tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91992302806797962482024-03-13T06:26:52.463-07:00That Fuzzy Bastard and The BelgianThe blog of Daniel McKleinfeld, covering games, movies, and whatever else I wanna talk about.That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-36352359599144091192023-11-02T16:59:00.001-07:002023-11-02T16:59:12.372-07:00Does this still work?Lemme see... it didn't for a while... but now?That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-68279961413174819572015-09-19T09:46:00.002-07:002015-09-19T19:19:45.729-07:00Never Odd Or Even<div class="p1">
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The new play by <a href="http://titlepoint.org/">Title: Point Productions</a>, NEVER ODD OR EVEN, is a show inspired by palindromes, those weird little phrases that are the same spelled backwards or forwards. Do geese see God? Some men interpret nine memos. No trace, not one carton. </div>
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Palindromes are fun to see, they're fun to say. But say too many of them, and all sentences start to assume their weird, lurching diction, where sentence construction is purely suited to the arrangement of letters. The usual concern of diction– what is being communicated?– falls away, and a purely systemic logic takes over. It's unsettling, because it raises the question of how much day-to-day expression is indebted to the needs of the system, rather than the needs of the user. </div>
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Palindromes are the spectacle of a system confronting its own limitations. We use a very small number of symbols to write phonemes; when you have only a few pieces, those pieces will sometimes fall onto the board in comically surprising ways. We don't like to think that we're just dropping pieces randomly on the board. When we write Hamlet, it's because we wanted to write Hamlet, not because we're one of an infinite number of monkeys.</div>
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Systems have a way of drawing attention to their own limits. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxes_of_set_theory#Paradoxes_of_the_infinite_set">The paradoxes of infinite set theory </a>seem at once impossible and plainly true– as Georg Cantor said, "Je le vois, mais ne crois pas." These paradoxes happen because math is not a physical thing that exists, subject to all reality's laws of logic and causality: math is the abstracted signifier of an order at once implacable and unreal, a set of manipulable symbols, and abstractions have a way of getting away from their source.</div>
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But it's not just an abstraction, right? Math works. It has to work. The mathematical principles work whether you're holding up a concrete bridge or a cotton blind. To witness a system eating itself is to question the system's value as signifier. Anyone who does that deserves to be thrown off one of our nice, solid, dependable bridges, into the systemless chaos of water particles surging coldly below it all.</div>
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Palindrome are prison, hallways with no beginning or end. They cannot be refuted, because they have no logic. Like Zeno's Parodox, an infinite-set paradox that makes it impossible to take a single step, a palindrome makes the very possibility of momentum seem absurd.</div>
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But we don't live in palindromes. We may fear or welcome historical cycles, cycles of violence, the reliability of human nature, the comfort of dependable genre films, the implacability of destiny. But our lives can only be cracked palindromes. Our end is generated by our beginning, but they are not the same. Death is nothing to be welcomed, but it's an effective refutation of the horrors of infinity. Nothing is infinite, really, because nothing lives forever. Much as we might, in our presumptuous imaginations, wish it to.</div>
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Our lives are a tension between our galumphing, unpredictable, infinitely varied bodies, and the graceful, dependable, tightly-bounded ouroboros we've constructed to keep us going within them, like the crisp beam of a projector washing across an actor's lumpy torso.</div>
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The play is also really funny. And scary. And it looks cool. It's a good play. It's a good life. But it's scary.</div>
That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-2613595704928694112015-09-08T12:28:00.001-07:002019-12-19T19:07:07.510-08:00Candida Royalle, 1950 - 2015<div class="p1">
RIP to a dearly beloved friend, Candida Royalle.</div>
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Candice was one hell of a filmmaker, in a genre that doesn't usually acknowledge that talent. Her porn films were super hot, and proudly feminist, but what always got me was that they looked genuinely great, with a sensitive eye for color, smart compositions, cleverly selective lighting, and camera setups that really evoked the subjectivity of the women on screen. Nearly every scene Candice shot had some clever visual idea– a bit of costuming, a well-chosen angle, a nicely placed shadow– that made them charming as well as sexy.</div>
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Candice's films were porn from a woman's point of view, but just as importantly (and just as rare), they were porn from an artist's point of view. You could always sense visual and cinematic intelligence behind the camera. If you want to see just how good a porn movie can be while still being plenty effective as porn, check out UNDER THE COVERS– shot on video, with a starvation budget, and it still manages to be both great-looking and plenty hot. </div>
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Candice was a great friend, a wonderful human being, and an inspiring entrepreneur. She transformed porn in ways that porn still hasn't caught up to. But most of all, she was an artist. And I will mourn, and miss, the artist as much as the friend.</div>
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That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-33136631178520479302015-06-18T08:10:00.001-07:002015-06-18T11:37:51.415-07:00Splatoon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My <i>Splatoon</i> review is <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/games/review/splatoon">up at Slant</a>. Tl;dr: It's really cool, and totally original, but we'll see if it's sustainable. I did have a couple of save-it-for-the-blog thoughts, though, so… Here's the blog!
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The lack of voice chat is a real shame, not just because chatting is fun, but because it really pushes against the game's best qualities. A game this unusual demands new strategies, and without voice chat, it's almost impossible to try new things. So games too often descend into either standard online dynamics or a bunch of colorful monads, which is both less enjoyable and less interesting than the bizarre plans people might concoct to master this very odd game.<br />
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But it's worth noting how very Nintendo the online experience is. You don't talk to the people you're playing with; your main interaction is in the pre-game lobby, where you can see other people's characters decked out in unique costume items and displaying Miiverse drawings. The only bonding experience is that everyone who plays must watch the day's unskippable video broadcast, which lays out what today's maps will be. Nintendo has always been mistrustful of the internet, but it's really something to make a 2015 game that's visibly nostalgic for broadcast media!<br />
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The general good cheer of the Miiverse means it's friendlier than most online games, but it's also asynchronous, so instead of getting to know people, you see what they're wearing and try to get that style for yourself; there's even a sketchy back-alley character who makes knock-offs of clothing designs you just have to possess. This is the first Nintendo-made game to have such an interest in clothes that they release official– and pretty good-looking!– <a href="http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/05/fashion_a_young_reader_shows_that_style_matters_in_splatoon">fashion shots</a>.<br />
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This is a very different mood from other major Nintendo games. While franchises like <i>Legend of Zelda</i> and <i>Mario World</i> are suffused with nostalgia for a rural idyll, <i>Splatoon</i> is gleefully urban in its emphasis on fashion, speed, and the anonymity of a crowd. But it's very Nintendo in its commitment to recreating a specifically Japanese experience. Most games follow the American model for online interaction, where the virtual game space is like a midwestern mall: cliques of young people talking shit and getting into fights, while respectable citizens try to enjoy the entertainment. <i>Splatoon</i>'s world is more like an online Harajuku, where anonymous individuals pose for each other but you're all basically alone.<br />
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<br />That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-65061162922917779532015-01-26T11:16:00.003-08:002015-06-18T07:34:22.537-07:00Inherent Vice<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="309" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" src="https://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/16187429460/player/" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="550"></iframe>
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The graininess of Inherent Vice makes every frame backwards-looking; the story's nostalgia for 60's dreams mirrored in director P.T. Anderson's nostalgia for 70's filmmaking, and for celluloid itself. But it's also well-suited to the movie's own story and themes. After all, film gets grainy when you're losing light.
