Recent film reviews

(I try to post reviews of all the films I watch over on letterboxd Here are the most recent reviews I’ve written)

The Inbetweeners - ★½

I’m not sure the makers of this movie meant to channel Waiting for Godot, but that’s exactly what it reminded me of in places. Someone said that the Beckett play was one in which nothing happens, twice. Well, The Inbetweeners 2 is a film where nothing happens for forty-five minutes, then someone gets hit in the face with a lump of shit, then nothing happens again for another forty-five minutes.

If it wasn’t for the ten-second awob-a-bob-bob scene, there’d be nothing redeeming about this film.

Chef - ★★

Chef felt like Jon Favreau trying desperately to recreate the light, breezy feeling of Swingers. Instead, we get a film that breaks down halfway under the weight of its own self indulgence and we’re left with a film where Favreau has Sophia Vergara as an ex-wife and Scarlett Johansson as a girlfriend and where it’s apparently okay for two middle-aged men to sing “Sexual Healing” to a child they’ve locked in a van.

Pride - ★★★★

So the story of Pride might be told in broadest possible strokes, right down to the evil, cackling neighbour that bordered on panto-villain ridiculous. But despite this, it’s still the most wonderful, joyful film I’ve seen all year.

(Update Wed, 8th October: As usual, my wife and I don’t agree)

Dark Skies - ★★

There’s hardly a single original thought in Dark Skies. Almost every scene has been lifted wholesale from other films. The usual suspects - a bit of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a little of Signs, and even some of The Exorcist thrown in for good measure. This wouldn’t in itself be a bad thing except the film is just lifting them as if it’s ticking off a list of scenes it feels it needs to have. As a result, it tries to create an atmosphere of tension that climaxes about halfway through the film. Then, having painted itself into a corner, it then decides to lift from Poltergeist with J.K. Simmons in the Tangina role.

Dull.

Dredd - ★★★★

Watching this film again, I was impressed that they managed to take an off-the-shelf action setup AND YET make it into a great Judge Dredd film AND YET keep it true to its comic-book roots AND YET make it seem gritty and realistic and big-budget AND YET keep it spikey and not round off the edges to try and capture a large audience.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I really love this film.

Madden NFL 15

(This review first appeared on thumped.com)

When Pete asked if I wanted to review Madden NFL 15, I initially said no. You see, I haven’t played a Madden game since the Megadrive, so I figured I’m in no position to talk about this game because I can’t tell you what makes this game better than the previous fifty-odd iterations. Plus I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched a game of American Football except one time when I was in New York over Thanksgiving and went to a friend’s house and the football came on and all the MEN went into the basement to watch the BIG GAME and I joined them because the idea of a man NOT watching the BIG GAME was kinda making everyone uncomfortable. Basically, I’m nowhere near an expert on this. I probably shouldn’t be reviewing this game.

Besides which, if you’re the kind of person who is likely to buy Madden NFL 15, you’ll probably have bought it already. Likewise, if you’re not interested in either the game or the sport, I doubted anything I could say here would convince you. But Pete is nothing if not insistent, so I got ready to write a review based on the things I did know about, like the politics of the NFL surrounding the recent Ray Rice incident. Or maybe the study by the Wall Street Journal which shows that although an average game of American Football lasts almost three hours, the ball is actually only on the field and in play for 11 minutes. I was going to talk about Friday Night Lights, a TV series about high school football in Texas and how it’s the most criminally underrated show ever made. I was ready to write around the game, rather than about the game. You know, the kind of review a real wanker would write.

But then I actually played the game. And, you know what? It’s actually won me over. I really, really like it.

It took a while to grow on me though. Like most EA Sports games these days, Madden NFL 15 opens by dropping you into the middle of an actual game and expects you to fend for yourself. Since I haven’t touched a Madden game in 20-odd years, I hadn’t a fucking breeze as to what was going on and it demolished me. If I’m being honest, more than any other game in recent memory, these first five minutes in Madden NFL 15 left me feeling a little alienated. It seemed to be a game shouting “THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. GO BACK TO DESERT GOLFING ON YOUR PHONE, YOU LAZY FUCK.” I was ready to throw in the towel and dust off that wanker-review.

