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Posts Tagged ‘reviews’

The Tunnel

Posted May 31, 2011

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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

  1. as in beer [↩]
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L.A. Noire

Posted May 29, 2011

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LA 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

  1. 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” [↩]
  2. 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. [↩]
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Joe Griffin Must Be Stopped

Posted May 13, 2011

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Look, I really, really don’t want this to descend into a personal attack on someone I don’t even know, so let me just start off by saying that I don’t have a problem with Joe Griffin in general. I think that when he sticks to writing about things he genuinely seems to know something about, like movies, he’s absolutely fine. Check out his blog, Moviedrome. As personal movie blogs go, it’s not terrible. I really wanted to hate it, but the best I can muster is a profound indifference.

What I don’t like is when he steps outside of his comfort zone and starts writing about videogames. Which he does every Friday as part of the Irish Times’ ‘The Ticket’ culture/entertainment supplement. He’s clearly out of his depth and represents everything I hate about the way videogames are covered by traditional media. For example, take a look at his recent review of Portal 2, which is somewhere between a hot mess and a 300-word syntactic nightmare. Here’s my favourite line of the entire thing:

This is a clever, captivating and sometimes hilarious sci-fi game, with compulsive gameplay. Here’s hoping I don’t have nightmares about GLaDos.

While you’re reading this review, please bear in mind that the Irish Times is supposed to be Ireland’s ‘newspaper of record’. Can you imagine if it treated all of its arts coverage this way? Can you imagine if their review of There Will Be Blood ended with “I hope I don’t have nightmares about Daniel Plainview.” It’s ridiculous.

Now, it’s completely possible that Joe is merely writing within a set of constraints set by the Irish Times. It may well be that Madam Editor called Joe into her office, sat him down and said ‘Listen, Joe, we still think videogames are for children, so we want 300 words written in the same tone you’d use if you were reviewing a Richard Scarry book.” I suppose this is possible, but why, then, does their other videogames correspondent, Ciara O’Brien, do such a better job?

The other thing that makes me say that Joe Griffin is out of his depth writing about videogames is the amount of times he has gotten the facts wrong. Just basic factual details that he’s either deliberately or carelessly missed. For example, in his editorial about videogame adaptations of literature from Friday, April 22nd 2011, he writes (emphasis mine):

There was some excitement this year when the Great Gatsby videogame resurfaced online. Originally an 8-bit title for the old Nintendo, the game is a platform adventure in which Nick Carraway fends off malevolent butlers and hobos.

First, since we’re on it: ‘old Nintendo’? There have been four consoles since the original NES. Any one of them could be referred to as ‘old Nintendo’. I remember talking to someone and they used ‘old Nintendo’ to refer to the Nintendo 64 (God, did that make me feel old). But this is all beside the point. One quick google search for “Great Gatsby NES” and you’ll see the first result is the game itself and the rest of the results are links to that game, with each one explaining how the game is a modern creation made to look like an old NES game. It’s a retcon, a fake artifact from a “parallel reality”. The Escapist explains it well:

In reality, Hoey created the game on a whim after creating an 8-bit tribute to the classic novel’s cover. They simply couldn’t stop, and eventually ended up with 4 levels of Gatsby-themed glory. The game includes several characters, places, and lines from the book, and even has a few short cut-scenes.

Know how much I get paid to write this blog? Nothing. Know how much I get paid to write about videogames at all? Not a penny. Know how many people read this blog? I don’t actually keep track, but it’s safe to say it’s statistically insignificant compared to the number that read The Irish Times. How hard would it be for Joe to just either (a) keep on top of the subject he’s getting paid to write about, or (b) do one quick google search before banging out an article?

Onwards and downwards.

Friday, May 6th, 2011

PORTAL 2 HAS been the subject of some rave reviews, but one innovation seems to have escaped critics: the villain’s voice is American and one of the sympathetic voices is English. This is very rare.

Reading his Portal 2 review, I thought “you know, this is all just fluffy bullshit that you could extrapolate from reading the back of the box – I don’t think this guy has actually finished the game.” This article, which appeared a week after his review, clinched it for me. I would bet cash money that Joe has not actually finished the 8-hour game he has been paid to write about. Actually, forget about ‘finishing’ the game, I would bet he hasn’t actually played the game for more than 4 hours1. Why do I say this? Because if you do play the game for that long, you’d realise that there’s a glaring error with Joe’s statement. There’s a second-act twist, which happens roughly three-to-four hours in, and he is completely oblivious to.

I’m not saying that reviewers need to finish all games to completion before reviewing them. This is completely unworkable. How would anyone ever review something like World of Warcraft which, in effect, has no ending? But I think it’s a genuine disgrace when someone can’t be bothered to finish a short game like Portal 2 — or even to play it for four hours — but will happily accept money to review it. It’s like a restaurant reviewer saying “Well, technically, I didn’t eat there, but I looked in the window and it seemed nice enough.”

