I liked doing the liveblog last night, so I’m doing it again.

We read Roland Barthes for our Critical Theory class this week. And I have learned stuff. For instance, from this quote from Image-Music-Text:

Narrative thus appears as a succession of tightly interlocking mediate and immediate elements; dystaxia determines a ‘horizontal’ reading, while integration superimposes a ‘vertical’ reading: there is a sort of structural ‘limping’, an incessant play of potentials whose varying falls give the narrative its dynamism or energy: each unit is perceived at once in its surfacing and in its depth and it is thus that the narrative ‘works’; through the concourse of these two movements the structure ramifies, proliferates, uncovers itself – and recovers itself, pulls itself together: the new never fails in its regularity.

What have I learned, you ask? That apparently I can use as many semicolons and colons within a single sentence as I darn well please! Plus a dash, thank you very much. Now every time professors ask me to rephrase rather than use dashes or semicolons, I’m going to point to this passage and say “Barthes did it.” Note for any fiction writers out there, you can use Jane Eyre to pull the same trick; I swear, she’s got some sentences that go on for a whole page – separated only by semicolons and dashes. Or Vanity Fair, which has the most prodigious dash use I’ve seen in my life, and believe me, I love me some dashes.

I’m going to try a new live-blogging thing tonight, just for kicks. If you’re reading during the show, you should be able to keep watching this page and see the post update without having to reload the page. You can also submit comments at any time, which I can display inline. It seems like a really cool platform, and won’t limit me to 140 characters, like Twitter does. That could be good or bad. ;)

I just realized that I forgot to ever post about last week’s shows. Tuesday I liked Samantha (the girl who came in with her friend, both of them enamored of Simon) and David (the boy who had struggled with paralyzed vocal chords) the best. I don’t remember on Wednesday, honestly. I watched it the next day and didn’t take notes, and don’t remember being particularly blow away by anyone. My continuing gripe this year is that Simon keeps saying “you’re just like everyone else and therefore we don’t want you” but the ones they choose are also just like everyone else. Although, I haven’t really seen any auditions that weren’t either good, but like everyone else, or awful. So maybe there just aren’t any original-sounding people willing to audition anymore.

Anyway, check back here at seven and we’ll try out CoverItLive.

This video made the blogosphere rounds many months ago, but it’s worth pulling out again (I don’t think I ever posted it). Film clips + GoogleEarth + on-location photography = a stunning exploration of famous movie locations in and around Los Angeles. The music is great, too. Really wonderful job by creator Blair Erickson.

This post is part of a project to watch the Film Bloggers’ 100 Favorite Non-English Films. See my progress here. Note: I have skipped #97 on the list, Satantango, because I have been unable to get it to watch and decided to move on. When I have the opportunity to see it, I will.

Previous Viewing Experience: I have seen this once before, in June 2006.

Previous Reactions: The first time I saw this, I knew to expect something surreal and weird, because I’d already seen a couple of other Buñuel films; I got pretty much what I was expecting. While I found it a bit slow the first time through, I also found it compelling. I rated it Above Average then.

Brief Synopsis: A group of upperclass dinner guests find themselves unable to leave the drawing room after dinner, held there by an overwhelming apathy and inability to act. Meanwhile, the police and family members have gathered outside the house, unable to enter.

Response: I didn’t find it at all slow or repetitive this time. I was impressed by the strength of the plotting, especially since there’s really so little story to plot. It’s done with remarkable economy without sacrificing any depth, and the last sequence is the perfect cap off, bringing us full-circle and beyond. The film is a scathing attack on the privileged classes, really–a sort of counterpart to Buñuel’s later The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, except instead of a dinner party which can’t get started, The Exterminating Angel is about one that won’t end. I wasn’t as attuned to the surrealists’ hatred of the upperclass the first time I saw this, so I didn’t note with as much care the almost constant distinction being made between the upperclass guests and the servants, who all had an inexplicable desire to leave before the party started, and did so. Throughout the film, the guests make disparaging remarks about lower classes: “I think persons of the lower classes are less sensitive to pain. Have you ever seen a wounded bull? Absolutely numb.” Being confined in the drawing room for days and weeks, they experience what they imagine as the living conditions of the lower classes (though whether they realize the connection is unclear)–as the host of the party, one of the more level-headed in the group, puts it: “What I have hated since my youth, coarseness, violence, filth, are now our constant companions.”

