I still can't get used to the idea that Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, is now one of the good (or at least decent) guys. But ever since his "break from the right", he's been relentless in reminding people why he broke, cataloging right-wing bigotry and ugliness with a thoroughness you can only do from the inside.
Going through comments looking for nuts is unfair, of course, and a lot of internet commenting is people deliberately saying the worst thing they can imagine because they're in a no-consequence environment. It doesn't even mean they believe it, just that they're getting off on breaking the taboo---any old punk who recalls Sid Vicious' and Siouxsie Sioux's Nazi armbands can understand the thrill. But all those caveats aside, jesus, this is ugly stuff---it's good to be reminded sometimes that there are thousands of people in the country, people sufficiently integrated into society that they have internet connections and time to leave comments, who write and maybe believe the kind of knuckle-dragging racist craziness that would seem over-the-top if it was dialogue in a Spike Lee movie.
A lot of the right's rage at liberals is basically textbook projection: taking one's worst attributes, and insisting they are the defining attributes of your enemy, so as to cleanse your own self-image. This kind of thing suggests that one of the many acts of projection is the constant complaint of "If Islam isn't evil, why won't moderate Muslims condemn terrorism?" Anyone who's paying attention knows that every time there's a terrorist incident, or even an act of censorship from the Islamic world, organizations like CAIR rush to issue press releases condemning it, mosques have "teach-ins" explaining to kids why this is wrong, and Muslim scholars go on television to explain to anyone listening why this is not okay.
But when the right erupts in bigotry and madness, moderate conservatives don't dare to condemn it publicly, and those who do (like Johnson) are immediately thrown out of the movement. I begin to suspect that the bleats about moderate Muslims not condemning hatred aren't just excuses to maintain anti-Muslim bigotry in the face of evidence, but are in fact desperate attempts, by conservatives who know how wrong their movement has gone, to assuage their guilty conscience.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Sonic Memento Mori
Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are breaking up, and I am sad, sad, sad.
As all good people with minimally-acceptable taste agree, Sonic Youth made a great deal of the best, most original, most interesting rock music of the 80s. I first came on board with Confusion Is Sex---tracks like Freezer Burn and Protect Me From You suggested a world much darker and weirder than the Misfits albums that had previously been my black standard. The Misfits aren't actually the worst comparison point---just like Glenn Danzig was a great vocalist because he always implied vocal energy beyond what he was expending, Thurston Moore could somehow hit a single unchorded string in a way that implied a whole range of counter-harmonics of the sort that would drive a Lovecraft character mad.
But as with any major rock band, the image was as much part of the story as the music. The most punk thing about Sonic Youth was their contempt for the bad-boy mythos of rock ideology: a conviction that being a hard-drinkin' wild boy was exactly what the industry wanted, but being crazy artists with a stable marriage was the biggest bird you could flip to the system.
As The Clash quoted, the overclass always wants to turn a conflict between rulers and ruled into a generational conflict, because generational conflicts fade away. Like protégé Kurt Cobain, Thurston and Kim wanted to prove that you could be in a healthy grown-up relationship without turning into James fucking Taylor, that anger at the world didn't have to be directed at the person you're having sex with, that living well was the best revenge. Sonic Youth rarely sloganeered in their music, but their commitment to each other was inherently political, and the feminist subtext of their songwriting duties, where Thurston tended towards the introspective and Kim towards the aggressive, was unmistakable.
Mainstream rock ideology is enamored of doomed, self-destructive rebellion, because mainstream rock exists to take youthful energy and countercultural anger and render them harmless, and nothing is more harmless than a corpse. That sense of rock ideology as a co-opting was at the base of the punk rebellion, and Sonic Youth was always gleefully snarky about punk bands they saw as dragging out all the old Jim Morrison bullshit. Many a hippie has criticized punk for its nihilism, but the truth is that punk built more infrastructure for sustainable countercultural life---'zines, indie labels, even communes---than the 60s generation ever conceived of. The hippies, raised in wholesome, stable families, always imagined that if they just looked at the powerful with big enough doe eyes, they'd be given what they wanted. The punks, children of a divorced generation, knew that you would only get as much life as you could build yourself.
A marriage is the ultimate collaboration, and the ultimate counterculture---two people forming their own nation, and learning every day the most basic and most important lesson: How to treat another person as though they're as important as you are. Thurston and Kim's commitment to being collaborators, equals, and partners while making angular, smart, deadly, pissed-off noise, was an inspiration to everyone who thought mutual love could be the fulfillment of one's individualism, not the end. The end of this particular marriage doesn't mean that's wrong---what ended this marriage is ultimately none of my damn business, not least because all the fantasies I've spun based on their image has very little to do with these two actual people---but the failure of these two people to keep their partnership together makes me even sadder than all the dashed hopes that will soon be shuffling away from Zucotti Park.
As all good people with minimally-acceptable taste agree, Sonic Youth made a great deal of the best, most original, most interesting rock music of the 80s. I first came on board with Confusion Is Sex---tracks like Freezer Burn and Protect Me From You suggested a world much darker and weirder than the Misfits albums that had previously been my black standard. The Misfits aren't actually the worst comparison point---just like Glenn Danzig was a great vocalist because he always implied vocal energy beyond what he was expending, Thurston Moore could somehow hit a single unchorded string in a way that implied a whole range of counter-harmonics of the sort that would drive a Lovecraft character mad.
But as with any major rock band, the image was as much part of the story as the music. The most punk thing about Sonic Youth was their contempt for the bad-boy mythos of rock ideology: a conviction that being a hard-drinkin' wild boy was exactly what the industry wanted, but being crazy artists with a stable marriage was the biggest bird you could flip to the system.
As The Clash quoted, the overclass always wants to turn a conflict between rulers and ruled into a generational conflict, because generational conflicts fade away. Like protégé Kurt Cobain, Thurston and Kim wanted to prove that you could be in a healthy grown-up relationship without turning into James fucking Taylor, that anger at the world didn't have to be directed at the person you're having sex with, that living well was the best revenge. Sonic Youth rarely sloganeered in their music, but their commitment to each other was inherently political, and the feminist subtext of their songwriting duties, where Thurston tended towards the introspective and Kim towards the aggressive, was unmistakable.