Again, I just want to reiterate that I don’t want this to be a personal attack on Joe Griffin. I’m sure he’s a lovely bloke and, like I said, when he’s writing about movies, he’s fine. I’ve even heard him talk about movies on Arena and I thought he was one of the better guests they’ve had on there. He was well-informed and articulate.

It’s just a shame that he can’t be the same when he’s writing about videogames. It’s even more of a shame given the amount of genuinely talented Irish people who are writing passionately and thoughtfully about videogames (e.g. the guys at Games Toaster or Shoryuken) and who would gladly write for free to get their stuff in The Irish Times.

Article updated at 21:43GMT+1 to tone down some things that were a little too mean

Footnotes

  1. Does anyone have his Xbox Gamertag or Steam/PSN account name? It would be easy to tell how much of the game he’s finished from any of these. [↩]
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Review: 300

Posted February 27, 2007

So the IFF Surprise Film was 300. Not that much of a surprise. The queue was a bigger surprise – jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that. Even the premiere of the Lord of the Rings movies had shorter queues.

Anyway, 300 completely floored me. It’s a love song to graphic violence and romantic heroism, told with the most stylish visuals this side of Sin City. The movie suffers from more than a few jerky moments with a lot of the dialogue falling apart as hammy and unconvincing, but I personally found that these were mostly in the parts where the screenwriters actually tried to by historically accurate (“Return with your shield, or on it” being the most obvious). The political sub-plot had real trouble hiding the fact that it existed only as ‘filler’ and illicited an inappropriate titter from the audience, which only highlighted its awkwardness.

But who cares about all this? This movie is about the action sequences and these are what make the movie stand out. Probably not the most epic battles ever filmed, but definitely the most beautiful and balletic. The fact that this was filmed in a warehouse means we never see more than a handful of ‘real’ people on screen at any one time but the director works this to his favour, giving each individual skirmish an intimacy that would be otherwise lost.

Tremenous stuff. Gives me high hopes for what Zack Snyder can bring to Watchmen.

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Review: The Fountain

Posted February 27, 2007

Have you ever had a movie finish and end credits roll, with the entire audience sitting back in stunned silence? Maybe it’s just the type of film I tend to go see, but this has only happened to me a handful of times. The Fountain being one of them.

The Fountain is a love story. Rather, it’s three love stories, told across a thousand years. In the past, a conquistador searches for the tree of life to save his beloved Queen. In the present, a doctor searches for the cure for cancer to save his beloved wife. In the future… well… a guy travels with his tree, in a bubble, to a dying star wrapped in a nebula.

Hey – noone ever said this would be easy.

Arthouse blockbuster or blockbuster arthouse? Either way, this is not a welcoming film. At times, the ambitious storytelling threatens to derail the entire production, and the more cynical among us would almost certainly have trouble giving this film the room it needs to breathe. But for the more persistent, there’s a great reward – something completely and defiantly unique. A sci-fi movie with a very human heart. A film that can leave an entire audience breathless.

I would say this is as close to unmissable as any movie I can think of.

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Fast Food Nation

Posted February 22, 2007

fastfood5.jpg

For his dramatization of Eric Schlosser’s tell-all expose of the Fast Food industry, Richard Linklater chose to focus on just two points from the book.

  1. The meat packing industry is ruthlessly exploitative.
  2. There is shit in the meat.

Although they’re both very important points, they are stretched past breaking point across a two-hour movie. This means, worryingly, that by the fifth time someone on screen has repeated “there’s shit in the meat”, it’s lost all of its emotional impact.

And though there is a token discussion of the morality of the fast-food lifestyle (courtesy of a brief appearance by Ethan Hawke), this thinly-veiled sermon is so naive as to be offensive.

Heavy-handed and overwrought. I wonder if a documentary might have been the better option for this material?

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Fahrenheit

Posted September 23, 2005

Positioning itself as a ‘true’ marriage of narrative and interactivity, and promising a different experience each time it’s played, Fahrenheit has a lot to live up to. It’s a shame then that the game comes off something more like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for the 21st century, except perhaps slightly clunkier.

Early on, the game seems to deliver on many of its promises. The initial flurry of interactivity appears impressive and leaves the player with high hopes for the rest of the game. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Regardless of what choices the player makes, the game remains largely unaffected. The game provides the illusion of a branching storyline where the players’ choices open new paths, but in truth there is just One True Path. This is most obviously demonstrated early on with the option to save a child who has just fallen into a frozen lake, with the police approaching. Choose to save the child and run away, the police find you – continue from last save. Save the child and run away in a different direction, and the police still find you (with the same cut-scene) – continue from last save. On my third attempt, I finally saw what the game wanted me to do. And it’s this distinction that holds the game back: it’s about what the game wants to do, not what the player wants to do.