It all becomes very Lord of the Flies-ish by the end, as they turn on each other. It’s much easier to blame someone else for unpleasant conditions rather than do something about it yourself. And this is, finally, their ultimately failure. They fail to act. They lack the willpower. And the most interesting thing is that they know they do! When Nobile, the host, says they need to work up a supreme amount of willpower and all leave the room together, rather than take his advice, they start blaming him for causing the whole problem by inviting them; eventually, they blame their absent families for not rescuing them. The other level-head, the doctor, at one point tells the now nearly barbaric guests that their behavior “is unworthy of us. Gentlemen, don’t forget your breeding.” But that’s the point. Their upperclass status isn’t going to help them in this situation, and it is in fact their apathetic, sophisticated, actionless aristocratic tendencies that threaten to destroy them.

(Since I’ve seen this before and remembered it pretty well, I opted not to include two responses; the response above can be considered a reflective response as well as an immediately-after-viewing response. I said my previous rating was Above Average; after this viewing, I re-evaulate that to Well Above Average. Give it a few more viewings, especially as I see more Bunuel films to add to the conversation, and it may quite easily move higher–especially if I can see a better print.)

So, according to this clip from major news outlet Fox News (which I have no overarching gripe about), Mass Effect is chock-full of graphic violence and sex and should be rated Adults Only and kept out of the hands of most gamers, since virtually all gamers are prepubescent boys. And this they know because some psychologist who hasn’t played the game, who in fact laughs at the hinted suggestion that she might ought to play the game before she rails on it, says so. Geoff Keighley tried his best to counter these ludicrous claims, but kept getting cut off before he could fully make his point. Which is, of course, that these are absolutely untrue, ludicrous claims, as anyone who’d actually, like, played the game would know.

Yes, there is a sex scene in the game. It comes after about 30 hours of play and lasts less than a couple of minutes, as Keighley points out. And there is no graphic nudity in it. In fact, it’s rather tastefully done; so “tastefully” that it’s almost funny, in the bad ’80s movie sort of way. And it’s presented as part of a long story/relationship-arc that has to be handled in a certain way to even get to it. It’s quite possible to play the entire game multiple times and never see the sex scene. Oh, and the anchor at one point, while showing a clip of the beginning of said sex scene, says “the player gets to decide exactly what happens between these two characters, if you know what I mean,” her tone intimating that you’re controlling the sex act itself, which is utterly untrue. It’s a cinematic cut scene; you control the dialogue and relationship choices that may or may not lead up to the scene, but you do nothing during it.

There are so many other little things here mostly stemming from people talking about things they know nothing about. Talking about ESRB game ratings, the anchor says you have to pick up the box and read the back to find out the rating; not true–the ratings are ALWAYS prominently displayed on the front (much more prominently than MPAA ratings are displayed on DVD cases, for example); as if reading the back were such a chore anyway. One of the other panel members at the end mentions buying an inappropriate game for his daughter because he either didn’t see the rating or didn’t know what it meant. I don’t know about all game stores, but certainly the ones I’ve shopped at have the ratings and their meanings displayed all over the store. The psychologist states categorically that most gamers are teenage boys, but the average gaming age is over 30 now. My favorite is when one of the panelists says she doesn’t understand why Mass Effect isn’t rated AO (adults only, the equivalent of NC-17 for movies) instead of M (mature, the equivalent of R for movies). Well, if any of these people had bothered to play the game instead of just condemn it, they would know that had Mass Effect been a movie, with the exact same amount of violence and sexual content, it would almost certainly have been rated PG-13.