Mainstream rock ideology is enamored of doomed, self-destructive rebellion, because mainstream rock exists to take youthful energy and countercultural anger and render them harmless, and nothing is more harmless than a corpse. That sense of rock ideology as a co-opting was at the base of the punk rebellion, and Sonic Youth was always gleefully snarky about punk bands they saw as dragging out all the old Jim Morrison bullshit. Many a hippie has criticized punk for its nihilism, but the truth is that punk built more infrastructure for sustainable countercultural life---'zines, indie labels, even communes---than the 60s generation ever conceived of. The hippies, raised in wholesome, stable families, always imagined that if they just looked at the powerful with big enough doe eyes, they'd be given what they wanted. The punks, children of a divorced generation, knew that you would only get as much life as you could build yourself.
A marriage is the ultimate collaboration, and the ultimate counterculture---two people forming their own nation, and learning every day the most basic and most important lesson: How to treat another person as though they're as important as you are. Thurston and Kim's commitment to being collaborators, equals, and partners while making angular, smart, deadly, pissed-off noise, was an inspiration to everyone who thought mutual love could be the fulfillment of one's individualism, not the end. The end of this particular marriage doesn't mean that's wrong---what ended this marriage is ultimately none of my damn business, not least because all the fantasies I've spun based on their image has very little to do with these two actual people---but the failure of these two people to keep their partnership together makes me even sadder than all the dashed hopes that will soon be shuffling away from Zucotti Park.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
"The New Yorker: Tabloid of Record"
http://bit.ly/ro5vnL
This is honestly the most visually interesting thing I've seen all week. It's the Church of Scientology's response to the exposé of the Church that recently ran in The New Yorker, and it's like a perfectly concise catalog of contemporary propaganda visuals.
In the first few seconds, you get an artificial aged film effect, a smug and angry voice-over that sounds like the South Park parody of a smug and angry voice over, harshly lit and hastily assembled 3-D animation. Then it suddenly takes a turn into 1950s newsreel style actors mugging disinterest and a Zhdanovite spiel insisting that the multi-Oscar winner is an unknown nobody.
The fact that it's incredibly clumsy just makes it all the more interesting. As Stephen King noted in Danse Macabre, less artful productions are often more useful as historical documents than good films. The hackish filmmakes lack an artist's individual voice, which means you get a much clearer sense of what was considered proper visual technique at the moment. This clumsy thing is unlikely to convince anyone---it's not a creative visual masterpiece of innovative propaganda techniques, like Triumph of the Will. It's more like an evening watching Fox: defamiliarize for a second, and you'll see all kinds of genuinely odd and obvious visual tropes that the blinkered filmmakers and audience regard as perfectly normal. And how weird is that?
This is honestly the most visually interesting thing I've seen all week. It's the Church of Scientology's response to the exposé of the Church that recently ran in The New Yorker, and it's like a perfectly concise catalog of contemporary propaganda visuals.
In the first few seconds, you get an artificial aged film effect, a smug and angry voice-over that sounds like the South Park parody of a smug and angry voice over, harshly lit and hastily assembled 3-D animation. Then it suddenly takes a turn into 1950s newsreel style actors mugging disinterest and a Zhdanovite spiel insisting that the multi-Oscar winner is an unknown nobody.
The fact that it's incredibly clumsy just makes it all the more interesting. As Stephen King noted in Danse Macabre, less artful productions are often more useful as historical documents than good films. The hackish filmmakes lack an artist's individual voice, which means you get a much clearer sense of what was considered proper visual technique at the moment. This clumsy thing is unlikely to convince anyone---it's not a creative visual masterpiece of innovative propaganda techniques, like Triumph of the Will. It's more like an evening watching Fox: defamiliarize for a second, and you'll see all kinds of genuinely odd and obvious visual tropes that the blinkered filmmakers and audience regard as perfectly normal. And how weird is that?
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Gaijin Games, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, stuff
My adoration for Gaijin Games has been made clear before. Out of that last post grew a rapturous---and I hope interesting---review of Bit.Trip Flux, over at Slant Magazine.
And then that led to an interview with Gaijin Games CEO Alex Neuse, which is chock-full of interesting practical tidbits and the occasional matzoh ball of conceptualism.
"Like Dziga Vertov's films, Mondrian's paintings, or Balanchine's choreography, BIT.TRIP FLUX presents the spectacle of a medium reveling in its essential properties, offering an aesthetic experience that wasn't possible until the form was created to engender it."
And then that led to an interview with Gaijin Games CEO Alex Neuse, which is chock-full of interesting practical tidbits and the occasional matzoh ball of conceptualism.
"Usually games teach the player how the game world works and stick to it; like when I'm playing Halo, I know a Grunt isn't going to suddenly split into four slower moving Grunts. But BIT.TRIP is all about simple visual elements that could do anything, and a lot of the humor of the BIT.TRIP games comes from that kind of surprise attack."
Meantime, my tradition of arguing with Glenn Kenny (all in good fun!) continues, as we argue about Death Wish, argue about Scorsese, and occasionally argue about criticism and Lester Bangs.
"I'm quite happy to say that social responsibility is more a negative than a positive virtue. That is, no artist is obliged to deliver "a positive message", but you are indeed obliged not to be actively evil. Y'know as if you were a person---you don't actually have to do missionary work, but you should refrain from yelling "ching-chong-Chinaman" every time you see a Vietnamese person on the subway. "
And finally... I've been writing regular game reviews over at Slant, which has been great---writing something that feels lower-stakes than my usual creative output is incredibly effective as a confidence booster. And occasionally, I get to write something as fun as my review of Pokemon White.
"So how does someone old enough to have voted for Paul Tsongas end up playing the new Pokemon game?"
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Red Riding Hood
I really wanted Red Riding Hood to be great, largely because the idea that Catherine Hardwicke would take her anger over being fired from Twilight and channel it into making the American equivalent of a Catherine Brellait film was a hugely appealing meta-narrative. My hopes were raised when I saw that she'd cast Amanda Seyfriend, arguably the greatest and most underrated actress of her generation. Ever since Veronica Mars, I've been eager to see Seyfried get a role that lets her show off her tremendous actorly intelligence; like Robert DeNiro, she makes very smart choices even when playing dumb characters, and can convey inner life with great economy of gesture. In Mean Girls, Seyfried's every slack-jawed stare was active and compelling, and the lines she did have were bring-down-the-house funny with wittily faux-earnest chirpiness. And in Veronica Mars (the first season, the good one) she took a cliched L.A. party-girl character and made her specific and individual through one layered line reading after another.
