A few months ago, I ran a commentary on the Oxford English Dictionary's strange alterations to its most recent editions. Someone left a comment gently suggesting that I was overreacting. Well, clearly I was right - literally! - because... (Note: NSFW)
As well, I've had more than one disagreement with my husband in regards to Kenneth Brannagh's (in)famous Hamlet. Well, let's see what Lord Blackadder has to say about that! The following is from Blackadder: Back and Forth.
Yes, I think that just about settles those two particular points of contention. :)
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Believe It!
Click here for the first interesting story to come out of this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Sex. Gambling. Psychological abuse. Ah, the good ol' days!
There is an enduring and irritating myth that all old movies - "old" typically referring to anything made before 1960 - are clean, naive, prudish family fun, and that Hollywood has since morphed into a wholesale distributor of corruption and degenerate morals. This myth was front and center in the reviews for Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's fantastic '40's-noir throwback, The Good German (2006), which drew a lot of criticisms for vulgar language, amongst other things. One usually level-headed reviewer lamented how the film was a perversion of the good ol' wholesome noirs; specifically, Casablanca, which was great for the whole family. All I can say to that is, I must have seen the unrated version. Of course, Hitchcock is always conspicuously absent from critical and audience laments for the days of clean and pure film. At any rate, whenever I get into such a conversation, I like to bring up George Vidor's Gilda, a film that lacks the sort of swearing, gore, or nudity that's par for the course these days, but proves that you don't need any of the above to make a picture that's about as adults-only as it gets.
Made in 1946 and starring Rita Hayworth in the title role, Gilda is one of those films that, like Chinatown, raises the ambient temperature a few degrees, but not for pleasant reasons. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is a small-time hustler living in Buenos Aires whose luck runs out one night when he finds himself at the business end of an armed robbery. Fortunately, luck rears its head in the form one one Ballin Mundson, a cold, mysterious dandy who carries a cane with a switchblade in the tip. Mundson invites Johnny to an illegal casino, where he promptly cheats his way to a tidy sum before being escorted up to the owner's office - the owner, of course, being Mundson. Mundson could use a man with Johnny's skills, and in a flash-forward we see that Johnny's become Mundson's right-hand man. The two men live by one fixed rule: gambling and women don't mix. Of course, it isn't long before one of them breaks that rule, and Mundson returns from a vacation with not only a wife, but a wife whom Johnny knows and hates (and vice-versa). What started out as a content existence of organized crime soon devolves into a cycle of torment, power struggles, and revenge that's split three ways as Mundson seeks to retain his control of Gilda and Johnny both.
In short, Gilda is the story of two people trying their best to destroy each other, under an angry megalomaniac's watchful eye. Gilda's weapon of choice is sex; Johnny's, psychological abuse; Mundson's, fear. The film is quite wordy, and the dialogue is rife with double-entendres as well as words too blunt to not be taken literally. It proves quite well that one can be harsh, vulgar, and downright dirty without uttering a single f-word. As well, sex is front and center. There are strong suggestions that Mundson is at the very least bisexual, and possibly experimented with Johnny at some point. It's implied that Johnny met Gilda when she worked as a stripper and, possibly, a whore, and while she's terrified of the fallout should Mundson learn of this, she's also not ashamed to keep living as if she were still a working girl. In one very famous scene, she dances the beginnings of a striptease while singing a song called "Put The Blame On Mame"...and though all she removes are her long black gloves, I've seen films with nudity that went to the point of simulated sex, and were much less sexual than Gilda. If anything, Gilda is the Theiss Tittilation Theory come to life, twenty years early. For those of you wondering what the heck I'm talking about, the Theiss Tittilation Theory is so named for original Star Trek costume designer Bill Theiss, who reasoned that not showing "the naughty bits" was sexier and more enticing than showing them. He put this theory into play by creating sexy alien-girl outfits that, say, fully covered the breasts but revealed, with asymmetrical draping, the stomach and navel...in other words, Theiss believed the tease can be more sexual than the actual reveal, and teasing is Gilda's stock in trade. These days, the Canadian and American film industry/audience/censor boards are often criticised for being overly lenient on violent content whilst being overly restrictive on sexual content. When I think of some of the old films I've seen, it often feels like this standard was once reversed. Yeah, there was the infamous "number of seconds a kiss can last before it's dirty" rule, but it seems like although filmmakers couldn't show whatever they pleased, they could say just about anything, so long as it had more (or less) than four letters and didn't support Communism.
I know, I know, I'm really not selling this picture as something anyone would want to watch. I can't deny that it's an unpleasant story. However, I also can't deny that it's a very good film, and more than a little interesting. It also raises some good questions as to what constitutes adult content, and provokes a re-examination of the belief that media being "clean" or "dirty" all depends on visuals and swear words. It also proves why Rita Hayworth was once the most bankable female star in Hollywood. And, on top of all that, it serves as a good reminder that humanity didn't make some sudden, unprecedented slide into corruption and vulgarity in just fourty short years - we just altered the way we express it.
Made in 1946 and starring Rita Hayworth in the title role, Gilda is one of those films that, like Chinatown, raises the ambient temperature a few degrees, but not for pleasant reasons. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is a small-time hustler living in Buenos Aires whose luck runs out one night when he finds himself at the business end of an armed robbery. Fortunately, luck rears its head in the form one one Ballin Mundson, a cold, mysterious dandy who carries a cane with a switchblade in the tip. Mundson invites Johnny to an illegal casino, where he promptly cheats his way to a tidy sum before being escorted up to the owner's office - the owner, of course, being Mundson. Mundson could use a man with Johnny's skills, and in a flash-forward we see that Johnny's become Mundson's right-hand man. The two men live by one fixed rule: gambling and women don't mix. Of course, it isn't long before one of them breaks that rule, and Mundson returns from a vacation with not only a wife, but a wife whom Johnny knows and hates (and vice-versa). What started out as a content existence of organized crime soon devolves into a cycle of torment, power struggles, and revenge that's split three ways as Mundson seeks to retain his control of Gilda and Johnny both.