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Inherent Vice is a movie about left-behind people. They're scuttling around the fraying edges of the counterculture, trying to stay warm by the dying embers of their past, trying not to notice the shadow of money and power as it slowly covers their entire life. Doc Sportello's stoner paranoia is a funny, sad attempt to imagine there's more to the story than the oldest story in the world: greedy assholes taking everything that was free and selling it.
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** ALL KINDS OF SPOILERS BELOW **
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The plot kicks in from the first scene, when a Doc's lost love Shasta Hepworth shows up with a story about her married boyfriend whose wife is plotting to get him institutionalized so she can take his money. When Doc first sees Shasta, he comments on how she's done herself up all respectable-like, not knowing just how sucked into the system she is; the plan is for a legal kidnapping, the square's version of a heist. The wife isn't mad about his habit of boinking hippie girls, which is just standard bourgeois infidelity. But she's determined to stop his hippie-influenced plan to give up building expensive condos and start building free housing. We can only imagine the delight she takes in making a flower child's honeypot part of her reactionary scheme.
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One of the major themes of the movie is a world where all the things once free are being packaged for sale. And the commodification of free love is a big part of that. The scenes of a wanna-be-hip dentist swapping easy sex for good coke may play as a laugh riot, but it's a lot sadder when you consider that these snow bunny deals are being made in an office complex built on top of the vacant lot where Shasta and Doc were once drugless, in love, and free. Making it all the more pointed that Doc is distracted by coke and ass as anyone. As in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, joy and freedom can only happen in the empty places where money has not yet begun to scheme, and as soon as anyone with power notices, they'll be plowed right under so that someone can sell admission.
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And in the movie, as with the historical 60s, ubiquitous sex is the promise that gets suckers through the door. Doc gets a free preview of the pussy eater's special, but the girls are just trying to distract a guy they think is a cop. A closet full of naked-lady ties is a souvenir of all the bodies that real estate money can buy. And when Shasta strips, it's a sure sign that something terrible is happening. Black revolutionaries and Aryan bikers may be the era's rebel motherfuckers, but they end up pawns as surely as the hopeless junkies who will always be good customers "as long as American life was something to be escaped from."
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Eventually all the interlocking stories are revealed as a plot of The Golden Fang, a vertically integrated 60s-eating monster, encompassing hard drugs, new age therapy, cosmetic dentistry and pricey real estate– everything you need to build the white man's Los Angeles. The Fang came into the 60s like Dracula drifting in by sea, and sucked the optimism out of the 60s with teeth made of precious metal. But the moneymen washed in on a wave of teenybopper sex, all those drugged-out, hope-addled girls irresistible victims for the dealers, the hustlers, and the frequently name-checked Charlie Manson. Doc's got a good heart, and he wants to save everyone. But he can't stop listening to his dope and his dick, and they keep him wrapped up in obscurantist insights and too-easy pleasures, never seeing the pattern that's right on the surface.That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-65954771019475735852013-01-23T10:44:00.003-08:002013-01-23T10:44:39.085-08:00Thomas Was Alone
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These days, it's no longer revolutionary for a game to use its gameplay systems as narrative devices. But doing something really well is always rare, and while <i><a href="http://www.thomaswasalone.com/">Thomas Was Alone</a></i> is pretty visibly influenced by <i>Portal</i> and <i>Braid</i>, it's influenced by their smartest aspects. Like those games, it uses the foundation of the puzzle-platformer genre as a place to build a cleverly cohesive fusion of gameplay and narrative.</div>
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From <i>Portal</i>, <i>TWA</i> gets the idea of making a story out of its own construction. Most puzzle games are set in stylized, often deliberately "computery" worlds, so the player just accepts their conventions without too many questions; no one's going to ask whose engagement ring these three matching gems are for. But <i>Portal</i> was set in a realistic 3D environment, so it needed some explanation for why the universe was a series of just-barely-transcendable barriers. The game's story of a person who had to make her way through computer-operated tests was a series of gentle pokes at the <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BreakingTheFourthWall">fourth wall</a>, jokingly putting the player in the same position as the character, though with a bit less risk of falling into a fire pit.</div>
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<i>Thomas Was Alone</i> is visually nearer to <i>Tetris</i> than <i>Portal</i>, which makes it a touching act of gratuitous creativity that that designer Matt Bithell gave it one of the better game narratives this year. We would have just accepted that the little dots have to get to the outline because the outline is the right size for a little dot, but <i>TWA</i> turns the progression through levels into drama. <i>TWA</i>'s tale of computer-generated dots getting to the end of a program raises the bar on <i>Portal</i>'s metafiction by openly acknowledging that all its characters are not just in a computer-generated environment but are themselves computer-generated. There's a thrillingly modernist, even Marxist <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/369034/materialism">materialism</a> in such frankness.</div>
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It helps that the story is told with a narrative compression that a lot of big-budget games could learn from; there's just enough information to spark the player's imagination without drowning us in irrelevant detail. And despite the deliberately crude visuals, Bithell cleverly built character traits around each dot's abilities--- the jump-assist character is too eager to please, the low-jumper is jealous, and so on---so that I found myself somehow feeling like each dot looked exactly like that character would look. Which is a neat trick when they're all a bunch of colored pixels arranged in an inexpressive line!</div>
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Better still is <i>TWA</i>'s use of game mechanics as vital narrative elements. As the verb tense suggests, <i>Thomas Was Alone</i> is a game about the shift from solitude to society, with all the attendant risks and rewards: companionship, mutual aid, obligation, betrayal, and the simple irritation of having to deal with people who aren't like you. You start the game controlling a single character, and you're gradually joined by more as the game shifts from heroic quest to ensemble drama. Initially, as I had to switch between multiple characters in the quest for the goal, I found myself instinctively trying to play like I did in the early levels---get a dot to its goal, go back and get the next dot to its goal, and so on. But it quickly becomes obvious that the dots can only get to the end by working together, and the act of discovering that the characters must work as a team nicely forces identification with the characters learning the very same lesson.</div>
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As gamers, we're used to investing personality into what are really just a bunch of lights. Usually, designers work to obscure that from us, lest we become ashamed of our anthropomorphizing sentimentality; <i>Thomas Was Alone</i> makes that the point of the game. Even more striking, it does so while making a bold attack on the thematic foundations of typical video games. Most single-player gaming is inadvertently, and perhaps inescapably, driven by a sort of sociopathy. Everything you meet in the world must answer only one question: "How can you benefit me?" With gentle, sweet-natured good humor, <i>Thomas Was Alone</i> nudges the player to a much more human question: "How can we help each other?"</div>
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<br /></div>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-62894567762221934952013-01-20T12:06:00.000-08:002013-01-27T14:38:53.914-08:00Thirty Flights of Loving<img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8071/8421913416_ed1773f74c.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="ThirtyFlights"><P>