So I ignored the bad reviews Red Riding Hood got, especially since most of them seemed like more lame boynerd Twilight-bashing. The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing, almost as embarassing as the Dungeons & Dragons-rulebook grumblings that the McCullen clan aren't "real vampires", whatever the fuck that means. I kept hoping that Red Riding Hood was going to be the movie that turned Catherine Hardwicke into Kathryn Bigelow, a female director who can make Hollywood genres seem new again via sharp intelligence and a unique perspective.
No such luck. Red Riding Hood is unforgivably dull, routine, and worse yet, appallingly professional. The problem isn't the panting romanticism, but rather the lack of same. An early flashback scene mixing bunny-slaughter and pre-teen lust takes place in vast beds of studio-built, brightly artificial flowers, and the first ten minutes had me looking forward to more Guy-Maddin-for-girls production design and unhinged, Almodovar-esque melodrama. But that visionary quality is lost the instant the movie proper starts. From then on it's all tediously "good" shots, in which every pan begins with a vertical movement, ends with a horizontal movement, and focus-shifts from foreground to background on an important beat. It's all quite proper and utterly numbing, and there's no way for wooly, hairy, slavering romance to break out when every beat is so carefully manicured.
And the orange-and-teal! Oy, the orange-and-teal! You don't get a sense of timelessness when your movie looks exactly like every other goddamn piece of digital color correction in the last ten years. Shot after shot is built around an orange thing in the foreground, teal in the background and then---OMG!!!!---rack focus to an orange thing in the background! Red and white are perfectly good colors to use in this story, and the occasional cameo appearance by purple suggests that someone in the production design department wants to make the movie look a little more interesting, but ultimately the color choices, like the camera setups, are indistinguishable from any other Hollywood action movie, part of the appalling homogenization that computerized industrial filmmaking has wrought.
Even Seyfried is reduced to typical young-actress mummery, wandering around with big eyes and a half-open mouth instead of making her character into a convincing human being. But then, nearly everyone in the movie suffers from the same lack of individuality, which I largely attribute to Hardwicke's refusal to let any of the actors decide clearly whether they're inhabitants of a medieval world completely different from our own, or basically modern people who just happen to be in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't help that the scriptwriter seems to think that the villagers are living before the invention of subtext; every line expresses exactly what it says, leaving the actors with no choices worth making. Only Gary Oldman gets to do anything other than be tediously sincere, perhaps thanks to English actors' inimitable knack for ignoring bad direction and breaking off bits of scenery to nibble when given nothing better to do.
Worst of all, although the movie early and often hammers on the theme that Valerie is set apart from the others by an inner darkness which gives her a unique connection to the Wolf, the script never, ever lets that be expressed through action. In some misguided attempt, perhaps, to make her "relatable", the first scene's intriguing hints of sadism are immediately dropped, and she's never allowed to have so much as an uncharitable thought. The movie seems to want to rebuke the fairy-tale division of victimized girl and threatening male by locating the Wolf's darkness within Valerie, but her only moments of violence are harmless (and ineffectual) gestures of self-defense. So while the movie is built around the Wolf's desire to make Valerie his consort, his temptations never seem very tempting to this Good Girl, and the suspense becomes purely external---WHO is the werewolf? WHAT was her wanna-be boyfriend doing when the attack happened? WHICH herring is the red one?---rather than character-driven. Suspense built around character choices deepens the audience's involvement in the story; suspense built around narrative conditions is merely screenwriter preening.
I had hoped that getting booted from Twilight would inspire Hardwicke to make something loopier, more intense, and more personal, but instead, she's trying to be Chris Weitz, making movies as polished, professional, and of-no-possible-interest-to-anyone as The Golden Compass. Every shot is nicely composed, Hollywood-busy (that is, full of background activity that never threatens to catch the viewer's interest), and perfectly un-striking. A fairy-tale movie needs to seize the viewer, either through unexpected grungy realism or wildly expressionist eccentricity, and force them into the kind of childlike credulity that movies and fairy tales can conjure. They need love, sex, blood, and profound weirdness. Red Riding Hood's clock-punching won't give anyone nightmares, fantasies, or even something to think about on the drive home. What a waste.
So I ignored the bad reviews Red Riding Hood got, especially since most of them seemed like more lame boynerd Twilight-bashing. The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing, almost as embarassing as the Dungeons & Dragons-rulebook grumblings that the McCullen clan aren't "real vampires", whatever the fuck that means. I kept hoping that Red Riding Hood was going to be the movie that turned Catherine Hardwicke into Kathryn Bigelow, a female director who can make Hollywood genres seem new again via sharp intelligence and a unique perspective.
No such luck. Red Riding Hood is unforgivably dull, routine, and worse yet, appallingly professional. The problem isn't the panting romanticism, but rather the lack of same. An early flashback scene mixing bunny-slaughter and pre-teen lust takes place in vast beds of studio-built, brightly artificial flowers, and the first ten minutes had me looking forward to more Guy-Maddin-for-girls production design and unhinged, Almodovar-esque melodrama. But that visionary quality is lost the instant the movie proper starts. From then on it's all tediously "good" shots, in which every pan begins with a vertical movement, ends with a horizontal movement, and focus-shifts from foreground to background on an important beat. It's all quite proper and utterly numbing, and there's no way for wooly, hairy, slavering romance to break out when every beat is so carefully manicured.
And the orange-and-teal! Oy, the orange-and-teal! You don't get a sense of timelessness when your movie looks exactly like every other goddamn piece of digital color correction in the last ten years. Shot after shot is built around an orange thing in the foreground, teal in the background and then---OMG!!!!---rack focus to an orange thing in the background! Red and white are perfectly good colors to use in this story, and the occasional cameo appearance by purple suggests that someone in the production design department wants to make the movie look a little more interesting, but ultimately the color choices, like the camera setups, are indistinguishable from any other Hollywood action movie, part of the appalling homogenization that computerized industrial filmmaking has wrought.