In short, Gilda is the story of two people trying their best to destroy each other, under an angry megalomaniac's watchful eye. Gilda's weapon of choice is sex; Johnny's, psychological abuse; Mundson's, fear. The film is quite wordy, and the dialogue is rife with double-entendres as well as words too blunt to not be taken literally. It proves quite well that one can be harsh, vulgar, and downright dirty without uttering a single f-word. As well, sex is front and center. There are strong suggestions that Mundson is at the very least bisexual, and possibly experimented with Johnny at some point. It's implied that Johnny met Gilda when she worked as a stripper and, possibly, a whore, and while she's terrified of the fallout should Mundson learn of this, she's also not ashamed to keep living as if she were still a working girl. In one very famous scene, she dances the beginnings of a striptease while singing a song called "Put The Blame On Mame"...and though all she removes are her long black gloves, I've seen films with nudity that went to the point of simulated sex, and were much less sexual than Gilda. If anything, Gilda is the Theiss Tittilation Theory come to life, twenty years early. For those of you wondering what the heck I'm talking about, the Theiss Tittilation Theory is so named for original Star Trek costume designer Bill Theiss, who reasoned that not showing "the naughty bits" was sexier and more enticing than showing them. He put this theory into play by creating sexy alien-girl outfits that, say, fully covered the breasts but revealed, with asymmetrical draping, the stomach and navel...in other words, Theiss believed the tease can be more sexual than the actual reveal, and teasing is Gilda's stock in trade. These days, the Canadian and American film industry/audience/censor boards are often criticised for being overly lenient on violent content whilst being overly restrictive on sexual content. When I think of some of the old films I've seen, it often feels like this standard was once reversed. Yeah, there was the infamous "number of seconds a kiss can last before it's dirty" rule, but it seems like although filmmakers couldn't show whatever they pleased, they could say just about anything, so long as it had more (or less) than four letters and didn't support Communism.
I know, I know, I'm really not selling this picture as something anyone would want to watch. I can't deny that it's an unpleasant story. However, I also can't deny that it's a very good film, and more than a little interesting. It also raises some good questions as to what constitutes adult content, and provokes a re-examination of the belief that media being "clean" or "dirty" all depends on visuals and swear words. It also proves why Rita Hayworth was once the most bankable female star in Hollywood. And, on top of all that, it serves as a good reminder that humanity didn't make some sudden, unprecedented slide into corruption and vulgarity in just fourty short years - we just altered the way we express it.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Go For Awsome!
Well, at least I can't!
Here's hoping they don't bother trying to make it deep or "legitimate", and just go for awesome. Wouldn't that be radical, having a based-on-something movie be every bit as unashamedly fluffy fun as the thing it's based on?
Friday Night Lights' Peter Berg is in talks to direct a movie adaptation of the Hasbro board game Battleship for Universal. According to The Hollywood Reporter, plot details are being kept under wraps, but the studio expects it to be "an epic naval action adventure." No news on casting, or which lucky actor will get to say "You sank my battleship!" - (Entertainment Weekly)
Here's hoping they don't bother trying to make it deep or "legitimate", and just go for awesome. Wouldn't that be radical, having a based-on-something movie be every bit as unashamedly fluffy fun as the thing it's based on?
It Was Too Beautiful For This World
It's official: Fox has not renewed the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I guess that's what happens when you have an extremely high-quality program with a laid-back fan base up against an extremely low-quality program with a rabid, obsessive fanbase (Dollhouse, I'm looking at you!).
Other renewed crap: Fringe, Heroes, Family Guy, Ugly Betty, CSI: Miami, Cold Case, and Grey's Anatomy.
This may depress me more than the snow on the ground. Friends, I believe I have woken up in Bizarro World. Green Superman should be showing up to insult me any minute now...
Other renewed crap: Fringe, Heroes, Family Guy, Ugly Betty, CSI: Miami, Cold Case, and Grey's Anatomy.
This may depress me more than the snow on the ground. Friends, I believe I have woken up in Bizarro World. Green Superman should be showing up to insult me any minute now...
Sunday, May 17, 2009
But Jeffster and Awesome Really Tie The Show Together!
The good news: Chuck has been given a third season. The bad news: NBC has slashed the show's budget so much that not only will the supporting cast's screen time be significantly limited, and they're only funding 13 episodes. I blame Lost and Battlestar Galactica for making this a new standard. Remember back in the day when a season meant 22-26 episodes?
Psst! NBC! I bet you could have 26 episodes of Life for what it costs to have Leno and celebrity guests five nights a week!
In other fall season news, word on the street is we'll know tomorrow whether the stellar Sarah Connor Chronicles will ever be seen again outside of a DVD box set. In the meantime, please enjoy this very amusing thanks-to-the-fans NSFW video courtesy of T:SCC star Thomas "My Circadian Rhythm Is So Screwed Up Right Now" Dekker. I know he may appear a wee bit stoned, but I've done more than one night shoot in my time and can attest that this is perfectly normal behaviour given the circumstances. Too bad he didn't shoot it a few hours later, when the giggles should really start to set in. Good times!
Psst! NBC! I bet you could have 26 episodes of Life for what it costs to have Leno and celebrity guests five nights a week!