But something about the game made me want to persevere and figure it out. Along with Call of Duty, Madden is traditionally regarded as the game that the ‘core’ audience (whatever that means) tend to glom onto. And since I’ve already dabbled with a CoD addiction (300+ glorious, fun-filled hours in Modern Warfare multiplayer), I didn’t want to give up before I at least won my first game.

So I fired up the ‘skills trainer’. This is a series of drills designed to familiarise players with the mechanics of the game, starting with passing and blocking and so on. I guess this is mostly intended for people who are entirely new to the game but it still presumed a level of knowledge that I just didn’t have. To make it worse, the game doesn’t do a great job of actually communicating any information that might be useful to a new player. One of the first drills you run is practicing a lob pass. “Do a lob pass”, it says. Except at no point during these drills does it say how to actually perform a lob pass. So I failed my lob pass. And I failed. And I failed. I had no idea what I was doing wrong and the game seemed completely disinterested in telling me. It was only by chance when I was loading the game that I saw it in one of the random loading screens that flashes up for a couple of seconds at a time: briefly tap the button to do a lob pass, hold the button down to do a ‘bullet’ pass. This was like a eureka moment - once this was figured out, the game unfolded in front of me like a beautiful flower.

You see, I’ve realised that Madden is not the type of game to explain itself or hold your hand. In other games, like EA UFC, the equivalent of Madden’s ‘skills trainer’ is a series of extended quicktime event where even a complete beginner can easily rack up 100% scores and gold medals in no time. Madden NFL 15 is tougher. It’s not just a quicktime event - it’s knowing what to do and when to do it. And, starting out, you’ll fuck up the drills. You’ll fuck them up a LOT. You’ll be forced to restart again and again. And it’s only when you’re into double-digits of retry attempts that you’ll actually scrape a success. You’ll happily take your bronze medal and move onto the next drill. It’s not arcade game. It doesn’t try to compensate for your lack of skill or knowledge. And you know what? I appreciate that. It means that when I actually perform a dead-perfect lob pass, there’s an extra sense of achievement. I fucking earned that pass. And so that means I’m going to make a wild statement that might annoy some people. Okay? Here we go. If you’re like me where you have no interest in American Football and you know nothing about Madden (or have forgotten anything you did know), Madden is sort of like Dark Souls: an impenetrable melange of game mechanics where each tiny advancement feels like a massive success.

There, I said it.

Even for a non-fan like me, there’s a lot to appreciate about this game. I’m pretty impressed with the social integration. The game tracks each player’s stats and decisions in the game and add that to a cumulative database, so when you’re in a particular situation, the game can say “the majority of the community chose this play”. Similarly, players are encouraged to send in their favourite screenshots from the game to be used in the interstitial loading screens. So you’ll see a picture and it will say “submitted by @AssMan1993”. Probably more than any other AAA game in recent memory, Madden NFL 15 prides itself on its community focus. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s listening to its players and involving them in the game. For example, the game shipped with a bug that caused one player to be rendered as 1’2” tall. This glitch was fixed, but the massive viral popularity of the bug caused EA to turn it into an official game mode called “tiny titans”. That’s something I wish more games would take advantage of. The only other game I can think that does anything near as great a job of channeling the community is Dark Souls. Okay, I’ll stop with the Dark Souls comparisons now.

I said I wanted to play Madden NFL 15 until I won my first game. Well, I’ve done that. I reached the arbitrary goal I set myself for this game. And I think I’m going to keep playing this game. As a sport, American Football is still mostly Greek to me. I don’t know who any of the players are, what any of the positions do, or when to run a particular play. Christ, I even feel like a total fraud for just using the words “run a particular play”. And I’m sure this knowledge would really open up the rest of the game to me - there are entire game modes, like the fantasy football-type thing, that require this outside knowledge. But at this early stage, it’s all incidental shite that doesn’t actually matter. The important thing is that the basic game itself is actually lots of fun. And that’s what’s going to keep me coming back.

Show your work

I’ve been reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, which is like this great little book that perfectly straddles the line between motivational anecdotal bullshit (e.g. the Ira Glass quote on the ‘taste gap’) and practical advice (e.g. ‘have your own domain name that people can associate with you’).

For the past year or so I’ve been taking part in a 1 Game a Month group here in Dublin. It’s a great group, full of lovely, helpful and enthusiastic people and I’ve learned loads about all sorts of different subjects I’m interested in: game design, programming, art, and sound. But I know people are frustrated with me there because getting me actually to let them see what I’ve done is like pulling teeth. I’ll keep it all to myself.