Even Seyfried is reduced to typical young-actress mummery, wandering around with big eyes and a half-open mouth instead of making her character into a convincing human being. But then, nearly everyone in the movie suffers from the same lack of individuality, which I largely attribute to Hardwicke's refusal to let any of the actors decide clearly whether they're inhabitants of a medieval world completely different from our own, or basically modern people who just happen to be in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't help that the scriptwriter seems to think that the villagers are living before the invention of subtext; every line expresses exactly what it says, leaving the actors with no choices worth making. Only Gary Oldman gets to do anything other than be tediously sincere, perhaps thanks to English actors' inimitable knack for ignoring bad direction and breaking off bits of scenery to nibble when given nothing better to do.
Worst of all, although the movie early and often hammers on the theme that Valerie is set apart from the others by an inner darkness which gives her a unique connection to the Wolf, the script never, ever lets that be expressed through action. In some misguided attempt, perhaps, to make her "relatable", the first scene's intriguing hints of sadism are immediately dropped, and she's never allowed to have so much as an uncharitable thought. The movie seems to want to rebuke the fairy-tale division of victimized girl and threatening male by locating the Wolf's darkness within Valerie, but her only moments of violence are harmless (and ineffectual) gestures of self-defense. So while the movie is built around the Wolf's desire to make Valerie his consort, his temptations never seem very tempting to this Good Girl, and the suspense becomes purely external---WHO is the werewolf? WHAT was her wanna-be boyfriend doing when the attack happened? WHICH herring is the red one?---rather than character-driven. Suspense built around character choices deepens the audience's involvement in the story; suspense built around narrative conditions is merely screenwriter preening.
I had hoped that getting booted from Twilight would inspire Hardwicke to make something loopier, more intense, and more personal, but instead, she's trying to be Chris Weitz, making movies as polished, professional, and of-no-possible-interest-to-anyone as The Golden Compass. Every shot is nicely composed, Hollywood-busy (that is, full of background activity that never threatens to catch the viewer's interest), and perfectly un-striking. A fairy-tale movie needs to seize the viewer, either through unexpected grungy realism or wildly expressionist eccentricity, and force them into the kind of childlike credulity that movies and fairy tales can conjure. They need love, sex, blood, and profound weirdness. Red Riding Hood's clock-punching won't give anyone nightmares, fantasies, or even something to think about on the drive home. What a waste.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Bit.Trip.Beat
The new Bit.Trip.Flux trailer is up, promising more of the Rez-meets-Pong gameplay that made Bit.Trip.Beat such a brainwashing gem. While I've enjoyed the other Bit.Trip games, none have had the unholy power of Beat---Core was marred by the Wiimote's unsatisfying thumbpad (has the art of making thumbpads just been lost, like medieval stoneworking techniques?), while Void and Fate had to accommodate a greater range of player action, which made Beat's musical precision impossible. And Runner, though fun, never sounded quite right to me---only after I turned my stereo's treble way down did the gold-grabbing sound stop cutting through the music.
It's only Beat that perfectly melded music and gameplay, producing a powerfully immersive experience that's surprisingly accessible. I've proffered Beat to a number of casual or non-gamers, and they've all been equally taken in by it, enjoying the experience from the start with none of the reluctance to waste their time on this nonsense that non-gamers typically have to overcome. A lot of that is due to its immediately accessible gameplay---pretty much anyone technologically savvy enough to use a telephone has seen Pong, so the how-do-I-do-it? barrier is low. Equally important is how the musical gameplay works on the player like a physical seduction, starting with gentle touches and building to a point where you couldn't walk away if you wanted to, and you've forgotten what it would feel like to want to walk away.
Okay, maybe I'm overstating some, but not by much. The basis for video games' power to compel is interaction: There's something incredibly appealing about "I can make the puppet do things!" The Bit.Trip games merge that with the physical dynamism of music, an art form with tremendous power to subliminally influence and control people in no small part because it's the art form that inflicts itself on the viewer's body (I always remind actors that to make an audible sound is to have a physical effect on your scene partner). Unlike more direct music games, Bit.Trip titles make the link between music and gameplay subliminal, and thus even more powerful---you don't quite realize your hands and ears are being enlisted in a technofrenzy crusade until your eyeballs have crusted over from not blinking.
Of course, the above also describes Rez, arguably the most successful of all the music-games-that-aren't-music-games. What Gaijin brings to the table is something rare among current developers: an unabashed willingness to fuck with the player. There's been a backlash against easy games lately, leading to the surprise triumph of a willfully difficult game like Demon's Souls. These hard games make a point of being tough but fair---critics praised Demon's Souls for always making clear what you had to do to beat a monster, so when you died, you had no one to blame but yourself.
Bit.Trip.Beat isn't like that at all; on the contrary, its most charming characteristic is the developer's gleeful sadism. Physics change in the middle of a level, dots will suddenly disappear, even your controls will abruptly change with little warning. The effect is surprisingly charming---the simplicity and consistency of Gaijin's games already make them feel more like an individual artwork than many made-by-committee titles, and the willful sadism paradoxically makes the game feel even more personal, even weirdly friendly. As designer Douglas Wilson notes, deliberate game designer sadism creates a dialogic relationship between the player and the designer, and it makes the latter much more real to the player, and therefore more human. You don't feel tormented by the world so much as specifically targeted by a human designer, who's cast himself in the role of your mean-but-loving older brother.
It's the simplicity of the Gaijin aesthetic that makes this enthusiastic messing-with-you so congenial. Look at a screenshot of almost any major-release game, and count how many elements on the screen have nothing to do with gameplay. If the designers started changing the rules on you, the player would soon find themselves completely lost, indignant, and frustrated. But when the player only has to look at a few on-screen elements, the designer can demand that they look much closer.