In other fall season news, word on the street is we'll know tomorrow whether the stellar Sarah Connor Chronicles will ever be seen again outside of a DVD box set. In the meantime, please enjoy this very amusing thanks-to-the-fans NSFW video courtesy of T:SCC star Thomas "My Circadian Rhythm Is So Screwed Up Right Now" Dekker. I know he may appear a wee bit stoned, but I've done more than one night shoot in my time and can attest that this is perfectly normal behaviour given the circumstances. Too bad he didn't shoot it a few hours later, when the giggles should really start to set in. Good times!
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Clear and Present Entertainment
My recent re-watching of The Hunt for Red October left me craving some more Tom Clancy. In high school, I read and owned all the Jack Ryan novels, Patriot Games clear through to Executive Orders, as well as the Mr. Clark backstory Without Remorse. I also read the second Mr. Clark novel, Rainbow Six, and stopped there. Then I moved away, left my books in a closet, and chances are high I'll never see them again. But that's what libraries are for!
My favourite of the Jack Ryan novels is, obviously, Clear and Present Danger, set between Red October and The Sum of All Fears. A drug war story involving Army special operatives and Latin American drug lords, rough sailors and foolish politicos, and introducing Mr. Clark in his first big role after his small but key appearance in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger finds Jack Ryan starting to take over Admiral Greer's responsibilites as the CIA's Deputy Director (Intelligence) as the Admiral is in the final stages of death by cancer. Provoked by both a heinous crime and an election year, the President, NSA, and heads of the CIA and FBI set up an operation so black only they and the operatives involved know about it - or so they believe. Said operation involves a new special ops team composed of Rangers, Green Berets, and other bests-of-the-best being dropped in the Colombian mountains to send some large and pointed messages to the drug cartel at their points of production and distribution. It's a thoroughly illegal operation, and one Jack is deliberately kept out of the loop on, until a combination of leaks and military men who aren't stupid, plus the assassination of the FBI's director, gradually blows the operation's cover. Things start to go wrong on the Colombian end, and when the NSA pulls out the team's air support and severs their radio connections, Mr. Clark approaches Jack for help getting them out. And so on and so forth.
Re-reading Clear and Present Danger for the first time in nearly a decade, I was quickly reminded why I enjoy Tom Clancy so much. His books are light reads, full of simple stories and archetypal, characters, but his consistency - not to mention plenty of fun technical detail - is what makes them work and keeps them interesting. Clear and Present Danger is populated with familiar, one-dimensional characters - we have the drug cartel's boss, Escobedo, the arrogant fool whose arrogance and foolishness will be his undoing, and Cortez, the suave and cunning second banana who really runs the show. We have National Security Advisor Admiral Cutter, the highly-placed buffoon in charge of field operations he has no experience with or understanding of, and CIA director Bob Ritter, the smart and experienced subordinate hobbled by his superior's bad decisions. We have Domingo "Ding" Chavez, the tough but smart kid from the L.A. barrio who joined the Army to avoid imminent arrest or gang-related death and quickly applied himself to be one of the finest graduates the Ranger school has ever seen. We have...you get the picture. Even the "deep" characters like Mr. Clark are very straightforward. And then, there's Jack Ryan, who defies existing action-hero/political thriller stereotypes as that rarest of literary creatures, the academic who understands and respects the military. What makes them all work is the fact that Clancy is consistent with each and every one of his characters. They have very rigid, clearly defined roles, and they all stick to them, not doing anything out of place with their character types. It sounds boring when I explain it like this, but it's actually what makes the books engaging, interesting, and fun instead of irritating, pretentious, and stupid.
Random content advisory: Clancy's soldiers and sailors swear like, well, soldiers and sailors, and quite frequently, too. If salty language, even in context, troubles you, these are not the books for you. Also, he doesn't sanitize violence.
If you've pondered watching the film Clear and Present Danger, my advice is: don't, especially if you've already read the book. The casting is pretty sketchy, and for a character-driven story, that's rarely a good thing. I like Harrison Ford, and I really like Willem Dafoe, but I don't like either of them as Jack Ryan or Mr. Clark, respectively. Also, it's just a very so-so picture. The book, on the other hand, is a tad long but well-conceived and enjoyable. If you're one of those people who likes to set aside the summer as a time for light reading, this is a good pick, and may even leave you wanting to read the rest of the series. If you do that, just be sure to read them in order, because from here to Executive Orders is one story arc. And no, Op Center, Splinter Cell, etc. are not part of that series, nor are they good. But Rainbow Six is.
My favourite of the Jack Ryan novels is, obviously, Clear and Present Danger, set between Red October and The Sum of All Fears. A drug war story involving Army special operatives and Latin American drug lords, rough sailors and foolish politicos, and introducing Mr. Clark in his first big role after his small but key appearance in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger finds Jack Ryan starting to take over Admiral Greer's responsibilites as the CIA's Deputy Director (Intelligence) as the Admiral is in the final stages of death by cancer. Provoked by both a heinous crime and an election year, the President, NSA, and heads of the CIA and FBI set up an operation so black only they and the operatives involved know about it - or so they believe. Said operation involves a new special ops team composed of Rangers, Green Berets, and other bests-of-the-best being dropped in the Colombian mountains to send some large and pointed messages to the drug cartel at their points of production and distribution. It's a thoroughly illegal operation, and one Jack is deliberately kept out of the loop on, until a combination of leaks and military men who aren't stupid, plus the assassination of the FBI's director, gradually blows the operation's cover. Things start to go wrong on the Colombian end, and when the NSA pulls out the team's air support and severs their radio connections, Mr. Clark approaches Jack for help getting them out. And so on and so forth.
