Archive for the 'Movies and TV' Category
Bomberman Live, Metal Gear?, Ebert
Here’s my review of Bomberman Live on XBox Live Arcade: It’s Bomberman. Online. With eight player support. Review over.
The only problems that I have with it is some nagging issues with the interface and net code. The actual in-game lag isn’t too bad. You’ll see some occasional jumping, especially from people with multiple “speed up” power-ups, but other than that it runs fine. The problem is that sometimes, because of lost packets or something, the game completely glitches out. I’ve had games start where nobody could move. I had a game where the game was over and I could here people over the headset complaining that the next round isn’t starting when I was still in the game. Weird stuff like that. It’s not too frequent, but it’s annoying that these issues are there at all.
With the interface there are a few minor grievances but the biggest of all is the fact that once you start a hosted player game on XBox Live, you can’t ever change the settings for that game unless you disconnect and start up a new room. It so ruins the flow of a nice room. So annoying.
But the game itself is awesome.
The Metal Gear Solid 4 gameplay trailer. You know, I used to be a pretty big fan of the Metal Gear Solid games. I remember playing the MGS1 PS demo over and over. I remember playing the full game non-stop for two weeks, beating it — start to finish — five times in that span. Including on extreme difficulty (that fucking Hind-D!!) But after seeing that weak E3 trailer and then being irritated by the gameplay trailer, my interest in the series is falling drastically.
Put bluntly, the series is getting stupid now. Looking at a bikini magazine to stop yourself from vomiting? Stupid. That Raiden+Vamp thing? Ridiculous. The AI? Good for a PS1 game. La Li Lu Le Lo? Fuck off.
The games do a good job of interfacing with the player and fucking with him (the late parts of MGS2 were fantastic), but they’re starting to tow this line between goofy and realistic, between serious and stupid and between melodramatic and provocative that I can no longer come to terms with. The series is too polarizing and I think it’s given more attention and relevance than it deserves. It’s not a system seller. Not anymore. But it sure is pretty.
Maybe it’s not the games but the fans that I hate.
Ebert is bring up that old games vs. art debate and it’s so fucking tired it’s not worth debating anymore. It’s been done and I don’t need to retread what I previously wrote. Yes, the idea that something interactive can’t be art because the outcome can change is idiotic. No point arguing that. But what bugs me about the recent incarnation of this tiresome debate is the mentioning of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is but one standout in a history of literature and storytelling spanning thousands of years. Imagine if all of literature existed for thirty years and was nothing but Tom Clancy novels and clones of Tom Clancy novels. Would you think of literature as an art form in that case? Probably not. This is where the game industry is at now. It has a thirty year history (and, really, the history of ’serious’ game design is even shorter.) Give it time. Given a hundred years — or longer — will there be standouts that transcend the medium? Most definitely.
You can argue that there aren’t any real “art games” now. That’s fine. Debatable, but still understandable. But to dismiss the whole medium for all of eternity? How shortsighted can you be. It’s like saying that film can never be art because the only films that exist are sideshow novelties showing oncoming trains that do nothing but frighten the audience.
New Release Tuesday
Today was a rather interesting new release day, with three films of note hitting DVD. Three very visual films with good soundtracks, but varying degrees of quality with regards to the other aspects of film making.
The Fountain. A disappointing film, though not all bad if you approach it the right way. I wrote about it last year during the film festival and my opinion hasn’t changed much. I still don’t have a massive boner over it and a second viewing didn’t fulfill as I thought it might, but the visuals are still dazzling and the soundtrack (though still mixed a little too loud) is still stunning. In fact, I think I’d recommend getting the soundtrack ahead of the movie.
Pan’s Labyrinth. Quick write-up. Still quite good. DVD package is quite nice, coming with a ton of extras and a little art book and so on.
Army of Shadows. Typical Criterion release quality. The packaging proclaims it “The Best Film of 2006″ despite it being almost forty years old, and it’s a claim that isn’t too off base (2006 is when it was first released in America). A little long, but thoroughly tense and imposing. I saw it at Cinematheque Ontario a little over a month ago and I’m ashamed to say that it was my first Pierre Melville film. But I was so impressed by this that it definitely won’t be my last. Highly recommended.
Spoilers as sexual dysfunction
As I’ve been growing increasingly fond of The Wire, I’ve been reading more about it from a cultural and creative point of view. This is perilous as a lot of the material out there talks about season four, which I’m just getting to after ending season three with a non-stop four episode awesomefest. I make note of the things I come across and save them for future reading. For when I’m done with season four.
One of these things of note is this series of QAs with The Wire creator David Simon and some music guy. I briefly perused a couple of them trying not to come across spoiler material when I saw Simon’s commentary about leaked DVD screeners on the internet. It’s hard to read tone, but from the looks of it he doesn’t seem overly upset about it because, in effect, it helped provide buzz for the show. He was, however, mighty distressed about spoilers.
