, both her performance and the film gritty with just a touch of imaginative mystery. Not really feeling the love for Ann Dowd, who I'm sure is capable but is given absolutely nothing to work with by <i>Compliance</i>.<br />
<b>Who's Winning?: </b>Hathaway, in probably the biggest lock of the night. The hype that has coalesced around "I Dreamed a Dream" is so great that I don't even want to see the movie anymore. There is the phantom of a chance that her occasionally obnoxious self-effacing public persona might detract from her chances, but it didn't stop Mo'Nique, who didn't even campaign and still won. I like Hathaway - she's proven herself to be talented, eloquent, and at least reasonably human. But calling your ticket to Oscar gold <a href="http://www.eonline.com/news/374659/anne-hathaway-my-les-mis-rables-performance-is-eh" target="_blank">"eh"</a> in public? Come on.<br />
<b>Who Should Win?: </b>Helen Hunt's performance is my favorite in this field. It's a shame that she's been MIA for so long - I imagine that part of it is the backlash after what some perceived to be an undeserved win for <i>As Good as it Gets</i>. She is by far the most consistent part of an underdeveloped, occasionally wobbly film. <b></b><br />
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<b>BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR</b><br />
(x) Alan Arkin, <i>Argo</i><br />
(x) Robert De Niro, <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i><br />
(x) Philip Seymour Hoffman, <i>The Master</i><br />
(x) Tommy Lee Jones, <i>Lincoln</i><br />
(x) Christoph Waltz, <i>Django Unchained </i><br />
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<b>What's What?: </b>Fun trivia - this is the only time in Oscar history that an acting category is filled by previous winners, some recent and some from many moons ago. There was an obvious rush to honor some Hollywood greats this year, and that meant handing out a couple of slots that far more accomplished work deserved. Not to desecrate the holy names of Alan Arkin or Robert De Niro, but both roles are more or less there because they have to be. There's nothing exceptionally intriguing, challenging or exciting about either the characters or the performances; they're good, but that sort of undistinguished "good" that most people forget about within the next year. Christoph Waltz...it would have been nice to see him nominated again, but for something other than Landa 2.0. The characters are different, to be sure, but the mannerisms and skillset the movie requires of Waltz are exactly the same. Plus, he gets way too much screen time for a "supporting" part. Philip Seymour Hoffman is reliable, but we've seen him do insidious piggy charm in his sleep. And Tommy Lee Jones - what a grump, amirite? He sure doesn't like to smile! I dunno, I'm just avoiding having to talk about <i>Lincoln </i>more.<br />
<b>Who's Missing?: </b>I was all about Samuel L. Jackson in <i>Django Unchained</i>. He puts forth an extremely intelligent, complex depiction of Stockholm Syndrome, a performance of a performance that slave/sycophant Stephen has danced through for so long that it's curdled everything about him. Matthew McConaughey had a banner year, turning in best in show performances in <i>Killer Joe </i>and <i>Magic Mike</i> and acquitting himself handsomely in <i>Bernie </i>and <i>The Paperboy. </i>A spot of recognition for a long-belittled actor flexing his abilities in unexpected ways isn't so much to ask, I think, especially because everyone in this category has already gotten some AMPAS love. In a fantasy world where things I irrationally love are rewarded by the public at large, Scoot McNairy might have gotten attention for <i>Killing Them Softly</i>. Michael Fassbender almost salvaged his senseless character in <i>Prometheus </i>through force of chilling android presence alone. This category is an embarrassment of riches this year and I wish we'd seen some new faces.<br />
<b>Who's Winning?: </b>Tommy Lee Jones is where I've got my money, but the final result is less of a sure bet than the other acting categories. Everyone else but Arkin, whose part is straight-up TOO slight to be rewarded further, is a potential threat. Waltz may have won recently, but sometimes Oscar is down for double dipping, especially when the roles are so similar. PSH and deNiro can never be discounted.<br />
<b>Who Should Win?: </b>I guess I'd give it to Hoffman. I'm having a hard time getting excited about this field, especially because there are so many good supporting performances this year that didn't get the attention they deserve. But again: good work is its own reward.<b></b>Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-62729945034642178952013-02-16T13:20:00.000-08:002013-03-18T18:53:19.225-07:00Alys Brangwin, hero of capitalist Motavia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7241006038735003649.post-51099375621180512922013-02-07T22:23:00.001-08:002013-07-25T22:16:14.509-07:00Maybe give Community a chance to breathe, guys? <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0cgg0M8jmrkOcfqDFIVp6-npXzp80m8bkCijbRi3KGqYm3NOiN-hc7v3pCdo1KJJRsowbaj9OxSh-jnuy3YZSX_EzaEq_mMIosvJz7ccJ67DgXdia6kzL-E1sL60Bl7oCCGy2-RkJ54d9/s1600/5-4-1.7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0cgg0M8jmrkOcfqDFIVp6-npXzp80m8bkCijbRi3KGqYm3NOiN-hc7v3pCdo1KJJRsowbaj9OxSh-jnuy3YZSX_EzaEq_mMIosvJz7ccJ67DgXdia6kzL-E1sL60Bl7oCCGy2-RkJ54d9/s320/5-4-1.7.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Who's missing?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/arts/television/community-returns-on-nbc-without-dan-harmon.html?pagewanted=1" target="_blank">Salvo 1</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/season-premiere-review-community-history-101-everything-is-just-fyne" target="_blank">Salvo 2</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/history-101,91985/" target="_blank">Salvo 3</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2013/community_season_4/week_1/community_season_4_recap_in_history_101_it_s_senior_year.html" target="_blank">Salvo 4</a><br />