Re-reading Clear and Present Danger for the first time in nearly a decade, I was quickly reminded why I enjoy Tom Clancy so much. His books are light reads, full of simple stories and archetypal, characters, but his consistency - not to mention plenty of fun technical detail - is what makes them work and keeps them interesting. Clear and Present Danger is populated with familiar, one-dimensional characters - we have the drug cartel's boss, Escobedo, the arrogant fool whose arrogance and foolishness will be his undoing, and Cortez, the suave and cunning second banana who really runs the show. We have National Security Advisor Admiral Cutter, the highly-placed buffoon in charge of field operations he has no experience with or understanding of, and CIA director Bob Ritter, the smart and experienced subordinate hobbled by his superior's bad decisions. We have Domingo "Ding" Chavez, the tough but smart kid from the L.A. barrio who joined the Army to avoid imminent arrest or gang-related death and quickly applied himself to be one of the finest graduates the Ranger school has ever seen. We have...you get the picture. Even the "deep" characters like Mr. Clark are very straightforward. And then, there's Jack Ryan, who defies existing action-hero/political thriller stereotypes as that rarest of literary creatures, the academic who understands and respects the military. What makes them all work is the fact that Clancy is consistent with each and every one of his characters. They have very rigid, clearly defined roles, and they all stick to them, not doing anything out of place with their character types. It sounds boring when I explain it like this, but it's actually what makes the books engaging, interesting, and fun instead of irritating, pretentious, and stupid.
Random content advisory: Clancy's soldiers and sailors swear like, well, soldiers and sailors, and quite frequently, too. If salty language, even in context, troubles you, these are not the books for you. Also, he doesn't sanitize violence.
If you've pondered watching the film Clear and Present Danger, my advice is: don't, especially if you've already read the book. The casting is pretty sketchy, and for a character-driven story, that's rarely a good thing. I like Harrison Ford, and I really like Willem Dafoe, but I don't like either of them as Jack Ryan or Mr. Clark, respectively. Also, it's just a very so-so picture. The book, on the other hand, is a tad long but well-conceived and enjoyable. If you're one of those people who likes to set aside the summer as a time for light reading, this is a good pick, and may even leave you wanting to read the rest of the series. If you do that, just be sure to read them in order, because from here to Executive Orders is one story arc. And no, Op Center, Splinter Cell, etc. are not part of that series, nor are they good. But Rainbow Six is.
We've Gone Here Before, But It's Still Fun: Star Trek.
For the second year in a row, Corey and I celebrated our anniversary by indulging in that most indulgent of luxuries: a movie in a real live theatre. This year, the early-season sci-fi blockbuster in question was J.J. Abram's Star Trek.
A little personal background: I like Star Trek. Always have, probably always will. I don't like it in the Trekkie, hobbyist sense; I do have limits (*coughEnterprise!*cough* see also: Voyager). That being said, from my first glimpses of The Next Generation, which premiered around the same time I hit grade school, and the original series, which was airing concurrently on Saturday mornings on the CBC, I was hooked. TNG and Deep Space Nine - particularly the former - remain some very fine examples of television sci-fi, and you know what, so does the original series, in its own way. As funtastic as it was, it still had meat.
And that's a good way to think of Abrams' Star Trek: a funtastic sci-fi/action flick that's got just enough ballast to avoid being total popcorn. The plot is familiar to Trek fans, involving time-travel and vengeance, and the whole thing plays like the best of the Next Generation episodes. What really makes this film shine, aside from a stunning introduction that left me fighting back tears (I kid you not, I'm getting sappy in my old age), is the character interaction. I've yet to see a film directed or produced by J.J. Abrams in which the casting was not spot-on, and Star Trek is no exception. John Cho as Sulu may be an exception, but it's hard to tell, as we see so little of him outside of a ludicrous fencing match that's heavily tinted with shades of Kirk Fu (See: Sulu's not-quite-a flying roundhouse as a method of closing with his opponent. As a one-time provincial medalist, I don't give a lot of quarter to bad on-screen fencing). However, it's the Big Three that are important, and Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and McCoy (Karl Urban) don't disappoint. Who knew Heroes' Quinto was in fact a good actor on a crap program? I would have liked a slightly higher ratio of interaction to action, because the writers had some great stuff going on here - this may be a situation that would actually tempt me to read the novelization, by the reigning king of sci-fi novelizations, Alan Dean Foster. The great casting goes through to important secondary characters as well, especially Bruce Greenwood's Captain Pike, and the background is littered with familiar TV and sci-fi faces eager to get in on the quasi-historic action. Fun fact: Faran Tahir, who played the captain of the U.S.S. Kelvin, was also in the movie we saw for our last anniversary, Iron Man, as the leader of the rebels who ambushed Tony Stark's convoy. If he's not in next year's anniversary flick, I'm going to be disappointed.
The disappointments of Star Trek are pretty minor, all things considered. For all the ad campaigns about this being "not your father's Star Trek", the film has at least 60% too much Old Spock, and the whole plot ultimately revolves around him. Irony! On the same note, if you're trying to avoid being "father's Star Trek", then would someone please explain to me why female naval officers are still rocking the minidresses and go-go boots? Otherwise, the film divorced itself from camp pretty well, except for a cheap "sentient but pet-like alien" gag that may work in Star Wars, but is kind of anathema to Star Trek's core ideologies of equality and respect as pertains to diversity. On a separate note, there's some blatant ripping-off of the Terminator musical theme at critical points in the action, particularly tacky considering the timing of the release. And the uber-fast editing style for action sequences, popularized by the Bourne films but rarely used well, is so poorly employed here that it not only turns otherwise good action into a blurry mess, it also left both of us with sore eyes by the end.