It's only Beat that perfectly melded music and gameplay, producing a powerfully immersive experience that's surprisingly accessible. I've proffered Beat to a number of casual or non-gamers, and they've all been equally taken in by it, enjoying the experience from the start with none of the reluctance to waste their time on this nonsense that non-gamers typically have to overcome. A lot of that is due to its immediately accessible gameplay---pretty much anyone technologically savvy enough to use a telephone has seen Pong, so the how-do-I-do-it? barrier is low. Equally important is how the musical gameplay works on the player like a physical seduction, starting with gentle touches and building to a point where you couldn't walk away if you wanted to, and you've forgotten what it would feel like to want to walk away.
Okay, maybe I'm overstating some, but not by much. The basis for video games' power to compel is interaction: There's something incredibly appealing about "I can make the puppet do things!" The Bit.Trip games merge that with the physical dynamism of music, an art form with tremendous power to subliminally influence and control people in no small part because it's the art form that inflicts itself on the viewer's body (I always remind actors that to make an audible sound is to have a physical effect on your scene partner). Unlike more direct music games, Bit.Trip titles make the link between music and gameplay subliminal, and thus even more powerful---you don't quite realize your hands and ears are being enlisted in a technofrenzy crusade until your eyeballs have crusted over from not blinking.
Of course, the above also describes Rez, arguably the most successful of all the music-games-that-aren't-music-games. What Gaijin brings to the table is something rare among current developers: an unabashed willingness to fuck with the player. There's been a backlash against easy games lately, leading to the surprise triumph of a willfully difficult game like Demon's Souls. These hard games make a point of being tough but fair---critics praised Demon's Souls for always making clear what you had to do to beat a monster, so when you died, you had no one to blame but yourself.
Bit.Trip.Beat isn't like that at all; on the contrary, its most charming characteristic is the developer's gleeful sadism. Physics change in the middle of a level, dots will suddenly disappear, even your controls will abruptly change with little warning. The effect is surprisingly charming---the simplicity and consistency of Gaijin's games already make them feel more like an individual artwork than many made-by-committee titles, and the willful sadism paradoxically makes the game feel even more personal, even weirdly friendly. As designer Douglas Wilson notes, deliberate game designer sadism creates a dialogic relationship between the player and the designer, and it makes the latter much more real to the player, and therefore more human. You don't feel tormented by the world so much as specifically targeted by a human designer, who's cast himself in the role of your mean-but-loving older brother.
It's the simplicity of the Gaijin aesthetic that makes this enthusiastic messing-with-you so congenial. Look at a screenshot of almost any major-release game, and count how many elements on the screen have nothing to do with gameplay. If the designers started changing the rules on you, the player would soon find themselves completely lost, indignant, and frustrated. But when the player only has to look at a few on-screen elements, the designer can demand that they look much closer.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Some Came Fighting
Another link-to-comments post... I'm criminally unable to resist baiting Glenn Kenny, the erudite proprietor of Some Came Running. With the result that I sometimes end up putting more time into comments on his posts than anything written here! Here's a highlight or two:
-Arguing about Howard Hawks and John Hughes
-Arguing about Eastwood, and dialogue
-Arguing about Lester Bangs, and Matt Zoller Seitz
-Arguing about Carol Reed and auteur theory
-Arguing about Godard
There's nothing at that Read more link! It's just a default!
-Arguing about Howard Hawks and John Hughes
-Arguing about Eastwood, and dialogue
-Arguing about Lester Bangs, and Matt Zoller Seitz
-Arguing about Carol Reed and auteur theory
-Arguing about Godard
There's nothing at that Read more link! It's just a default!
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Documenteur
Though Agnes Varda has said that Documenteur is her favorite film, it's not her best. Despite an opening statement that all gestures are inherently false, the movie's non-acting, first draft dialogue, and awkward dubbing never becomes an effective style. Instead it's just alienating in a non-Brechtian sense, making it hard to get as emotionally involved in the film as the director clearly is. Meanwhile the sedate montage and script keep the film from achieving much intellectual frisson. But Varda's visual knack is as strong as ever, and the film is, for all its script problems, an incredibly powerful evocation of depression's effect on vision.
Part of the movie's trouble may be that the story, inspired by Varda's painful separation from husband Jacque Demy, was just too personal for her to achieve the compassionate yet unforgiving perspective of her other films. In Cleo From 5 To 7, for example, Varda is at once skewering Cleo's narcissism while remaining deeply sympathetic to her fears of losing the beauty she's utterly dependent on. Similarly, Varda's masterpiece Vagabond exudes deep sorrow for its protagonist's lonely death while never forgetting that she's a pain in the ass whose fate is pretty much her own damn fault. Even a documentary like Ydessa & The Bears teases the subject's self-dramatizing grandiosity (especially embarrassing when placed beside the Holocaust memories Ydessa's work deals with) while acknowledging the power of her emotions.
No such tension is achieved in Documenteur; the circumstances behind the protagonist's separation are never touched on, her love for her child is never problematized, even her sorrow is a little generic. Despite an occasional bout of willfulness or temper, and Sabine Mamou's interesting face, there's just not much to identify Emile, the protagonist, as a unique individual, or make her anything but a transparent reactor to circumstances. Worse still, in the film seems to aim for a simple identification with its lead that is much more conventional than what Varda usually pulls off with such aplomb. When she cries, we're to cry along with her, and when she succeeds we're prodded to admire; this is cinema rhetoric of the most ordinary kind, and it's a shame to see Varda fall into it.
Varda's photographic eye, however, is always unique, and that alone makes the movie worth a look. Too many cinematographers, and too many viewers, think that saturated colors and high contrast equals good photography. What's striking about Documenteur is how much Varda accomplishes visually with natural light, soft contrast, and deliberately dull colors. Though obviously shot quickly and cheaply, the look is reminiscent of beautiful 70s productions like McCabe and Mrs Miller or Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More.
The title Documenteur blends the French words for "documentarian" and "liar", just as the film blends documentary and fictional (albeit roman-a-clef, semi-fictions). But more intriguingly, the film's visual texture suggests the way that plain sight can lie, manipulated by circumstances. Emile is a woman in the throes of despair, but unable, due to the obligations of child-rearing, to succumb to that despair with romantic dissipation. Instead she crawls through her day, hoping the feelings will go away, and in the meantime living as though submerged in dirty water. Varda objectifies this situation by shooting the world's most famously bright city with deliberate dullness that poses as objectivity. The loose blocking and natural light exudes you-are-there documentary realism, but it's all deliberately muddy.