I’m most disappointed in the viewers with bootlegged copies who have consistently posted spoilers on websites and impaired the viewing experience of others. I find that to be selfish and not a little bit infantile — the sort of behavior that denotes someone who is unable to, say, sustain a sexual act for more than a few seconds, thereby proving themselves a huge disappointment to any and all partners. Yeah, I’d definitely say that any asshole, who, armed with a bootleg copy of a show, posts a clip of a major character being killed on YouTube or headlines a website posting with “XXname hereXX R.I.P.” has pretty much defined himself before the world as a hopeless, useless premature ejaculator.
There you have it. People that post spoilers are useless premature ejaculators
, like those that posted this Battlestar Galactica Season 3 blooper reel. SPLOILERS.
Though, to be honest, I kind of lost interest in BSG after “Exodus.” Or, more to the point, pretty much right after I started watching The Wire. I only have room for one TV show at a time in my life and right now, I’m committed.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Go see Pan’s Labyrinth*. Seriously.
Though one thing bugs me about it. The title “El Laberinto del Fauno” translated to “Pan’s Labyrinth” which would mean that “Fauno” would be “Pan” — but in the actual subtitles, they never once say “Pan” and instead call the creature “Faun.” This bugged me more than it should have.
Pan’s Labyrinth was one of about four movies that I wanted to see at TIFF but couldn’t on account of it selling out before individual tickets went on sale. The massively positive buzz that it received during the course of that festival further fueled my own preconceived hype. Well, it lived up to it. Great film.
* Protip: leave site open to listen to what seems like the entire soundtrack. I’m guessing bandwidth wasn’t a concern here.
Update: Good AP article on Pan’s Labyrinth.
List of (most) Films Watched in 2006
Back in February I started compiling a list of movies watched using a pbwiki. I kept good track of everything until mid-July, which was about the time when I bought an XBox 360. No coincidence there. However, using various other posts across the internet (including on flickr — I honestly don’t know why I started doing this), I can try to fill in the blanks.
In no specific order, with my favourites and stand-outs in bold, the list is:
Favourites of ‘06
It’s that time of the year again. List season! I, too, have to partake and call out my favourite things from the past year from, in some cases, a rather small sample. But we make due with what we have.
Favourite Games of the Year
This was really the year of the XBox 360 (and DS). Sure, the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii launched to much fanfare in 2006, but one console’s rediculous price and the other’s popularity (SOLD OUT) means that the 360 was it this year. Not surprisingly, my favourite game of ‘06 was a 360 game: Dead Rising.
I (quickly) wrote about it, and my runner-ups, at Idle Thumbs’ Your personal games of the year 2006 thread.
Favourite Film of the Year
This is what I mean by “small sample.” I hate going to the theatre. Apart from the Toronto Film Festival (the one exception), I’ve been to the theatre a total of one times this year, for Manufactured Landscapes. So, out of all the 2006 films that I’ve seen, my favourite will have to be my Film Festival favourite: Climates.
Favourite Album of the Year
The majority of the albums on Pitchfork’s Top 50 albums I have not heard. Vast majority. However, I find myself (for the first time?) in agreement with their number one pick. The Knife - Silent Shout. I heard this playing on the speakers in my favourite independent music store in Toronto, Penguin Music. After a brief listen and a recommendation by the clerk, I picked it up. Best “blind” purchase I’ve made this year (though The Proposition would argue with that).
Runner ups: Tool - 10,000 Days and Clark - Body Riddle.
Favourite TV Show of the Year, sort of
I might be five years late to the party, but The Wire is the best show of the year. Maybe even last five years (though I really do like Deadwood too, which comes in a close second.)
Favourite Podcast of the Year
Connexion Bizarre. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts in the last half of this year, mostly at work, and this one is my favourite. It’s fairly specific in its musical picks, sticking with that whole industrial/noise/IDM/synthpop/experimental/EBM cluster, but it’s varied enough so that you never know what you’re going to get each week. Sometimes it misses, but most often it’s consistently awesome… so long as you are into those genres. I am. ffwd’s linklog is thanked for that link.
Pacing
It seems as though the “older” I get, the more drawn I am to deliberately paced movies. I say “deliberately paced” beacause it’s a lot more appropriate and a lot more positive than the often used, and negative, “slow” label. Movies by the likes of Terrence Malick and Nuri Bilge Ceylan are some of my favourites, and I’m currently trying to catch up with the filmographies of Tarkovsky and Antonioni, amongst others.
In the commentary for Antonioni’s “The Passenger”, Jack Nicholson says pretty much exactly why I find these movies so appealing. They’re the complete opposite to all the testosterone fueled mindless shooters and the high-fantasy adventures and all that shit that we see in nearly all narrative driven games. It’s my media of choice but, really, at times it can be so mentally draining. Here’s an audio clip of it.
it’s exactly the opposite of the twenty-five years [...] cycle of melodrama we’re in where the audience is stimulated and, I suppose, you could say video games oriented… so this kind of pace is, to me, still fascinating.