Otherwise, it would seem Abrams and co. have finally broken the odd-numbers curse. It was a nice use of a Saturday, and I'd happily see a second film with the same cast.
A little personal background: I like Star Trek. Always have, probably always will. I don't like it in the Trekkie, hobbyist sense; I do have limits (*coughEnterprise!*cough* see also: Voyager). That being said, from my first glimpses of The Next Generation, which premiered around the same time I hit grade school, and the original series, which was airing concurrently on Saturday mornings on the CBC, I was hooked. TNG and Deep Space Nine - particularly the former - remain some very fine examples of television sci-fi, and you know what, so does the original series, in its own way. As funtastic as it was, it still had meat.
And that's a good way to think of Abrams' Star Trek: a funtastic sci-fi/action flick that's got just enough ballast to avoid being total popcorn. The plot is familiar to Trek fans, involving time-travel and vengeance, and the whole thing plays like the best of the Next Generation episodes. What really makes this film shine, aside from a stunning introduction that left me fighting back tears (I kid you not, I'm getting sappy in my old age), is the character interaction. I've yet to see a film directed or produced by J.J. Abrams in which the casting was not spot-on, and Star Trek is no exception. John Cho as Sulu may be an exception, but it's hard to tell, as we see so little of him outside of a ludicrous fencing match that's heavily tinted with shades of Kirk Fu (See: Sulu's not-quite-a flying roundhouse as a method of closing with his opponent. As a one-time provincial medalist, I don't give a lot of quarter to bad on-screen fencing). However, it's the Big Three that are important, and Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and McCoy (Karl Urban) don't disappoint. Who knew Heroes' Quinto was in fact a good actor on a crap program? I would have liked a slightly higher ratio of interaction to action, because the writers had some great stuff going on here - this may be a situation that would actually tempt me to read the novelization, by the reigning king of sci-fi novelizations, Alan Dean Foster. The great casting goes through to important secondary characters as well, especially Bruce Greenwood's Captain Pike, and the background is littered with familiar TV and sci-fi faces eager to get in on the quasi-historic action. Fun fact: Faran Tahir, who played the captain of the U.S.S. Kelvin, was also in the movie we saw for our last anniversary, Iron Man, as the leader of the rebels who ambushed Tony Stark's convoy. If he's not in next year's anniversary flick, I'm going to be disappointed.
The disappointments of Star Trek are pretty minor, all things considered. For all the ad campaigns about this being "not your father's Star Trek", the film has at least 60% too much Old Spock, and the whole plot ultimately revolves around him. Irony! On the same note, if you're trying to avoid being "father's Star Trek", then would someone please explain to me why female naval officers are still rocking the minidresses and go-go boots? Otherwise, the film divorced itself from camp pretty well, except for a cheap "sentient but pet-like alien" gag that may work in Star Wars, but is kind of anathema to Star Trek's core ideologies of equality and respect as pertains to diversity. On a separate note, there's some blatant ripping-off of the Terminator musical theme at critical points in the action, particularly tacky considering the timing of the release. And the uber-fast editing style for action sequences, popularized by the Bourne films but rarely used well, is so poorly employed here that it not only turns otherwise good action into a blurry mess, it also left both of us with sore eyes by the end.
Otherwise, it would seem Abrams and co. have finally broken the odd-numbers curse. It was a nice use of a Saturday, and I'd happily see a second film with the same cast.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Dad's Wager: Fallout 3
In my world, the biggest factor in determining an RPG's (role-playing game's) success in regards to personal satisfaction and appreciation is how much the game offers to make me consider why I make the choices I do. That's one of the main reasons I don't enjoy playing Japanese-style RPGs, as they tend to run on predetermined, destiny-based plotlines that make the experience more literally playing a role, as if one was in a play with a fixed script. When I role-play, I want to explore what makes me tick in real life. Recent releases like Mass Effect have been great for that, but I have to say that Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3 (2008) is the greatest yet, and with a few tweaks could be my favourite RPG thus far.
The newest addition to a series I've never played, Fallout 3 takes place two hundred years after a nuclear war has decimated most if not all of the U.S. and is set in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area. You play someone who's grown up in a Vault, an underground bunkered community safe from radiation and other dangers above. Raised by your loving dad after mom dies in childbirth, life is content until you're woken up one day to discover that Dad's left the Vault (forbidden!), the Vault's Overseer is furious and has already had Dad's assistant killed, and Dad, that louse, has left you nothing but a cryptic note explaining absolutely nothing in regards to where he's gone and why. It should be mentioned here that Dad is the Vault's doctor, so it's a safe bet that whatever's happened has something to do with scientific pursuits of grave importance. And so, up you go in to the big wide Capital Wasteland, a lonely nineteen year-old forced to take your first taste of the world as you set out to find your father, and ask him why he left you.
The most notable thing about Fallout 3 is that it's massive. What I mean by this is, the map is humongous, and very, very full. Even the buildings are huge compared to similar zones in other games - you can easily spend two hours exploring a bombed-out school or office building. And it's not just the size that requires so much time. You know how the word "wasteland" is generally preceeded by "barren", and used to describe a place that is empty and desolate? The Capital Wasteland is a literal land laid to waste, full not only of rubble and half-ruined buildings, but the detritus of human society. Everywhere you turn the ground will be littered with things like bent tin cans, empy bottles, lunch boxes, and it's pretty common to find drugs lying around in a bathroom. The sheer amount of random crap lying around for you to pick up in Fallout 3 is astonishing, but perfectly realistic and an effort much appreciated by this gamer. Also, a lot of it isn't so random, as you can build your own weapons out of certain items, and one of those weapons is a launcher that can use anything as ammo. Anyways, from a visual point of view, it's one of the most holistic games I've seen. It even does the "retro future" thing well, without seeming forced or winky to trying too hard. I don't think I've ever seen this style feel normal before.