One of depression's most insidious powers is its ability to pose as accurate perception, as though the hollowed-out world the sufferer sees is truer than the illusions of the happy, and Documenteur perfectly captures both the grimness of that world and its pretence of simple reality. The camera is both documentarian and liar, it's very identification with the depressed protagonist compromising its ability to capture reality.
The film is also notable for its ground-level view of Los Angeles, an L.A. without palm trees or movie stars. Keeping her eye downcast, Varda ably captures the placeless residential districts of the city, and its low-key immigrant communities. The shots of dumpster-diving for furniture, or fishing on Venice Beach, evoke precisely what day-to-day life is like in L.A.'s eternal June, while the scenes in the luxurious beach house portray how the rich of late-70s L.A. built faux-organic hermitages that produced the illusion of nature while remaining sealed off from the outside.
Part of the movie's trouble may be that the story, inspired by Varda's painful separation from husband Jacque Demy, was just too personal for her to achieve the compassionate yet unforgiving perspective of her other films. In Cleo From 5 To 7, for example, Varda is at once skewering Cleo's narcissism while remaining deeply sympathetic to her fears of losing the beauty she's utterly dependent on. Similarly, Varda's masterpiece Vagabond exudes deep sorrow for its protagonist's lonely death while never forgetting that she's a pain in the ass whose fate is pretty much her own damn fault. Even a documentary like Ydessa & The Bears teases the subject's self-dramatizing grandiosity (especially embarrassing when placed beside the Holocaust memories Ydessa's work deals with) while acknowledging the power of her emotions.
No such tension is achieved in Documenteur; the circumstances behind the protagonist's separation are never touched on, her love for her child is never problematized, even her sorrow is a little generic. Despite an occasional bout of willfulness or temper, and Sabine Mamou's interesting face, there's just not much to identify Emile, the protagonist, as a unique individual, or make her anything but a transparent reactor to circumstances. Worse still, in the film seems to aim for a simple identification with its lead that is much more conventional than what Varda usually pulls off with such aplomb. When she cries, we're to cry along with her, and when she succeeds we're prodded to admire; this is cinema rhetoric of the most ordinary kind, and it's a shame to see Varda fall into it.
Varda's photographic eye, however, is always unique, and that alone makes the movie worth a look. Too many cinematographers, and too many viewers, think that saturated colors and high contrast equals good photography. What's striking about Documenteur is how much Varda accomplishes visually with natural light, soft contrast, and deliberately dull colors. Though obviously shot quickly and cheaply, the look is reminiscent of beautiful 70s productions like McCabe and Mrs Miller or Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More.
The title Documenteur blends the French words for "documentarian" and "liar", just as the film blends documentary and fictional (albeit roman-a-clef, semi-fictions). But more intriguingly, the film's visual texture suggests the way that plain sight can lie, manipulated by circumstances. Emile is a woman in the throes of despair, but unable, due to the obligations of child-rearing, to succumb to that despair with romantic dissipation. Instead she crawls through her day, hoping the feelings will go away, and in the meantime living as though submerged in dirty water. Varda objectifies this situation by shooting the world's most famously bright city with deliberate dullness that poses as objectivity. The loose blocking and natural light exudes you-are-there documentary realism, but it's all deliberately muddy.
One of depression's most insidious powers is its ability to pose as accurate perception, as though the hollowed-out world the sufferer sees is truer than the illusions of the happy, and Documenteur perfectly captures both the grimness of that world and its pretence of simple reality. The camera is both documentarian and liar, it's very identification with the depressed protagonist compromising its ability to capture reality.
The film is also notable for its ground-level view of Los Angeles, an L.A. without palm trees or movie stars. Keeping her eye downcast, Varda ably captures the placeless residential districts of the city, and its low-key immigrant communities. The shots of dumpster-diving for furniture, or fishing on Venice Beach, evoke precisely what day-to-day life is like in L.A.'s eternal June, while the scenes in the luxurious beach house portray how the rich of late-70s L.A. built faux-organic hermitages that produced the illusion of nature while remaining sealed off from the outside.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
What the fuck is Alain Resnais thinking?
I can't remember the last time I experienced such a gap between what the reviews told me and what a movie delivered as Alain Renais' Wild Grass. According to reviews good and bad, it's "cute", "freewheeling", "zany", and a lot of other adjectives that might lead you---certainly led me---to think it's a brightly-hued, albeit surreal, romantic comedy, ruefully self-aware and polished with Gallic wit.
Wild Grass is nothing of the sort. Like Resnais' classic Last Year At Marienbad, it's a horror movie about the fundament of misogyny: a man imposing his ontology on a woman with no regard for her subjectivity---but this time made much creepier by the director's ambivalent complicity in that imposition. It's also genre-damaged, confused, and profoundly slippery; I still can't decide if it's a cunning attack on the romantic comedy and the romantic thriller, or merely an old Frenchman's grumbling act of gender senescence, like listening to your Grandpa complain about not being able to pat the waitress' butt.
Misogyny drives the plot at every step, beginning with Margaritte Muir getting her purse (ahem) snatched by a young man outside a shoe store. Elderly ex-con Georges Palet finds her wallet, but before he can return it, he becomes fixated on Muir's ID photo. She calls to thank him for the purse's return, but like many a self-important male, Palet convinces himself that a simple act of decency merits a free pass to her vagina. He begins--- really there's no other word for this---stalking Muir, starting with angry phone calls and escalating to tire slashing. Muir calls the police, who warn him off in a marvelously-observed scene charting just how to give a suspect enough rope.
Now here's where things get really icky. When Muir attempts to confront Palet at a movie theater, she finds herself feeling affectionate, maybe even a little in love with her stalker. She ignores her friend Josepha's warnings and starts more or less pursuing him, though always insisting that his long-suffering wife come along. Her attraction to Palet (every woman's attraction to Palet!) is never explained, or even formally accounted for; even a tipsy Josepha seems unable to resist his liver-spotted charms, going from angry and afraid to putty in his hands the instant he moves in for a kiss.