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Look at all of these proclamations of a slow death!<i> Community</i>'s season premiere was tonight, and to hear some of the big critical voices tell it, the episode was the first horseman of what would be a disappointingly average season. The once-adoring fanbase, based on 320 AVClub ratings, bid it a similarly dismissive B-. "History 101" was a rough sit sometimes, don't get me wrong, but seeing a sitcom falter to find a new take on necessarily predictable characters is something typical to its fourth season. <i>Parks and Rec </i>did a little; <i>Archer </i>is feeling it right now;<i> 30 Rock </i>sure as hell did, especially in its sixth. <i>Community </i>itself was stretched a bit toward the end of its third season. <br />
<br />
Let's not damn the genre, but the medium: nearly every show sustains these hallmarks of decay, especially considering how the very act of running and producing a show is such a volatile task. In a way, avid watchers of the show had primed themselves for a potential disaster right out of the gate. Dan Harmon was gone, Chevy Chase was pissed, and there was little satisfaction when we learned that the premiere would be something as trendy and cheap as a <i>Hunger Games </i>parody episode. When you love something long-running like a television show, you owe it to yourself to be objective about the changes that accumulate around it; losing its distinct auteurial voice and the illusion of interpersonal harmony were two that just didn't register well with most people. Harmon was crucial to the show's vision, and without him the best I was hoping for was a muted (at least relative to <i>Community </i>standards), sweet bowing-out.<br />
<br />
This was not muted, nor was it particularly sweet. It was oddly loud and those end-of-the-episode affirmations, powerful if sporadically graceless, fell heavily here. The laughs were there, but minimal. The <i>Hunger Games </i>stuff was dire as expected, and barely had anything to do with <i>The Hunger Games </i>in the first place. The subplots accomplished nothing. Bearing all of this in mind, it's important to remember is that the show's season premieres, as Sepinwall points out in that second article, have never been its strongest episodes. Each season takes such a radically different perceptual tack from the one that precedes it that they need these episodes as a sort of readjustment time. What aired tonight was a public examination of the show's anxieties, an entity fully aware of the impossible space of satisfaction it must fill. Abed's regressions into his own mind, spurred by anxiety or disunity in the real universe, reveal a similarly pitched but entirely artificial multi-camera sitcom. We see the sort of show that <i>Community </i>was always concerned about becoming, a gradual distillation of something much smarter, and its recognition that a sitcom must broaden in order to become more commercially viable should shade the initial flatness as ground to grow upon. There are elements of an arc here, a multileveled examination of the necessity of change - hell, the episode is called History 101, begging for an understanding of the genre's failings - and that's enough for me to not write the season off as some thoughtless back 13 of a dying sitcom.<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I understand the desire to take this
attitude toward the show; it isn't a particularly flattering one, but
it's common to just about everyone. Those who are able to
systematically demonstrate why what they once loved isn't good
anymore feel they are proving, simultaneously, both their love for
the original show and their disdain for the assumed breach of
principle that this new and inferior version has brought about. "Kill
your idols," in this critical climate, has become a proving
ground. Art evolves through criticism, but not through melodramatic
proclamations of a show's death upon its first episode of a season.
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Harmon is gone but not forgotten. <i>Community </i>still knows this. Let it have its say.<br />
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<b>Sneaky July update: </b>Season 4 was essentially a disaster, start to finish. Some cute moments, a few nice ideas, and exactly one big laugh. The rest is poorly-made, exsanguinated comedy flotsam. So you can disregard this entire entreaty, I suppose.Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05077904955757301685noreply@blogger.com0