I wouldn't want every game– or even most games– to be like <i><a href="http://blendogames.com/thirtyflightsofloving/">Thirty Flights of Loving</a></i>. But I'm really glad that <i>Thirty Flights of Loving</i> is.<br />
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Brendon Chung is sort of the <a href="http://www.understandingduchamp.com/">Marcel Duchamp</a> of video games; he's less about providing the pleasures in which his chosen medium specializes and more about creating artifacts that force the viewer to question the medium's definition. Like Duchamp (and unlike most of his imitators), Chung's art is saved from sterility by his seemingly instinctive aesthetic talent. <br />
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<i>TFoL</i> is pretty willingly an interactive short story rather than a game. You run from place to place absorbing narrative information, with nothing to really test your ability. Even in the one area where you get to shoot stuff, it quickly becomes obvious that the bang-bang is just there to propitiate gamer reflexes, with no real impact on how the story progresses.<br />
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So it's exactly the kind of thing that inspires Steam reviewers to grumble about "<a href="http://steamcommunity.com/app/214700">hipsters</a>". Previous interactive narrative experiments, like <i>Dear Esther</i> and <i>The Path,</i> were frustrating even to my artfaggy self, as their eschewing of combat or puzzles seemed to be part and parcel of a generally dour dislike of kicks, joy, entertainment value... In short, they seemed to have a sneering contempt for fun, which <a href="http://author-quest.blogspot.com/2011/12/video-games-should-be-fun.html">games should be</a>!<br />
<br />
Like those games, <i>TFoL </i>wants to tell you a story rather than challenge you to a battle, but unlike them, Chung understands that a story is fundamentally a machine for creating delight. You'll only be playing it for about 15 minutes, but those 15 minutes are full of color, music, groovy sights, funny jokes, <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/game-on/2012/09/04/thirty-flights-of-loving-and-the-invention-of-videogame-space/">never-seen-that-before techniques</a>, and charmingly irrelevant tangents.<br />
<br />
The immersiveness of the experience is cemented by the sturdy reliability of its stories: a heist gone wrong and a love triangle, two templates guaranteed to rope in just about anyone who's ever wanted to be rich or have sex. Because those stories are so familiar, the viewer can't help but try to guess at much of the information that Chung revels in not providing. And if you're the sort of pervert who likes having their brain coochie-coo'ed, coy narrative elision is a potent fan dance.<br />
<br />
Trying to figure out what happened in between the game's smash cuts is far more engaging than navigating any of the game's spaces. Which suggests that <i>TFoL</i> is not so much eliminating challenge as shifting where it happens. In most games, getting from one end of the level to the other is difficult while following the story is (insultingly) easy, and in <i>TFoL</i> it's just the opposite. Games are defined by their most challenging aspect, so while most video games are about figuring out fighting patterns with some story as background, <i>TFoL</i> is really a game about figuring out the shape of a tale with some running around corridors as background.<br />
<span style="color: #1d1d1d; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1d1d1d; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">In this brave new era of theory-informed, progressive game design, even a number of big-budget titles have experimented with allusive storytelling. Though <i>Bioshock</i> conveyed plenty of narrative through bog-standard voice-overs, many of the most interesting subplots, like Fontaine's bible-smuggling operation, were suggested by environmental details and other small aspects of the game. </span></span><span style="color: #1d1d1d; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">The faint whispers of story were the most interesting thing about <i>Dark Souls</i>, imbuing its battles with faint suggestions of tragedy like a <a href="http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/2012/02/buzludzha-buzludja-bulgaria/">utopian monument fallen into ruins</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #1d1d1d; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">But in every case, the suggestive storytelling never quite becomes gameplay, because it lacks the pass/fail mechanical demands that more or less define what's important to a player. What's needed now is a game where figuring out the story has in-game consequences, making the act of figuring out a story inherent to the game. Perhaps a role-playing game where you interact with NPC's differently based on conclusions you've made about their background, with consequences for different guesses? Of course, such a mechanic means a developer has to commit to a right interpretation of story hints, which risks undoing exactly what's so interesting about these subtle fragments. Is there a way to make the act of figuring out a story as open, compelling, and challenging as running through a combat zone?</span></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-15079968766156601222012-10-12T05:49:00.001-07:002012-10-12T05:49:34.327-07:00How to create custom teams in Worms Revolution for the Xbox 360News you can use! I just <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/games/review/worms-revolution/233">reviewed Worms Revolution for Slant</a>, and for the most part, I loved it. But! But! But the game has a terrible system for making and playing with custom teams. So that others may profit from my example, I hereby give you step-by-step instructions for playing with custom teams in Worms Revolution on the Xbox 360:<br />
<br />
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">1) In the Xbox dashboard, sign out all controllers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">2) Sign
in a controller with a secondary profile. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">Use that profile to start Worms Revolution</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">3) In the game's main menu, g</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">o to Customization, and create a team with your </span><i style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">noms de guerre</i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> of choice.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">4) Exit the game. If you want multiple teams, repeat steps 1-3. Remember, every profile can only have one custom team.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">5) </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">Now sign
into Dashboard with the main controller.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">6) Start Worms, and go into deathmatch.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">7) Using the main controller, "Add profile" for each player.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">8) Using the main controller, click on the first secondary profile.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">9) Using the controller for that profile, select each worm, and replace them with a custom worm.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">10) Repeat steps 7-9 for each player.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">That is how you play deathmatch with custom teams in <i>Worms Revolution</i> on the Xbox 360. And good Christ is that stupid!!!!! </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">I loved </span><i style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">Worms Revolution</i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">, but did no one at Team 17 even test in-room multiplayer with custom teams?</span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-50950811359905551352012-02-13T07:16:00.001-08:002012-02-29T15:43:26.738-08:00ProjectionI 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 <a href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/39912_Fox_News_Commenters_Respond_to_Whitney_Houstons_Death_With_Deluge_of_Hatred_and_Racism">reminding people</a> why he broke, cataloging right-wing bigotry and ugliness with a thoroughness you can only do from the inside.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-90506693477404062282011-10-16T15:09:00.001-07:002011-10-17T09:19:41.566-07:00Sonic Memento Mori<a href="http://gothamist.com/2011/10/15/is_this_the_end_of_sonic_youth_kim.php">Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are breaking up</a>, and I am sad, sad, sad.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-77547944314557678982011-09-01T12:50:00.000-07:002011-09-01T13:16:38.370-07:00"The New Yorker: Tabloid of Record"<a href="http://www.freedommag.org/special-reports/new-yorker/video-new-yorker-tabloid-masquerating-as-literature.html">http://bit.ly/ro5vnL</a>
<br />
<br />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.