The idea of an bitter, charmless old man who's irresistibly attractive to woman thirty years younger than him is a pretty standard trope of commercial cinema (and the repulsive late novels of Phillip Roth, prominently displayed at one point in the film), and it's disappointing that Resnais can't bust out something at least more unusual. Worse yet, the script blatantly violates the Bechdel rule, portraying a world where women, when alone, talk about nothing but cute boys. It's hard to believe the man who made Last Year At Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, either of which could serve as surrealist versions of The Handmaid's Tale, is making any kind of prescriptive pronouncement about womanhood. And there's certainly enough metacinematic gags to make me resist simply psychologizing the characters, or treating this behavior as reflecting Resnais' assumptions about the world. But there's not a firm enough satiric perspective to make the idea that this film is simply an apologia for sullen male privilege completely dismissible.
The semiotics of the movie make it even harder to pin down what Resnais' attitude towards his characters' lunacy is. As Palet's stalking escalates, Resnais deploys the long, wide shots and skittering strings of a standard-issue woman-in-peril thriller. But then, many of the scenes with Palet and Muir are scored with chipper jazz, and surrounded by bright colors, as though Resnais was making a parody of romantic comedies, where behavior that would get people put in a loony bin is just accepted as charming. In interviews, Resnais has said it's a movie about l'amour fou, but there's not much amour on display here, just a series of purely selfish demands, made with contempt and executed joylessly. It's like The Stepford Wives from the husbands' point of view.
The result isn't so much fascinatingly ambivalent as deeply unsatisfying, in no small part because the movie pivots on deliberately irrational behavior but bounces between genres where behavior is everything.. In a comedy, especially a parody, we accept characters doing ridiculous things because that's what happens in comedy. But if you're making a thriller, implausible action kills audience tension; it's not very scary to watch a moron walk off a cliff. Resnais refuses to commit either way, but it seems less like he's trying to do both than like he's trying to do neither---the shots aren't iconic enough to be comedy, nor withholding enough to thrill. There's occasionally low-comedy situations, like an extended open-zipper gag, but they're never very funny, and the sheer ferocity of Patel's contempt for women (and the movie's complacent furthering of that contempt) makes the laughs stick in the throat.
Many of the critics consider it "prosaic" to treat the movie's specifically gendered freakiness as being at all relevant to actual gender politics. But no one seems to have an idea what, if not misogyny, the movie is actually about. Is this an elaborate fantasy of Patel's that Resnais is cooly transcribing, like a highbrow Brent Easton Ellis? The film opens with a shot of wild grass piercing the pavement, but Georges is a relentless mower of his carefully-planted lawn; is this a satire of bourgeois repression? If so, it would need to explode its narrative more than it does, the way Resnais' early films emphatically did. Like Palet, the movie seems to have something violence and uncontrollable lurking beneath its manicured facade, but it never quite allows it to escape, and the result is a painful wreck.
Wild Grass is nothing of the sort. Like Resnais' classic Last Year At Marienbad, it's a horror movie about the fundament of misogyny: a man imposing his ontology on a woman with no regard for her subjectivity---but this time made much creepier by the director's ambivalent complicity in that imposition. It's also genre-damaged, confused, and profoundly slippery; I still can't decide if it's a cunning attack on the romantic comedy and the romantic thriller, or merely an old Frenchman's grumbling act of gender senescence, like listening to your Grandpa complain about not being able to pat the waitress' butt.
Misogyny drives the plot at every step, beginning with Margaritte Muir getting her purse (ahem) snatched by a young man outside a shoe store. Elderly ex-con Georges Palet finds her wallet, but before he can return it, he becomes fixated on Muir's ID photo. She calls to thank him for the purse's return, but like many a self-important male, Palet convinces himself that a simple act of decency merits a free pass to her vagina. He begins--- really there's no other word for this---stalking Muir, starting with angry phone calls and escalating to tire slashing. Muir calls the police, who warn him off in a marvelously-observed scene charting just how to give a suspect enough rope.
Now here's where things get really icky. When Muir attempts to confront Palet at a movie theater, she finds herself feeling affectionate, maybe even a little in love with her stalker. She ignores her friend Josepha's warnings and starts more or less pursuing him, though always insisting that his long-suffering wife come along. Her attraction to Palet (every woman's attraction to Palet!) is never explained, or even formally accounted for; even a tipsy Josepha seems unable to resist his liver-spotted charms, going from angry and afraid to putty in his hands the instant he moves in for a kiss.
The idea of an bitter, charmless old man who's irresistibly attractive to woman thirty years younger than him is a pretty standard trope of commercial cinema (and the repulsive late novels of Phillip Roth, prominently displayed at one point in the film), and it's disappointing that Resnais can't bust out something at least more unusual. Worse yet, the script blatantly violates the Bechdel rule, portraying a world where women, when alone, talk about nothing but cute boys. It's hard to believe the man who made Last Year At Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, either of which could serve as surrealist versions of The Handmaid's Tale, is making any kind of prescriptive pronouncement about womanhood. And there's certainly enough metacinematic gags to make me resist simply psychologizing the characters, or treating this behavior as reflecting Resnais' assumptions about the world. But there's not a firm enough satiric perspective to make the idea that this film is simply an apologia for sullen male privilege completely dismissible.
The semiotics of the movie make it even harder to pin down what Resnais' attitude towards his characters' lunacy is. As Palet's stalking escalates, Resnais deploys the long, wide shots and skittering strings of a standard-issue woman-in-peril thriller. But then, many of the scenes with Palet and Muir are scored with chipper jazz, and surrounded by bright colors, as though Resnais was making a parody of romantic comedies, where behavior that would get people put in a loony bin is just accepted as charming. In interviews, Resnais has said it's a movie about l'amour fou, but there's not much amour on display here, just a series of purely selfish demands, made with contempt and executed joylessly. It's like The Stepford Wives from the husbands' point of view.
The result isn't so much fascinatingly ambivalent as deeply unsatisfying, in no small part because the movie pivots on deliberately irrational behavior but bounces between genres where behavior is everything.. In a comedy, especially a parody, we accept characters doing ridiculous things because that's what happens in comedy. But if you're making a thriller, implausible action kills audience tension; it's not very scary to watch a moron walk off a cliff. Resnais refuses to commit either way, but it seems less like he's trying to do both than like he's trying to do neither---the shots aren't iconic enough to be comedy, nor withholding enough to thrill. There's occasionally low-comedy situations, like an extended open-zipper gag, but they're never very funny, and the sheer ferocity of Patel's contempt for women (and the movie's complacent furthering of that contempt) makes the laughs stick in the throat.
