Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Rome Blocks The Economist
Living in Italy? Wondering where your issue of The Economist is? Here’s cover of this week’s European issue of The Economist, which has been blocked at Fiumicino airport for ‘inspection’.
It’s like a perfect demonstration of everything the Economist is saying.
In the meantime, most of the content of the absent issue is available on their website. While you’re at it, you should also check out Ariel Levy’s feature about Berlusconi in the latest issue of the New Yorker.
Outside Aperture
(via jwz)
The Tunnel
Crowd funded, shot on a tiny budget and released for free1 on the internet, The Tunnel is a superb little Australian horror movie that puts bigger-budget nonsense like Paranormal Activity 2 to shame. And I can’t recommend it enough.
It’s a perfect, uncomplicated, no-frills setup for an uncomplicated, no-frills horror movie. Presented in a documentary style, like The Last Broadcast or The Blair Witch Project, it tells the story of a TV new crew chasing a story of homeless people going missing in the tunnels under New South Wales as they start exploring the tunnels themselves and quickly realising there’s something else down there with them.
What I particularly love about this film is that it doesn’t try to give you any answers. It doesn’t try to say what that ‘something’ is. Too often, horror movies try to package things up in with neat little Scooby Doo explanations: “Ahah! This so-called poltergeist was just Old Man Withers all along!” Instead, there are clever clues in The Tunnel that allow you to construct your own meaning, but the film doesn’t explain whether something is a legitimate clue and what’s a red herring. I honestly wish more films would do this.
Another thing worth pointing out is that the film was shot on a ridiculously small budget. Originally, the creators had intended to fund the film under what they called the ‘135k project‘, where they would get 135,000 people to sponsor a frame for $1 each (figuring 1 frame x 25 frames per second x 60 seconds x 90 minutes = 135,000). In the end, they only managed to raise $36,000. Rather than giving up (which is what I would have done), they went out and shot the film more creatively.
Without meaning to get too Merlin Mann, there’s an idea I keep coming back to, the idea that limitations — especially in creative projects — are often a good thing. Spielberg’s original plan for Jaws was to have the shark on screen as much as possible, from almost the first frame, thinking that this was the best way to scare people. Except the mechanical shark kept breaking down and so they had to figure out ways of generating scares without actually showing the shark. The film we love came from a limitation brought about because of a mechanical malfunction. In the case of The Tunnel, the creators managed to put their money to great use and I can’t imagine how an extra $100,000 could have helped make this film any better.
I highly recommend checking this film out. Plus it’s free, so what have you got to lose?
Footnotes
- as in beer [↩]
Bad Lamp – Never Know the Difference
Great video made by splicing all the SFW parts from porn movies. I love that people are annotating the porn actresses in the comments section.
If you like the song (and why wouldn’t you?), it’s available from the Bad Lamps Bandcamp, where you can name your price.
L.A. Noire
Let’s get this out of the way: L.A. Noire is not the game you think it is.
You’re probably expecting something like GTA IV or Red Dead Redemption, and of course there’s the superficial similarity to those games that comes from using the same engine, but that’s about it. The actual game itself is less ‘GTA with fedoras’ and more like *Phoenix Wright with the cinematic aspirations of Heavy Rain thrown in for good measure.
Playing as Detective Cole Phelps, fresh from the battlefields of World War II, the game has you solving a series of cases and progressing through the various departments of the LAPD. Like most Rockstar games, it wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve. The glue is still fresh from where they ripped scenes and characters from L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia. There are even larger-scale political machinations to deal with, a la Chinatown. It’s a bit tiring though, especially if you’re even slightly familiar with noir and neo-noir films (or even just the three that I mentioned). You can almost map out the entire story before it happens. On the other hand, this is Rockstar’s most accomplished storytelling so far — a narrative that remains consistent throughout the length of the game — but it also comes at a price: it’s also the most cutscene-heavy of all their games. Ten hours of actual gameplay puffed out to twenty-one hours. There will be large parts of the game, especially towards the end, where you won’t even have the controller in your hands, you’ll just be watching the game unfold for you.
Even when you are controlling the game, the things we traditionally associate with Rockstar games — the driving, the shooting, the mayhem, the wonky controls — are still (mostly) present, but have now been reduced to minor parts. Like Phoenix Wright, most of the activity in L.A. Noire mainly consists of two mechanics: searching crime scenes for clues and interrogating suspects to see if they’re telling the truth or lying. If you’ve played the Ace Attorney games and found either of these parts frustrating, then maybe this isn’t the game for you, because it suffers from much the same limitations, such as not being able to progress until you’ve found all of the prescribed clues at the crime scene and not being able to fail1. Regardless of how badly you interrogate suspects, your character will eventually stumble towards the same, linear ending of each case. The only thing that will be affected is your overall score at the end. It’s here that I wish the game was less rigidly game-like and took more of a lesson from Heavy Rain‘s book. A game with a branching narrative, where you could ‘fail’ a case and progress down a different path would have been a lot more interesting.
The main new thing about the game — and also its single most impressive feature, even above the painstakingly recreated streets of 1947 Los Angeles — is the terrific facial animation technology. Rather than the traditional method of layering still photographs of actors over hand-created and hand-animated models of faces, the boffins at Team Bondi actually recorded each actor’s performance with a new kind of motion capture technology that allows them to deliver absolutely perfect facial animation2. For the first time in a game, you can actually see the emotion on the faces of characters and you can use this to tell if the person is telling the truth or not. This is what allows the interrogation mechanic to work so well.
Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. As a technical show-piece for this new facial animation technology, the game is a huge success. And it’s great to see Rockstar try something new, but I wish that they’d taken even more of a risk and hadn’t tried to shoehorn an adventure game into a GTA structure. As it stands, it falls between two stools: too loose to be a great adventure game, and too rigid to be a great open world game.
A disappointment.
Footnotes
- I realise you can ‘fail’ in Phoenix Wright, but this results in a “game over, try again” situation. Likewise, in L.A. Noire, it’s possible to ‘fail’ a case if, say, you drive a car over the crime scene. Again, “game over, try again” [↩]
- The only time we even approach the uncanny valley is when this is juxtaposed on top of the more traditional 3D work, such as the clothing and body animation. [↩]
The Fountain Commentary (Updated)
Following up on my previous post about Darren Aronofsky’s commentary for the Fountain, @FocalFury sent me a toot to point out that no-one is seeding the MP3 any more.
So, if anyone is looking for this file (and Google Analytics reckons 99% of my traffic comes from people searching for ‘the fountain commentary’), I’m making it available for download here.
Download The Fountain Commentary.mp3
Note: If you’re the copyright holder and you have a problem with me hosting this file here, just send me an email.
Italian Movie Translations
All of these are 100% legit.
- Zack and Miri Make a Porno – Zack and Miri: Love at First Sex
- Made in Dagenham – We Want Sex1
- Superbad – Suxbad2
- The Crazies – The City Will be Destroyed at Dawn
- I Spit On Your Grave – Don’t Rape Jennifer
- Reservoir Dogs – The Hyenas
- The Road to Perdition – He Was My Father
- The Hudsucker Proxy – Mr Hula Hoop
- The Hangover – The Night of the Lion
- The Sound of Music – All Together Passionately
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – If You Leave Me, I Erase You
- See No Evil, Hear No Evil – Don’t Look at Me, I Can’t Hear You
- Home Alone – Mamma, I Missed the Plane
- Home Alone 2 – Mamma, I Missed the Plane Again, I am Lost in New York
- Home Alone 3 – Mamma, I Got the Measles
God in the Tree of Life
Over at Reason Magazine, Kurt Loder has a terrific reading of the parents in The Tree of Life
The parents themselves might represent the two sides of God’s nature. Mrs. Henderson is the embodiment of unconditional love and forgiveness. Her husband, however, while loving his family deeply, is also a fierce disciplinarian. (Asked by one of his sons if a friend might come over to visit, the father harshly replies, “Is your family not good enough for you?”) Even more tellingly, there’s a scene in which young Jack, defiant in the face of one of his father’s Old Testament furies, says, “It’s your house. You can kick me out whenever you want.” And then, “You’d like to kill me.”
This makes a lot of sense. While I was watching it, I remember thinking that a lot of the dialogue sounded more biblical than I was expecting, even from a Terence Malick film. Strangely, Loder chooses to complain about Sean Penn’s presence in the film rather than trying to see it through the lens of his reading. If the parents represent the two sides of God, then Sean Penn represents contemporary, secular society, once religious but now having fallen out of touch with God because of some particular event (in Penn’s case, the death of his brother; in real life, take your pick).
Senses and Time
I’m slowly making my way through The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz. I say ‘slowly’ because it’s a book that deserves to be basked in, not skimmed over. It’s part fictional travelogue, part philosophy essay, sort of in the same vein as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In the book, Ajvaz describes visiting a strange island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and the bizarre way that the inhabitants interpret reality. He talks about how the language of the inhabitants has been almost completely overrun by prefixes and suffixes that are used to describe seemingly incidental details about the subject of the word — for example, one prefix is used to describe whether the object is partly shaded in a specifically mauve-coloured shadow — to the point where the root word has been reduced down to a single syllable that is only now used to connect the prefixes and suffixes.
One idea that has really stuck with me from the book is the idea of different ways of telling the time. He says there is no real measurement of time on the island. Clocks do not exist. These are supposed to be an ethereal people whose spoken language so closely resembles the ambient sounds of the environment that even the sound of running water resembles a monologue to them. So, of course they would use a different sense to tell the time. The islanders tell the time by using a series of tubes that release different smells throughout the day. There’s an obvious advantage to this. You wake up in the dark and, rather than fumbling around, turning on a light to look at a watch or clock and see what time it is, you can just take a sniff. If it smells like lavender, for example, you know it’s around 2am. Would a clock like this be feasible? Jay Griffin seems to believe so. In her book, A Sideways Look at Time, she proposes a few different ways of telling time, such as a ‘spice clock’, which works the same way as Ajvaz’ scent clock, and a ‘flower clock’, using flowers that bloom at different times of the day.
Now I’m completely fascinated by different ways of telling the time. And I don’t just mean cool/geeky watches like the Genome, which are the same as ordinary watches, just more convoluted. From my own experience, it’s possible to roughly estimate the time from our apartment in Rome by just using the environmental noises. The traffic gets bad around 8am and the horns start honking, sure. From 7am until around 10am, there are non-stop bells from the various churches. Because the churches all have different mass times, you can be more precise by listening for how far away the bells are and figuring out which church bells are ringing. On top of that, there’s a cannon that fires every day at 12pm from the top of the hill near my house. That’s a really handy one for telling the time. The post-lunchtime lull means everything gets less busy for a few hours between 2-4pm. Then around midnight, there’s almost always fireworks celebrating something.
Jack Hughes also created a new way to tell the time. The Colour Clock (also available as a screensaver for OS X) translates the current hour, month and second into a hexadecimal colour value, so if you’re really good, you can tell what time it is by the hue of your screen. I’m not sure how effective it is as a method of telling the time, and I may need to study my Pantone colour cards before I can ditch my watch but I’m still glad it’s out there.