<br />
<br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhdanov_Doctrine">Zhdanovite</a> spiel insisting that the multi-Oscar winner is an unknown nobody.
<br />
<br />The fact that it's incredibly clumsy just makes it all the more interesting. As Stephen King noted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Kings-Danse-Macabre-King/dp/042518160X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314907166&sr=8-1">Danse Macabre</a>, 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?That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-49582753278275273222011-03-30T13:59:00.001-07:002011-03-30T14:31:06.046-07:00Gaijin Games, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, stuffMy adoration for Gaijin Games has been made clear before. Out of that last post grew a rapturous---and I hope interesting---<a href="http://slantmagazine.com/games/review/bit-trip-flux/83">review of Bit.Trip Flux</a>, over at Slant Magazine.<p><br /><BLOCKQUOTE><i>"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."</i></BLOCKQUOTE><br />And then that led to an <a href="http://slantmagazine.com/games/feature/interview-alex-neuse/257">interview with Gaijin Games CEO Alex Neuse</a>, which is chock-full of interesting practical tidbits and the occasional matzoh ball of conceptualism.</p><br /><BLOCKQUOTE><i>"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."</i></BLOCKQUOTE><br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><P>Meantime, my tradition of arguing with Glenn Kenny (all in good fun!) continues, as we <a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/01/death-wish.html">argue about Death Wish</a>, <a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/03/what-schrader-wrote-what-deniro-acted-what-scorsese-shot-what-farber-saw.html">argue about Scorsese</a>, and occasionally<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/09/three-citations.html"> argue about criticism and Lester Bangs</a>.</p><br /><BLOCKQUOTE><i>"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. "</i></BLOCKQUOTE><br /><p>And finally... I've been <a href="http://slantmagazine.com/user.php?id=117">writing regular game reviews over at Slant</a>, 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 <a href="http://slantmagazine.com/games/review/pokemon-white-version/87">review of Pokemon White</a>.</p><BLOCKQUOTE><i>"So how does someone old enough to have voted for Paul Tsongas end up playing the new Pokemon game?"</i></BLOCKQUOTE></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-11427020951234067432011-03-13T09:36:00.000-07:002011-03-25T07:44:32.399-07:00Red Riding HoodI really wanted <i>Red Riding Hood</i> to be great, largely because the idea that Catherine Hardwicke would take her anger over being fired from <i>Twilight</i> 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 <i>Veronica Mars</i>, 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 <i>Mean Girls</i>, 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 <i>Veronica Mars</i> (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.<br /><br />So I ignored the bad reviews <i>Red Riding Hood</i> got, especially since most of them seemed like more lame boynerd <i>Twilight</i>-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 <i>Red Riding Hood</i> 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.<br /><br />No such luck. <i>Red Riding Hood</i> 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.<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br />And the orange-and-teal! Oy, the orange-and-teal! You don't get a sense of timelessness when your movie looks exactly like <a href="http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html">every</a> <a href="http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-part-2.html">other</a> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />I had hoped that getting booted from <i>Twilight</i> 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 <i>The Golden Compass</i>. 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. <i>Red Riding Hood</i>'s clock-punching won't give anyone nightmares, fantasies, or even something to think about on the drive home. What a waste.<br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-16846742212228089122011-02-01T14:13:00.000-08:002011-02-01T15:29:19.150-08:00Bit.Trip.BeatThe new Bit.Trip.Flux <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEYW9SSWlJk">trailer</a> is up, promising more of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwWWkgx2Stc">Rez</a>-meets-<a href="http://www.xnet.se/javaTest/jPong/jPong.html">Pong</a> gameplay that made <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6cjZF7m6fU">Bit.Trip.Beat</a> 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.<br /><br /><SPAN CLASS="fullpost"><br /><br />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 <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1608/is_12_14/ai_53286976/">touches</a> 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. <br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.cracked.com/article_18405_7-insane-ways-music-affects-body-according-to-science.html">physical</a> 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 <a href="http://www.rockband.com/">direct</a> music games, Bit.Trip titles make the link between music and gameplay <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Persuaders-Vance-Packard/dp/0671531492">subliminal</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://gamasutra.com/view/news/32575/Road_To_The_IGF_Were_Very_Uncomfortable_With_The_Copenhagen_Game_Collective.php">notes</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.</span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-12613626494494774402010-11-09T09:15:00.000-08:002010-11-09T10:09:11.312-08:00Some Came FightingAnother 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:<br /><br />-<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/11/the-current-cinema/comments/page/2/#comments">Arguing about Howard Hawks and John Hughes</a><br /><br />-<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/11/text-and-subtext-in-eastwoods-invictus.html">Arguing about Eastwood, and dialogue</a><br /><br />-<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/09/three-citations.html">Arguing about Lester Bangs, and Matt Zoller Seitz</a><br /><br />-<a href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2005">Arguing about Carol Reed and auteur theory</a><br /><br />-<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/05/scenes-id-like-to-see.html?cid=6a00e5523026f5883401348127d96b970c">Arguing about Godard</a><br /><br />There's nothing at that Read more link! It's just a default!That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-21522952288473486732010-11-06T09:11:00.000-07:002010-11-06T19:47:12.444-07:00DocumenteurThough Agnes Varda has <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-06-24/film/agn-egrave-s-varda-from-0-to-80/">said</a> that <span style="font-style: italic;">Documenteur</span> 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.<br /><br />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<span style="font-style: italic;"> Cleo From 5 To 7</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Vagabond</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Ydessa & The Bears</span> 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.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />No such tension is achieved in <span style="font-style: italic;">Documenteur</span>; 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Documenteur</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">McCabe and Mrs Miller</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More</span>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5150985155/" title="Documenteur_1 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 353px; height: 222px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1377/5150985155_a407c7b65a_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_1" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5150985271/" title="Documenteur_3 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 352px; height: 222px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4130/5150985271_25ba5d5c27_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_3" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5151595362/" title="Documenteur_12 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 353px; height: 221px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1389/5151595362_06be70539c_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_12" /></a><br /><br /><br />The title <span style="font-style: italic;">Documenteur</span> 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5150985201/" title="Documenteur_2 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 353px; height: 222px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1147/5150985201_0603a5608a_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_2" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5151595036/" title="Documenteur_5 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 351px; height: 221px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4103/5151595036_412a435fa1.jpg" alt="Documenteur_5" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5150985431/" title="Documenteur_6 