Many of the critics consider it "prosaic" to treat the movie's specifically gendered freakiness as being at all relevant to actual gender politics. But no one seems to have an idea what, if not misogyny, the movie is actually about. Is this an elaborate fantasy of Patel's that Resnais is cooly transcribing, like a highbrow Brent Easton Ellis? The film opens with a shot of wild grass piercing the pavement, but Georges is a relentless mower of his carefully-planted lawn; is this a satire of bourgeois repression? If so, it would need to explode its narrative more than it does, the way Resnais' early films emphatically did. Like Palet, the movie seems to have something violence and uncontrollable lurking beneath its manicured facade, but it never quite allows it to escape, and the result is a painful wreck.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
You are a controller
I'm incredibly psyched about the Kinect (a.k.a. Project Natal), Microsoft's upcoming motion controller for the Xbox 360. Many of its titles do indeed look like updated EyeToy titles, and in my book, that's great---if Sonic Free Riders is basically EyeToy Antigrav with a (finally!) working control scheme, I will be overjoyed.
I loved the EyeToy, even with all the gimmicky minigames. Like any sensible person, I found it incredibly immersive to make my body into a controller, and I was delighted by the total concentration induced by the physical gameplay. It's not unlike the effect of playing Rock Band (music, with its deep evolutionary origins, is a handy shortcut to physicality)---instead of the tunnel-vision concentration of most games, you get a kind of effortless oneness.
Unfortunately, a lot of gamers don't seem to feel that way---the comment sections over at Kotaku and Joystiq are full of whining from people who think all this flailing is the opposite of what games are for. Some of this is simple fat-ass don't-wanna-get-off-the-couch laziness, which is worth what it's worth. Some of this is horror at the idea of looking silly, though for those who complain that the people playing the games look like morons, I'd like to ask them if they think people look less moronic while staring slack-jawed at the TV with a controller in their hands.
But what's most prevalent is the typical North American Male horror of being made aware of their body in any way at all. The list of things that completely freak out typical North American Males includes dancing, being cruised, going to the doctor, and, apparently, motion controllers. What all these things have in common is that they make the body cease to be a tool, to be used as transparently as possible, and make the body instead an object in itself, a thing to be considered and evaluated.
In fact, it might be that part of what's driving gamers' horror at the Kinect (and the Wii before it) is a sense that they're losing an essential aspect of video games ---the mediation of an avatar. For a lot of hardcore gamers, much of the appeal of their entertainment of choice is the change to get out of yourself. You get out of your living room and into another, better art-designed world. You get out of your daily grind and into a bunch of challenging yet surmountable tasks. And maybe most exciting for those already deeply alienated from their bodies, you get out of your own meatsack and into a body vastly more responsive, agile, and capable. That sitting on the couch playing games makes your own body even less like that of your digital avatar is a classic irony of addiction.
As Douglas Copeland's Microserfs so ably dissected, much modern tech culture is built upon a foundation of body-horror, and a desperate need for body-escape. Video games ably meet this need, offering the player the chance to become an NFL star, a beefy marine, or a sexy babe gunfighter (and really, what guy hasn't wanted to be in the body of a hot chick, if only so they could play with their own boobs?). But if your body is the controller, then your body has to be subjected to the same sort of stress-testing and evaluation that every new gaming system is subjected to---it's like being cruised by the cattiest of queens! No wonder so many gamers look on motion control with a desperate, frozen sneer, hoping no one dares to glance below their necks.
I loved the EyeToy, even with all the gimmicky minigames. Like any sensible person, I found it incredibly immersive to make my body into a controller, and I was delighted by the total concentration induced by the physical gameplay. It's not unlike the effect of playing Rock Band (music, with its deep evolutionary origins, is a handy shortcut to physicality)---instead of the tunnel-vision concentration of most games, you get a kind of effortless oneness.
Unfortunately, a lot of gamers don't seem to feel that way---the comment sections over at Kotaku and Joystiq are full of whining from people who think all this flailing is the opposite of what games are for. Some of this is simple fat-ass don't-wanna-get-off-the-couch laziness, which is worth what it's worth. Some of this is horror at the idea of looking silly, though for those who complain that the people playing the games look like morons, I'd like to ask them if they think people look less moronic while staring slack-jawed at the TV with a controller in their hands.
But what's most prevalent is the typical North American Male horror of being made aware of their body in any way at all. The list of things that completely freak out typical North American Males includes dancing, being cruised, going to the doctor, and, apparently, motion controllers. What all these things have in common is that they make the body cease to be a tool, to be used as transparently as possible, and make the body instead an object in itself, a thing to be considered and evaluated.
In fact, it might be that part of what's driving gamers' horror at the Kinect (and the Wii before it) is a sense that they're losing an essential aspect of video games ---the mediation of an avatar. For a lot of hardcore gamers, much of the appeal of their entertainment of choice is the change to get out of yourself. You get out of your living room and into another, better art-designed world. You get out of your daily grind and into a bunch of challenging yet surmountable tasks. And maybe most exciting for those already deeply alienated from their bodies, you get out of your own meatsack and into a body vastly more responsive, agile, and capable. That sitting on the couch playing games makes your own body even less like that of your digital avatar is a classic irony of addiction.
As Douglas Copeland's Microserfs so ably dissected, much modern tech culture is built upon a foundation of body-horror, and a desperate need for body-escape. Video games ably meet this need, offering the player the chance to become an NFL star, a beefy marine, or a sexy babe gunfighter (and really, what guy hasn't wanted to be in the body of a hot chick, if only so they could play with their own boobs?). But if your body is the controller, then your body has to be subjected to the same sort of stress-testing and evaluation that every new gaming system is subjected to---it's like being cruised by the cattiest of queens! No wonder so many gamers look on motion control with a desperate, frozen sneer, hoping no one dares to glance below their necks.
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