In a recent interview, Ron Gilbert (creator of Monkey Island) condemned the idea of ‘interactive storytelling’, saying

…I don’t believe stories should be interactive. I believe stories should be participatory… You’re participating in my story, but you’re not going to change it, because it’s my story. I have a story to tell you.

This makes a lot of sense, and Fahrenheit sits a lot better as a “participatory story.” Hackneyed script aside, it’s as immersive a game as I’ve ever played, and it’s quite capable of tearing away a few hours at a time, while comfortably providing plenty of opportunities to duck out of the game: a feature I wish more games provided.

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Review: Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D

Posted August 30, 2005

Regardless of how you try to justify it, Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D is a bad movie. Spy Kids 3D (the obvious comparison) was the weakest of that series and yet it still towers over Sharkboy in terms of plot and well… sense of fun. Even worse is that Sharkboy commits that cardinal sin of children’s movies: actually talking down to its audience.

And yes, I know it’s a kid’s movie and all, and I shouldn’t have high expectations but none of the kids in the cinema with me seemed particular engaged. In fact, most seemed bored by the story, although completely wowed by the 3D effect. The standout moment came for me when Lavagirl died (In children’s movies, all heroes are contractually obliged to die or appear to die) and some kid behind me shouted out “Deadgirl”.

Genuinely poor.

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Retrospective: Stop Making Sense

Posted June 9, 2005

Talking Heads were the first band I was can remember being ‘aware’ of.

I mean, I understood music in a general sense. I understood “songs”. I understood that there were songs that scared the crap out of me (I used to challenge myself to listen to Ray Parker Jnr’s theme from “Ghostbusters” in the dark, alone. I don’t think I’ve managed to do it yet) and I understood that there songs whose videos made me laugh (Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life”). But I really didn’t understand the concept of “bands” until quite late.

When I was about four or five, my sister – ten years older than me and a die-hard Prince/Adam Ant fan – challenged me to name the bands I liked. So I named “Talking Heads”, the only band I was aware of.

“Arty wanker.”

(I was five)

It wasn’t until much, much later that I understood what she meant. Talking Heads did their best to skirt the line between art and commercialism, occasionally pushing one more than the other. Sometimes this produced something difficult and awkward (like the deliberate nonsense-language of “I Zimbra” on “Fear of Music”). But sometimes, it produced something beautiful. Like “Stop Making Sense”.

The few concert videos that stand out as something special do so because the artist and the director have a clear definition of what they want to achieve (and both have the talent to support it). Other examples, such as Prince’s Sign O’ The Times and Scorsese’s The Last Waltz are both as entertaining to watch as movies as they are to listen to. Stop Making Sense represents a band at the peak of their abilities with enough of a vision to, if nothing else, produce something completely unique.

I’ve always been just a casual fan of Talking Heads. I’d never seen Stop Making Sense, but I thought I’d gotten everything I could out of their music. Until a few weeks ago. I was at a Skinny Wolves night in Bodkins. At these things, they usually accompany the music with movies projected on a big screen without the sound – things like the Clash’s Rude Boy and Devo Live. This particular week, they were showing Stop Making Sense.

Now, it may have been the copious amounts of booze sloshing around my system, but I was completely mesmerized. I must have come across as a rude sumbitch because I think I spent most of the night ignoring all attempts at conversation. I was completely transfixed by these bunch of complete… well, there’s no other way to put this… geeks doing the coolest things I’d ever seen on stage.

Throughout the entire thing, David Byrne moves his gangly body in strange, hypnotic ways. And the entire band puts out enough energy to power the show themselves. For example, the entire band jogs its way through Life During Wartime. During the guitar solo, David Byrne jogs around the entire stage, again and again and at the end, goes back to singing without being even slightly out of breath.

There are set changes, costume changes, instrument changes, but none of it seems forced. It seems progressive. It gradually, sensibly builds up. Rather than blowing its load right at the very start (like U2′s technically impressive Zooropa and Popmart tours), Stop Making Sense has a structure. It starts off with David Byrne coming out to a bare stage in a suit, with an acoustic guitar and boombox, and announcing to the crowd that he’d like to play a song. He launches into a version of Psycho Killer that is so different from the album version as to be almost unrecognisable.

For the next song, part of the band comes out. For the next, the backing singers come out. And so on. By the end of the show, there’s a small country on the stage.

And, like Psycho Killer, each song on Stop Making Sense is radically different from the album versions which makes them instantly compelling. And more significantly, they’re arguably better than the album version. When it came to producing a “Best of”, Talking Heads chose to present two songs from Stop Making Sense instead of their album versions, that’s the kind of quality we’re talking here.

It’s easy to understate just how amazing this movie is. Even if you’re only a casual fan of Talking Heads, I’d encourage you to hunt down this movie and be won over for yourself.

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