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 350px; height: 220px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4124/5150985431_96ea4ce34b_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_6" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5151595160/" title="Documenteur_8 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 345px; height: 217px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4036/5151595160_a3ca19c26e_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_8" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5150985613/" title="Documenteur_10 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 344px; height: 217px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4047/5150985613_d11f233edd_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_10" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5151595326/" title="Documenteur_11 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 344px; height: 215px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1231/5151595326_e5da283199_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_11" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5150985469/" title="Documenteur_7 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 352px; height: 224px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4153/5150985469_2415730b5d.jpg" alt="Documenteur_7" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5152400184/" title="Documenteur_4 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 355px; height: 444px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1422/5152400184_b6da1b09d8.jpg" alt="Documenteur_4" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5151595196/" title="Documenteur_9 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 350px; height: 227px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4149/5151595196_cfd428b0dd_m.jpg" alt="Documenteur_9" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/5151595392/" title="Documenteur_13 by That Fuzzy Bastard, on Flickr"><img style="width: 351px; height: 222px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1159/5151595392_19da72c598.jpg" alt="Documenteur_13" /></a><br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-23381310788156618862010-06-30T16:13:00.000-07:002010-07-02T00:52:53.811-07:00What 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' <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1156143/">Wild Grass</a>. According to reviews good and bad, it's "<a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/wild-grass/4440">cute</a>", "<a href="http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940319.html?u=IMDB&p=H2BE&cs=1">freewheeling</a>", "<a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/movies/25wild.html">zany</a>", 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.<br /><br />Wild Grass is nothing of the sort. Like Resnais' classic <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/1517-last-year-at-marienbad">Last Year At Marienbad</a>, 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.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zizyphus/34585797/">Bechdel rule</a>, 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 <u>The Handmaid's Tale</u>, 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-09-22/film/new-york-film-festival-2009-director-alain-resnais-87-years-young/">interviews</a>, Resnais has said it's a movie about<span style="font-style: italic;"> l'amour fou</span>, but there's not much <span style="font-style: italic;">amour</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Many of the critics consider it "<a href="http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/09/some-notes-on-resnais-wild-grass.html?cid=6a00e5523026f588340120a5a17157970b#comment-6a00e5523026f588340120a5a17157970b">prosaic</a>" 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 <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V111/N18/jackso.18o.html">Brent Easton Ellis</a>? 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.<br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-48813119547014875812010-06-15T11:12:00.001-07:002010-06-16T19:58:03.205-07:00You are a controllerI'm incredibly psyched about the <a href="http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect/">Kinect</a> (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 <a href="http://news.punchjump.com/blog/2010/06/16/e3-video-sonic-free-riders-for-kinect-for-xbox-360/">Sonic Free Riders</a> is basically <a href="http://ps2.ign.com/objects/682/682881.html">EyeToy Antigrav</a> with a (finally!) working control scheme, I will be overjoyed.<br /><br />I loved the EyeToy, even with all the gimmicky <a href="http://www.ghttp//www.blogger.com/amespot.com/ps2/action/spytoy/review.html">minigames</a>. Like any sensible person, I found it incredibly immersive to make my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeBp2KVRM_o">body</a> 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 <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_10_006832.php">origins</a>, is a handy shortcut to physicality)---instead of the tunnel-vision concentration of most games, you get a kind of effortless oneness.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />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 <a href="http://www.todddeutsch.com/newthumbs.htm">staring</a> slack-jawed at the TV with a controller in their hands.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://velvet_peach.tripod.com/fpaccruising.html">cruised</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/T/theweleit_male.html">object</a> in itself, a thing to be considered and evaluated.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://dailyobsessional.blogspot.com/2009/06/potraits-of-gamers-and-their-avatars.html">avatar</a>. 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, <a href="http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=Kr5&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=halo+gameplay&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=">better</a> 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 <a href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1531713/what_a_tragic_adventure_this_is_addiction.html?cat=38">addiction</a>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-50524711958694562232009-11-25T06:57:00.000-08:002009-11-25T07:05:41.117-08:00Best Films of the 00sBecause what's the point of having a blog if you can't make the occasional dumb list? Starting at the top, with the single best movie of the decade, which is....<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Full Frontal</span>: I've <a href="http://thatfuzzybastard.blogspot.com/2008/12/full-frontal.html">defended</a> this at great length before, and I continue to think that this is the single best summation of The Way We Live Now, a funny, sharp, compassionate look at life inside the mediascape, with a visual palette that gets more interesting with every viewing. This movie always makes me feel like Martin Donavan in Surviving Desire---You don't think this is the best movie of the decade? Then watch it again. (Honorable mention to the deliberately slight but completely unique Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience---would that more major American directors were trying to make movies about real people in these unreal lives).<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Werckmeister Harmonies</span>: The cinematography, like the story, grounds itself so firmly in reality that it's able to transform into myth. The long takes, the focus on just getting from Point A to B, and the deep, sharp photography have been major influences this decade, and the performances are still riveting. Even Tarr hasn't caught lightning in a bottle like this since, but Werckmeister is probably the most genuinely magisterial movie we've had in a while.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mulholland Drive</span>: It's not Lynch's best because it's elliptical and beautiful, though it is. All his films are. It's his best because production circumstances forced Lynch to think through his story a lot more than he's used to, and the result is the rare Lynch movie that's more than the sum of its parts, where all the images and sounds cohere into a narrative that's at once scary and genuinely moving.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Gleaners and I</span>: Deceptively casual, this is one of the smartest of the current crop of docu-essays. Without pretension or ego, Varda bats around capitalist excess and cinema convention and like a master juggler, makes it look easy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A Mighty Wind</span>: In the commentary, even Christopher Guest seems a little surprised at just how moving this turned out to be. It starts as just another Guest-style parade of goofballs, but somehow turns into a touching portrait of aging---the way we form communities to keep out the cold, the way we end up at once just who we were at the start and also unrecognizable, and the way our best intentions fail us. That it does this while still being very funny is what makes it a masterpiece.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Up!