Around Christmas, I took part in a gamejam where I made a game where you had to navigate using sound. This was the first time I’d ever let anyone else play something I’d created and it scared the shit out of me.

I want to get better at this - showing people my works in progress. And most of all, showing people my finished work.

So here we go.

Amazon guts Comixology

Gerry Conway: The ComiXology Outrage

And so, as we could have predicted, Amazon wrecks Comixology.

What has it been, less than a month since Jeff Bezos bought the most promising tool for renewing the mass distribution of comics in the digital era? I’ll give the man this: he’s moved faster to undermine an existing technology for the benefit of his own company than General Moantors did when it sabotaged Los Angeles’s public transit Red Line for the benefit of the bus fleet they wanted to sell the City of Angels. Job well done, Jeff. My comics reading has gone through the goddamn roof thanks to Comixology. The convenience of having an entire comics store at my fingertips is a powerful thing for someone with poor impulse-control. Being able to buy and read a comic from the same app is beautiful and simple and is exactly why I spend way more time inside Comixology than say, Comic Zeal.

Splitting it into two experiences - buying a comic from the website, switching apps, downloading reading it in the Comixology app destroys this simplicity. It destroys what made Comixology so powerful. And to what end? To increase the profits on each individual sale at the expense of what I bet will be lower overall sales? It’s a giant shame to see a smart company be so short-sighted.

(Of course, I realise this whole thing is such a Western problem. You’d expect a lot of people’s monocles to fall into their tea over this issue. “You mean they changed it to make it harder for me to waste money with them?!”)

House of Cards Against Humanity

Netflix teamed up with the Cards Against Humanity guys to promote the second season of House of Cards. We’ve already seen how CAH have a habit of thumbing their nose at the established way of doing business, so how did this work out? Predictably. Here’s how CAH introduced this new pack:

Last month, someone in the Netflix marketing department had an epiphany: House of Cards andCards Against Humanity both contain the word “cards.” When we got a phone call from Netflix, we enthusiastically agreed that the two products indeed contain the word “cards.”

You know how Cards Against Humanity works, right? It’s sort of like Apples to Apples. The black cards have sentences with blanks in them and the white cards have potential answers for those blanks. In the House of Cards set, the first black card says “I can’t believe Netflix is using to promote House of Cards.”

https://twitter.com/MaxTemkin/status/434063801567031296

https://twitter.com/MaxTemkin/status/434063968370323458

I don’t think Cards Against Humanity will be getting a call from Netflix again any time soon.

Extras

Having hauled 2,000+ DVDs to Italy and back again (and then, having hauled them across Dublin as we moved houses), I couldn’t face it again. It’s ridiculous, unnecessary work. I was carrying 20 boxes of discs whose digital information can, for the most part, be grabbed off Netflix. So I got rid of them. Went to the Dublin Flea Market and sold almost all of them.

But it’s not just the stress of moving and storing these things that bothered me. The plain fact is that physical discs, as a medium, are dying. The industry is moving towards digital distribution. Here in Dublin, HMV closed down at the beginning of the year. Since then, it’s become nearly impossible to find blu-ray discs for sale in any brick-and-mortar shop. Likewise, Xtravision have pretty much wound up its business in the Republic. Discs are dead.

And you know what? I’m mostly okay with this. Services like Netflix and iTunes Movies are the convenient future of entertainment in the home¹. But my problem with digital distribution is that we’re returning to the VHS era. A situation where you only get the film, no ’extras’. Even Apple, who offers sparse ‘iTunes extras’ on a handful of titles, can’t play these extras through their custom streaming device, the Apple TV. To me, this feels like we’ve gone back 30 years, to before Laserdisc was introduced.

Why do I think this is a problem? Here’s an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson from back in 1997, when Boogie Nights was first released.

My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school. Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it.

Technically savvy directors who really want to record a commentary will find a way of getting one out out there. When Warner Bros decided against putting a commentary on the DVD of The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky released his own. Likewise, Rian Johnson released his own commentary for Looper when the film was still in cinemas. But these are the exceptions. How many filmmakers are going to voluntarily sit in a recording booth and talk for two hours? And if we’re moving to digital-only distribution, is there anyone even anyone asking directors to do this?