Indeed, Fallout 3's attention to detail extends clear through to its soundtrack. Sure, it has an instrumental score, but it also has two fixed in-game radio stations, one of which plays nothing but retro jazz and big band tunes - all of which have lyrics that make nice, often sad or hilarious allegories for things like leaving the Vault, Dad's quest, and one, from South Pacific, that I've determined is a dark in-joke for folks who know their U.S. WWII history as relates to the sequence of events that led to the bombing of Hiroshima. People who still insist that video games as a medium are brainless and stupid have less of a leg to stand on in this decade than ever before.
A nice gameplay touch is the "Perk" system. Every time you level up, you distribute your skill points and then must select from a list of perks, according to your level and skill/attribute ranks. On top of that, some perks have ranks, so as more perks become available to you, choosing between acquiring new ones (say, better criticals) and raising the ranks of existing ones (increasing the number of skill points you get for reading books, for example) becomes a tough tactical decision. Oh, and speaking of tactical decisions, you can't progress past level 20, so choose those perks and skill increases wisely! My other favourite aspect of Fallout 3's gameplay? You can't just magically repair your weapons and body armor, you must have spares to take the parts from. In other words, in order to repair an assault rifle, you'll need another assault rifle on your person. Fun! It's those little touches, upping realism and requiring a little strategy, that really tie a game together.
There are, of course, downsides to the gameplay. The in-game targeting system, V.A.T.S., can be very helpful, but can also be a real hinderance. If you're low on ammo, you'll likely waste more in V.A.T.S. than you will just eyeballing it. However, you could inadvertently wind up wasting a lot eyeballing as well. The game's assisted targeting or auto-aim can't be turned off, so far as I can tell, and what would in a first-person shooter be a guaranteed kill shot can end up missing the target. The auto-aim also doesn't work through gaps so well, meaning that if you want to be sneaky and pop someone through a hole in a fence, regardless of where your cursor is aimed there's a high chance that round will be considered to have hit the fence, and if you're really unlucky it might ricochet back and kill you. It's almost like the game punishes people who are better shots than the assisted targeting is, and it can make playing my favourite character type, the sneaky little sniper, very frustrating.
The single biggest downside to Fallout 3, and what causes the war within me for recommending it, is that it is the first gratuitously violent game I've played. Now, if you know me, or read this blog, you know I'm against sanitizing violence. The thing is, Fallout 3 goes to places unnecessary: all critical hits and/or kill shots result in decapitation or dismemberment. I can see this being justifiable when using explosives, missile launchers, the Fat Man (a mini-nuke launcher), or even a shotgun at close range, but so help me, I'm 99.9% certain it is physically impossible to decapitate a man with a single .44 pistol round to the forehead at 100 meters. You can in theory circumvent this unpleasantry by only using energy weapons, which turn people to ash or goo, but even the plasma rifle can, in V.A.T.S. animation, somehow manage to blow someone's head off before the instant incineration caused when plasma meets organic matter. And, of course, V.A.T.S. happens in slow-motion. It's disgusting, it's unhealthy, it's completely gratuitous and, unfortunately, it's an inescapable part of an otherwise incredible game. I wasn't expecting this at all from a Bethesda game, but Corey says that in this they were just being true to the rest of the series, which Bethesda didn't work on. I wonder if it's Bethesda taking a swipe at this aspect of the series when Galaxy News Radio's DJ, Three Dog, makes a sarcastic comment about "today's forecast: excessively violent, with a chance of dismemberment!". I'm all for ratings boards, but when Australia's board refused to allow Fallout 3 in-country because the game developers wanted to call morphine "morphine" (i.e. a real-world drug reference), but didn't blink an eye over the relentless, excessive decapitations....well, that just seems strange to me. I mean, it's not like using cutesy names for drugs discourages usage - "Special K", anyone? - but excessive violence does desensitize.
And yet, in spite of that major downside, Fallout 3 is the most interesting, probably best RPG I've ever played on the RP side of things. The main story is excellent, and the side quests are just great, and range from fun 'n frivolous to annoying-but-beneficial to dark and disturbing, and everything in between. Also, there are a few fun sci-fi/horror homage quests, like "Those!" and "The Replicated Man" (or, Bladerunner). In keeping with the overall tone of the game, even fun quests will send you to dark places. In "The Nuka-Cola Challenge", you'll have to make a stop at the Wasteland's main slave camp, and whether you just steal the cola and sneak away or kill all the slavers and lead the slaves to safety has nothing to do with the quest, and is entirely up to you. But either way, doing "The Nuka-Cola Challenge" will force you to confront this option. Which brings me to my appreciation for Bethesda's clear stances on good and evil. The most common human enemies in Fallout 3 are slavers and raiders, roving gangs of humans who thrive on slaughter, sadism, and sexual torture, and for whom no potential victim is off-limits. The only reason I cringe when killing a raider is if V.A.T.S. decapitates one. You get Karma (this game's good/evil measurement) for killing them, and a bounty if you join the Regulators after level 14. However, you can choose to live like a raider in Fallout 3, which brings us to this game's best, most interesting, most unique aspect: the ending. If you don't want to know how it ends, this would be a good time to stop reading. In most RPGs, the main quest leads up to you triumphing over seemingly impossible odds, to either continue making the world a better place or begin your formal reign of terror. What makes Fallout 3 different, and more interesting, is that the game will end with your death. No matter how you've chosen to live your life, whether you've brought light to dark places or lived a life of careless evil and depravity, you will die. Much like in real life, you might say. Before your death, you must choose whether to commit a final, wide-scale act of evil, a final, wide-scale act of good, or to do nothing, and simply wait until the clock runs out...but for you, every action has the same consequence. The wantonly evil acts available in Fallout 3 are often so useless - like blowing up the only city you can buy a house in, or extorting people who can't give you more than a couple of bucks - that, combined with the ending, it's almost like a secular, video game version of Pascal's Wager.