</span>: Any best-of-the-decade list has to contend with the massive achievement of Pixar, cranking out a long string of critical darlings that are also massive hits. It's a little early to say for sure, but Up! may be their best one yet, combining a thoughtful story with relentless visual inventiveness that never strays too far from character. It's the kind of animated film that makes all live-action films seem a little lacking in expressive resources.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Lord of the Rings trilogy</span>: We may never, as Lester Bangs says, agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis, but the LotR trilogy comes close. And just like the LotR books are a sort of compressed history of Middle Earth, so are the LotR films a compressed history of film. They deploy every special effects technique ever invented, from Meliés-style forced perspective to artificial-intelligence-driven CGI (with plenty of models, makeup, and mattes in between), and also makes use of every directing technique ever conceived, from the Griffith-esque battle scenes to contemporary digitally-controlled camera swoops. Like Joyce's Dubliners, If every other film was destroyed but these, you could still extract everything that had ever been.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Y Tu Mamá También</span>: A strong reminder---as if we needed one---that the quality of the plot is only tangential to the quality of the film. In summary, it sounds like a perfectly average teen sex comedy, but the <span style="font-style: italic;">Nouvelle Vague</span>-influenced technique turns it into a casually funny, honestly sad portrait of how relationships are inextricable from the social circumstances in which they form, a subject few movies even know how to approach.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Man Who Wasn't There</span>: Maybe the Coen's most complete statement about the relationship between crime and storytelling. There's plenty of jokes, but they don't overwhelm the sadness at the movie's heart, and the retro visuals are both arrestingly sharp and endlessly worthy of close analysis.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A Prarie Home Companion</span>: Not just because Altman will be missed, though he will be. PHC stares unblinking into the void and doesn't bother with self-protective laughs or self-indulgent despair; it just shrugs, smiles, and keeps on singing. Maybe the culmination of Altman's echt-Midwestern no-big-deal sensibility, which so often produced masterpieces that don't take themselves too seriously.<br /><br />Runners-up: Spirited Away, Donne Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grizzly Man, My Winnipeg, Spider (much more uncompromising than A History of Violence), The Incredibles, Lost In Translation, Waking Life, The Hurt Locker<br /><br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-1006896145223786512009-10-29T21:53:00.000-07:002009-10-30T08:23:44.388-07:00Paranormal ActivityWhat keeps <span style="font-style: italic;">Paranormal Activity</span> from being quite as good as its obvious <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/">inspiration</a> is a shortage of subtext. <span style="font-style: italic;">Blair Witch</span> delivered plenty of shocks'n'scares, but what made it capital-A Art was its savvy analysis of mediation. "Nobody gets lost in America," Heather said, but the camera-obsessed characters find themselves more lost the more they look, and the final shot's multileveled attack on the act of viewing pulled the thematic threads together with sharp clarity.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Paranormal Activity</span> doesn't go that deep, largely because its whole story is its central couple, and they're pretty generic---he's a cocky guy, she's a meek girl, and together they're just like every other couple we've ever seen in a horror movie. Some of the commenters at Jim Emerson's <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/">Scanners</a> have actually had the most interesting points to make about the movie's themes----<a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/10/paranormal_activity_boo.html#comment-801743">Jeffrey Simons</a> noted the ways voyeurism becomes an element within the story, not just the way the story is told, and "<a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/10/paranormal_activity_boo.html#comment-800882">Joseph</a>" made the interesting suggestion that the whole movie is closer to Repulsion than Rosemary's Baby, a story about a woman lashing out rather than a woman persecuted.<br /><br /><br />[spoilers below the jump]<br /><br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br />One aspect I haven't seen mentioned, though, is how the film plays with its own dog-that-didn't-bark: the young couple in the big new house... with no talk of children. But that's not to say children aren't a presence---at the other end of the hall from the bedroom there's a room we glimpse only in passing, with a big bed, and a giant teddy bear. That seems to be where the demon comes from in many of the scenes, and the stuffed animal suggests that it's the planned bedroom for the planned child, should Micah and Katie ever start filling this big house with something other than expensive toys.<br /><br />More explicit, but more witty, is the way the couple's dynamics get affected by Katie's haunting---they start out affectionate, though a little out of joint with each other. But as the hauntings get worse, sleep deprivation becomes the defining element of their relationship, and much of the "negative energy" that feeds the demon is generated by their snapping under the pressures of exhaustion, like many a young couple with a new visitor making their nights into constant vigilance. Similarly, a major turning point of the film into full-on horror is when an invisible presence crawls into bed with them, as though the demon itself is a nightmare-prone toddler determined to enact Oedipal rage.<br /><br />A terror at sexuality floats all through the movie, and not just because the locus of its horror is the couple's bedroom. Katie's haunting began with an apparition at her bed when she was eight, and her telling of the story, complete with helpless sister, could easily be read as a recovered memory of molestation. The signs of the demon---breathing on the neck, invasion of the bed, and grabbing of the leg---resemble the moves of an aggressive seducer (particularly when we see that the demon's ultimate goal is to be inside Katie). And every time Micah brags about setting up a camera in the bedroom, it's impossible not to think that he's planning to make an awesome sex tape once this whole demon thing blows over.<br /><br />What keeps Paranormal Activity from greatness is that it never quite gets specific enough with any of this---the themes float through the film but don't really develop, and it's frequently disrupted by superfluous elements, like a completely pointless bloody cross (in a movie where no character shows the slightest religious inclination---Blatty wept!). Still, the material's charged, the directing is solid----the slightly dutch-angled <a href="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2268498176/tt1179904">shot</a> of the bedroom, with the door and the hallway beyond it balanced by the visual weight of the bed, is an image film students should study carefully---and it's ultimately pretty goddamn scary. A good spook-show rather than great cinema, but still enough tension that I'll remember it for quite a while. And if nothing else, I'm still overjoyed that it <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ia1FPSxXY_CtWNU2djwNxRbGiU3wD9BJ17Q02">whupped</a> Saw VI.<br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-79601365420443552972009-08-17T10:43:00.001-07:002009-08-17T10:44:42.982-07:00HousecleaningSo, for those following this blog on RSS: For a while now, I've been blogging over at A Fuzzy Day, with the intent of making this the space for longer pieces, and that the place for the tossed-off. I have since decided that this was a stupid idea.<br /><br />So this blog is about to get a whole bunch of posts, imported from the other site---enjoy, and in the future, I'll stick to blogging here.That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-25746007968939576882009-08-17T10:36:00.000-07:002009-10-29T22:03:52.859-07:00The Time-Traveler's WifeGiven its immense book sales, a movie of "The Time Traveler's Wife" was inevitable, despite its lack of climax, conflict, or drama. The book is actually a pretty good time, despite being chock-full of moments where characters must accommodate the demands of the plot by behaving like completely different, mostly brain-dead people, most prominently in the heroine's out-of-nowhere whining about wanting to be pregnant despite the high likelihood of<a href="http://www.rawbw.com/%7Esvw/superman.html"> "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"</a>-style complications. Though I suppose one could defend this sudden, senseless, self-destructive shift in attitude as quite <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/26WOMEN.html">realistic</a>.