In a post-Vine world, where making a film is now just a matter of taking out your phone and pushing a goddamn button, a good source of knowledge and education about the process of filmmaking is more important than ever.

Best games I played in 2013

Gone Home

For the most part, this list is unordered. It’s just a collection of games I really enjoyed playing, with no attempt to impose any sort of arrangement or ranking. With one massive exception. Gone Home is, by a huge margin, the best game I played in 2013. It’s a short game. An unfussy game. One where the story is genuinely affected by what you bring into it. It’s a story about a family and each member of that family. But you need to pay attention to things. Random notes, ticket stubs, receipts all tell the story of the family. It’s possible to finish the game without discovering any of this. Such clever, mature storytelling made me think that maybe game developers are finally ready to move beyond stories about space marines or zombies.

Last of Us

Which isn’t to say that stories about zombies should go away. They’re played out, for sure, but they’re not dead (sorry). When they’re done well, they can be sublime. The Last of Us is another perfect demonstration of great storytelling helping players overlook some wonky gameplay mechanics. It’s a small story told against a massive backdrop. And goes to show that we can empathise with a game character, and we don’t need to be with a character for 8 hours for their death to have emotional resonance.

GTA V

It doesn’t quite reach the dizzy heights of Red Dead Redemption (which could be my favourite game of the last console generation), and I’m a little disappinted they’ve lost (or, after Saint’s Row, abandoned) some of the biting satire of the earlier games, but this was the first GTA I’ve actually finished. That has to say something.

Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Closely tied with Wind Waker for my favourite Zelda game of all time. A Link Between Worlds cleverly plays with our nostalgia for the franchise and the series’ own internal systems. It’s familiar and yet different.

Tomb Raider

Post-Uncharted, things clearly had to change for Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise. So they toned down some of the more ridiculous aspects of the franchise and brought the grit (so much grit). It lost some of the charm and whimsy along the way, but it was another example of great, grown-up storytelling.

Rogue Legacy

Look at my steam stats and you’ll probably see that Rogue Legacy is the game I’ve played most this year. It’s a hardcore platformer – Castlevania crossed with a Dark Souls. But as crushingly painful and un-fun as that sounds, Rogue Legacy has a huge playful streak. Every time you die, you have to choose your next character, one of three children of your now-dead hero. And they all have their own traits. For example, one might be myopic, so everything far-away is blurred. Or one might suffer from flatulence, so every jump causes a little toot. You’ll choose a deliberately dodgy character just to collect a bit of money and see what your next heir will be like. Pulling yourself out of that “just one more go” cycle is tough.

Candy Box

Like Frog Fractions, Candy Box is about unexpected discovery. A simple text page slowly gives way to an entire RPG adventure told through ASCII. Our office lost an entire day of productivity to this game, as people got drawn into the strange things the players shouted at each other across the room. This was my favourite surprise of 2013.

Ridiculous Fishing

Another game with a surprising depth (Oh God, I swear that was not meant to be a pun. I’m so sorry), Ridiculous Fishing is actually three games in one. The first game sees you casting your lure, trying to avoid fish as it goes down. The moment your lure touches a fish, it stops descending and then you have to play a second game - touch as many fish as you can as your lure comes back up. Once they’re up, you need to blast them with your shotgun to score points. This was my favourite short-session game of 2013.

Papers Please

If there’s a common theme to the games on this list, it’s that the games I liked most in 2013 felt grown-up. In Papers Please, you’re a border guard for an eastern European country in the 1980s. You have to check the day’s rules to figure out who is allowed into your country. Your wages then go to paying rent or making sure your family don’t starve. The game isn’t ‘fun’ in the traditional sense. And I’ve never been so stressed in a game. But it’s compelling in a deep, dark way.

The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is a game about choice. Do you go through the red door or the blue door? When the game’s narrator (best narrator since Thomas Was Alone) is saying “Stanley went through the red door”, do you still go through the red door, or do you disobey the game? It’s also a game all about player agency. But better than that - it knows it’s about these things. It can poke fun at them. It’s always one step ahead of the player. There’s a glitch where you end up outside the map. I thought I’d broken the game, but the narrator kicked in with “So, you found a glitch. I bet you feel pretty proud of yourself.” It’s like a mystery box. Even writing about it now, I want to get back into it. To see exactly where its boundaries are.