I think that’s what really gets me; I understand the principle of not wanting sex and violence in games, but I don’t understand the double standard whereby games are vilified for having shades of things in them that movies have had for ages and very few people get unduly up in arms about anymore. No one goes, OMG, Shakespeare in Love has a sex scene with nudity, without at least considering the rest of the film and whether there’s value in it. But that’s exactly what people do with video games; forget the fact that Mass Effect has a film-quality story and script, excellent acting, incredible graphics, and groundbreaking gameplay. Nope, it’s got one sorta sex scene that we’ll blow all out of proportion and thereby condemn the game entirely. (At least the anchor does attempt to be somewhat fair by pointing out how gorgeous the game is.) And believe me, when you finish Mass Effect, the thing you remember from it won’t be the fact that your character got laid. Unless the media continues to hype it this way to the point where you can’t remember anything else.

(via Joystiq.

This post is part of a project to watch the Film Bloggers’ 100 Favorite Non-English Films. See my progress here.

Previous Viewing Experience: I have tried to watch this film, unsuccessfully. I think I made it through about the first five or ten minutes before I got really bored and quit. This was probably eight or ten years ago, though, when I was a teenager, so we’ll see if my attention span has improved.

Knowledge Before Viewing: My previous experience of trying to watch it has left me thinking it’s slow-moving and sort of…non-commital. The second thing fits with what I’ve heard about the film being a cinema verite, almost documentary-like version of Christ’s life.

Brief Synopsis: Exactly what you’d expect; the story of Jesus as told by Matthew’s gospel.

Initial Viewing Response: Right, so I’m perfectly willing to acclaim this as pretty much the most straight-forward, accurate version of Jesus’ life (perhaps excepting the Jesus movie, which is primarily used as an evangelical tool). But what catapults it into the realm of great cinema I haven’t yet figured out. My initial expectation of a non-commital storytelling style is spot-on, but I had thought it was supposed to be highly realistic and naturalistic; instead many of the scenes felt very staged and the actors were all very measured and stiff. I’ll need to read a bit about the production–that could be a side-effect of casting non-actors, who are sometimes paradoxically less naturalistic than trained actors (there are exceptions, like the girl Vittorio De Sica cast in Umberto D). Only the various scenes that have children in them (Palm Sunday, for example) have any sense of spontaneity and immediacy. This isn’t to say that there aren’t powerful scenes. Obviously the source material is powerful on its own, and that shows through in the Pharisee-conflict scenes and the slaughter of the innocents (which actually reminded me of Potemkin‘s Odessa Steps sequence). I also found the use of English-language spirituals interesting, mixed in with more traditional church choir music. The idea of Jesus as an Italian peasant isn’t as strong as I expected it to be, though most of the costumes and buildings are believable as either Italy or Rome-occupied Israel. Basically, I’m trying to figure out what it is that I’m meant to get out of the film that I can’t get from reading the Bible, and I haven’t found anything yet. It’s a very literal adaptation, but where is Pasolini in it? (I haven’t seen any other Pasolini films, so I may be at a bit of a disadvantage there.)

Reflective Response: I was supposed to write this a few days after seeing the film, but it’s ended up being about three weeks. Ah well. After I wrote the initial response, I read the back of the video case, and it mentioned that the simplicity and directness of the film was in some ways at odds with the opulence of the Italian Roman Catholic Church, which I can definitely see. So what I may have missed in my initial viewing was the fact that presenting a peasant-class Jesus in a simple setting might have actually been quite radical when Pasolini made the film; it doesn’t seem that way to me, because that’s how I tend to think of Jesus anyway (perhaps as a Protestant, perhaps as a Biblical literalist). In any case, my initial reaction sounds as though I don’t find any value at all in literal adaptations, which isn’t entirely true–I just don’t think they’re as interesting, and while I might put a film like The Gospel According to St. Matthew on a list of great adaptations, I don’t know that I would put it on a list of great films. On the other hand, I’m fairly sure I’ve missed something.

Time for me to wish I were a real film critic and could be going to film festivals. Like Sundance, which is going on right now…except I hear it’s brutally cold there right now, so maybe I don’t wish I was there. This is the trailer for In Bruges, the opening night film, which looks like it’s right up my alley. And here’s a very positive review from Cinematical’s James Rocchi.