There's so much I've left out here, like some of the funny bits, or the main quest, or how drug use will turn you into an addict and severely impact your attributes, or how you can get power armor that'll make you look just like the cap trooper on the cover of my edition of Starship Troopers. If you've been to D.C., as I have, you may get a real kick out of recognizing half-ruined landmarks, or knowing where to go when your quest objective is something like "go to the museum of Natural History and speak with Reilly". I know I did! On a different note, the voice acting is even more uniformly excellent than Mass Effect, and if Dad sounds familiar, that's because he's known by day as Liam Neeson. I have mixed feelings about famous actors making forays into voice work, as professional voice actors have been all but eliminated from Hollywood animated movies in favour of famous names, and major studio games are now the only high-profile platform for professional voice actors to strut their stuff and, you know, make a living). But, it seems like there are only a handful of game voice actors who don't make me want to skip the dialogue, and they seem to be getting regular work on good titles, so...I just don't know.
Fallout 3''s grim nature and setting, plus its gratuitous violence, make it less fun than other RPGs I've played, but all in all, I'm willing to crown it most interesting. If you can stomach it, its a fascinating excercise in, well, yourself, and how you live your life, and to what purpose. Or, to paraphrase the tagline for Shaun of the Dead, a smash hit father-daughter wasteland adventure. With mutants.
The newest addition to a series I've never played, Fallout 3 takes place two hundred years after a nuclear war has decimated most if not all of the U.S. and is set in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area. You play someone who's grown up in a Vault, an underground bunkered community safe from radiation and other dangers above. Raised by your loving dad after mom dies in childbirth, life is content until you're woken up one day to discover that Dad's left the Vault (forbidden!), the Vault's Overseer is furious and has already had Dad's assistant killed, and Dad, that louse, has left you nothing but a cryptic note explaining absolutely nothing in regards to where he's gone and why. It should be mentioned here that Dad is the Vault's doctor, so it's a safe bet that whatever's happened has something to do with scientific pursuits of grave importance. And so, up you go in to the big wide Capital Wasteland, a lonely nineteen year-old forced to take your first taste of the world as you set out to find your father, and ask him why he left you.
The most notable thing about Fallout 3 is that it's massive. What I mean by this is, the map is humongous, and very, very full. Even the buildings are huge compared to similar zones in other games - you can easily spend two hours exploring a bombed-out school or office building. And it's not just the size that requires so much time. You know how the word "wasteland" is generally preceeded by "barren", and used to describe a place that is empty and desolate? The Capital Wasteland is a literal land laid to waste, full not only of rubble and half-ruined buildings, but the detritus of human society. Everywhere you turn the ground will be littered with things like bent tin cans, empy bottles, lunch boxes, and it's pretty common to find drugs lying around in a bathroom. The sheer amount of random crap lying around for you to pick up in Fallout 3 is astonishing, but perfectly realistic and an effort much appreciated by this gamer. Also, a lot of it isn't so random, as you can build your own weapons out of certain items, and one of those weapons is a launcher that can use anything as ammo. Anyways, from a visual point of view, it's one of the most holistic games I've seen. It even does the "retro future" thing well, without seeming forced or winky to trying too hard. I don't think I've ever seen this style feel normal before.
Indeed, Fallout 3's attention to detail extends clear through to its soundtrack. Sure, it has an instrumental score, but it also has two fixed in-game radio stations, one of which plays nothing but retro jazz and big band tunes - all of which have lyrics that make nice, often sad or hilarious allegories for things like leaving the Vault, Dad's quest, and one, from South Pacific, that I've determined is a dark in-joke for folks who know their U.S. WWII history as relates to the sequence of events that led to the bombing of Hiroshima. People who still insist that video games as a medium are brainless and stupid have less of a leg to stand on in this decade than ever before.
A nice gameplay touch is the "Perk" system. Every time you level up, you distribute your skill points and then must select from a list of perks, according to your level and skill/attribute ranks. On top of that, some perks have ranks, so as more perks become available to you, choosing between acquiring new ones (say, better criticals) and raising the ranks of existing ones (increasing the number of skill points you get for reading books, for example) becomes a tough tactical decision. Oh, and speaking of tactical decisions, you can't progress past level 20, so choose those perks and skill increases wisely! My other favourite aspect of Fallout 3's gameplay? You can't just magically repair your weapons and body armor, you must have spares to take the parts from. In other words, in order to repair an assault rifle, you'll need another assault rifle on your person. Fun! It's those little touches, upping realism and requiring a little strategy, that really tie a game together.