<br /><br />For those who don't know the plot: The book's about a guy who, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five">Billy Pilgrim</a>, is permanently unstuck in time. Every couple of days, he's suddenly shot into the past for a few hours, but his journeys seem to center around a particular woman. He first appears to her when she's a little girl and he's a man in his thirties, which is about the age he remains for all the visits to her in childhood, as well as when he appears during her horny teenage years (fear not, he remains entirely gentlemanly). When she's in her mid-20s, he tells her that they're going to meet soon---that is, she's going to meet him in his actual linear life, and he won't know her yet. When they do meet, he's actually a few years younger than she is, and much more awkward than the older man she's known up until now. But love blooms, and they have some beautiful years together.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />It's all very sweet, and not too badly written. But what really sells the book is its ruthlessly perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy. Not just the predestined love aspect, though that's certainly no small thing; no, it's the traveler who's a projection of a man too perfect to exist outside of fiction(which makes casting Eric Bana, who's played a lot of too-good-to-be-true men, appropriate, though how I'd love to see him in a remake of "<a href="http://www.stevenderosa.com/writingwithhitchcock/suspicion.html">Suspicion</a>"). For the (largely female) readership, the time traveler is both the suave older man who won't fuck you no matter how hard you beg, and he's <span style="font-weight: bold;">also</span> the stumbling younger guy you can slyly seduce, <span style="font-weight: bold;">and</span> he's the sweet, bumbling hubby who you can mold into the aforementioned suave older man (and he'll happily go along with it, because you're trying to make him into the man he already is/was/will be). The fact that the heroine's actual father is barely-glimpsed and seemingly unlikable only further underscores the time traveler's role as simultaneous daddy and boytoy. And his chronological unreliability gives the story the vital "sisters must do it for themselves" aspect that any successful piece of female-oriented pop fiction needs.<br /><br />Of course, such wish fulfillment is a vital part of all popular fiction---witness detective novels' endless procession of men who are tough, independent, hard-living, and seemingly irresistible to hot babes who conveniently disappear. But it's sort of rare to see a piece of popular women's fiction so eager to dive into genre devices (and sci-fi devices at that) in the interest of crafting a shamelessly perfect fantasy scenario. It has some of the glassy-eyed intensity of very specific fetish porn, the sense that you're reading something carefully crafted to fit perfectly in the keyhole in someone's brain.</span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-29437654156009245002009-08-12T23:34:00.000-07:002009-08-17T10:56:57.057-07:00Serial Mom<span style="font-size:78%;">Flickr gallery for this piece <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/sets/72157622033919452/">here</a></span><br /><br />I've always liked John Waters' movies without ever thinking he was a particularly good director. Which is fine---the amiable <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsuqG2XeixE&feature=related">amateurism</a> of his films is much of their appeal. But after massively enjoying<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111127/"> Serial Mom</a>, I'm starting to think that Waters, like <a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/555.html">Wagner</a>, is better than he looks.<br /><br />Because the thing is, Serial Mom is funny as hell---guffaw-out-loud-in-an-empty-living-room funny. But aside from a handful of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111127/quotes">quotable lines</a>, the script isn't all that striking. Which has weirdly little impact on the movie's immense hilariousness. Most of the scenes have flatly functional dialogue---"Officer, we don't allow gum in this house." "Sorry, ma'am." ---- but through some strange alchemy, it plays like gangbusters.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />That flat functionality is maybe the most defining characteristic of Waters as a filmmaker. Much of the fun of the Waters/Divine pairing was always the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iTSxiT2YWQ">discordance</a> of this loud, ferocious creature and the weirdly narcotized world that contained her. From his early films to the present, his compositions have a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og_85XJTOac&feature=related">theatrical</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl4f7wK67Uw">frontal</a> quality. Even at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWmbwJ_iyzc">climactic moments</a>, when the screen gets more angled and kinetic, the camera hangs back, arresting momentum.<br /><br />This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what a director is supposed to do---"keep the audience immersed" is pretty much the filmmaker's first commandment. Serial Mom <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818831401/">pays</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3819638592/">extensive</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832251/">tribute</a> to goremeister <a href="http://www.herschellgordonlewis.com/films.htm">Herschell Gordon Lewis</a>, not least in its combination of luridly <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832475/">violent</a> subject matter and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832697/">bizarrely</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832417/">uninflected</a> visual style. In Lewis, that was just the result of his mild-at-best technical competence---where a great (hell, <span style="font-style: italic;">good</span>) director might have a villain terrify you through commanding movement of the frame, Lewis' baddies just lean into the lens and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXkBcl-jzUU">leer</a>. But Waters has always idolized the accidental Brechtianism of crappy exploitation movies of the 50s and 60s, before ubiquitous film school degrees made even low-budget <a href="http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/movie_reviews/b104072_last_house_on_left_remake_brutal_vacant.html">sleazefests</a> <a href="http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/film/465">blandly</a> <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=horrorremake.htm">mediocre</a>.<br /><br />The damned thing is that in Waters' films, it works. The air of campy quotation turns every <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818831557/">piece</a> of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832573/">set</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832017/">dressing</a> into a <a href="http://www.justinspace.com/obscene/oi1intro.html">giggle</a>, and the foursquare framing makes a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818832785/">guy</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3819638832/">spitting</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3819638194/">out</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3819638648/">gum</a> into a weird little gag that isn't really funny, except that it is. His <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proscenium">proscenium</a>-oriented <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818955811/">direction</a> is definitely distinctive; his auteurist cred is certainly triple-A. But more important, his storytelling voice is incredibly effective at his project of making the whole world look <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818831473/">sublimely</a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3818831751/">freaky</a>, turning even the most normal behavior into a too-tight Halloween <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27405679@N05/3819639168/">mask</a>.</span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-7717408060286772972009-08-11T13:21:00.000-07:002009-08-17T10:56:36.240-07:00Judd ApatowThere's something of a running complaint that Judd Apatow presents a perniciously misogynist view of woman as unfun taskmasters of free-spirited men. The latest manifestation of this misreading is up at <a href="http://www.doublex.com/section/arts/apatow%E2%80%99s-women-have-face-reality">Slate's Double-X blog</a>, because if there's one site <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2212708/">guaranteed</a> to <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2214324/">always</a> get the arts wrong, it's Slate.<br /><br />It's an understandable misapprehension---Seth Rogen is a lot more fun than Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up (though Heigl seems to be building a solid comedy career out of being the new <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0241669/bio">Margaret Dumont</a>), and Steve Carell's pals in The 40-Year-Old Virgin get a lot more jokes than Catherine Keener. But it seems to fundamentally miss what Apatow's movies are about, which is the need to put away dudehood's childish things. Both Virgin and Knocked Up (and, from what I've heard, Funny People) hammer pretty obsessively on the necessity of putting down the bong and leaving the <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brah">brahs</a> behind in order to become a functioning adult.