Proteus

I feel weird putting Proteus on this list when I already have The Stanley Parable and Gone Home. People will accuse me of having a boner for the First Person Walker genre. But Proteus is something genuinely special and I wish more people would try it out. You don’t even have to “get” it, just try it. And I don’t mean “get” it intellectually – it’s about the passage of time and life and death, big whoop – I mean “get” it in an emotional way. And even the fact that I’m using words like ‘“get” it in an emotional way’ about a videogame should give you an idea of exactly why I love this game so much. Try it.

Microtransactions

There’s an Andy Warhol quote I come back to again and again. It’s from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol:

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

One of the things that made Soulja Boy’s video review of Braid so fascinating (for me, at least) was that it showed a successful musician geeking out about something that nerds had almost taken for granted. We’d played this game. We knew it. On the other hand, Jay-Z’s lyrics are increasingly about extremely exclusive experiences ("Let’s get faded / Le Meurice for like 6 days"), but in the case of Soulja Boy and his Braid video, this was an experience that anyone with an Xbox could have.

Videogames used to be a great social democratiser. If you could afford a videogame, you would be getting the exact same experience as anyone else It didn’t matter how many albums you’d sold or how much money you had in the bank. The only experiential difference came down to your skill at the game.

The recent controversy surrounding microtransactions in Forza 5 makes me think we’ll be seeing the end of this. If I can’t afford to buy a particular car with real money in Forza, then I have to grind and grind until I amass enough in-game credits. According to some calculations, this could take anywhere up to a couple of years for some of the top-end cars.

And that’s what I find most troubling about microtransactions. They’re extending class structure to something that didn’t need one. Now, when I play a game, I’ll know I could always pay more and be playing a better version of the same game.

The continuing awfulness of Penny Arcade

If you ask me, Penny Arcade is a brand in trouble. Financially, they’re doing well. Their three conferences draw huge crowds annually (although people are saying that’s not necessarily a positive thing), but critically, they’re facing a massive backlash for their handling of the whole “dickwolves” issue (which is far too long and complicated to get into here - read Rachel Edidin’s article on Wired if you want to be depressed).

So given that they’re already turning a lot of people against them, why did they think it would make sense to advertise a job like this?

It goes to show the importance of context. If Penny Arcade was a struggling startup, the ad would make a certain amount of sense. Almost every startup has had someone working a job like that (although maybe they’d be slightly ashamed and wouldn’t describe the role in such a humblebrag). And no-one would think twice about it. Except Penny Arcade aren’t a struggling startup. They’re a multi-million dollar corporation with fingers in lots of different pies. Besides the successful conferences I’ve already mentioned, they’ve got advertising, videogames, a ’tv’ show, books, merch. They’re not struggling for cash. And yet, they’re looking for a lynchpin of their entire infrastructure and they’re looking to pay them peanuts.

Of course, the response from the internet has been predictably savage.

And know what I think is the worst part? They saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.

I get this feeling we’ll get a lot of interest for this job… (AN IT HIRE!) http://t.co/SiCjPTAQRJ

– Robert Khoo (@rkhoo) November 26, 2013

I realise this whole thing is of little relevance to anyone who reads this blog, but I just want to add my voice to say please, don’t anyone take this job. Even as a worst-case, there are thousands of other start-ups out there who have this exact same role with the exact same shitty remuneration, but at least you would go home knowing you weren’t being exploited by a misogynistic, tone-deaf conglomerate.

What do Hate Groups Think of Jennifer Lawrence?

Hey there. I was just wondering if you could tell me your opinions on Jennifer Lawrence? Tony Alamo Christian Ministries: I have no idea who that is.

You know who Jennifer Lawrence is! She just won the Best Actress Oscar? She was the one who tripped on the stairs when she was going to get her award, and it was adorable?
This is Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. This is a church. 

You didn’t see the Oscars this year?
Did you call us because you have nothing better to do? Let me just say, real quick, the Lord’s coming back. Very soon. And He’s not gonna ask you how many movies you saw or which celebrities you knew. He’s gonna ask you what you did for his son, Jesus. He died on the cross, and He did that just for you, and that’s what we preach.

**Wait, are you doing that thing where people pretend they don’t know what someone or something is to seem cool? Like, my friend is really cerebral and is into a bunch of obscure old music, and one time he claimed he didn’t know who the Spice Girls are. Which, obviously, is bullshit. **
Did you hear anything that I just said?