There are, of course, downsides to the gameplay. The in-game targeting system, V.A.T.S., can be very helpful, but can also be a real hinderance. If you're low on ammo, you'll likely waste more in V.A.T.S. than you will just eyeballing it. However, you could inadvertently wind up wasting a lot eyeballing as well. The game's assisted targeting or auto-aim can't be turned off, so far as I can tell, and what would in a first-person shooter be a guaranteed kill shot can end up missing the target. The auto-aim also doesn't work through gaps so well, meaning that if you want to be sneaky and pop someone through a hole in a fence, regardless of where your cursor is aimed there's a high chance that round will be considered to have hit the fence, and if you're really unlucky it might ricochet back and kill you. It's almost like the game punishes people who are better shots than the assisted targeting is, and it can make playing my favourite character type, the sneaky little sniper, very frustrating.
The single biggest downside to Fallout 3, and what causes the war within me for recommending it, is that it is the first gratuitously violent game I've played. Now, if you know me, or read this blog, you know I'm against sanitizing violence. The thing is, Fallout 3 goes to places unnecessary: all critical hits and/or kill shots result in decapitation or dismemberment. I can see this being justifiable when using explosives, missile launchers, the Fat Man (a mini-nuke launcher), or even a shotgun at close range, but so help me, I'm 99.9% certain it is physically impossible to decapitate a man with a single .44 pistol round to the forehead at 100 meters. You can in theory circumvent this unpleasantry by only using energy weapons, which turn people to ash or goo, but even the plasma rifle can, in V.A.T.S. animation, somehow manage to blow someone's head off before the instant incineration caused when plasma meets organic matter. And, of course, V.A.T.S. happens in slow-motion. It's disgusting, it's unhealthy, it's completely gratuitous and, unfortunately, it's an inescapable part of an otherwise incredible game. I wasn't expecting this at all from a Bethesda game, but Corey says that in this they were just being true to the rest of the series, which Bethesda didn't work on. I wonder if it's Bethesda taking a swipe at this aspect of the series when Galaxy News Radio's DJ, Three Dog, makes a sarcastic comment about "today's forecast: excessively violent, with a chance of dismemberment!". I'm all for ratings boards, but when Australia's board refused to allow Fallout 3 in-country because the game developers wanted to call morphine "morphine" (i.e. a real-world drug reference), but didn't blink an eye over the relentless, excessive decapitations....well, that just seems strange to me. I mean, it's not like using cutesy names for drugs discourages usage - "Special K", anyone? - but excessive violence does desensitize.
And yet, in spite of that major downside, Fallout 3 is the most interesting, probably best RPG I've ever played on the RP side of things. The main story is excellent, and the side quests are just great, and range from fun 'n frivolous to annoying-but-beneficial to dark and disturbing, and everything in between. Also, there are a few fun sci-fi/horror homage quests, like "Those!" and "The Replicated Man" (or, Bladerunner). In keeping with the overall tone of the game, even fun quests will send you to dark places. In "The Nuka-Cola Challenge", you'll have to make a stop at the Wasteland's main slave camp, and whether you just steal the cola and sneak away or kill all the slavers and lead the slaves to safety has nothing to do with the quest, and is entirely up to you. But either way, doing "The Nuka-Cola Challenge" will force you to confront this option. Which brings me to my appreciation for Bethesda's clear stances on good and evil. The most common human enemies in Fallout 3 are slavers and raiders, roving gangs of humans who thrive on slaughter, sadism, and sexual torture, and for whom no potential victim is off-limits. The only reason I cringe when killing a raider is if V.A.T.S. decapitates one. You get Karma (this game's good/evil measurement) for killing them, and a bounty if you join the Regulators after level 14. However, you can choose to live like a raider in Fallout 3, which brings us to this game's best, most interesting, most unique aspect: the ending. If you don't want to know how it ends, this would be a good time to stop reading. In most RPGs, the main quest leads up to you triumphing over seemingly impossible odds, to either continue making the world a better place or begin your formal reign of terror. What makes Fallout 3 different, and more interesting, is that the game will end with your death. No matter how you've chosen to live your life, whether you've brought light to dark places or lived a life of careless evil and depravity, you will die. Much like in real life, you might say. Before your death, you must choose whether to commit a final, wide-scale act of evil, a final, wide-scale act of good, or to do nothing, and simply wait until the clock runs out...but for you, every action has the same consequence. The wantonly evil acts available in Fallout 3 are often so useless - like blowing up the only city you can buy a house in, or extorting people who can't give you more than a couple of bucks - that, combined with the ending, it's almost like a secular, video game version of Pascal's Wager.
There's so much I've left out here, like some of the funny bits, or the main quest, or how drug use will turn you into an addict and severely impact your attributes, or how you can get power armor that'll make you look just like the cap trooper on the cover of my edition of Starship Troopers. If you've been to D.C., as I have, you may get a real kick out of recognizing half-ruined landmarks, or knowing where to go when your quest objective is something like "go to the museum of Natural History and speak with Reilly". I know I did! On a different note, the voice acting is even more uniformly excellent than Mass Effect, and if Dad sounds familiar, that's because he's known by day as Liam Neeson. I have mixed feelings about famous actors making forays into voice work, as professional voice actors have been all but eliminated from Hollywood animated movies in favour of famous names, and major studio games are now the only high-profile platform for professional voice actors to strut their stuff and, you know, make a living). But, it seems like there are only a handful of game voice actors who don't make me want to skip the dialogue, and they seem to be getting regular work on good titles, so...I just don't know.
Fallout 3''s grim nature and setting, plus its gratuitous violence, make it less fun than other RPGs I've played, but all in all, I'm willing to crown it most interesting. If you can stomach it, its a fascinating excercise in, well, yourself, and how you live your life, and to what purpose. Or, to paraphrase the tagline for Shaun of the Dead, a smash hit father-daughter wasteland adventure. With mutants.
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