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />This is, obviously, a pretty common theme in romantic comedy. What makes Apatow different is that he doesn't take the line seen in movies like <a href="http://amysrobot.com/archives/2009/06/reviews_of_the_hangover.php">The Hangover</a>: "Being a dude is totally fun, but you gotta stop doing it 'cause chicks don't like it and dudes like chicks." Instead, Apatow is always very conscious, even when the boys are having their fun, of how hollow that fun is. All the guys in The 40 Year Old Virgin are gradually exposed as liars, hypocrites, and frauds. Even more pointed is the flophouse that Rogen inhabits in Knocked Up---for the first half-hour or so it looks like a great place to hang out, but it gradually seems increasingly purgatorial, culminating in the <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/22506/knocked-up-pink-eye">pinkeye outbreak</a> that leaves everyone looking like zombie junkies. This is where so many of the Apatow-imitators fail---they try to shoehorn all the growing up into the finale, rather than leading us to its necessity.<br /><br />If anything, the problem with Apatow's movies is their monomaniac focus on a heteronormative family as the only fulfilling life. Though Catherine Keener is a little funkier than most romance objects, there's a real lack of any kind of alternative culture in Apatow's world, and the preachy insistence on showing how anyone who doesn't end up well-scrubbed and properly paired is doomed to a life of chronic masturbation gets not-a-little grating. It's hard to imagine a current Apatow movie providing a moment of subculture pride like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai1FHufz_HY&feature=PlayList&p=F66AEA5CCB14E07B&index=0&playnext=1">the first shot of Freaks & Geeks</a>. Looking back on that show, it seems like it was Paul Feig who provided the identification with the underclass, while Apatow was the talent-spotter (and a helluva spotter, considering how many of the F&G crew ended up comedy stars).<br /><br />Still, I can't much condemn Apatow for being about as limited in his perspective as almost every other romantic comedy ever made. If anything, much of the criticism of his films misses the extent to which he's simply rewriting classic screwball comedies with the gender roles reversed. Movies like Bringing Up Baby often revolved around a stuffy, career-obsessed male who's transformed by his meeting with a wacky, free-spirited female; if anything, the biggest difference is that the women of screwball comedies were required to change much less than Apatow's males.<br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199230280679796248.post-30016656921323669912009-08-03T11:56:00.000-07:002009-08-17T10:56:10.225-07:00Public EnemiesThere's a taciturn quality to Michael Mann's Public Enemies that I'm sure he regards as a virtue. Mann's deep love of macho playacting (he's like Scorsese without Scorsese's critical detatchment from his big-dicked poseurs) certainly extends to his own direction, which is at once swoony and brisk. And there's some real virtue to it---his refusal to subject us to what-does-it-all-mean speechifying can be welcome.<br /><br />It can also leave us sort of unclear on, well, what it all means. Public Enemies is good fun---the clothes are nice, the picture looks good (though some of the gun battles take on a weirdly interlaced, flat quality when the camera moves too much), and it's great fun to see a bunch of actors comport themselves in all those period jackets. But in the end, it's sort of unclear why Mann wanted to tell this story, what he expects us to take from it, what distinguishes this movie from any of the other versions of the tale. Mann obviously assumes we have a fair amount of foreknowledge of Dillinger's fate---every mention of the Biograph theater fairly thrums with foreboding---which makes it all the more important for him to make clear why he's bothering to tell it to us, and he just won't.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />There's hints all over the place---sometimes he seems interested in the Heat-like battle of wits between Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Sometimes his attention is grabbed by the gap between Dillinger the celebrity and Dillinger the man, best articulated a scene where Dillinger goes unnoticed in a movie theater full of people searching for John Dillinger, largely because he's just a guy in a hat rather than a 15-foot-high mug shot. Sometimes it seems like the love story is what he wants to tell, signaled by the big music cues that come in whenever Dillinger and his best girl, Billie Frechette, are separated or reunited.<br /><br />But every time a thematic thread is raised, it's soon dropped---nothing ever sinks in. Purvis is introduced unerringly shooting down Baby Face Nelson with a scoped rifle---as the Fuzzwife noted, Mann seems to be setting up a conflict between Dillinger as a tommy gun (inaccurate but deadly) and Purvis as a rifle (just one shot, but it's a good 'un). But Purvis' shooting skills never come up again, nor does his patience, nor does his accuracy. Dillinger's celebrity is frequently teased, but it never really resolves---Mann certainly doesn't even seize the opportunity to give us a shot of Dillinger dying in front of the movie theater, which would solidify that idea. <br /><br />Even the love story doesn't really take over, not least because while Frechette gets a little speech about her boring life up until now, Mann's too disdainful of psychologizing to really let us see that as an aspect of her character. Marion Cotillard doesn't get to dig into Frechette as a thrill-seeker, or as a girl from the rez trapped in bad rez choices of bad rez men, or as a country mouse enjoying big-city sophistication---she's just a plot device, placed in the movie to wear clothes, take off clothes, look pretty, get slapped, and cry. Maybe a better actress could have found a way past Mann's disinterest, the way Christina Ricci did in Buffalo '66, but considering Mann's relentless drive to move ahead whether or not a character trait has been established, probably not.<br /><br />For all Mann's meticulous shooting, the overall impression is one of sloppiness---it's like Mann glued a bunch of scripts together and started shooting without bothering to resolve it into a single draft. This rushed, ramshackle quality extends to the little things as well as the big, as Mann has a terribly bad habit of failing to introduce information until the last possible minute, not as a suspense trick, but because he simply seems to have forgotten what we need to know. An early example is in the scene when Dillinger comes to the coat check where Frechette's working, fights off a customer, and takes her away. Just before Frechette goes from turning him down to leaving with him, there's a moment when she looks at the other girl working the coat check, and that seems to change her mind. Maybe it's because she sees something in the other girl that she doesn't want to become, maybe it's because she sees the girl's admiration for this tough guy who so badly wants to be her boyfriend. But it's almost impossible for us to even think about the question, because we've literally had zero visual indication that there even is a second girl at the counter before the shot where Frechette looks at her---I don't have a disc here, but I don't believe the other girl is even visible in the wide shots. <br /><br />Another small but telling example---what sends Dillinger to the Biograph Theater is the heat of the Chicago summer, and the Biograph's air conditioning. But one the day he decides to go, after a series of scenes of Dillinger setting up various plans, he comes into the house and, in one shot, runs his wrists under cold water and says "It sure is hot---let's go to the movies." It seems like Directing 101 to establish that it's hot beforehand, so that you don't have to cram cause and effect into a single, clumsy moment like that, but here again Mann seems to be shooting scenes with no awareness of where a scene is going, so he has to carry out this kind of clumsy shuffle whenever the plot demands a reason for action.<br /><br />Similar directoral sloppiness besets the action scenes. When Purvis and his boys have Dillinger holed up in a rural hotel, there's a lengthy discussion of who's going to approach from the north, who from the south, and what the plan is for closing the exits. But Mann never gives us shots that would make clear which way is north, who's coming from where, or how the plan goes wrong. It's fine if he wants to sacrifice spatial clarity for visceral excitement---I'm not a purist about knowing who's standing where---but it's bizarre to do so after giving us so much setup discussion of the directional plan.<br /><br />Public Enemies is a perfectly good time at the movies---I went to see Johnny Depp wear cool clothes and shoot guns, and it delivered. But while I don't mind its anemic moral vision, it's narrative messiness borders on real contempt for the audience. Taciturn silence looks great on a western lawman, but on a storyteller, it's more than a little irritating.<br /></span>That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.com0